Cutting the Threads: Why Rituals Work Where Understanding Alone Falls Short
October Special 2026: “Spooky Psychology”, Part 2/3
Strings attached? When threads tie us down
Part 1 was about the mechanics behind repeating patterns: beliefs steer perception, perception steers behaviour, behaviour confirms the belief. Which leaves one question: how does a belief like that actually change? The short answer: mostly through experience - and that’s exactly where rituals come in. And inner images - from inner child work to a machete.
Threads show up in therapy and movement practices all the time, usually as an image. “Imagine a thread gently pulling the top of your head towards the sky” - that line could come from a tai chi class or a Feldenkrais session (a body-oriented learning method). Threads hold us upright, connect us, keep us safe.
And sometimes they tie us down.
Why we fall back into old patterns - even though we know better
You know where your pattern comes from. You’ve seen through it, named it, maybe sorted it out in countless conversations. And then the moment comes - the tone of voice, the look, the email from your boss - and you react exactly the way you used to.
There are neurobiological reasons for that. Under pressure, the alarm system takes over.
Fight, flight, freeze, fawn: in none of these states do we choose freely; we react automatically.
The knowledge is there - it’s just out of reach in that moment.
An example I see often: if you learned early on that anger gets punished, you may smile today at things that deserve a scream. Because smiling was once the safest option. And the alarm system struggles to settle as long as your face and your feelings are sending opposite signals.
Queens of the Stone Age put it this way in “Smooth Sailing”: “Fear is the hand that pulls your strings.” Point taken - but before we cut those strings, I want to put in a good word for fear:
fear has a job. Its job is safety and survival - without it, we’d miss even more red flags. But safety comes at a price: safety from getting hurt costs closeness. Safety through routine costs room to move. Safety from mistakes costs the playful trial and error that new things grow from.
The good news: what was learned can be relearned - just rarely in your head alone.
Conversations in which we sort through our thoughts and understand where they come from are valuable - often they’re the first step. But the nervous system learns through experience:
through the moment it lives through something turning out differently.
Eric Kandel showed how literally that’s meant - with a sea slug. Aplysia has nerve cells so huge you can almost see them with the naked eye. When the slug learned that danger was coming, new connections grew between its nerve cells where there had been none before. When it learned that a touch was harmless, connections receded. Its nervous system rebuilt itself
- depending on what it experienced. Kandel received the Nobel Prize for this in 2000.
Experience rewires the nervous system. Literally. In both directions.
Applied to us: withdrawal is learning too. It protects us - and it writes itself into our thoughts and our posture. Going out and experiencing that something we fear turns out differently than expected writes itself in just the same way. The nervous system builds with what we give it.
New things grow where we experience new things.
Rituals, broadly speaking
By “ritual” I mean any consciously designed, tangible action that carries meaning.
There are plenty of them, including right in the middle of classic psychotherapy:
Write it down, tear it up. Writing a letter to someone who will never read it, then tearing it up or burning it. In a study by Briñol and colleagues (2013), people relied less on thoughts they had written down and thrown away - as if the mind had taken the gesture seriously.
Exposure therapy. Facing a fear step by step until the body experiences that the dreaded catastrophe doesn’t happen.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). A trauma therapy method in which distressing memories are processed using bilateral stimulation until they lose their force in the here and now. I’ve done EMDR myself, for something distressing from my past. It was pretty exhausting - and it worked.
Bodywork, movement, breath. The moment shoulders that have been up for years drop for the first time.
Imagery. Inner images that let old scenes be experienced with new endings. More on that in a moment.
Rituals in the classic sense. Acts with a set sequence and symbolic meaning that mark a transition: something ends, something new begins.
Do Rituals Actually Work? What the Research Says
The research here is promising, if still young: in experiments, rituals eased grief (Norton & Gino, 2014) - even in people who don’t believe rituals work. Researchers see rituals as a way to regulate emotions and regain a sense of control (Hobson et al., 2018). One well-known study on rituals and performance anxiety has since been retracted - a good reminder that this field is still being sorted out. So perhaps it’s less the belief in the method that matters than the act of engaging with it.
Still, new pathways in the brain don’t form overnight. They need repetition, and under stress we keep reaching for the old path long before the new one holds.
Three trees, a circle of water, a machete: my most unusual ritual
At the wildest end of the spectrum, for me, was an afternoon in a park. A man whose work doesn’t fit into any box drew a circle of water around us between three trees. In a trance-like state, I went through an old, distressing memory once more – and while I imagined stepping through a portal, he cut threads all around my body with a machete. My trousers survived. In spiritual circles, this is known as a cord cutting ritual.
How I found those three trees in the first place is a story of its own – I’ll tell it in my newsletter on 30 October.
Sounds wild. At its core, though, it’s surprisingly familiar: what I experienced as a portal, psychotherapy calls imagery.
And it has been working with it for a long time - with good evidence.
Inner Child Healing: How Imagery Rescripting Works
Imagine you were five, and something threatening happened. Back then you were small, alone, with no way out. The moment is “frozen”: it still shows up today whenever a situation smells, sounds or feels similar.
