There was a night early in the process of my divorce where I found myself trying desperately to get to bed. I’d crawl in, but then it would feel like electricity was coursing so strongly through me that I had no choice but to crawl back out and start pacing the floor. I’d wander around the small, empty apartment that my husband and I had rented to birdnest while we sorted through the details of deconstructing a life. It was too quiet, too still, too tight. My babies were too far away.
I was in grief, and I was also in fear. Everything felt unfamiliar. Even the routines that I’d had for years and hadn’t much changed – like going to work or, on the nights I was with them, tucking my kids into bed – felt somehow altered in this new reality. I felt this internal grasping for something that would feel grounding and known to me. But every time I reached, I was met with empty air.
I had this feeling of having been abandoned in the darkened woods, not sure whether to wander to find safety or to stay put to avoid more danger. It felt intolerable at times to be in my own body, my own experience, while also impossible not to be.
At the time that this was all happening, I hadn’t yet had a single close friend who had already gotten to the other side of divorce. I was fortunate to know a couple others whose processes were close in timeline to mine, I wasn’t in close relationship to any alumnae of the experience.
There was the lady who had rented the apartment to us, who when my eyes filled with tears explaining our situation, had put her cool hand on top of mine on the laminate countertop, told me she’d been where I was, and said, “This might be the hardest season of your life. But know that seasons change.”
But aside from her and some of the authors of the memoirs I had started reading, I felt absent of guides. I felt absent of a map to know how or when this aching season would conclude. I felt absent of a way of understanding, even with all my professional training, why something I’d thought was for the best still felt so excruciating.
I didn’t know it or have language for it at the time, but I was in my initiation. Not just any initiation, though. I was in what Francis Weller, psychotherapist and author, calls a rough initiation. And I was only at the start.
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I know that you too have had the experience of a concept or idea finding its way into your consciousness over and over again, like a penny that keeps showing up beneath your foot. For me, lately, it’s been the concept of initiations. In all kinds of disparate places, I found myself presented with this theme. Okay, universe, I’m picking up the penny.
It wasn’t a topic I’d ever given much thought to. I’d had a vague notion of how some cultures throughout history have had initiatory practices that marked a transition for a person. But as I started to delve into it, I learned that almost all cultures have had their own version of an initiation. While the form that these initiation rituals have taken have varied widely, they share some core components..
First, the need for an initiation ritual itself has been based on the notion that to move from one role to another requires an embodied practice. Communities knew that becoming an adult wasn’t just something that happened because our cells aged. It meant something – and required something – to emerge into a new stage. The initial ritual wasn’t a test, exactly, though it often involved challenges. It was an experience and a signal, both for the individual and the community, that someone was now something new.
Across cultures, many of the traditional coming of age initiations rites have taken place in early or mid-adolescence. Like the Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, where 13-year-olds read from the Torah and deliver a speech to the community, signaling a transition into responsibility for their own actions. Or the Kenyan Maasi rite of Enkipaata in which a delegation of boys between 14 and 16 are sent out with elders for a period of seclusion, physical demands, and then eventual return to the community. Or, particularly torturous seeming, the ritual of the Brazilian Sateré-Mawé where elders have young men put their hands into gloves filled with bullet ants, thought to inflict dozens of bites that are each as painful as a gunshot.
I might have chosen the ten minutes of fire ants over the nights spent aching for my babies, but the point is that all initiations involve pain or tasks that feel unsurvivable.
They all involve elder mentors, importantly not parents, acting as guides through the process. And they all involve working one’s way through three stages of the initiation process: separation, liminality, and return.
Separation is when the initiate is pulled away from all that is comfortable and familiar, asked to step into the land of the unknown – a forest, a cave, a one-bedroom apartment. Liminality is the messy middle. It exists outside of typical structures and even time, and it’s when the initiate is faced with challenges that are or feel very much like confronting death. The threat of potential annihilation is important here, because it’s inherent to what humbles and transforms. In fact, annihilation does occur – annihilation of the old self. The final stage is the return, which is often minimized but in fact central. It is here that the initiated makes their way back to the community, not to resume their life before, but to forge a new one. It is the adult that is welcomed back, bringing with them the lessons and medicine of their experience.
Jonathan Haidt talks about initiation in The Anxious Generation, his bestseller about kids using smartphones and other factors that have distorted the growing up process. He points to the absence of initiation rites in more modern culture as a key factor in the Peter Pan-ing of younger generations; without ritual challenge and expectations and an intentional signal of adulthood, we find ourselves with kids – and then chronological adults – who don’t see themselves as capable or contributory.
