Successful Relationship with Emma

Exploring Rituals to Enrich Relationships and Create Change w/ Dr. Evan Imber-Black (Ep. 14)

• Emma Viglucci • Episode 14

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Rituals are a significant facet of our human experience. They enrich and give meaning to our life, and they make everything more fun- if done right!

If we didn’t have rituals, our days would just meld into each other as would our weeks, months and years… Our life would not have distinctive segments to focus on for personal care, productivity, creativity, connection, fun and enjoyment… It would be a string of passing time without it being acknowledged and properly experienced…

Rituals help us delineate time as in our daily routine, life transitions and celebrations. They facilitate the rites of passage and mark  milestones. They give meaning to our experience.  But they are even more impactful than this – they connect us, they give us identify, they give our relationships cohesiveness, they transmit legacy, they deepen our experiences. And most importantly they can serve as a mechanism for creating change…

In today’s episode I’m honored to share time with the wonderful Dr. Evan Imber-Black a prominent contributor to the Marriage and Family Therapy profession. We have a lovely conversation about the significance of rituals, their purpose, what makes a great ritual, and how they are impactful in our relationships and in special circumstances like step-families and multicultural families.

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🌟ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Dr. Evan Imber-Black is the Program Director of the MFT Program at Mercy University, and she founded and directed the Center for Families and Health at the Ackerman Institute in NYC, where she is affiliated as senior faculty. She was also a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she founded and directed the Urban Institute for Families and Family Therapy Training. Dr. Imber-Black was the editor of Family Process, a major scholarly journal in family systems research and family therapy, and also the author of over 80 original papers and several books. She has made major contributions to the MFT profession in Families and Larger Systems, Family Rituals and Family Secrets. Learn more about her here.

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🌟MENTIONED INSIDE / RESOURCES:

Book – Ritual for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships

Article – Rituals in the Time of COVID‐19: Imagination, Responsiveness, and the Human Spirit

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🌟MORE ON THIS EPISODE:

Watch the YouTube Video!

More about the podcast on our Podcast Page. 

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DISCLAIMER: This content is meant to support your Journey and not as a replacement for professional assistance. Additionally, the ideas and resources provides by our guests are their ideas and recommendations alone and not necessarily a reflection of the host’s.



Emma Viglucci:

Welcome to another episode. I am so excited to have Dr Evan Ember Black with us today and so honored for her choosing and deciding and agreeing to join us today in this conversation on how to do rituals for life to create a refresh in your relationship, in your life, in your family, whatever you might need as you start a new season and just in general, to make your life more rich and to even have healing properties. So that's why we have Dr Ember Black with us to enlighten us on how to use rituals during specific times in our life to really create healthy family bonds and a rich life with each other. So with our father, I do. I am going to read her bio and then I'll say hello to Dr Evan Ember Black. So she is the program director of the Marriage and Family Therapy program at Merced University.

Emma Viglucci:

Dr Ember Black was the editor of Family Process from 2004 to 2011 in major scholarly journal in Family Systems Research and Family Therapy. She founded and directed the Center of Family Studies and Health at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in New York City, where she's affiliated as a senior faculty. She was also a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she founded and directed the Urban Institute for Families and Family Therapy Training. Dr Evan Ember Black was the past president of the American Family Therapy Academy and throughout her internationally recognized career she has made a major contribution to thematic themes in the field with models for practice, including families and larger systems, family rituals and family secrets. She's the author of over 80 original papers and several books and has received major awards for her contributions, so I am so honored to have her here with me today. Hello Evan, how are you today?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

I'm fine thank you, emma, for that lovely introduction.

