Witnessing Life Transitions with Ritual and Ceremony in Family Therapy: Three Examples from a Metis Therapist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ceremonial acknowledgment of significant life changes can offer support, connectedness, dignity and a sense of belonging. When the change involves loss, as in the case of separation and divorce, the grief can be witnessed ritualistically in ways that provide comfort and support for the shifts in social identity or status. While Western cultures hold traditions that mark many joyous accomplishments, there are fewer ceremonial opportunities to acknowledge sorrowful endings, particularly separation and relationship transition. Many Indigenous cultures mark transitional moments with ritual and ceremony. However, when rites of passage are lost due to colonialism, reinventing rituals and transitional ceremonies becomes more important and can be experienced with an added poignancy. This paper explores four aspects of ritual by offering: (1) a brief history of ritual in family therapy, (2) a discussion of what rituals consist of and how they can be applied, (3) three examples of developmental rituals from a Metis family culture, and (4) the significance of rituals from a Metis perspective. The creation of culturally inspired therapeutic rituals can offer richness in work with families and support the benefits of connection, belonging, spirituality and acknowledging achievement. These goals support therapeutic goals related to growth, change and transformation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".