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Podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist.
And I'm Kurt White, a social worker and psychotherapist. Now, Mary, we're closing in on the end of the year. If you're listening to this as it comes out, 2025 will soon be behind us. I always sort of love the end of the year. It's a time for a bit of reflective contemplation, and I try to do a little bit of that each year.
Try to take stock. I like the New Year's resolution things. Try to think back at the year that's come all the unexpected things. Do do you have any traditions like that in your, in your family or in your personal life?
Yeah. You know, we kind of do, but I had never thought about it as a tradition until you asked me what I did on the New Year. And on New Year's Day, my family and I trek out to an old grave site that was in our family, the old Wilson Graveyard in Vermont. And it's kind of an adventure to get there. We never exactly know if we're going to find it because it's the thick brush.
And then we finally stumble upon it, and we look at all the stones. A lot of them are in disrepair and unreadable, and we sort of think about our ancestors, and it's sort of a time of reflection, little bit of melancholy to it, but also hopeful and fun.
I love it. I think it's a end of year's a perfect time to think about that, isn't it? The things that have that have gone, the the things that brought you to be here and here in this place too, isn't it? Yeah. Right? You have such a such a wonderful New England sense of place. It's how you paint a beautiful picture of it.
Yes. And we want to talk about the cyclical nature of things, the time of renewal, and also hope and forward thinking as well.
Yes. I I've had this idea for a while that maybe we could have an episode like exactly this one, where we invite our listeners to join us in that process of considering how did you get to be where you are right now and what's next. And today we have a great interview with Doctor. Justin Hecht. And Kurt, how did you meet Doctor. Hecht? Yes. Through the American Group Psychotherapy Association. He's also a group therapist. And I joined one of his training groups.
And so I have been in groups with him for the last couple of years and have really gotten a great deal out of that personally and professionally. Was so excited that he sat down with us today to have this conversation. Doctor. Hecht is a Jungian analyst. He is a psychologist.
He has a private practice in psychotherapy. He's licensed in California and Massachusetts. He's written several papers on topics related to group psychotherapy and union psychotherapy. And I'm just really excited for this interview today.
Yes. I think our listeners will find that it is just the perfect moment for this conversation.
Doctor Justin Hecht, welcome to Unraveling.
Thank you, Kurt. It's good to be here with you.
So as we're approaching the end of a year, that's got me in a kind of frame of mind where I I've been really wanting to talk to somebody with your particular expertise about some ideas that I've heard you talk about before, specifically having to do with the ways that we metabolize and can make use of difficult or even traumatic experiences in our lives. That's an interest that you've had as a psychotherapist, isn't it?
Yes. That's correct.
How did you come to that interest?
Well, in addition to being a psychotherapist, I'm a Jungian analyst, and I've done a lot of work as an executive coach working with people who are powerful executives in organizations. They had two things they were interested in with me. One was stress and stress management and how to deal with all the stress that they were facing. Most of these people, the way they dealt with stress is by taking more effective action, so they ended up being exhausted and neurotic and working really, really hard and unable to take breaks. That, of course, would lead to the midlife crisis.
And, the midlife crisis is when a very successful person achieves their goals. Doesn't have to be very successful, but that's what I frequently saw. They'd done everything they wanted. At age 20, they had a life plan. They'd realized it by age 40, they felt miserable.
And why? So in working with a lot of those people, I have used Jung's ideas to try to understand them. Jung often talks about the tension of the opposites, the problem of the opposites, that we have to resolve things that pull us in different directions.
That's interesting. For those that might not be familiar with Jung, we're talking about Carl Jung, one of the early great psychotherapists, contemporary of Freud, but who had some very different ideas than Freud. Can you give us a sort of thumbnail about what Jungian psychology is?
Sure. Well, this is gonna be a very brief introduction. Carl Gustave Jung, 1875, 1961, wrote about, 25 to 40 volumes depending how you count them. So he was very prolific, multilingual, fascinated with the question of how do people find meaning in their lives in a modern world. He was writing a lot right around World War one and its aftermath.