Emma Viglucci:

My pleasure. So why don't we get started and tell us a little bit about how you chose this magnificent field to be a therapist, to contribute, and tell us a little bit about how your career kind of progressed?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, sure, my first job out of college at age 20 was as a high school teacher in Chicago, in on the west side, and I did that for four years and then I moved to California. I moved with my then husband and we had two children. And then our marriage fell apart, as many do, and I was looking for what to do and there was a wonderful program at Cal State Hayward University in psychotherapy master's level and so I started with that. I got very interested in working with families in particular, rather than just individuals A couple therapy had really not become its own separate field at that time and I finished my master's and got a scholarship for my doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. So we picked up and moved cross-country and I did my doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh where I really focused. It was a program where you could very much choose your own focus, which was wonderful a PhD program, and I focused on family systems. And then I got my first faculty job at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where I taught family therapy. I remained there for a period of time, for five years, but they were not about to hire another person in family therapy and I just felt that I would not grow if I stayed in a place where I was the only faculty member. So I was offered and took a job in Carl Tom's program in Calgary, alberta.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

So we picked up again and moved again cross-country and country to country and I stayed there for four years. It was quite wonderful. I was the training director there for four years and I met LaCelle's Black, who became my husband and we both really wanted to leave Calgary. It was about time and we moved to New York City and we stayed. While we stayed in New York until a couple of years ago. Sadly my husband passed away and I decided to move up to Connecticut. But during all that time let's see, I'm trying to think from 2006 to the present, I have been the program director at Mercy University in the master's program in marriage and family therapy. That program, like all MFT masters in New York, was agreed upon by the state of New York licensing board in 2006 and we were one of the first programs and I've been there ever since.

Emma Viglucci:

And wonderful, and you turn out beautiful students from there. I had the pleasure of supervising a few. Oh, thank you, that's good to hear.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

That's very good to hear. I love it there. We do have wonderful students. And yeah, I mean. If any of your listeners are interested in pursuing a master's in MFT, give us a shout.

Emma Viglucci:

Lovely, I love that. Yes, totally, we totally encourage that and then I do a small private practice. Where do?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

you practice From my home, From my home in Farmington, Connecticut. Some of it's virtual, most of it's virtual. People seem to like that a lot today, and so yeah.

Emma Viglucci:

Yep, yep, very good, Lovely. So you are known for your work with family secrets and with family rituals. It's a lot of things, but those are your. You have a few books on those topics and I wanted to focus today on rituals, as we spring us around the corner and we have all the holidays coming up and I figured what a beautiful time to talk about rituals and how to do them properly and the benefits of rituals. So anything that you want to start with in terms of teaching or showing us why rituals are important.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Sure, well, you know. Let me just give a little background. I started the interest in rituals at the University of Massachusetts, so it's a long time ago. My then graduate student, jeanine Roberts, and Dick Whiting, who were PhD students, worked with me and we did an edited book called Rituals and Families and Family Therapy. It's still available. It's in a second edition. It's probably a little dated, I would think. But then I wrote a popular book called Rituals for Our Times and I did that one myself. It's a book for professionals and for an educated lay public, so your listeners can use it with their clients and it really lays out everything that you need to know about family rituals and cultural rituals, which are also very important.

Emma Viglucci:

Yes, yes, so I actually based a lot of my work with rituals when I speak about rituals with my clients from this book and also you had a nice chapter in family transitions, I believe was called the book, but Manaka MacGoldrick. Yes, so, yes, so a few stories there, so I'm familiar with some of the work and I definitely weave that in. So I want to enlighten the rest of our clients, whether they're professionals or lay people, about how to do rituals and why they are meaningful, like what is the significance and importance of having rituals.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, well, maybe if you wouldn't mind, first let me just sort of go through for people the kinds of rituals, so that everybody knows where you can find rituals. They're everywhere, the first beginning with daily rituals the things that people do that are different from just mere interactions not mere, but I mean they are invested with meaning. So something like a family meal, whether that's in the morning if the family is eating breakfast together, or, more likely, in the evening for supper time, that's a good example of a daily ritual. It happens every day or almost every day, and it has to it special meaning. When you ask adults to tell me about what meal time was like when you were a kid, and you'll hear what were the repeating interactions that happened, what were the symbols, and that's something very important, I think, for us all to think about.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Rituals have symbols. They have aspects to them that are rich with meaning. So if we take something like a daily ritual, like either a supper time or, let's say, a bedtime ritual, both for children and adults, they're going to have symbols. Maybe it's a storybook that your five-year-old wants to hear over and, over and over again. At supper time, maybe you have some pieces of dishware from your family of origin, things like that that are rich with meaning and, I think, help us, quite frankly, just to be human with each other. And then the category of family traditions. Now, those are things like birthdays, anniversaries, special times on the calendar that are unique to your family. When it's your birthday, it's not everybody's birthday in the culture, although I understand there is an island people and I can't remember their name right now, unfortunately where they all celebrate their birthday on January 1st.

