Healing Rites explores how women can initiate healing in domestic spaces through intentional, creative rituals—designed collectively, guided by storytelling, and grounded in trauma-informed design.

This work emerged from the intersection of feminist theory, behavioural insight, and shared experience.

Through a participatory, co-design approach, I developed a set of rites and artefacts that transform everyday domestic moments into acts of agency and care.

To understand the systemic conditions behind gender-based trauma, I began by studying the rape kit as both medical object and cultural artefact. This led to a broader inquiry into the rape culture embedded in geographies, language, and the gendered politics of space.

I asked:
How do we heal from trauma when institutional care is absent, inaccessible, or inadequate?

While therapy is invaluable, it is not always available—due to cost, geography, culture, or belief. But there are other ways of healing, rooted in everyday creativity, ritual, and shared expression.

Domestic space has long been coded as feminine, and often carries a double symbolism—site of nourishment and site of trauma.

Healing Rites reimagines this space as sacred. Not private and passive, but powerful and performative. Using ordinary objects, gestures, and stories, women are invited to transform their immediate environments into sites of ritual, reclamation, and emotional authorship.

Low-Tech, High-Agency
The rites were designed to be:

• Accessible: No tech, no tools—only what’s already in your home.
• Democratic: Created with and for women across contexts.
• Intuitive: Rooted in story, sensory action, and shared traditions.

Inspired by totems, talismans, placebos, and poetic symbols, each rite invites participants to externalise emotion through metaphor and making.
✷ Behavioural Insights
Through the lens of behavioural science, the rituals draw upon:

• Commitment Bias: Acts of making reinforce internal intent.
• The Endowment Effect: What we create, we value.
• Affordance Cues: Domestic objects subtly signal reflection and transformation.
• Narrative Identity: Ritual gives structure to emotion, helping us ‘story’ what defies words.

The result: objects and experiences that hold meaning, invite action, and offer symbolic closure.
✷ Core Principles of Healing Rites

1. Transform the Negative
2. Create symbols and acts that reframe pain into process.
3. Give Shape to Emotion
4. Physicalise inner states through craft, repetition, and spatial gestures.
5. Reclaim the Domestic
6. Subvert the narrative of home as confinement; reimagine it as sacred, creative ground.
7. Honour Feminist Histories
8. Engage with ingredients, actions, and stories that echo women's traditions of resilience.

✷ Key Actions
Healing Rites is a call to occupy emotional space—alone or together. Through small, symbolic acts, we address both individual and collective trauma in a holistic, embodied way.

• Share grief without performance
• Reclaim stillness as protest
• Create memory, movement, and metaphor from the mundane
• Let healing be chosen, not assigned

✷ Participatory Design as Methodology
It became clear that shared experience could be ritualised—if given structure, permission, and purpose. The project evolved into a co-created ceremonial framework, with women across the globe contributing.
The first set of Healing Rites saw participation from over 30 women worldwide, each guided by visual and written instructions for enacting their own rituals.
✷ Emotional Themes & Rites Framework
Three dominant emotional themes emerged:

• Fear
• Shame
• Grief

These were met with intentional antitheses:

• Courage (to face fear)
• Love (to soothe shame)
• Joy (to honour grief)

Each rite was designed to explore this emotional polarity through symbolic acts—small, sensory movements with deep internal resonance.
✷ First Rites: Format and Practice
The initial rites included elements such as:

• Origami as a meditative, folding ritual
• Free-association writing to externalise suppressed thoughts
• Colour and visual theory to stimulate emotional recognition

The kits were mailed with instructions and artefacts, designed to be non-prescriptive—allowing each woman to perform the rites on her own terms, in her own space.
This stands in stark contrast to the rape kit, where agency is stripped in the name of procedure. Healing Rites returns the ritual to the subject.
✷ Closing Thought
Healing Rites is not a product. It is a platform for presence. A soft structure. A handmade scaffold for remembering that healing doesn’t have to be handed down—it can be created, chosen, and shared.