So he was looking at terrible destruction and trying to make sense of it. One of his most important ideas is the concept of individuation, and this is the idea that there is an irreducible unconscious drive for people to become who they are. And when that drive gets frustrated, people become neurotic and miserable. That's Jung in a nutshell.
It's actually kind of a radical idea, even maybe in psychotherapy for non Jungian people. That's not necessarily the dominant paradigm of things. Right? Psychotherapies are organized around what's wrong with you, what diagnoses have you got, what problems have you got, how can we get them out of the way, how can we get you back to normal, whatever that's supposed to be. And even Freud said at one point, what do you get after you have an analysis?
Is it ordinary human misery? Which doesn't sound appealing, does it? I mean
Well, it it certainly wasn't appealing to me. Yeah. And I I wanted something more. And, you know, we Jungians try to deal with this idea that there are constant paradoxes and opposites. And so we we were talking about this idea of the wound and the vision, and the idea is that out of your woundedness comes your vision.
Many people are traumatized and hurt and beaten down and crushed by their lives psychologically, and they feel exhausted, and yet it's so important to be able to imagine that things could get better. And I was introduced to this concept in my own analysis. I was lucky to have a Jungian analysis with a woman named Jean Shinoda Bolan. She's a well known psychiatrist and author of many Jungian books, and I recommend any of them. She's most famous for goddesses in every woman and gods in every man, where she talks about archetypes.
And one day I was struggling with something, and she said, well, I could help you hold that vision. And it touched me deeply that she would be willing to do that. It was something I'd never heard of, and so I I thought about this, and this must have been about twenty five years ago, and I began playing with this idea of helping my clients to hold vision. And it's really a way of giving them hope, but it also is very interesting because it begins a dialogue around what vision is being held. Now many therapists would think that this is not our business at all, but clients really do love it.
If you're holding the wrong vision for them, then we'll tell you. But the idea that you might wanna help them have some hope is something that I've found to be, very productive, helps to, build a good alliance, and people begin to make difference. So if you're wounded or traumatized, to have a vision that this is is not going to define the rest of your life can be very helpful.
That's very that's very interesting. I'm curious to know more about what you mean by vision, and maybe also what you mean by wounded. Because I I mean, I think we could each imagine that. But I I get the sense that the way you're using the words, it has a certain weightiness of meaning, and I'd like to dig into it a little.
Sure. I I wanna start with one of Jung's quotes. He said, I am not the history of what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. I am what I choose to become.
Now if you think about this, this is quite heroic, and it locates a self with agency at the center of a life, and I find this much more inspiring than ordinary human misery. So the woundedness is that if you think about your life or the life of a child, children dream about all kinds of things. They have visions or possibilities or ideas of what they can do, and very few children escape the experience of having those dreams crushed. Again and again, I've had people tell me they have perfectly productive, profitable, affluent, comfortable lives to to greater or lesser degrees, but they'll talk about having wanted to be an actor, a playwright, a painter, a gardener, and frequently they got shamed or coerced into a career that was more of what was expected. And those social expectations create deep wounds.
Similarly, you know, a broken heart can take years to recover from. Neglectful or poor parenting can take a long time. People are wounded by being abused, neglected. There's such a long list of ways that people are wounded, including literally, you know, attacked, assaulted. So so that's what I mean by wounded. It it's the whole spectrum of ways that humans have their spirits crushed or damaged.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a it's a hard weight to carry, isn't it? And I think much has been written about that, but I sometimes find more generative information about it in literature and poetry than I often have in mainstream psychotherapy writing, for example. But it seems like Jung was on to something from a long time ago.
I I think so too. And I think that part of the the paradox is that, over and over again in Greek mythology, there's an idea that the wound can also provide healing, that in overcoming a challenge, there is a transformation that occurs, and that's part of the vision. The vision can be something as simple as I believe you can be better. I believe you can feel better. I believe things could be better for you.