Emma Viglucci:

We don't do that.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

We have individual birthdays and it is a day to help someone feel special and to mark developmental milestones and so forth. Often we make a bigger deal about decade birthdays, you know 20, 30, 40, etc. And so that's a very important kind of family tradition.

Emma Viglucci:

Anniversaries.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, anniversaries, and that can be a wedding anniversary. It can be an anniversary of when you met someone who was very significant to you. It can be an anniversary of the start of a friendship. It doesn't necessarily have to be a wedding anniversary. So those are some examples of family traditions. They are unique to your calendar. They're not happening everywhere at the same time, right, you have to put a little extra effort into them. And then, for instance, in the next category, family celebrations, which are the holidays primarily.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

You know, depending on what religious group you belong to or ethnic group you belong to, those are specific times that happen on the calendar, if it's a regular calendar or if it's a lunar calendar.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

In the Jewish religion or in the Muslim religion, right now, yesterday, I believe, ramadan started, and it's an entire month where people fast all day and then they get together for a big meal with friends and family in the evening, and so that's happening all over the place, anywhere where there is a Muslim population. Later this month on our regular calendar, we'll have Easter, and it's at the end of March this year. Good Friday, easter Sunday, and for some people that's a very serious religious holiday, for others it's just I don't know what to call it a fun holiday, easter eggs for children and chocolate rabbits and whatever the family's way of doing that particular holiday celebration. In most years, easter and the Jewish holiday of Passover fall right near each other, within the same week, within the same day. But because the Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, this happens to be a leap year and instead of adding a day, the Hebrew calendar adds a month, to straighten things out again. So Passover won't be till, I think it's a third week of April.

Emma Viglucci:

Oh wow, we didn't realize that.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

So they're quite far apart. And it's a wonderful holiday, and I myself am Jewish and we make a Seder meal with a booklet that we read from the Haggadah, and we don't eat bread for eight days. We eat matzah, which tastes mostly like cardboard, but you know, it's okay, you don't have to eat it, but you're not supposed to eat bread or bread products. And so, as I say, normally those three holidays Ramadan, easter and Passover are very, very close. This year they're a little more spread out because of lunar calendars and our American calendar, whatever it's called, I don't know, but it is a period of time when people are gathering with family, or they may not be, because there's a cutoff in the family. And that's something that comes to the attention of us as therapists I think especially us couple and family therapists where, if people are not getting on with their family of origin, we work to try to help them mend those kinds of cutoffs.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

And then the next category, the final category, is life cycle rituals, and those are the rituals that celebrate special moments in the family life cycle. So weddings, birth of a child, graduation yeah, again, if people are religious, they might be celebrating a communion, they might be celebrating a bar mitzvah and all of those things are wrapped up in life cycle rituals. So we created this way of categorizing really the rituals so that they would be simpler and more available to people to think about and to think about what's missing in my life. Is there something? Is there something I want to change?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

I think sometimes, for instance, when a couple gets together, creating new family rituals can be difficult. Perhaps in a heterosexual couple, he comes from a family that didn't do much celebrating and she comes from one that did lots of celebrating, so they have a good deal of negotiating to do to figure out how are we going to do it. That's right and yeah, and sometimes couples will start out with not much in the way of meaningful rituals. Maybe they still go back to their own families of origin, but once they have children if they have children is when it usually starts to become important to create long lasting family rituals.

Emma Viglucci:

Yeah, so thank you so much for that breakdown of the types of rituals, sure, and if you could share a little bit about why they're important. Why is it significant? Because, in the example that you gave, the guy could say why don't we have to do all the celebrations? What's the point? Such a waste of money, time, who cares? I'm not outgoing, I'm an introvert, right, right, all the things. And so why is it significant? Are we important to have rituals?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah Well, that's a great question. They really are the connective tissue in our family and community systems. Right, and you know, if you just try to imagine your life with no rituals, it's hard to imagine. I mean, you're going to have daily rituals, like it or not. You're going to eat a meal together, you're going to, you know, put a child to bed and read a story, and things like that. The bigger rituals tradition, celebrations, life cycle rituals often there has to be a good bit of negotiating in a couple, because one comes from one kind of background, the other comes from another kind of background. Bits of arguments certainly occur around different ritual seasons. Do we celebrate, Don't we? How do?

