Ritual and Performance in Domestic Violence Healing: From Survivor to Thriver Through Rites of...

Ritual and Performance in Domestic Violence Healing:From Survivor to Thriver Through Rites of Passage

Danielle F. Wozniak • Karen Neuman Allen

Published online: 28 October 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract This article describes a group for domestic violence survivors to help

them move past a ‘‘liminal’’ state in which their social identity is characterized by

being ‘‘victim’’ or ‘‘survivor’’ to one of ‘‘incorporation’’ defined by ‘‘thriving’’ and

joy. Through the creation and use of healing rituals, blessings, poetry, art and music,

the women in the group establish ‘‘communitas’’ and support each other in the work of

self-reclamation and healing. The group, ‘‘Rites of Passage’’ is intended for women

who have completed shelter-based crisis interventions, and uses a structured curric-

ulum that integrates theoretical and philosophical concepts from anthropology, post-

modernism, humanistic psychology, social work, and existentialism. Through the

Rites of Passage group, women identify and traverse a healing trajectory to construct

an identity founded on strength and fulfillment. Patterned after non-western sex-

segregated rites of transition, those who go through the group celebrate its conclusion

with a defining ritual that publically marks their change in identity and status.

Keywords Domestic violence � Ritual � Narrative � Performance �Healing

Ethnographic Moment from Montana

After dinner the conversation gets louder as the ten women in their high heels, best

clothes, and makeup walk to a footbridge over the rushing Rattlesnake River for the

last ritual.

D. F. Wozniak (&)

University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

K. N. Allen

Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:80–101

DOI 10.1007/s11013-011-9236-9

Pulling out a watertight bottle each woman reads a statement proclaiming her

new status and then places it inside. They are proclamations of victory and

accomplishment and they sound like this:

‘‘I am a thriver. You can be too.’’

And, ‘‘My life is changed. I am finally enough for me.’’

And another, ‘‘I have found my joy and will never let it go. I am a powerful

woman who claims her rights to be.’’

Dusk is slowly encroaching, urging us forward in the ritual, but this night and this

feeling of joy and exhilaration belong to these women; they fight their excitement to

savor the moment.

‘‘Should we just throw it in?’’ someone asks of the container holding their

statements.

‘‘We should say a prayer first,’’ comes the answer.

‘‘Who should say the prayer?’’

‘‘We all should. You start.’’

And so begins a prayer each woman helps to build: ‘‘Dear Creator of the

Universe. We come to this spot to mark a momentous occasion.’’

‘‘Yes. We come to throw a bottle full of our own thriver energy into the water.

May it find other thrivers and may it also find anyone who needs to know that

thriving is possible.’’

‘‘Surround this bottle with white light and protect it,’’ comes another voice.

‘‘Guide it on its way.’’

‘‘May we all come to grow in our thriver selves this next year.’’ adds someone

else.

‘‘May we stay together and help each other. I love all of you.’’

‘‘I want others to find the bottle and can let us know about their own journey.’’

‘‘And if they do,’’ comes yet another voice, ‘‘I want them to know that they

can heal too. They can do it. We did it and we will say, h-a-n-g in there, baby.

You are on your way.’’ The women laugh.

‘‘Amen. Now quick—join hands.’’

And then, every woman holds her breath as one of them throws the bottle into

the swollen river. We stand in the growing darkness of the Montana night and

watch the bottle make its way down the Rattlesnake River to where it meets the

Clark Fork River and then watch it bob out of sight. The significance of the speed

with which it travels, the very fact that it travels from one river to another

signifies their rebirth, their transformation, their emergence into the world as new

women. Through the release of their messages they connect themselves with every

other human being who has been wounded and every other human being who has

healed.

The women’s eyes are glued to the bottle as each woman travels with it, beyond

herself, beyond the footbridge, beyond her struggles, to connect with the infinite

possibilities their messages represent. When it is no longer visible, each woman

turns her eyes from the river back to the group and hugs whoever stands next to her.

Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:80–101 81

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Dark settles around us and brings with it calm. The laughter gently ebbs into the

pensive and slightly exhausted feeling one gets after any graduation. Women leave

the bridge, knowing they have become someone else, knowing that through

transformation they are connected to a pulse in the universe that is uniquely human

and simply transcendent. Together, they cross to the other side of the bridge in

silence and head for home.

Introduction

Empowerment models are appropriate and necessary in social work interven-

tion with disempowered women who are victims and survivors of domestic

violence….[although] the literature is generally not specific about what

principles and helping behaviors are useful in such models. (Parsons 2001,

p. 160)

Anthropologists, priests, folklorists, artists, and mental health professionals

recognize that performance and ritual can create change, not just in the performer or

the audience, but in the social relations that bind both audience and performer

together. When used with women recovering from domestic violence, empowering

performances and liberating rituals can challenge enduring and debilitating effects

of violence and promote post-traumatic growth. This allows women to change the

social relations by which they live and move from a social identity rooted in self as a

‘‘victim’’ or ‘‘survivor’’ of violence to a sense of self, rooted in recovery, strength

and fulfillment. In this article, we describe a holistic, spiritually-based group

intervention with women recovering from domestic violence and discuss how

performance, art, ritual, and story-telling help women begin to create a new sense of

self and personal narrative.

Much of the work in contemporary Western cultures with women who have

experienced abuse focuses on empowerment-based strategies aimed to support

cognitive-behavioral changes sufficient to assist them in extricating themselves

from a violent relationship (Dutton 1992; Freeman et al. 1989). Emanating from

psychotherapeutic and behavior change theories in the 1980s (Burke et al. 2001)

stages-of-change models conceptualize behavior change as processual involving

cognitive and behavioral processes that facilitate movement from one stage to the

next (Burke et al. 2001; Burman 2003; Prochaska and DiClemente 1982; Prochaska

et al. 1994) These models shift us away from a dichotomous model of change

(women either choose to leave an abusive relationship or stay in one), to a nuanced

understanding of the changes women experience before actually leaving a battering

relationship and constitute one of the most important theoretical improvements in

the IPV literature.

