A few days ago, I was talking to an old friend who works with so-called “troubled” teens in North Carolina. He said one of the things they try work on is creating new rituals. The idea was pretty foreign to me, so I asked him about it.

Everyone has rituals, he explained. The most obvious example is prayer, especially if it has to be done before eating or sleeping is possible (I once saw a guy pray over a danish at work; later he was fired for a hit and run – of the building. His job is in Mexico now anyway), but there are many more daily rituals for most of us. You get up at the same time every day and put on a pot of coffee. You later sip your coffee while you read the paper. You do this pretty much every day, and it becomes a part of your life. You depend on it, rely on it, even need it. Those are minor rituals that seem essential but really could be changed relatively easily. Rituals become much stronger when there’s a physical dependency involved.

I’ve noticed that most smokers have to tap their packet of cigarettes before they open it and do the same for each cigarette before lighting. I once asked a friend why, thinking it was just a nervous habit for the nicotine-deprived. But it turns out that the tap was to move the tobacco away from the end of the cigarette, so none of the “good stuff” would be burnt before the smoker could inhale. Wow. That’s got to be a ritual that’s hard to lose. And that’s not even counting the ritual that is smoking.

Getting back to my friend, he explained to me how they try to create certain group-related rituals to replace the rituals of their old lives. Now they circle up and hold up their palms when they are “present.” Now they say “we are here” in near unison, creating not only a ritual but also an implicit urge to be in the moment, at least theoretically.

I thought it was a fascinating concept, but it made me wonder how such rituals were sustained after the kids were through in the program with my friend and were back in the “real” world. It seems to me that – minimally – all of the group-centric rituals would be gone, leaving a vacuum and a more powerful need for the old, unhealthy rituals.

And the whole thing has me wondering what rituals I depend on. I don’t smoke, but I did drink coffee from age 14 until I had to quit eight years later. I still have the occasional cup of joe, and I now realize that coffee does have a certain ritual that even a similar cup of hot tea doesn’t have. But what other rituals do I have that I don’t notice? Are there any useful rituals I should pick up or harmful rituals I, too, should replace?

And how do you go about replacing rituals?

Then of course there’s the real question: how do you change other’s rituals when they need to be changed? I definitely see unhealthy rituals in the kids – from as basic as popping their knuckles when its really not appropriate to the more complex rituals involved in procrastination – but while changing your own ritual is difficult, with deference to my friend in NC, I have to wonder how possible it actually is to change the ritual of others. Certainly that’s why he was trying to replace them, rather than just trying to stop them cold turkey. Maybe you can only kill off bad rituals in others by giving them something better to do.

Either way, my guess is the knuckles are a lost cause.