Emma Viglucci:

we make our own.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Which family do we go to, if it's, you know, christmas or Easter or Passover, and Passover, thankfully there's two nights of Seder's so you can go to both, but it's it's convenience.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, and so you know and that's something that I will certainly hear in a therapy session how people have struggled to work that out. What happens at key developmental points, like children leaving home and setting up their own household. How does the ritual, you know, let's say, of Easter that's what's coming need to change, or is the expectation that adult children will always come back to their family of origin? Well, that's fine until they have a partner, and then there needs to be some negotiating as to are we going to do one one year and one the other, or are we going to take two days? And, you know, visit here and some and today, I'm sure you and your listeners know so many people have moved far away from their families of origin. So you know, certainly we always see on television for Christmas, for Easter and so forth, big airport days, right, big travel days, big driving days where people want to go and be with their families.

Emma Viglucci:

Right, yeah, for sure. So one of the things that I know that rituals do and why I encourage clients to partake and to get better at them and better and better and make it more and more meaningful and special, is because and you could correct me if you have additional thoughts on this or reinforce what I'm saying they have a way of transmitting family legacies as well. Yes, and imparting the meaning of who we are. Yes, and I'm afraid that cohesive, missing the family. So any thoughts about that?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

I think you're right. Of course you always want to find out, let's say in a couple, what was a given ritual like in the family they came from, because sometimes one partner had a terrific experience with, let's just say, christmas and the other had a terrible experience year after year after year. I think in rituals for our times I've talked about a family where, when Christmas would come, the father would take to his bed and just would not come out, and it was very hard on the mom and the kids and they didn't understand it. And finally, finally, he was able to speak about what happened to him as a child. That Christmas was a terrible time. It was.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

He was in a family that was quite abusive, and on Christmas it was even worse because his father would not just get drunk but roaring drunk and would abuse him, and so he took to hiding on holidays. And once his wife and his children understood his story, then they were able to figure out with him how can we make this so that it's very different, that it doesn't bring back bad memories. And they worked on it and they created a new ritual for themselves, and so it's that kind of thing, you know. I think it's important for all of us to think about what was a given ritual like in the family I come from. How was it celebrated? Was it celebrated Were people good to each other, or were they not good to each other? And then you can begin to work on how do you want this to be now and into the future.

Emma Viglucci:

Right. So that ties it back to what I said earlier, that they could be healing right. What a beautiful experience If we have a chance to now change it, have a different story around it, a different experience. That's right, that's lovely, right, very, very nice. And so when everything got up and dead during COVID, yeah, so any thoughts about how rituals I mean we lived it. So we know right, factually what happened and how we felt.

Emma Viglucci:

But in terms of clinically and the experience and the healing and the trauma and how resilient we were at the end of the day. Anything to say about that?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Well, you know, one of the things that I guess is both a blessing and a curse is Zoom, and that during COVID, people celebrated with each other by not, they didn't see each other in person, but they were able to Zoom. And I remember Passover was the first holiday after everything shut down for me, you know, and for my family, and my children and grandchildren were living a couple of hours away and so we set up Zoom and had a Seder. So, you know, did it take a little bit of work? Yes, it did, especially for those of us who are not that technologically savvy, right, but there are ways, certainly. Now I did do a scholarly paper called Rituals in the Time of COVID. I published in Family Process in 21, I think, or 22. I'm not sure.

Emma Viglucci:

I think I read that one, yep yeah.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

So your listeners are certainly invited to take a look for that paper. I think it's one that they don't charge for.

Emma Viglucci:

I think it, yep, I was able to see it.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, and because I was very interested in how our people maintaining, though changing, because you had to the familiar rituals and you know, I interviewed people, I talked to people and all of the ones we mentioned earlier Ramadan, passover, easter were all occurring at that time and you could not go out into a crowd, I mean, unless you really wanted to take a big chance, and so people remained at home and used the technology to connect to each other. So we're living in a different time, you know, than when a lot of these were first created.