Some intermediate-term interventions premised on stages-of-change models

have been helpful in outlining a woman’s journey away from her abuser and

delineating the parallel cognitive-problem solving and cognitive-restructuring

processes that accompanies change after a woman actually leaves her batterer

(Burman 2003; Ham-Rowbottom et al. 2005; Prochaska and Prochaska 2002;

82 Cult Med Psychiatry (2012) 36:80–101

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Roberts and Burnam 1998; Walker 1994). However, these interventions are often

typically short term (6 months or less) and have a poorly operationalized construct

of ‘‘success.’’ Given this framework, ‘‘success’’ typically refers to being ‘‘abuse

free’’ for 6 months1; a perceived increase in self-esteem with no stated plans to

return to their abuser; and/or improvements in behavior and intra-psychic

functioning such that they are physically safe and emotionally and cognitively

stable (Brown 1997; Burke et al. 2004; Burman 2003; Fortune 2002). These

interventions leave us guessing about the long-term cognitive and behavioral

processes that allow women not only to leave abusive relationships, but to heal

from the physically and psychologically traumatic effects of violence, to become

self-caring, functional, healthy members of society (Campbell and Soeken 1999;

Cox and Stoltenberg 1991; Harway and Hensen 1993; Rounsaville et al. 1979). No

stages-of-change model currently identifies as an important intervention outcome

lifeway and identity changes in which women no longer define themselves in terms

of their abuse or trauma. Nor do they set a specific path for future growth. This

neglects the possibility of additional important developmental and stage-related

changes and contributes to an eclipsed conceptualization of intervention ‘‘success’’

or ‘‘effectiveness.’’

This is salient because while women who have left a battering relationship and

received either short- or intermediate-term interventions may no longer show overt

physical manifestations or psychological symptoms of trauma, they often continue

to define themselves relative to their experience with violence long after they have

left their batterer. We wondered if beyond a certain point in recovery, women who

continued to retell and thus relive their traumatic experiences may ultimately run the

risk of foreclosing their identity as primarily ‘‘survivors of violence’’ or ‘‘victims of

abuse,’’ rather than integrating the experience into a more holistic sense of self. In

other words, the abuse (and leaving it) becomes the centerpiece of a women’s

identity rather than one aspect in a rich constellation of accomplishments,

experiences, values, and understandings.

This is not to suggest that telling their story of victimization and trauma and

receiving support isn’t important. Indeed perhaps the best understood intervention

outcome for battered women is a sense of safety, mutual support, and community

provided through battered women’s shelters and post-shelter community-based

support groups (Bowker 1984; Dobash et al. 1985; Donato and Bowker 1984;

Dziegielewski et al. 1996; Hoff 1990; Mitchell and Hodson 1983; Sullivan et al.

1995; Tann et al. 1995; Tutty et al. 1999; Yalom 1995). However, we wondered if

there was a point at which women must begin to tell a new story about themselves

and their life trajectory that is different from the one they told when they were

with their abuser and different from the one they told shortly after leaving their

abuser.

1 Since some data used in women’s shelters indicate that a woman may return to an abuser between 6 and

7 times before finally being able to leave the relationship only examining a woman’s behavior for

6 months suggests that we know little about stages-of-change past a post-crisis period.


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We based this question on ethnographic data collected largely at transitional

housing sites for battered women2 in which we consistently encountered women

who had left their batterer and who were physically safe, yet who could not envision

themselves in a world in which violence did not exist.3 They told stories of isolation,

despair and deprivation punctuated by anxiety-based thinking in which the teller

anticipated and calculated calamitous events that could befall her at any moment.

These women were self-described ‘‘victims’’ or ‘‘survivors’’ and spoke of feeling

depressed, anxious, and emotionally lost. While functionally, hyper-vigilance

allowed women to survive an abusive relationship, in a non-abusive context it

wreaked havoc with their social relations maintaining isolation and fueling fear,

despair and suspiciousness. Isolation and lack of a clear plan for the future

consistently undercut their efforts to move forward by maintaining an identity

steeped in debility.4

Thus taking a ‘‘next step’’ may not just be leaving an abusive relationship and

establishing ego-equilibrium as outlined for us in stages-of-change models, but

shifting cognitive processes and self-constructs such that women no longer defined

themselves and their futures in terms of the trauma associated with the past. In other

words, once stabilized outside an abusive relationship, we posited that women need

to make another transition that breaks with past patterns and ways of thinking about

themselves and their world. We suspected that this step cannot be taken alone, but

must occur in the context of a community and would best occur in the form of the

creation and enacting of a new life narrative that can reestablish one’s place in the

world as something other than a victim or a survivor.

2 Wozniak conducted ethnographic interviews with women who experienced domestic violence (DV) at

two sites in the USA, during the summer and fall of 2007 with approximately 30 women. The study used

a mixed-method ethnography, integrating participant-observation field work with structured and semi-

structured interviews, to assess the possibility of healing resulting from an experimental group

intervention. The first site was a privately owned and operated suburban sober house for women leaving

prison or substance abuse rehabilitation. The second site was an urban transitional living facility run by a

battered women’s shelter. The women who participated were all between the ages of 20 and 60. Based on

intake data gleaned from the directors of the facilities all women had significant life experiences with

chronic violation in their families of origin and families of creation. All of the women also received

ancillary mental health or substance abuse related services.3 Interestingly, if women lived in a psychic world where violence is still anticipated and accepted as a

way of life and a natural occurrence in a romantic relationship, then the meaning of their stay at the

shelter and at transitional housing, where women can often live for up to 2 years, may simply be an

interlude between abusive relationships—a respite from violence. This may offer some explanation as to

why women who don’t return to their previous relationship get involved with other abusive relationships.4 Our data is consistent with finding from other studies. For example, Ham-Rowbottom et al. (2005)

report that up to 75% of women who received extensive emergency or transitional living shelter

continued to exhibit signs of depression, trauma, and life dissatisfaction. Additional studies of women up

to 6 months after their shelter stay also suggest that depression continues to be a major problem

(Campbell et al. 1995, 2002; Campbell 2002; Houskamp and Foy 1991). This suggests that the journey

away from abuse and ‘‘survival’’ outside of an abusive relationship are not the same as healing or mental

health.