We we have to be careful here not to provide denial or an illusion, but just to hold enough of a vision that we mobilize and motivate people to with whom we are working, our clients, to to keep trying, to have a possibility, to believe that they can make their lives better. And, it may sound naive, but I've I've seen great results in the people I worked with. I do a lot of my work in group therapy, and I encourage my clients to help each other hold visions. So for instance, I'll have, right now, I have a couple of clients who are trying to reduce their use of marijuana and other drugs, and every week, a couple of people check-in with them and say, you know, I have a vision that you're gonna use this responsibly. There was one man who was struggling in one of my groups for a long time to get a better job, and everyone believed he could do it.
And they took examples of his being articulate and thoughtful in the group and said this shows us your capability, and it helped him to move to get a better job. This is what holding a vision means. It it means believing that a life can be made better. Yes. This is why I talk about holding you know, tending the wound, which is careful attention to the wound, but also having a vision that, life can be better, can be rich, can be fulfilling.
When when I think about some of the things that people will come to psychotherapy for, I mean, they're often very tragic circumstances. You know, maybe an unexpected loss or something. It's usually something that exceeds a person's ability to kind of manage it within the frame of their own life. And people are kind of left looking around going like, what now? I had an aunt after my cousin died, who's a similar age cousin, and sick, very sick throughout childhood, and died as a young adult person.
And I remember her mother saying to me at the burial, what am I gonna do now? Mhmm. You know, like, what is gonna what am I gonna do? And I think it's a it's a hard question to answer because people often want they wanna they wanna hit undo in a way. But there isn't an undo. So vision is different than than that, isn't it?
It it really is. And to use the case of your aunt, I would say, first of all, that the first thing she'd need to do is really grieve, really know herself, really deeply accept and mourn and and wail the loss of her child. And that clearly had been a motivating purpose in her life to take care of your cousin, and then she lost it. But even in the, in the question, there's a kind of beauty. You can hear it two ways.
What am I gonna do? I'm lost. I don't know. But you can also hear the purposive teleological in it. What am I going to do?
You know, there's an opportunity there. And this talks a little bit about the archetype of vocation. So an archetype is a is an enduring human pattern of behavior and organization of a personality that's present across all cultures and throughout history. Some of the examples are a benevolent maternal goddess that's present in all the cultures we know about, or saint like figure, the heroic, the hero archetype. There's also the helper, the wounded healer.
These are all archetypes that are present throughout cultures. And vocation comes from the Latin vox or vocatos to be called. Most famous, of course, is is God calling Saul of Tarsus who becomes Saint Paul to follow Jesus, where it's a, you know, a divine voice directing you. But I believe there are other kinds of archetypal vocations that we all face. And in my work, I've seen a lot of what I call the negative vocation.
And the negative vocation is when it's the precursor to a midlife crisis. You're going along in your work. You've achieved all your goals. You think everything should be fine, but it isn't. You wake up with anxiety or bad dreams. You're bored at work. You get snappish with your husband, wife, or partner. You know, you you fantasize about other things. People start affairs. They overspend.
They use drugs. All of these are negative vocations saying that something is wrong, that there's a misalignment, a misattunement, and that's because the vision that you had twenty years ago has been fulfilled and exhausted. A positive vocation is you're in college. You're reading through the course catalog, and you see a course on something that really sparks your interest. Oh, archaeology.
People do that for a living. I could be an archaeologist. And you follow that vocation, and it gives you energy. When we lose our vocations, our north stars, our guidance, our vision, we become depleted, defeated, exhausted. And then the negative vocation starts coming up and saying, I've got to find a replacement. This is part of how I think the archetype of vocation helps to respond to people who are feeling wounded by providing a vision.
It relates a bit to creativity, it sounds like, doesn't it?