Emma Viglucci:

That goes to show us how important rituals are to us, that we figure out the technology, because soon was. I mean it was like we did soon back then, but it wasn't what it is today. No, that's true, we definitely brought it up to like, ooh, we need to zoom. And people figured it out and people sometimes will cancel family plans and not do holidays if there was a conflict or whatever, but they made sure there was a ritual during this time because they couldn't. They figured it out, they got over all the humps and hurdles. That's right.

Emma Viglucci:

So that goes to show us that the impact that rituals have, how they create that meaning in rich, in the connection that helps us feel more connected and loved, right without them, where it feels like we're floating.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, I think you're right.

Emma Viglucci:

So they kind of grow on that they anchor us.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

They anchor us with our family, with our friends. Who are we? What do we want to continue? What do we want to stop doing? All of that is involved in rituals.

Emma Viglucci:

How do we become our better selves If our family's abusive, if our family's boring, if our family is, whatever, gossipy, complaining, whining over whatever? All the things that families do, right, access, eating, drinking, all the things. An opportunity to do them differently now and start changing the patterns, right? That's right, yeah, lovely, very nice. So, in terms of we talked about COVID being a thing what are more natural and organic things that are ongoing? Covid was a big exception to life, something that we don't expect to have very often. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully, but other things that happen more often are step families and multicultural families, right. So any thoughts on how to use rituals to create more unity and cohesiveness within families that might struggle with that because they come from such different backgrounds and there's so many moving pieces.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah Well, that's a great question. Let's start with step families, remarried families. There needs to be conversation. You can't assume that your partner, your new partner and his or her children have done things the way you and your ex-partner and your current children are doing things, and the worst thing you can do, I think, is force people to participate in something that just feels too foreign to them. So in a remarried family, I think you have to find out. You're not starting from scratch because you have children usually and you have to have conversations so that his children, her children, maybe they have an hour child together.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

All of that has to go into what kind of rituals do we want to have? And if it's a holiday to have a conversation, how did we used to do this? And it's going to take a while. It's not going to feel automatically natural and one of the things that can really get remarried families into trouble is insisting. Each one insisting on it's got to be my way. Children not liking changes.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

So there needs to be a lot of conversation and people don't think of that because some of these rituals feel so automatic to us. We've done them for years and this is how you do it and it can really get people into difficulties. So that's one category that you mentioned. The other multi-ethnic, multi-religious couples and families also have to find a way to make room for each one's way of doing things, and I think that's what's hard for people, particularly if they're not sharing the same religious beliefs. Hopefully they've talked that through carefully before making a commitment. These are important conversations. They're important conversations for first couples before they move in, get married. What are some of the big fights we hear about? Wedding planning, how it all got pulled off or didn't get pulled off, and so forth.

Emma Viglucci:

That's so funny that you said that, because when my couples are getting married and they start having some difficulties, I'm like this is what happens. It comes with the territory, it's totally normal, it just comes with it. You're negotiating a lot of different things. You're melding two families, two lives, two, everything. It's not easy. So.

Emma Viglucci:

I'm not really sad with the multicultural aspect, the ethnicity, the religions, to make space for both people's things. My way, your way. You have to give up yours, you do mine. That's just now a nice way of honoring your partner, absolutely.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

And there's a richness in that. That comes from finding out as you get to know a new partner and you're thinking about making things more permanent. For instance, what's the history? How has their family done any of these big rituals? How did they want to do it? What's?

Emma Viglucci:

the meaning behind them. Why is it important? How does it play out? How does it fit into your belief systems?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Exactly, exactly.

Emma Viglucci:

I love all of that. That's perfect. I've been in conversations a couple of times and any suggestions on key things to cover to make sure that they have a good conversation. Supposed to start talking about something and then it's a fight.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Right, we're saying conversation, not fighting right In terms of planning a ritual. You mean yeah.