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Anthropology Meets Social Work

The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘‘threshold people’’) are

necessarily ambiguous…[they] are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and

between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and

ceremonial…. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the

womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an

eclipse of the sun or moon. (Turner 1969, p. 95)

Our thinking was informed by the work of anthropologists van Gennep (1960)

and Turner (1969), who examined cross-cultural transition rites that normalize and

institutionalize social identity or social position changes. We posited that healing

from intimate partner violence paralleled rites of passage demonstrated in other

cultures and as described by Turner (1969), required completion of three stages—

separation, liminality, and incorporation. He suggested that rites of transition were

marked initially by separation from one’s old life ways and then marked by

liminality, (a time of ambiguity, rolelessness, and danger), in which those

undergoing change were neither the people they were, nor had they yet become

personally or socially something different. During this time, Turner (1969)

identified the importance of communitas, or the intense camaraderie and emotional

bond that developed between individuals experiencing the same transitions and

sustained those who were undergoing change. Once those making change shed their

old identity and life ways and learned the components of their new identity, they

re-emerged in their new role or identity and were reintegrated into society

(Goodenough 1963). Women who leave their abusers (separate), but who continue

to identify themselves as ‘‘survivors of abuse’’ or as ‘‘victims of violence’’ mayremain in liminality in which they must grope both for communitas and strive for the

next necessary stage of change. Often crisis oriented services end at this point,

leaving the women to perpetuate psychic investment in an identity marked by

deficit, debility, or a social problem.5

To address this conceptual and practical gap in services and to assist women in

continuing a healing trajectory, we developed and refined a 10 week group

curriculum entitled Rites of Passage premised on the creation of a like-minded

community to help women develop and perform stories of their social transforma-

tion such that they could traverse liminality and move toward reincorporation as

women who are healing and thriving in spite of their experiences with violence.

Based on the belief that healing from relationship violence is a social, spiritual,

cultural, and psychological process, we designed a group treatment approach that

helped facilitate the ‘‘shift’’ in women from ‘‘surviving’’ to a ‘‘thriving.’’ Using

holistic, integrative, and alternative healing approaches—such as prayer, medita-

tion, yoga, creative visualization, and art therapy—the group draws on philosophical

underpinnings from human development/human improvement literature, narrative

5 Barbara Whitfield has conceptualized these stages as ‘‘victim,’’ ‘‘survivor’’, and ‘‘thriver’’ and

operationalized particular thinking about self, others and behavior in the social world that accompanies

each stage (Whitfield 2003).


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therapy, feminist spirituality, anthropology, and social work group process theory to

facilitate sequential steps away from an identity embedded in trauma and violence

toward a sense of self embedded in wholeness, health, and strength. It is premised

on the idea that women, within the context of a supportive community, transition

through stages of healing by creating a vision of themselves and their future that is

radically different from their past.

Premised on an understanding of healing as a rite of passage from one stage

(victim or survivor) to another (thriver), we involved women in creating their own

healing rituals to facilitate transitioning and strengthen group cohesiveness (Csordas

1987; Csordas and Lewton 1998; Turner 1969; van Gennep 1960; Wallace 1966).

We drew on Turner’s (1969) understanding of ritual as a codified and pattered social

drama allowing for transformation and his work on breaches as powerful sites of

revolution and reconciliation to inform our thinking about the use of ritual in our

Rites of Passage group. We understood symbols within the context of women’s

healing rituals similarly to DeFlem (1991) who suggests that ‘‘the handling of

symbols in ritual exposes their powers to act upon and change the persons involved

in ritual performance’’ (p. 3).

Within the context of the group, we used ritual to facilitate resolution of tension

and disruption, that is, to repair the breaches that existed in women’s relational lives

after leaving a battering relationship. Rubenstein (1984), consistent with Douglas

(1970) saw breaches as ‘‘normal, if sometimes anxious disruptions in a world that is

defined and renewed by ritual drama’’ (p. 4) that could be mediated through ritual.

‘‘From this perspective,’’ Rubenstein suggests, ‘‘ritual brings about healing by

defining and resolving the naturally occurring disruptions in everyday life’’ (p. 3).

We also incorporated Eliade’s (1965) notions of protected time and space when

creating a for healing rituals and Huizinga’s (1970) sense of play and playfulness

when creating the space for healing rituals that embrace the dialectic between sacred

and profane, serious and play, real and other-worldly.

Although we focused on rituals of passage in the group, we also recognize that

some of the group activities had intensification and protective elements. The

creation of rituals throughout the group process occurred in variety of ways: some

deliberate and planful and others spontaneous. Some rituals were borrowed from

other cultures and adapted, such as Native American cleansing rituals; others were

created spontaneously and reflected the uniqueness of each group and its respective

needs and expressions. However the ritual emerged, it was quickly codified,

ritualized, and incorporated into the regular, predictive patterns of group behavior

which were endowed with meaning and value by group participants. These rituals

included the creation of symbolic objects such as collages and future directed

journals; performance, including letting go rituals; storytelling and the creation of

new characters, chapters, and endings; and shared prayers and blessings which came

to define the group’s purpose and goals.

As our conceptualization of healing and recovery in this population was still

being conceptualized, we used a grounded theory approach to engage the women in

constructing a full and rich definition of healing that was generated from the

participants themselves. In an earlier work (Allen and Wozniak 2011; Wozniak

2009), we documented the group’s effectiveness in reducing symptoms of


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post-traumatic stress. We also used a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss

1967) to facilitate the women constructing a conceptualization of healing that

consisted of: being safe; self-pride and self-care; reclamation of self and restoring

life trajectory; experience peace and serenity; and rejoining the community (Allen

and Wozniak 2011). In this article, we add to this earlier work by describing the

creation of ritual, joy and meaning that happened throughout the group process that

facilitated healing.

We implemented the curriculum at agency based or transitional housing sites in

Connecticut, Montana and Michigan over a 4-year time span. Women came to the

group by referral from community-based mental health agencies or were self-

referred through word of mouth or advertisement posters placed in areas women

were likely to see. We used a structured and semi-structured interview protocol to

screen participants. All participants had to meet the following criteria: they were no

longer living with their batterer and were living in a safe environment; they had told

their story of victimization, escape, and survival before joining the group to a

mental health professional or a battered women’s support group; and they were

receiving or had received some type of social service support. Those who did not

meet the criteria were excluded. Approximately, 40 women have participated in the

five groups offered over a period of 4 years.