There’s much more to say there on culture and especially on what’s happening to boys, but where I want to go here is to what happens when initiations don’t happen as part contained process and instead as a result of trauma or profound life circumstances. As I reference before, Francis Weller has called the latter rough initiations. Rough initiations often manifest through the experience of things like a serious health issue, an encounter with violence or betrayal, a significant loss, or a sudden disruption in identity.
Rough initiations share all of the same stages and pain of a ritual initiation process, but they lack some of the containing elements. Rough initiations lack clear guides; no one is directly shepherding you through the experience. Rough initiations lack community celebration; you don’t necessarily feel backed by a village happily awaiting your return. Rough initiations lack the preparation that helps you feel agency of the process. And, importantly, rough initiations lack clear meaning while you’re in the early stages; unlike the lost kid in the woods who, while scared, can at least reassure himself that he will emerge an adult, in a rough initiation we often question why the hell this is happening to us.
But if we can begin to see our experience as an initiation, as rough and terrifying and overwhelming as it may be, we may just be able to begin instead to ask why this is happening for us.
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Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t asking myself about the deeper meaning of my marriage dissolving while I was making a spreadsheet of my retirement savings or packing up kids’ clothes. Sometimes that liminal stage is so liminally that it feels impossible to see beyond the next day – or hour. When we are in crisis, from a brain science standpoint, our stress and grief may be draining our cognitive resources to such a degree that making a grocery list is a win. Exploring what beautiful medicine we will returning to our village with is often not on the list of today’s survival tasks.
Which is indeed right in line with the initiation process. No one is asking the kid with his hand in the bullet ant glove, while he’s writhing and moaning on the ground, what his transition to adulthood means to him. We have to know where we are in the journey. It’s often only upon the return that we have the capacity for a meaningful reflective process.
That said, simply seeing ourselves as in the initiation process, can pave the way for our eventual development. I like to say that I hate to waste a good crisis – because we can absolutely use the tragedies that befall us to stay stuck in the wilderness or to emerge a different, wiser, and more whole adult.
The difference doesn’t come down to the specifics of the crisis, which is a hard pill to swallow (and might catch me some flack). We aren’t more likely to grow up into our fully adult self because we had an ex who was easier to deal with or because our diagnosis was less serious or because the loss was softer. The potential gift of things falling totally apart or away is that we have no illusion left of things ever being the same. We will survive or we won’t. If we cling to the idea that what came before our initiation was the only way to be or be happy, we remain stuck in the wilderness.
There are things that do make a difference, though, and give us a much better chance at an eventual return. One is finding guides. Because, again, rough initiations don’t have those built in elders lighting the path, we often have to intentionally seek them out. They can come in all shapes and forms, but the key is that they have been in the wilderness themselves before. They’ve seen some real shit, and they aren’t scared of the dark. They might be a friend of a friend, a sponsor, a family member, or a therapist.
Another difference-maker is building in structure. Rough initiations collapse so many of the structures that existed prior. In contained, ritual initiation, the structure of the experience itself offers expectation and predictability. We can begin to scaffold our new structures – even if they end up as temporary – in our liminality, to give us a sense of something to rely on. By this I mean anything from the routine of a midday walk, a weekly dinner with a friend, a skincare ritual. One of the structures I clung to in my early post-divorce life was eating a real breakfast. The nutrition helped, of course, but what was more important was knowing I could rely on myself when things were falling apart.
I also wrote a lot. I still write a lot, but back then, writing was a means not of bringing medicine to others, but of starting the very early process of meaning-making for myself. The ramblings didn’t look like meaning, certainly. They just looked like a pile of puzzle pieces of my most complicated feelings. It was only over time, as I moved from separation to liminality and started to make my way back that I could find pieces that connected. It was only with time and routine that colors and shapes started to form something, anything recognizable. It doesn’t have to be journaling or writing, but I think rough initiations call for us to find ways to look at our thoughts and our beliefs – to spread them out on the table in front of us and examine what new beautiful image we want to create.
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In the initiation rite of the African Ndembu people, the newly transformed initiates return to their community with much fanfare – music, dancing, masked performances. There is celebration not just for the initiate’s feats, but for the benefit that the community gains with their return.
Unfortunately, not all cultures have elaborate return rituals, and they tend to certainly be lacking in rough initiations. In fact, the return is rarely a parade, which can make it even hard to recognize as happening.
The return may look more like looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror one cold morning and finally being able to smile at the person looking back. It may be when you realize you just did something you had assumed you could never do. It may be the day you share your story with someone still in the wilderness.
What’s important is that the return does happen, even when that feels nearly impossible to believe. And when it does, we are transformed into the elders, the guides, the mapmakers. We can offer our medicine to the community.