Emma Viglucci:

And just kind of integrating, creating just togetherness, right With all these things.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

I think the first thing is, people do need some awareness that there's got to be different we're each, even if we're the same religion, same ethnic background and so forth. We come from two different families and the way your family did things and the way my family did things are going to be at least slightly different. Okay, the only time I think maybe this is less true is when both people come from a very orthodox kind of religion and they both share that. That's probably going to have more similar rituals, at least the holidays and life cycle rituals. Now, things like daily rituals, however, are probably always going to have been different for each.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

How do people start the day? How do they say goodbye to each other in the morning? Do they? Do they notice that each one's leaving? How do they greet each other at the end of the day? Again, do they or people just slip into the house and no one knows who's there? And meal times and bed times and so forth those are perhaps more likely to be quite different, coming from different families. So it's a good thing to have a conversation about it. How did your family do Tell me about a typical day in the family that you come from, from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night, and then you'll get a take on what their daily rituals are like. Are they having daily rituals? I mean, there I see so many couples, younger couples, that work. They don't get home till nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, he goes to the pile of mail, she goes to the computer. They don't sit down to eat or to discuss how was your day, and I think that is not good. Okay.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

I'll make a judgment there. If you're away from each other for hours and hours and hours, you need a way to greet each other at the end of the day that is reliable and repeatable, and you probably need to share a little food or a glass of wine in order to reconnect. So saying goodbye in the morning and then saying hello again when you re-meet each other. Rituals are important, and they're really important for children. I think children thrive on the regularity, the repeatedness that they can rely on in daily rituals.

Emma Viglucci:

Right, so that's another aspect of also the benefit of rituals. It creates emotional safety that, like I know what's happening, I know where I belong, I know how I'm going to be treated, I know what's expected, all of that stuff creates a lot of good stuff, exactly.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Exactly, love is so good.

Emma Viglucci:

And, as you were saying, as you were going through the touch points throughout the day, I'm hearing transitions in there. You're hearing, I'm sorry, some Transitions. Yes, transition times are massive. That's why things break down during transition times. That's something that I usually call out yeah, monday night, monday morning.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

If one parent is not working outside the home, then they're there to create some kind of daily ritual with children when they return from school, and that's a good thing.

Emma Viglucci:

Or even if they do work, because most people work, even if they do work when they reconnect right after they care.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

That's right, that's right. If they're not at home. What?

Emma Viglucci:

does that look like?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah, and there's a repetition of familiarity, right. Children thrive on that, that's right. They absolutely do.

Emma Viglucci:

Yeah, and adults do also right. So something that I usually point out to couples is be very intentional about the transitions into the weekend out of the weekends before vacation after vacation Right.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Yeah.

Emma Viglucci:

Night time, morning, like getting home, leaving the home, getting to the home, like all those touch points get tricky for people and that's when people get triggered and things happen. Yeah, so if they could integrate some kind of a good ritual there, bam, right, right, perfect.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Very, very nice, absolutely.

Emma Viglucci:

So, evan, can you share some light onto what makes a good ritual? So you already mentioned consistency and the frequency. I think you said the frequency by consistency, definitely. What else, what are some other elements of a good ritual? I?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

think, the participation of, if it's a couple, both members of the couple talking about how did this particular ritual go in the families we come from? Okay, how do we want it to be? How can we remain open to changing a ritual in changing circumstances? Hmm, so somebody needs to work longer, somebody gets ill, all of the things that happen in life. How do we integrate that into a given ritual, whether that's a daily ritual, a family tradition, a family celebration? They're not going to look the same on year 10 as they did on year one. At least we hope not, and that can get couples into arguments and so forth. But there needs to be flexibility. What's working for us, what worked for us when we were a childless couple, is not going to work the same for us when we have children. And what worked for us when our children were preschoolers is certainly not going to work for us when they are teenagers. That's right, and so I think, if families can keep that in mind and adjust their rituals, they may need to deal. I'm sure they will need to deal with a loss. And how do we integrate that into our rituals If we always went to grandma's house for, let's say, easter, which is coming up and we've lost grandma, nice. What are we going to do?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Some families, unfortunately, just stop celebrating, and that's not a good solution. It's going to be different. It requires conversation. How can we do this in a good way, in a way that honors grandma moves us on as well, with developmental stages of children, the rituals that you may be doing when your kids are five, six, seven, and the rituals what are those rituals going to require when that same child is 16 or going off to college, and so forth. So I guess my message is stay flexible, I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it, and I think that leads us into my last question for the day. That leads us into the last question, right? So, which is what makes a ritual meaningful.