The Stories We Live and Tell

In the modern world in which we all live identity is a life story. If you want to

know me, then you must know my story, for my story defines who I am. And if

I want to know myself, to gain insight into the meaning of my own life, then I

too, must come to know my own story. (McAdams 1993, p. 5–11)

The stories we create influence the stories of other people, those stories give

rise to still others, and soon we find meaning and connection within a web of

story making and story living. Through our personal myths, we help to create

the world we live in at the same time it is creating us. (McAdams 1993, p. 37).

Ricoeur (1984) suggests that ‘‘time becomes human time to the extent it is

organized after the manner of narrative; narrative in turn is meaningful to the extent

it portrays features of temporal existence’’ (p. 3). Women who have been abused

retell their story of violation to explain who they were and how their lives made

sense. Yet in doing so, they maintain the abuser’s power and control and maintain

themselves in an abusive relationship. Their stories can neither depict a world

without violence nor could their stories escort them to new and different life stage or

understanding of themselves (Bettelheim 1976). In fact, the stories they tell to each

other and themselves simply seem to reinforce their misery. And in spite of an

extensive literature in the helping professions about the importance of narrative to

the healing process (Etherington 2000; Frank 1995; Freedman and Combs 1996;

Herman 1992; McAdams 1993; McLeod 1997; Pennebaker 1993; Polkinghorne

1988; Valentine 2003; White 2004; White and Epston 1990; Weston 2003) none of

the available domestic violence support services seemed geared to addressing


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women’s very specific need to develop a new chapter in their life stories.6 If, as

Ricoeur (1984) suggests, human beings comprehend time in terms of their stories,

and as Durkheim (1915) suggests our stories help us make meaning of the unfolding

events in our lives, then the questions that guide the next leg of women’s journey

are: How might the story continue to unfold in such a way as to not only be about a

new reality, but to actually shape and create a new reality? How might we as mental

health professionals assist in the construction of that new story?

Because the emphasis of healing at this stage is to construct a new way of

thinking about oneself and the social world, the journey through liminality vis-a-vis

the Rites of Passage group was not the painful work of excavation. It was the joyful

work of creation. The groups’ motto, if you can dream it, you can see it; if you cansee it, you can get there, served as a starting point for women’s healing work. Group

activities focused solely on reclaiming women’s ability to imagine possibilities,

envision life alternatives, articulate a vision of happiness or perfection, and then

develop a plan for attainment. The curriculum utilized creative visualization, guided

meditation, projective stories, active day dreaming, and the creation and

deconstruction of personal myths and metaphors. We enhanced activities by

drumming, music, creative movement and through simple verbal sharing. We

consistently premised activities on the question: What new story about who am Iand where am I going can women create together as they set their sights for the

future?7 The curriculum allowed for significant flexibility relative to the order or

6 This points to a troubling double-bind for battered women’s support services. Because services to

battered women are consistently driven by resource scarcity and a never-ending influx of new victims,

most communities lack the resources necessary to develop additional support services to those ready to

move to a new developmental stage in their healing. And most community- or shelter-based support

groups emphasize women’s ability to break the silence they kept as victims by encouraging women to tell

their stories and thereby garner support, validation, and companionship through their shared violence

experiences.7 Because we posited that repetitive disclosure about the violence and self-identification as a ‘‘victim’’ or

a ‘‘survivor’’ may prevent women from ‘‘moving on,’’ in the group context we do not, as part of the

curriculum, include a time for sharing women’s history with abuse. Moreover, no one is asked to tell their

story of violation as a way to gain entry into the group. We define the group through our advertising

posters and flyers as a group for women who are healing from domestic violence. When we meet face-to-

face with women in an intake interview we explain again that this group is for women who have

experienced domestic violence, have had a chance to tell their story and are in a place where they are

ready to create a new and different future for themselves and their children. Thus group members know

that a women is in the group because she, like themselves, has experienced some form of violence. All of

the women we have accepted into the group have received support group services offered generally

through the local shelters or received individual therapy.

Interestingly, within the group meetings conversation about being battered rarely comes up and women

consistently show relief when they are told during the intake interview that they will not be asked about it.

When a group member bring up the topic of their own violation they tend to refer to the violation in

general terms or they tend to mention it as a comparison. For example, ‘‘when I lived with Ricky, and he

would beat me I did….’’ In other words, women consistently showed that they no longer wanted or

needed to talk about the details of their battering experience but may want to reference the way they

thought at that time or the way they behaved as different from the way they do now. On one occasion, a

woman in one of the Montana sites asked her group mates if anyone wanted to tell what had happened to

them, that is, tell about their abuse experiences. All of the women in the group unanimously said no and

suggested through phrases like, ‘‘that was then,’’ or ‘‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore’’ or ‘‘I am done

with that time in my life’’ that they wanted to maintain a future oriented perspective—at least in the

context of the Rites of Passage group.


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quantity or nature of the activities. Participants were involved in the decision

making process as to group content.

As we conducted Rites of Passage healing groups, we found a high consensus

healing sequence that followed this pattern. As women began to imagine positive

possibilities in their lives (for example returning to school), they began to shift from

their internalizations of the batterer’s abuse and control ‘‘logic’’ (I can never do that;

I am not smart enough; I don’t deserve to go to school; no one will admit me with

my grades) which then creates a complementary world of failure and limited

possibilities, to expansive possibility-oriented thinking (what if I did go back to

school?; what if I was accepted and got a degree?; what if I got a great job?) that

allowed them to begin to create opportunities in the social world (getting a course

catalogue, talking to an admissions counselor at a local college, applying for

financial aid).

Once women began to recognize that they could create possibilities they shifted

from articulating disaster-based thinking to investing in unlimited expansive hope-

based thinking. Rather than seeing themselves as reactive, they began to see

themselves as proactive agents of their own destiny. Rather than thinking of

themselves defined through violence (I am Sue, and I am a victim or a survivor),

they began to define themselves in terms of their strengths and in terms of their

future (I am Sue and am studying law). As women’s self-constructs changed they

forged social relations based on possibilities which ultimately converted a hostile

universe to one of benevolence and abundance and actually allowed women to

create additional social opportunities.8 Within the Rites of Passage group, this

sequence of change turned on women’s ability to conceptualize and tell new self-

stories of strength and wholeness concretized through performance and ritual. A

supportive community heard, understood, and sustained these new stories. By

attending to how new self-stories were envisioned and enacted through the group

process, we gained insight not only in how women wove new stories of selfhood

into performance narratives that, as Bettelheim (1976) suggests, escorted them to a

