#2 Getting Back to our Natural Rhythm of Life with Kit Winter, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist and Lawyer

What is our greater purpose here on Earth? Are you hungry for spiritual nourishment?

Many of us in today's modern society are hungry for spiritual nourishment. We may be brought up to believe that our value is based on how much we can produce for the least amount of money, leaving us to put our basic human needs of relationships, physical and mental health, and self actualization to the side.

This pulls us further and further away from our true nature, leaving us wondering, what is the meaning of all this? Why does life feel so meaningless?

In this episode, we talk with Kit Winter, attorney with over twenty years experience serving the needs of Internet, new media, and technology companies. He then went back to school to pursue a career in Marriage and Family Therapy, where he met Maayan in graduate school. In this episode, we talk about how we can get closer to our true nature and rhythm of life.

Resource Mentioned:
On Being Certain by Robert Burton, MD

Get in touch with Kit:
kit.winter@gmail.com

Get in touch with Maayan and Michal:
Website: https://www.sistersinpsychology.com
Instagram: @sistersinpsychology
Email: sistersinpsychology@gmail.com

Transcript

Guest - Kit Winter 0:00

Because of the way our society has evolved, we are most of the time disconnected from most of the things that in our human evolutionary history gave us meaning. 

And so, it's not surprising to me that in our little nuclear families or a one-bedroom apartment where we sit alone and like, cry and pet the cat, that we go search around and go, like, how can I find meaning in my life? Because you're not doing any of the things that you are I think, hardwired to do.

INTRO  0:31 

[Maayan]  1:37 

We have with us a very special and dear friend, Kit Winter.

[Kit]
Hello!

[Maayan]
Hello, kit!

[Michal]
Welcome to our podcast!

[Maayan]  1:48

Thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited to see you. It's been a while, like a month and a half ago, I think since I've seen you last. 

But I'm so thankful to have you and I just, it was just so amazing getting to know you. So I'm just excited for our listeners to get to know you a little bit. 

I guess we can start off by the question: How do we know each other?

[Kit]  2:11

So, we [Maayan and Kit]  know each other because we were in the same cohort in our Master's program at Alliant International University. Learning to become marriage and family therapists.

[Maayan] 2:22

Kit, you've been amazing in the cohort experience for me.  I always feel like you "big brother'd me" -- You always checked in on me. And, I really just liked our relationship. 

So I'm curious, do you want to tell the audience what you were before this career?

[Kit] 2:41

Yeah, so I've been a lawyer since 1997. And I've done a lot of different things as a lawyer.

I started off at a big law firm. And then I went to a boutique intellectual property first amendment law firm. 

And then I was hired away from that by one of their clients to become General Counsel of an internet company. And I did that for a little while until they were acquired. And then I had a solo practice for a few years. 

And then I went back to a fairly big law firm about 500 attorneys. And I was there for almost a decade, and then I left to have my own practice again, and go back to school. 

So it's been a lot of different ways of being a lawyer.

[Michal]   3:24

Was there some kind of impetus or some kind of event that happened that made you want to transition into marriage and family therapy?

[Kit] 3:34

So you know, that's a great question. And I'm not really sure-- there are so many answers that I'm not sure I can provide you like, THE answer.

The context is that my mom is a PhD marriage and family therapist, and she teaches supervisors. She went back to become a marriage and family therapist after I had graduated from college. 

So she became an MFT in her 50s, like her late 40s, early 50s. My husband is currently a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. And he started doing that after we'd been together for probably about four or five years, maybe. 

So, I love being a lawyer in the sense of the intellectual journey and the challenge of it and the strategy, and the sort of focused attention that it demands. I enjoy that part. I enjoy being a lawyer in that sense. 

4:30 
The part of it that is about how power functions in our society, is really problematic for me. 

And it's always been sort of a bit of a struggle. Like, if you're at a big law firm, you work for the clients of the firm, and those can be dictators or polluters, or, I mean, you might get a good client, but you might get a bad client. 
 
And so, part of being a lawyer -- part of the indoctrination into being a lawyer -- is this process of developing a belief system in which your personal ethics don't matter. 

It's sort of: Oh, well, everybody deserves a lawyer and everybody deserves legal representation. And that's how the society works. 