Very much so. Yes. So Jung had a concept which he called the ego self axis, and the self was his idea of something that dwelt within each person that was divine and profoundly creative, kind of like the idea of the Greek muses. Now the the Greek muses were demigods, goddesses, who flew from Mount Parnassus to inspire poets. So people will talk about having lost their muse.
For those of you who are engaged in creative pursuits, it might actually feel like an embodied presence when you're very, creative. If you've lost your muse, maybe it feels like that thing that you relied on, that energy you relied on is gone. So, Jung's idea of the ego self access is that from the self came a lot of creative ideas coming through dreams, fantasies, active imaginations, reflections, contemplations, and and this is why it's so very important to slow down, to meditate, to contemplate, to go for long walks in the forest, a park, on the beach, where you can regain perspective, move away from stress, and begin to tune into your small still voice, try to invite the muse in that will allow you to be creative. Now when we think about creativity, we typically think about artistic creativity, music, writing, poetry, painting, but there's so many ways to be creative, gardening, cooking, but also just living your life creatively. And if you can slow down, not demand answers, listen to yourself and your soul, try to hear that vocation, that I believe can be a a way to regain the vision that feels authentic.
Mhmm.
Is there a relationship between the specific nature of a person's woundedness and the kind of vision that might come out of a process of recovery and self discovery and creativity as you're describing it?
I haven't thought about that. It's a very interesting question. There's not one that I'm aware of.
In a way, that's an optimistic thing, isn't it? Yes. You know, because it it sort of suggests that perhaps the deck can be cleared after all, you know, that the that, you know, in the Buddhist sense sometimes, right, when a terrible thing happens, you can say, well, but now all the karma is gone for that. It's all done now. It's all gone.
And what happens next, we actually have more freedom, not less, because we're not we don't have the baggage of the thing that was weighing us. Is it more like that?
Yeah. I I really like that, and I see that kind of thing more often. You know, I I have seen the example, and I think so many of us have, of parents who have lost children in a particular way than dedicating themselves to helping other children who might have that or other families. Of course, that makes a lot of logical sense, but I've also seen people really transform their lives and the directions of their lives in completely unexpected ways.
Yeah. Yeah. You did a bit of that yourself.
I did. Yeah. I did.
I didn't mean to be leading toward it, but maybe you could tell that story as an example.
Yes. So, I thought I had a calling to be a lawyer. I loved politics and was very interested in political ideas, legal ideas, and, studied them and found that I really didn't like my fellow classmates who were going on to be, politicians and didn't wanna be a become an attorney. And it was also a time for me when I was coming out as gay, and in the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, there was just I didn't see a possibility of a career, and so I began looking at what else I could do and, tried a couple of things. I tried, entertainment.
I worked as a, agent in training at ICM in Hollywood, and I worked in advertising and corporate identity. And I began to find that it was really empty, especially in the mid to late eighties as my friends began to sicken and die. I was very moved and pulled and had that negative vocation I was talking about. I remember I had just gotten a promotion to an office with a window, which on on at the time in Madison Avenue was a really big deal, and and I had a stack of of work to do on this company I was working with, and I just heard a voice saying no. No.
And it felt like it was both in me and not me, but I really knew that if I didn't attend to it, I would I would be destroyed, that my soul would be empty. It it was that clear to me. I wish I had that clarity more often in my life, but I did have that clarity, and I I went to the HR director, a very kind woman, and I said, I'm leaving. And she said, you know, are you sure? And I said, well, give me some time.
And so I went to a monastery and, meditated very quietly. And and after a week or two, I told her no. I stayed at the at the monastery another four to six weeks, and, one day I was stepping in the shower, and again, I had a very clear idea. You should become a psychologist, and that was 1989. And I followed that vocation for, what is it, thirty five, thirty six years now.
Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. I love that. We both used, you know, spiritual and religious language, or in some cases maybe metaphor, but to describe this kind of journey a person could be on, that's probably no accident in a way, I think. Is it how do you see the spiritual life's connection to this process of recovery from wounds and finding vision for oneself?