Footnote 7 continued

We have also consistently found that while women at times have to maintain contact with the batterer,

either through child visitation or divorce proceedings, a woman’s group mates keep her from being

emotionally dragged back into a victim mentality marked by negative, fear-based thinking in which

women feel responsible for the abuse and the abuser. For example, one evening in the Montana site a

woman shared with the group that her ex-husband and father of her youngest child had been calling her

non-stop on the phone to engage her in an argument about visitation. She shared that her new strategy was

to put the phone down and walk away while he ranted. Over the course of the group, supported and

encouraged by her group mates, she continued to develop increasingly agentive strategies for his verbal

abuse that culminated in her divorce. Thus, we also routinely provide women with resources and referrals

to legal and mental health professionals should crises or emergencies arise that involve their batterer and

certainly women garner support from the group for exigencies that arise from their past relationship with

the batterer—for example, these inevitably involve issues with children.8 Our observations of sequential change were similar to Shamai’s findings (2000) which suggested that

many of the cognitive shifts women made turned on a relationship or relationships in which women’s

sense of self as independent, worthy, differentiated and whole was either restored or a nascent sense of

self nurtured and supported. Experiences which supported women in creating an alternative life by

offering them first the right and ability to envision change and then supporting them in their steps for

change were also cited as critical.


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new and different life stage or a new understanding of themselves in the world, but

how women negotiated and forged a healing process.9

Since the women who entered our groups were often understandably guarded and

anxious when forming new relationships outside their immediate support circle

(which was often limited to themselves and their children), we utilized folklorists

understanding of performance as a way to create relationships between the audience

and performer and among the members of the audience that ultimately changed the

nature of the social world (Bauman 1975; Csordas 1987). Each week we ate dinner

together and shared casual social conversation which allowed women to re-learn

and practice social skills with other women. This helped to reduce social isolation

and build a trusting community through which changes could take place. Before the

group formation, none of the women had eaten together or gotten together socially

even though in two of the sites they lived in the same transitional housing complex.

Instead, they regarded each other with suspicion and sometimes-outright derision

and were wary of any group interaction. Dinner was followed by breathing and

relaxing exercises and a guided meditation. Guided meditations allowed women to

experience creation and agency relative to their own healing. For example, a

meditation for their ‘‘sacred word’’ helped them find a positive word that perfectly

described their core self, —or a meditation for safety that allowed them to surround

themselves in protective white light, or a meditation for perfection that allowed

them to create and visit a perfect space in which they received meaningful healing

gifts from the universe. Next, women were asked to create and share new self-

stories in the form of a picture, a poem, a reflection, an art project, and/or answers to

a guided activity all of which turned on creating self sui generis rather than asserting

a vision of self in relation to victimization. For example, in one activity women

created a collage of thriving, in another they created a self-symbol from clay that

illustrated a perfect aspect of themselves, and in another activity women envisioned

and described their perfect future. At no time did we invite women to disclose their

abuse history or experiences, and no group activities turned on looking back to the

time in their life when they were being abused. After each activity, women shared

with the group what they created and what the experience of creation was like for

them. It was this simple sharing that became an unexpected component of ritual and

an important piece in women’s healing journey.

Women who were initially shy about sharing, shy about using their voices, shy

about asserting their own vision of reality, grew in delight at getting the group’s

attention. As women shared, their facial expressions, voices, word choices, and

phraseology became more expressive and drew their group mates into the drama

being enacted. Activities began with a modest scope focused on self-reclamation

and progressed to more assertively challenge victim-thinking and abuser-logic. For

example, in an activity adapted from two other women’s empowerment groups10

9 Informal assessments of women’s progress after they leave the group suggests that indeed women on

the threshold of creating a new self-text can shed their construction of self as victim or self as survivor, be

escorted through liminality, and create positive life change.10 Sharon Maynard, a Mohegan Tribal elder, who ran a support group for Mohegan tribal members in

need of healing, based on Mohegan spirituality and sequential change and Susan Omilian, who created

My Avenging Angel group in West Hartford Connecticut, both had some form of this activity.


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women were asked to ‘‘silence the negative chatter’’ in their heads by dividing a

piece of paper in half. On one side they wrote the self-sabotaging messages they

heard (often the internalized voice of the batterer) and on the other side of the paper

‘‘answered’’ the voices with a counter argument that asserted their inherent value,

perfection, and worth.

As women shared this activity, they groaned, laughed, commiserated with each

other; they digressed, and bolstered each other up when they had to confront

especially painful internalized messages like, ‘‘you are a bad mother,’’ or ‘‘you are a

failure.’’ Their sharing took the form of a performance which allowed women to

challenge the legacy of thought and action established through patterns of abuse

(e.g., I am not lazy; I work hard for our family and my children. Or, I am not a

failure. I am a successful teacher and mother). Through the performance both story

teller and listeners reconnected to and developed a personal sense of agency and

self-efficacy that had been truncated through violence. As they created themselves

in the context of the group, they were in essence, performing their freedom, creative

abilities, and joy. Through their performances, they garnered power in the form of

confidence to enact that same performance of liberation in the larger social

environment. In the process, group mates initially regarded with suspicion were

converted to a helpful chorus and an appreciative audience as women worked

through lingering artifacts of violence to create solidarity or communitas.Performance not only offered women a way to enact agency and shift power

relations between themselves and the abuser, it also offered women an important

opportunity of redress for the violation they endured. Most women exiting an

abusive relationship simply flee and never have the satisfaction of confronting their

abuser or challenging the legitimacy of his dominance, control and violence. While

we consider women who are able to leave alive the lucky ones, there is something

enormously disempowering about not being able to challenge the abuser’s right to

inflict pain. However, through performance women created new power relations in

which they had the power, they had the ability to determine their life course; theycould undo the hold the abuser had on them. In essence, they were challenging the

abuser and his hold by talking back and taking back the agency and generation they

had lost. Consistent with Turner’s description of ritual as a four-part performed

‘‘social drama’’ in which participants symbolically violate social norms, enact

redress, and then create new social norms women shook their fear by defying the

abuser and then by creating a world in which neither he nor the abuse existed. They

thereby gained mastery over the abuser by writing him invisible. This was effective,

as Kwan (2007) suggests, through ‘‘its dynamic, diachronic, and physical

characteristics. In other words, ritual efficacy lies in the manner of performance;

not in any rational discursive argument’’ (p. 747).