And to some extent, that's all true, but as you get deeper, as you become a lawyer for longer and longer, you notice that most of the people around you seem to -- I mean, my experience with this -- is they seem to have largely lost their ethical bearings. 

5:32
And, of course, the things that you do as a lawyer do have, they do make a difference in the real world. And they're not just abstract exercises in reasoning. 

And so I've found that challenging. And the system is just very -- it just favors the wealthy and powerful in really profound ways that I think are very hard to understand for people who don't work within the system, like the depth of that. 

People can say, Oh, yeah, the rich have a better time of it or whatever. But like the nitty gritty of how that works is really, it's really baked into the system. And I'm a little bit of a softy, I'm a soft touch. And so I keep getting these clients who you have no money and big problems. 

So then I'm like, Oh, God, you know, here we are, again. And it's tough. 

So I was not feeling particularly fulfilled as a lawyer and I went back home to visit -- I went back to DC, where my dad and my stepmom live. I visited them. 

And they're both of the time they're both, at the time, they were both in their 80s and working, working hard and enjoying it. And  I sort of thought, wow, you know, I'm in my 50s, and I had sort of thought I had had a relatively short view of like what retirement was going to be. 

And seeing them working in their 80s, I was like, oh, you know, I actually could maybe do something else other than this.  

And, and then I saw Taylor Mac, the drag performer. Have you heard about Taylor Mac do the 24-hour history of music in America?

[Maayan] 7:03

No, I haven't. But I want to.

[Kit]  

Yeah, so Taylor Mac won a MacArthur Genius Grant for this, for this piece. It's a 24-hour show. I think it was presented once in like a 24-hour, continuous performance, but I saw it in over three nights of 3 eight hour performances. 

And it was very kind of political and current and contextual. And there was something that Taylor Mac said to the audience about kind of challenging us to do something different, you know, to be bold, and to make changes. 

And that kind of actually resonated with me a little and that was in March before I started the program. So .

7:45 
So I'm an MFT because of a drag queen!

Taylor Mac uses the pronoun, Judy. So Judy is like a brilliant performer. So I don't want to downplay Judy at all.

[Michal]  8:01 
Well, no, it sounds like Judy had some words that really resonated with you and pulled you closer to this career.

[Kit]  8:11 
Yeah, absolutely. It was a very, very powerful theatrical experience.

[Michal]
Yeah, clearly!

[Kit]
So, here I am! Two years later, here I am.

[Maayan]  8:23
Yeah, that's incredible. I want to watch that now.

[Michal]

I know, me too. I want to see what this performance was all about. 

[Kit] 
I'll send you some video links. 

[Michal]
I'll get some inspiration from it, it sounds like.

[Maayan]  8:34

I'm curious if it will reaffirm my current career or want me to make a switch.

[Kit] 
Okay, so, Taylor, Mac is a vocalist, a singer, and a performer. And so most of the show was singing, performing. 

And the part that I'm referring to was sort of the monologue stuff in between the songs and the audience interaction stuff. And so I'm not sure that would be captured in any of the videos because the videos are mostly songs. 

[Michal]  9:04

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

So on your journey, through the MFT program, was there any moment where you were like, Oh, I don't know. I kind of miss law a little bit.

[Kit] 9:20

So, I'd been practicing law while I was in school. I still have my own little private practice, and I'm still practicing law. 

And yeah, the answer is yes. Many times I thought, what the heck am I doing? Why did I do this? This is idiotic. What am I doing? 

Especially when I had like papers do and I thought, I don't need to be doing this. 

But yeah, my cohort actually got me through a lot of those. 

I mean, I think there was there were times when I was really tempted to take some time off and kind of slow the process down and do it over three years instead of two. 

And the fact that I felt so close to my cohort actually really kept me on the schedule. So yeah, so thank you, Maayan!

[Maayan] 9:58

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I feel like we were all kind of like dependent on each other to finish and like stick together, but also still accepting of the people that needed to take their time. 

So I'm curious, I guess this leads to our next question: What has your experience been with love and marriage? And what was it like growing up as a gay man in America? 

You've been through the legalization of gay marriage, what was that, like?  Tell us everything.

[Kit] 10:30

That's like 10 years of  an extremely, extremely long podcast! People would be like, covered in cobwebs by the time it finished.  

So, I was born in 1965. And so I was four years old when Stonewall happened. 