Oh, that's a wonderful question. I wanna talk about two things. One is the the importance of mythology, and the other is the the, vocation discernment dialectic. I wanna start with the importance of mythology. And when we Jungians talk about mythology, I wanna be sure that your listeners hear that I'm speaking about this with reverence.
I believe that myths are fantastically rich poetic ways of understanding who we are. One of the myths that's central to my life is the myth of the Buddha. When I was 15 years old, I had a wonderful teacher whose name was, Hirshaira. He was my German teacher, and, he assigned me the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, which is a modified myth of the Buddha. And the idea is that he keeps seeking and seeking and seeking and looking for the truth in himself.
That was a very important myth for me. It also is an archetypal myth that describes a midlife crisis. You know, Gautama Siddhartha is a young prince. He has everything he could ever want, and a mischievous god shows up and shows him the hollowness of his extravagant life, and he goes on a vision quest for what is real and right in his life. He finds it at age 40, realizes that he sees more than any other human, and that he he could just vanish and be done with life, but instead he devotes himself to teaching and helping for the next forty years.
It's a perfect myth for our time about individuation, very similar to the Odysseus myth and the Odyssey. And you see these stories again and again and again. And so I think we need to look at our religious traditions and also look at, what is available in in in any of them that you might have grown up with. What what gives you hope and meaning? Jung said, how do we live with mythological religious consciousness now that we're scientific?
And he said that, religion is not literally true. We can't prove that it's literally true, but it is psychologically meaningful, and that's the way to approach it. So I think that's very important. What I wanna talk about a little bit is, the vocation discernment dialectic and opposite.
That's a mouthful. That's good.
Right. So so in the Episcopal church, which is my tradition, and perhaps in others as well, when a person believes that they're called to become a minister or a priest, they enter into a period of discernment where you basically say, is this really what I wanna do? Am I meant to do this? Am I aware of the sacrifices? How deep is this vocation?
So the vocation is not an impulsive, ill considered spontaneous action. It's a deeply felt calling that then needs to be investigated. And this goes to Jung's idea that the way that we grow up is through hard disciplined work. He was very harsh and and critical in this way. He thought that a lot of people were too immature and needed to, work harder in their lives.
He himself worked worked and pushed himself very hard. I sometimes think he was too harsh and cruel in that way, but I do like this idea of vocation and discernment. The reason is that many people do what's called a spiritual bypass, which is impulsively going from one trend to the next without seriously doing the work that's necessary to grow. So as people are thinking about finding a vision, trying to hear their vocation for the new year, what I'd urge them to do is simultaneously be aware of discernment, being aware of the sacrifices they might need to make. Here again is the religious language.
One of Jung's most famous saying is that, neurosis is a result of when people fail to make a necessary sacrifice, a needed or legitimate sacrifice. And there's so many people who have dreams or visions and haven't done the hard work of deciding that they're going to make the sacrifices they need to do to make the vision a reality. Along this line, Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, is famous for saying, you know, how do you find your vision? How do you lead a life of individuation? And he he said, follow your bliss.
And a Jungian formulation of that might be, yes, follow your bliss and be prepared to pay for it because it isn't easy. So this message of tending the wound, holding the vision, and then listening for the vocation, being ready to make the sacrifice, and operating with discernment. This is how people can go from a place of woundedness and inauthenticity to leading a more fulfilling, authentic, and satisfying life.
If if, and it sounds like if others can help them to hold that vision in times when it's hard to hold it alone. Is that right?
It absolutely is, and I think this is what we humans have been doing forever. I wrote a paper you might have read called Uptown Group, Downtown Group, and the the essence of the paper is that I learned how to lead groups from a wonderful man named Jim Holmes at the gay men's health crisis in 1989, 1990. And I I had not I didn't have a doctorate in psychology, and the groups were so simple. We came in. We checked in.