By the third week women’s dinnertime sharing changed from casual sharing and

talking about the struggles of the preceding week to asking each other about the

week’s triumphs. Stories in which agency and communion were central themes were

triumphant, instructive, and comforting. They were stories in which good

vanquished evil and in which ‘‘Right’’ prevailed. Women greeted them eagerly

since they were new, exciting and fed their nascent belief that ‘‘good’’’ and ‘‘right’’

were possible. For example, in a Montana group a woman used this sharing time to


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inform the group of her grandfather’s sudden death. While the text of the story was

of loss and bereavement the subtext was agency in the face of loss as she regaled the

group of her efforts to negotiate with a florist for a lower price on an exotic plant her

grandfather loved, build a small shrine to her grandfather with the plant and invite a

group mate and her children to come and see it. Through her dramatic and humorous

story, illustrated with the difficulties of trying to find the plant and then trying to

barter on the price with four children in tow, her group mates shared her triumph,

and identified with her victory.

This type of performative social drama also occurred through a ‘‘power mantra’’

activity in which women read together this affirmation: I reclaim my power from allthose who have tried to take it. I reclaim my power from the universe that held it forme until this moment. I reclaim my power and will never let it go again. I feel mypower re-enter my body, mind and spirit. I am filled with the power of love and joy.Women then created a personal gesture that accompanied the mantra. This gesture

would be used as a sign for each woman and for her group mates indicating that she

had embraced and reclaimed her own power. As each woman showed the group her

sign as she recited the mantra the women collapsed into giggles, laughter, and

imagined scenarios where they ran into each other at the store and in the check-out

line at the grocery and gave each other the secret power sign. Women acted out

these possibilities to more laughter and continued to envision scenarios where this

would be funny (double dates, restaurants, library, etc.). Women ended the evening

by making plans to give each other their gesture should they see each other during

the week. In and through this joy and the association of women’s power with joy,

they reclaimed a sense of their own abilities and agency. By imagining and then

acting out potential uses for the power sign, they created a new reality in which they

were not frightened, scarred, or depressed women but on the contrary were joyful,

powerful, agentive women. By performing this new reality, they created a space in

which their abuser simply failed to exist and thereby no longer posed a threat. And

by enacting that reality socially they transformed the environment in which they

lived.

Performance was also a dress rehearsal for healing where group members could

‘‘try on’’ or act ‘‘as if’’ healing had already occurred to see what it felt like to be

healed or victorious and to see how the social world in that moment responded to

them. This is where performance and ritual in Rites of Passage intersect. As

Seligman (2010) suggests, ‘‘through its emphasis on action, on the performative and

its creation of a subjunctive universe, ritual creates a world, temporary, fragile to be

sure, but not false—a world where differences can be accommodated, tolerance

enacted (if not fully understood) and openness to the other maintained’’ (p. 15). In

both the Connecticut and Montana sites, women were asked to take index cards and

create a journey from victim to survivor to thriver by recording life turning points.

One woman created a serpentine trail on the floor using index cards that were three

different colors to signify discreet stages of her journey. As she read the life events

she explained to the audience, her fellow travelers and group mates, what the events

signified, why they were important, and why they lead her to take the next step on

her path. While she had not yet, in her own reckoning reached thriver status, she

projected what this status would look like: She was finished with school; she owned


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her own bookstore. She lived in a Victorian house with her dog named Princess. She

was happy. Her group mates shared with her the trek and she, with them, created the

social space for her eventual next step: herself as a fulfilled, healed woman.

In this activity, index cards signified women’s journeys and the events written on

the cards were signs of their ability to heal. By calling attention to the journey, by

bracketing it through a public performance, we collectively defined an intentional

trajectory of meaningful and purposive events that led to an eventual and desired

outcome. As women narrated their journey for the group they created a story in

which they were the heroes. And group mates were called to identify with that

heroic element through each performance, supporting it, appreciating it, trying it on

before or after they presented their own story. This helped recontextualize as

necessary or useful, things women were ashamed of and kept secret, like long bouts

of drinking, drug use, or debilitating depression since these events allowed women

to get to their next stage. By seeing them as necessary in the progression of events

that led to a positive outcome rather than simply evidence of failure, lack of

character, or moral weakness the events were detoxified and transmuted into a sign

of achievement (I got through that) with which others could resonate. Each

woman’s journey was embedded in collective memory and each woman shared with

the other performers the victory story.

The Mark of Change: Transformative Ritual

Ritual is much more like play, which is the joint entrance into an illusionary

world. This is what I mean by the creation of a subjunctive universe. By

framing our interaction… the frame actually pulls us in after it, making the

illusion the reality. And the reality will last only as long as we adhere to the

illusion. (Seligman 2010; p. 10)

Rituals, as anthropologists remind us, are performative and iterative. They

concretize and bind meaning and allow participants access to the multivalent nature

of the contained meaning over time. As Seligman (2010) suggests, ‘‘Participants

practicing ritual, act as if the world produced in ritual were in fact a real one. And

they do so fully conscious that such a subjunctive world exists in endless tension with

the real world of lived experience’’ (p. 14). This was evident in the index card activity

where the culmination of the trail marked women as healed or as ‘‘thrivers’’ in spite

of their own acknowledgement that they were not quite there yet. Just as those who

are ‘‘saved’’ may not be able to lead completely sinless lives, they live having

glimpsed their perfection through ritual. Similarly when group participants, as in the

opening ethnographic moment, walk around the fire and release qualities they no

longer need, they are not so much celebrating an event that has already taken place

(their achieving a finite status called ‘‘thriver’’) as they are creating a moment in

which they can, together, be as if it had taken place. By acting as if, they create

themselves healed, in the material world, even if only during the ritual. Once created

and held in social reality, they can return over and over to visit it, to try it on, to

embrace it, feel it, enhance and perfect it, and to sustain each other through and by it.


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Interestingly, while the group is premised on recognizing and expanding

women’s agency and affirms a world of infinite possibilities and perfection, it is a

world that women may never have experienced. It is a mythical world, a world from

fairy tales, a world of make believe. In fact, we ask women when envisioning this

world to think back to a time when they were happy, fulfilled, and aware of their

perfection, strength, even if that time existed for only a few minutes in the distant

past or even if this world only existed in their thoughts. We also ask them repeatedly

to create that world in their minds through guided meditations that are often

fanciful, involve a journey, and are always very pleasant. Through ritual in which

they enact transcendent ‘‘as if’’ moments of healing they are in effect putting that

myth into action by actually creating it in the empirical world where it is seen, felt,

heard, and enacted.