In imagery rescripting - developed by Arnoud Arntz among others, and a core part of schema therapy - you return to exactly that scene in your imagination. This time with backup: your present-day adult self steps in, stands in front of the child, says what nobody said back then, and brings the child to safety. The scene gets a new ending. Many people also call this inner child work.
What changes is the meaning and emotional charge of the memory - “I was helpless” can become “Today I’m someone who can protect.” The method is well researched, including for post-traumatic stress disorder and social anxiety: an updated meta-analysis found that it works about as well as established treatments such as exposure or EMDR (Kip et al., 2023).
Star Wars or unicorn? What the image needs to do
Now for the part that surprises people: the image doesn’t have to be realistic. In imagery rescripting, helper figures can appear - a grandmother, a superhero, a Jedi, a flying unicorn. Whether you step through a portal, beam yourself somewhere or ride a dragon: what matters is that the image carries meaning for you and makes you stronger.
What’s well established - and what’s still open
What’s proven: imagined images trigger stronger emotions than the same content in words (Holmes & Mathews, 2005). And mental practice changes the brain much like real practice - people who practised a piano exercise only in their heads showed similar changes in the motor cortex to those who actually played (Pascual-Leone et al., 1995).
What’s still open is which part exactly does the work - the image, the emotion, the new meaning, the relationship with the therapist - and whether the specific image matters at all. That imagery works is established. Why exactly, and with which images, is less clear-cut.
Caution: imagery can create false memories
This is where a lot of nonsense lives. Imagery rescripting works with memories you already have and changes their meaning - the facts stay the same. It becomes dangerous when imagery is used to “uncover” memories you’ve supposedly forgotten.
In the 1990s, exactly that led to one of the biggest scandals in psychotherapy: in suggestive sessions, people “remembered” abuse that had never happened - with devastating consequences for them and their families. Memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus showed how easily false memories can be created - a finding recently confirmed in a preregistered replication (Murphy et al., 2023). Even repeatedly imagining an event can strengthen the belief that it happened (Garry et al., 1996).
If someone promises you that trance or imagery will “finally reveal what really happened back then”: that’s a reason for scepticism. Your inner self sets the pace - bringing painful things back to the surface does something to you. Your concern belongs at the centre. Anyone mainly keen to show how much they can dig up is probably more focused on themselves.
Which ritual is right for me? Openness, conviction and a critical eye
Before everyone reaches for a machete - two things:
First: my afternoon in the park built on years of therapy. It was a catalyst - the practice afterwards was up to me. Being visible while staying safe inside is something I’m still training today.
Second: a ritual works best when it fits you. And what you need right now. Depending on the situation, very different attitudes help.
Where openness helps
When trying things out. For one person it’s the torn-up letter, for another it’s exposure, for some it’s a machete. Staying open gives you more paths to choose from. Studies on open-label placebos show how surprising this can be: people with irritable bowel symptoms improved even though they knew they were taking a placebo (Kaptchuk et al., 2010). Why belief can have physical effects is something I explored last December using the example of a “curse”.
A client showed me how naturally different paths can sit side by side in the very first sentences we exchanged. She looked like a lioness, wide awake and imposing, and said: “I had my anxiety disorder drummed away. But I’d like to talk to you about my relationship with my mother.” For one, she had found a ritual that worked. For the other, she was looking for someone to sort things through with and understand. Experiencing and understanding complement each other.
Where firm belief helps - even when results take their time
New pathways need repetition, and the first few times often feel worse rather than better. That’s how EMDR was for me too. If you stick with exposure or a new habit, you need the conviction that it will be worth it - before the evidence is in. Psychologists call this self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977). That conviction is the fuel that carries you through the phase in which nothing seems to be changing yet.
Where scepticism helps
Open also means critical. “Not quantifiable” doesn’t mean “non-existent” - but without quality control, a lot of harm is possible, especially with unprocessed trauma.
A few questions help:
Is your consent asked for, and can you stop at any time?
Are you being sold hope through guarantees of healing?
Are you being pressured to come back or pay more?
Are hidden memories supposed to be “uncovered”?
And: who catches you - and how - if something unexpectedly heavy comes up?
Scepticism also helps where belief replaces action: manifesting instead of practising rarely gets the nervous system very far. And it helps when a ritual turns into a compulsion.
The difference: a helpful ritual is something you choose, and afterwards there’s more freedom.
A compulsive ritual is something you have to do, or disaster feels imminent - and the room to move shrinks a little more each time.
How to tell real regulation from numbing: after real recovery, there’s more of you. Not less.
The key is you
If it’s therapy that defuses old connections: great. If it’s a machete cutting old threads: also great.
All kinds of (im)possible things can work. What matters is that you find a way to believe in your ability to shape your here and now.
Your body often knows best what you need and when. Listen without judging. And go gently.
Part 3 is about a voice from outside: what a medium in the Black Forest has to do with decisions - and why we sometimes only hear certain truths when someone else says them out loud. The finale of Spooky Psychology comes out on 30 October – newsletter only.
Part 1: Why Some Patterns Keep Repeating · Part 3: The Medium in the Black Forest
Elena Tinkloh (aka Tink) is a licensed psychotherapist in Germany, specialising in cognitive behavioural therapy, and works with people on changing old patterns through both understanding and experience.