We as therapists tried to make connections, and we checked out, and people loved it. And people who were without hope themselves could offer hope and a vision to others, and it transformed their experience. So this mutual vision holding, mutual caretaking is not that difficult. It's profound, and we humans have been doing it as long as there have been human beings in a campfire. I really believe that.
It strikes me. It it might be one of the powerful things about AA or something, for example, holding a vision of a different way of living.
Absolutely. And and in fact, AA, you know, they have so many slogans like, keep coming back. It works if you work it, so work it. And then there's the serenity prayer. So many other groups provide this kind of holding of a vision.
And maybe that's one of the things that makes a difference between someone who experiences a certain kind of adversity and and their life gets sort of shrinks, gets narrower versus someone who can who can kind of find the vision in something and move toward it afterward.
I I think that's really true. I. M. Forster famously said, only connect. You know, that this was this was his, the work he wanted to leave, how important it was for people to connect.
However problematic the mainstream churches might have been as they began to disappear and dwindle, they did provide a place for connection, witnessing, vision holding, vision tending, and people may reject beliefs that they experience as supernatural, but the need for that kind of connection and meaning making and holding has not disappeared.
I think it's something about the end of the year that always gets me this way. Know, that I I think it I I like the process of sort of taking stock and looking back at things. But sometimes you you remember how hard it's been in a way. You know, I've had a sort of hospitalization and surgery this year, neither of which was expected when I started the year on January 1. There's been hard times, unexpected things happen.
And they'll happen again, you know, hopefully different ones, at least we can get some variety, variety, spice of life, you know. But what would you say to somebody who's maybe trying to make sense of the unexpected hard things that have happened and trying to find their way to a better future despite the uncertainty in it?
Yeah. That's a wonderful question. So the first thing I would say is slow down. Slow down. And you have to feel what you're feeling. You you you cannot leave a place you've never been. So if you don't know what you felt when you were in
the
hospital or for whatever other things listeners might be experiencing, death of a loved one, loss of a job, distress over events in the world, you do need to slow down and acknowledge what you're feeling. And and that gives a kind of dignity. This I think is one of the great things about, group connections, that groups can slow down and talk about these things. Once the feelings have been made real, they're easier to bear. As those feelings become born, you metabolize them.
I believe, of course, this is best done in a group. Once the feelings have been born and metabolized, you've been tending the wound. Right? Wounds frequently resolve on their own. So it's so important to be patient and not force it.
After you've done that, then you can begin to open up space and in a in a mysterious way because it comes from a place that isn't our ego, and we really have to work to cultivate the part of us that can listen. Then you'll begin to get vision. And other people can offer you visions, and I believe that's helpful because you can try it on, and then you can use your discernment. It fits. It doesn't.
It partially does, but it gets that process going. So first, we tend the wound, and then we try to look for visions to hold. And then if something feels right, we we're in that vocation discernment dialectic.
What would you say to someone who really wants to know, how do you actually do it? How do you find the vision that might be missing from their life in this moment?
Well, I have one thought. And that is that over the mantle over the the lintel Mhmm. The threshold coming into Jung's home outside Zurich, he had words in Latin that said, which means whether bidden or called or not called, God or the divine will be present. The way I like to translate this, and this idea comes from a French thinker named Christophe Andre, and he said that whether you want to or not, the question of what is divine will be imposed on you. And many people who have no belief in anything religious, nonetheless have a religious devotion to something.
Frequently, unfortunately, too often, it is something without a lot of value. The the dominant cultural religious mythological value in our culture, the number one is materialism. If I have enough stuff, I'll be happy. Having worked in advertising, I can tell you that psychologically, was known that we were gonna mythologize this, you know, literally. As an example, I worked on the Pepperidge Farm campaign, and, basically, we're trying to sell friendship.
You know? So so there are all these myths. Underarm antiperspirant sells social acceptance and on and on and on. All these myths that are present about, nostalgia, belonging, that's materialism. The second one is is narcissism and fierce independence.