This is consistent with Durkheim’s (1915) conceptualization of commemoration

and performance of a mythic past that liberates through aesthetics. Through the art

of creative expression and performance, women write, draw, paint, narrate, share

their mythic moments of joy and in so sharing, both create a shared social reality of

joy and cement the social bonds through which their myth hold salience. Each

woman’s performance of her moments of perfection-myth marked her as rightful

inhabitor of that moment. And this, as Driver (1998) suggests, gives rise to a

template for additional moments of enacted perfection. ‘‘Rituals are likely to bear

more meanings than words can say. If we look at ritual from the front, from the

point of view of its inception, we do not see clear rational meanings but instead the

laying out of ways to act, prompted by felt needs, fears, joys, and aspirations’’

(p. 92).

Turner (1969) reminds us that symbols are the building blocks of ritual and thus

facilitate healing through their condensed and multivalent nature. Women’s rituals

consistently contained themes of rebirth, renewal, and connection and included

symbolic releasing activities that gave way to reclaiming a new identity or social

self. Within these rituals, women moved symbolically from one world or one state

of consciousness to another and marked their shift in social identity by a change of

clothes, hairstyles, dress, or physical position or activity. For example, in most

concluding rituals, women dressed up in their nicest clothes, put on make-up and

wore high-heeled shoes. In other groups, women used the final ritual to announce

they were moving out of the transitional housing units in which they lived. Several

groups opted to go out to dinner as a final ritual symbolizing their place in society as

women who are no longer victims or survivors—members of a subjugated,

demoralized, or dominated class—but women who are able to partake of abundance,

luxury, and ease. Women burned qualities they no longer wanted in a fire that

cleansed and relieved them of those qualities and embraced others through a walk

that symbolized their future selves.

Rituals of rebirth and emergence also contained an ephemeral substance like

water or smoke, symbols of the Divine, or of the ubiquitous nature of positive

energy. In the Michigan site, as women planned their concluding ritual, they shared

how they had lost all their personal and family photographs when they left the

abuser and thus symbolically had lost who they were and their ability to see their

past juxtaposed to their future. In order to create a visual record of transformation,


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the group began taking photographs of themselves and their family and on the last

night created a scrapbook for the photos. Photos were anchored in their scrapbooks

using calligraphy, blessings women had authored for the start of each group, wishes,

aspirations, meditations and reflections that had been ritualized throughout the

group process. One participant called this the ‘scrap book for her new life’ or the

‘‘scrapbook for her future’’ rather than the past. This group had also adapted a

Native American smudge ritual for use in beginning each group meeting in which

white sage was burned with participants walking through the smoke, purifying and

cleansing them in preparation for the group. Evoking this activity in their

concluding ceremony ritual, the women again burned sage, this time passing their

scrap books through the smoke to ‘‘cleanse’’ the books and ‘‘purify’’ their hopes for

future as they began their lives as ‘‘thrivers.’’

Women’s rituals often also included acts of connection through which women

recognized their common past and projected a shared future. During final rituals,

women bridged the last vestige of isolation to physically hug each other and to share

perspectives and definitions of what healing was to them. These shared definitions

laid the foundation for a shared subjunctive future once group ended. Healing in the

context of a final ritual was often described in metaphors or figurative language that

both suggested independence and self-sufficiency within a context that claims for its

member’s interdependency and connection.

Conclusion: Meaning, Transformation and Community

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the

symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other

constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back (Campbell 1949, p. 11).

Rites of Passage intervention was premised on the idea that women can continue

their journey away from abuse toward healing in sequential stages that involve an

interpersonally and socially recognized transition, and implemented an intervention

designed to facilitate these steps. In the ethnographic moment at the beginning of

this article, women take the two oppositions around which the group coalesced,

healing and woundedness, and use their final ritual to contextualize both as a

universal human phenomenon that no longer isolates them from others, but instead

actually connects them to all of humanity. Standing on a bridge, women announce

their own healing and then opt to send a message of healing down a river, a clear

metaphor for their own journey and ultimate rebirth, a connection with others who

are both healing and who are in need of healing. The ritual ends with hope as they

impart a prayer that asks their messages to form a connection, to bridge a gap if you

will, between their past selves as wounded women—selves who can recognize

others who are wounded, and themselves as thriving women, whose social position

is concretized through their walk across the bridge. Healing and joy are seen

through the ritual of rebirth as they reach out to connect with a universe that is now

benevolent, and full of uncontainable joy. Thus perhaps the most significant way in

which ritual, like those enacted in the Rites of Passage group, contributes to


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women’s transformative healing experiences is through the creative, redressive play

that it incites for women as they negotiate a new reality (Turner 1969, pp. 13–14).

This in turn allows women to create a new sense of self and to create a social world

compatible for a changed self.11

In order for the healing process to continue, women must continue to develop

stories about themselves and the world around them founded on hope and possibility

that can simultaneously compel them into the next stage and narrate it. This in turn

creates a ‘‘community of memory’’ (Swora 2001) that not only allows women to tell

and hear other’s stories of healing and possibility but to participate with a

community in co-creating life ways in which this healing is enacted. Toward this

end, all of the women leave the Rites of Passage groups with each other’s phone

11 This is an important point we wish to underscore. In Turner’s work whole communities embraced and

accepted as changed, initiates who returned from their rites of passage. That is to say, the communities

Turner wrote about received the newly changed initiates and incorporated them into society in their new

roles and positions because it was members of the community who invoked the transition and who shared

its meanings. This raises an interesting question about how the women who ‘‘graduate’’ from or leave our

group fair when they enter a society or community that does not invoke the transformation and who may

not recognize or understand it and who may not understand or know what a ‘‘thriver’’ is. Within Western

culture major social position, role, or identity changes can be difficult to effect and integrate into one’s

sense of self when there are neither institutionalized or formalized rites of passage and when the transition

is not one necessarily marked by observable physical change or ceremony. In response, some mental

health interventions turn on developing an artificial cultural community like that developed through

Alcoholics Anonymous or through support groups like bereavement support for SIDS (Sudden Infant

Death Syndrome) or even in some residential treatment facilities. But none embed intervention within a

sequential rite of passage based on facilitating and recognizing a social and personal identity change, or a

healing. Thus, there is little data to suggest whether the impact of the ritual change shifts over time or

requires supportive community. These questions point to an area of further research.