And so through my formative years, I guess you could call them, I had no role models or no gay man or lesbians or anything in popular media or no TV shows.. 

The closest there was was like the super effeminate kind of Paul Lynde comedian characters, you know, on game shows and stuff or Liberace the real flamboyant-- although, I guess people thought Liberace was straight at the time. 

But you know, the depictions of gay people were very stereotypical. And my parents were liberal, they are Liberal Democrats, they're very into equality and justice and all that stuff. 

But that didn't really extend to gay stuff. So it, they didn't really have anything bad to say about gay people when I was growing up, they just didn't really acknowledge the existence of gay people either. 

11:46
So it was sort of a big nothing. And then I came out when I was 17, and that was right before the AIDS crisis. And that was a big, I mean, I can't even go into that... it was just too much. 

But you know, interestingly, before the AIDS crisis came along, the sort of mainstream gay political view was very much against same-sex marriage, and they thought that same-sex marriage was like buying into this heteronormative you know, white picket fence, nuclear family thing, and that gay people should not go down that road and we should seize you know, liberation and sexual liberation, and, you know, personal autonomy and self-actualization and all of that stuff, instead of fighting for, you know, legal rights. 

And so in some ways, I think same sex marriage is really because of AIDS. And it was very crazy-making, I have to say, that when aids came up, the cultural message was very strongly that gay men should not have sex or, you know, that sex dangerous, sex is death, gay men are irresponsible, they're whores, that blah, blah, blah, and everybody should, you know, pair up and be in monogamous relationships. 

And so there was this big shift from this kind of sexual liberationist, political perspective to this big like, oh, relationship, monogamy, stability, kind of ethos. 

And because that change had been so swift and so strong in terms of like the message for people were, you know, gay people were having their houses firebombed. And there was this idea of sort of safety, or suddenly saying, stable gay relationships are a threat to Western civilization, and we have to outlaw them. 

So, I mean, it's been a really quite a head-spinning journey, for sure. 

And Bush, George W., really, in 2000, and again in 2004, really ran on a platform-- his main platform position was that gays are a threat to civilization. 

And you know, at the time, I was a lawyer, I was a homeowner. 

And it's really, it's very complicated to try to function in a world -- even if the people around you are okay, and even if your employer is okay -- it's very difficult to try to function in a world where you're just going about your business trying to be a productive adult, and you open the paper, and you're told, you know, that here's one person saying you should be put to death. 

And here's the president of United States saying you're the biggest threat to society that exists and here's, you know... 

So, I don't want to, you know, downplay the fact that it's been challenging to be a gay man, but I'm super privileged. So I'm aware of that as well.

[Michal] 14:39

And that was all just in the last 20 years what you're referring to, which is crazy to think about. So how did you cope with that? I'm sure it was different throughout, but, if you can take away one theme that you kind of leaned on to cope through it, what would that be?

[Kit]  15:00

So being politicized really saved my life when I was a teenager.  Like learning about power, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, women's studies, gender studies, all of that stuff, and really understanding sort of the socio-cultural, political framework for identity and these fights.

And activism saved my life. I was in New York in the late 80s, and early 90s. And that really saved my life and my sanity. 

And later on, I became less of an activist and more of a drinker and drug user. And that eventually proved problematic.

15:46

That was not a very healthy coping mechanism. Yeah, so I guess those were the top two activism and drugs. 

[Maayan] 15:57 
How did you get out of drugs? I know you're in recovery now. You're 11 years sober?

[Kit]
Yeah.

[Maayan]
What was it like, getting sober? And, yeah, everything that you've been saying, it's so much oppression, and it's great that you are aware of your privilege, and you've been already going through such a hard time with your situation, and you are a white male in our society, which, you know, levels you up in that way compared to people that are not in that status, and the status quo of that. 

So it's really sad that society kind of like puts us in that box of who we should be.

[Michal] 16:36
And who we can't be.

[Kit] 16:36

So, I think addiction -- like many processes-- is dependent, I think, on a feedback loop phenomena, where if you can't cope when you turn to a substance or a person or a behavior to cope, and as a result of doing that, your situation becomes worse. 

And something in your dopamine system is telling you to keep doing it.  I mean, it's a trap immediately, that you just keep doing more of the same thing, and it keeps making you need to do it more because the consequences are making your life even less manageable to you than they were before. 