I'm gonna do it all alone. I'm better than anyone else. I'm gonna live forever because my life is bigger than than anything, and that's that's an inflation. So these are two very dangerous myths that many many people, get involved with. I believe that healing comes from being very humble.
It's been a huge struggle in my own life to to work with my own humility, but but I've learned a lot. And my practice of, Buddhist meditation has been enormously helpful. Over the last forty years, I've been meditating, almost forty, and and just sitting still for some period of every day, thirty to forty five minutes, takes you out of the ego and moves you back to what is holy and sacred. And so I would urge people to begin looking at, number one, quiet contemplation, slowing down, tending their wounds to make that sacred, and that out of that idea of making that sacred, you begin to slow down, and you you go to a place so you feel what you felt, and you know the experiences you've been to, and you make your own life deeply considered. Then once you've been to that place, you can begin to make the next thing sacred, which is to try to attend to a positive vision, a vocation, a calling that will guide you and mobilize your whole being towards achieving something worthwhile.
And I think that if we can make those two things an important center of our lives, then the thing that we choose out of that vision to make that sacred will be worth sacrificing and will be worth will be a project worth devoting our life to. And I believe that's after you've tended the wound, that's the vision that you can hold that I hope will carry anyone listening to this podcast into a wonderful 2026.
So thank you to doctor Justin Hecht for that really amazing discussion and interview that I feel like I've gotten so much from it. And joining me again is Mary. Hi, Mary. Hello. Yeah.
I really enjoyed that conversation. And Mary, I was thinking about your New Year's Day tradition of hiking to the Old Family Cemetery. Having listened to this now, maybe you're thinking about the end of the year in a slightly new way as I am. And I wonder what you'll carry with you from this on that trek and journey tomorrow.
I think I will see it through a different lens. And he mentioned, you know, trying to find some moments to quiet your brain, and I think the physical activity and being away from the screens will help with that. And then looking at some of those tombstones, a lot of them, you know, sadly, back in the day were of children and young babies, and it's it's so very sad. But in that sadness, as doctor Hecht mentioned, there's the opportunity. And now having two young kids of my own, I think it'll make me just very grateful to have them with me for the new year.
That's wonderful. And, Kurt, I know you mentioned that it's a
time of reflection for you. What do you have planned for the new year?
Oh, I I like to do a little writing exercise, a year compass, actually. It's kind of a thing that originated in, I think, some folks in Europe, where they sort of take you through reflecting on the year that's just closing and the year that's ahead and in a kind of formal way. Make some tea and put some music on and sort of just sort of do that. And then and then maybe like watch some old movies, like It's a Wonderful Life
Yeah.
Things like that. Something that ends with Auld Lang Syne would be wonderful.
Oh, yes. Auld Lang Syne, I I love hearing that too this time of year. What is it about that song?
Well, you know, it's from a it's from a poem of of Robert Burns, actually, I think. Right? And if it was set to music, will old acquaintance be forgotten, never brought to mind as a sort of rhetorical question? How will we carry the people who exist inside of us, people who exist maybe out in the world that we haven't thought about in a while? Relationships, how will they be into the new year?
And I guess maybe as a therapist I'm always thinking about like, not just who are we, but who do we carry around inside of us. And what do we do with that? And what kind of intention could we bring? And sort of maybe Auld Lang Syne speaks to that for me. Plus, I just sort of like that everyone sings together out of nowhere Yeah. All of a sudden in the middle of the night. What could be better? Right.
Yeah. And if you wanted to
learn more about what we spoke about today, Doctor. Hecht has recommended some great resources, and we've put links to those in our show notes.
And we wish all of our listeners a very happy, happy New Year.
Happy New Year and to many wonderful episodes in 2020 We're
looking forward to it.
Unraveling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Beuteau, and Jason Oberholzer. And you can find us on social media by searching Brattleboro Retreat. Brattleboro Retreat is committed to exploring diverse perspectives on mental health. While we invite hosts and guests to share their insights, the views expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the hospital or its staff.