In our experience, we have witnessed women handle this potential disjuncture, i.e., the absence of a

community with a shared meaning of the ritual change, in the following ways. First, we have witnessed

and heard about ways in which women educate their families about the changes they are making in the

group—and thus make a community for themselves. We have seen women bring their families to

participate in the group and participate in the rituals. In the Montana site, for example, a woman came

back to the second group meeting with her mother and three sisters. On the fourth group meeting she

brought her teen aged daughter. She had thus, created a community capable of sharing her meanings of

healing, around her.

We have also seen how women have enacted a changed thinking and a changed sense of self within

their communities, for example their church or their circle of friends and seen ways in which communities

have, in response, responded differently to women, reinforcing women’s changed position. But we have

also observed women shift their friendships and communities because those groups could not support

their changed thinking. Using what we termed in the group the ‘‘positive law of attraction’’ we

encouraged women to find other like-minded women with whom they could associate. That is to say, find

the community that could share their meanings of thriving.

Several women expressed the desire to start their own groups and thus enlarge the communities who

can recognize and respond to them as healed or healing or thrivers. Perhaps the hallmark of women’s

changed social position however is the absence of ‘‘victim’’ or ‘‘survivor’’ from their lexicon and the

replacing those identifiers with strength-based identities. This too allows women to create around them a

community that recognizes them differently even if these reference groups don’t recognize that this

represents a shift.

Finally we want to create a community-based ritual similar to those that helped the survivors of rape

and written about by Galambos (2001) in which women not only proclaim their new status but have an

opportunity within a supportive community to acknowledge their work and changes. It is worth exploring

for the future. However, this exploration is balanced against a sense that women’s healing rituals are

uniquely their own and take on an aspect of the sacred, personal, and intimate.


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numbers, email addresses and Facebook information. And through social outings

encouraged in the group have generally developed sufficient social relations with

each other to stay in touch with a ready-made community of women who have

shared their transformational experience.

But they also leave with the ability to find, recognize, and create those stories

with other like-minded women. Swora, in a study of the meaning of narrative in

Alcoholics Anonymous calls our attention to term anamnesis which connotes

remembrance and reminding (Ferguson et al. 1988, p. 238 in Swora) and suggests

that ‘‘acts of anamnesis are by definition social, both embedded in and re-creating

master narratives’’ (2001, p. 74). Thus to help women continue to develop their

narratives of healing remains a critical ‘‘next step’’ for further work.

For those looking to help women heal from the ravages of violence, the creation

and enactment of a new self-text can be facilitated through performances and rituals

in which women are socially marked as whole, strong, and competent. While

transformative rituals do not ‘‘cure’’ women or mark them as healed once and for all

they do position women to clearly see what comes next on their healing trajectory

and to see how they, as members of a community, might get there.12

Looking back, one woman summed up her transformation this way, ‘‘It was

difficult to admit I was just a survivor. As one point, we were fighters just to stay in

the game. Now, healing is within my reach. I see my life getting easier. I am where

I want to be.’’

Finally, a word on the transformative effects of ritual, performance and healing

as it intersects with the role of the therapist. We recognize the many limitations,

issues, biases, lack of controls, etc., when this work is viewed from a scientific,

logical positivist paradigm. We have acknowledged these in a previous article

(Allen and Wozniak 2011), and continue to explore them as our research evolves.

Nevertheless, we hope this work makes a contribution in suggesting new approaches

and interventions that promote long-term healing, hope, and joy in women who have

been abused. Recognizing that the traditional researcher/therapist boundary is

modulated to some degree in this kind of participatory research model, we wanted to

engage fully with the women in the group as co-creators and equal participants. That

being said, we also recognized our position of relative power within the status of

the group and were very careful around issues around personal self-disclosure,

12 Our ability to track women after they leave the group is limited as much by our own efforts as by

group participant’s efforts. First, of the women who wanted to remain in contact with the group

facilitators none has returned to an abusive relationship. This represents roughly over 50% of the women

who have graduated from our groups. Second, while all women initially expressed an interest in staying in

touch, we do not know, for those who did not, if it represents a change or heart or a change or living style

or a change of address. This tends to be a highly mobile population and many of the women knew they

were moving either out of transitional housing or to a new state for a new job. So unfortunately we have

not been able to track every participant to find out if the intervention was successful at helping them

change their lives in way the group supported. However, the group also operates on the assumption that

once women have gained a new perspective and a new way of thinking, whether they were able to sustain

it indefinitely and consistently forever misses the point. In our experience it is more plausible that women

have a new way of thinking about themselves and the world around them as a tool in an expanding

repertoire of tools they can use to make life changes. Thus rather than something that helps them create

one final change, it is something they can draw on and build upon and come back to as they move through

their life.


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especially as it might relate to our own experiences with interpersonal violence.

Still, we felt we connected with the members beyond the traditional therapist/client

relationship as women in an unequal society that tolerates the oppression of women.

Thus, we entered into the community of women in the groups, participated in the

rituals themselves and felt the transformative, releasing and reaffirming effects in

our own psyches. We found ourselves somewhat unburdened by the past, and freer

to imagine our own futures in a more robust way. We became aware of internalized

negative thought patterns at personal and professional levels and challenged

ourselves to remove them. We were also challenged by the women, who became

very sensitive to us and found their voice in suggesting new ways for us to look at

things.

We are in the process of more rigorously standardizing the core content in the

curriculum of the group and developing a more detailed facilitator’s guide to

enhance the consistency with which the group is being offered. Once this is

accomplished, we plan additional, more traditional studies to measure the groups’

effectiveness. However, we also envision a time when women ‘‘thrivers’’ facilitate

their own Rites of Passage group, creating new communities of mutually supportive

women who share a common bond that is reinforced through the creation of shared

rituals. Finally, we also plan to develop better ways to track women who have been

through our groups and examine the long-term implications of the changes they

made during our groups as well as to examine the ways in which women’s sense of

identity, or their story about who they are, changes and intersects various life way

changes.

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