Emma Viglucci:

What makes a ritual meaningful? What makes a ritual meaningful?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Well, that's a very good question. You do want to examine and re-examine your rituals as they start to feel repetitive without meaning, like you're going through the motions. It's time to talk Like flat. Yeah, it's time to talk. You may need to discard it. You may need to just change it up in some way. And what makes you know a quote good ritual is meaning, is each participant feeling like they want to be there, that there's room for multiple voices to alter a ritual, to change something, to talk about maintaining something, because it's very important the way it is, and so I would encourage couples and families to have discussions ahead of, especially, the major holiday ritual. Yes, okay, so we've been coloring Easter eggs for the last 15 years. Do we still want to do that, right? Or do we want to do something different and get everybody's voice involved, and then you'll know that you're creating something meaningful.

Emma Viglucci:

Lovely. So that's the great definition of that. Meaning means that everybody has a voice, that everybody's contributing. That's what makes it meaningful. So what if somebody doesn't want to participate? What if you have a couple and one partner like what we were saying earlier is really into it and the other one isn't? So then how can we?

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

go about dividing the partner. I think you want to review with each other what were rituals like in the family I come from? So, again, let's take this time of year what was Easter like in the family that I come from? And if it was a good experience, then often you want to keep it going, you want to repeat it in your new family and so forth.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

If it was not a good experience and there are families where there's alcoholism, if there's drug abuse, if there's other things there many times people take a holiday as a time not just to get drunk but to get roaring drunk, and your partner may have terrible, terrible memories of that from childhood that you don't even know about. So I think my advice on this would be when you're getting to know someone, when you're seriously dating, talk about family rituals. Talk about what was meal time, supper time, like in your family. Here's what it was like in my family. What power birthdays celebrated were they? There's a lot of families that once a kid is past 10 years old or something, they just stop celebrating. There are others who make it a big deal and an important matter forever.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Okay. So holidays what? How did your family do Easter? Here's how my family did Easter. What do we want to do so that you don't get caught in these needless arguments that you don't even know where it's coming from? When one partner is saying, oh, this isn't right, we're not doing this, right, what do you mean? Right, what's right? Well, what's right is how my family did it.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

And so you know if you can have those conversations and you know if you're going to one person's family of origin. You need to kind of put your way of doing it to the side for a day, and it's a great way to learn about your partners, how your partner was brought up and is doing things Right, to have these opportunities to have a holiday meal with one family or the other. I'm sure you know from your practice and I'm sure your listeners know there can be endless arguments about what's the right way to do this. That's not how my family did it. Well, you're creating a new family and so you need to talk it over. How did each of you do it? What did you love about it? What did you quite frankly hate about it and wish would never happen again? And then you are on the road to creating a good set of rituals for yourself.

Emma Viglucci:

I love it. That was amazing, perfect. So if one partner is not interested, I love what you were saying to there might be a reason for it, right? Yes, so to be curious and compassionate yeah.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

We have always found out that if somebody says I don't celebrate, what do you mean? You don't celebrate? What were celebrations like in the family you come from, and you start to hear some pretty awful stories sometimes and that someone's solution is I'm not going to celebrate. That's the easiest way out of this, and so you have to work on it with people and let them know there are other ways than the way their family might have done a particular ritual.

Emma Viglucci:

Beautiful, perfect. So I heard the takeaway and the last part in words were is they open and flexible? So I love that I'm going to quote you on that Very good.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

And I want to wish everybody a happy Ramadan. If you're celebrating that Happy Easter, happy Passover and work on your rituals together, I love it.

Emma Viglucci:

Thank you so much for sharing time with me today.

Dr. Evan Imber-Black:

Thank, you I really appreciate you.

Emma Viglucci:

Thank you for everything that you've contributed to the profession and for just having a beautiful life. Thank you so much. Okay, Bye everybody, and to the listeners. I'll see you at the next one. Thank you.

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Emma K Viglucci, LMFT

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