And I was really stuck in that. 

And I think that question of what happened, and again,  it would take a long time just for that question. I did find my way to a 12-Step program and, and so if anyone is listening, and they are struggling, and they feel like the 12 step programs are not for them, I felt very strongly that 12 step programs were not for me. 

I'm an atheist. And I consider myself you know, a scientist and my approach to life and an empiricist. And I was not at all interested in having to pray or hear about people praying or hear about higher powers. 

17:56
And those -- partly because I live in LA and went to gay LA meetings, which are a little different. But also just my preconceived notions were just not right. And I did  -- in spite of my disinclination to do the things I thought I would have to do, it was a very effective program for me anyway. 

And I'm still an atheist still, and it still worked for me. So I encourage anyone who's struggling to find their way to a meeting. 

They're all on zoom now. So you can do it from your bed. It makes it easy.

[Maayan] 18:28

As you know, I went through Al-Anon. And I just -- the community is incredible. And yes, there's a higher power part of it.

And also, there's a community part of it, which is what we need. Sometimes we need to hear other people's stories to remind us that we're not alone in our suffering and in our pain, and in our confusion.

[Michal] 18:53 
And even the whole sponsor, sponsee relationship, you know, having someone to call to hold you accountable, or if you're, you know, thinking about using again... I think that's also a really great system that's so needed. 

So you've experienced quite a lot in your years on this earth. And that leads me to our next question, which is the big one -- The big question: What is your meaning of life?

[Kit] 19:25

So, I think that I have to give a little bit of context for what I think the meaning of life is, kind of in the abstract, before talking about my meaning of life.

So. In the abstract, I think that there are two different ways to think about the meaning of life. One of them is the way that you know philosophers have done for thousands of years. 

It's a cognitive exercise, an intellectual exercise, in which you think about what is the meaning of life. But I think most people, if they thought about it, would recognize that that intellectual process of thinking about the meaning of life does not actually touch in any meaningful way, the place that they feel their life is meaningful. 

So I can say the meaning of life is friends, or the meaning of life is being of service or love or any of those things. And I can make a very cogent argument that that's the case. But that has nothing to do with whether I feel that my life is meaningful, right or not. 

20:33 
And I think that I can still have those things that I say are the meaning of life in my life, and still not feel that my life is meaningful. So that second part of the meaning of life is the one that I think we're talking about, it's what do you feel -- like the feeling of meaning? And the experience of meaning, rather than an intellectual, oh, a proclamation.

[Michal] 20:55

Exactly. Yeah. What is your meaning of life? What lights you up? wWat fuels you?

[Kit] 21:00

Yeah, so. So I think that the meaning of life, first of all, I think that it's a bit of a fakeout question in the sense that people whose lives are fulfilling never asked the question, what is the meaning of life?

They might ask in that philosophical way, but they don't cry out in spiritual pain, "What is the meaning of life" in the sense of like, " I don't have meaning in my life". 

And so because of that, I think that meaningfulness, as an experience, is an emotion, like happy, sad, angry, afraid, meaningful, full of meaning: meaningful or meaningless. And so you can be happy or sad, and you can be meaningful or meaningless.

And all of the stuff that we think about when we experience that emotion, is just kind of our brains trying to process an emotion that has its own existence, like it doesn't arise from our thoughts, it arises from our emotional core.

And so, there's a book I read that made a strong impression on me,. It's called, On Being Certain and the subtitle is Believing You Are Right, Even When You're Not. And it's by a guy named Robert Burton, MD. 

And the basic premise of the book is that the feeling of being right is just an emotion, it has nothing to do with external reality. And he makes a very strong case that you can experience the feeling of being right, or being certain about something and be completely wrong.

22:50
And it happens all the time that people feel certain that they are right, but they are, in fact, objectively wrong. 

And so his view of this thing that I had always thought of as a cognitive experience, like about being right, about being certain about something -- his reframing of that as it being primarily an emotional experience, really kind of informed how I think about the meaning of life. 

And so I think you could go through his book and cross out like being certain and write in: Having meaning. 

And it would pretty closely express what I've come to think of as the meaning of life, which is, it's a feeling that you have, and if you have it, you might engage in lots of thinking about what you can do to change that feeling. 

But it's not necessarily going to change the feeling, because it's primarily an emotional experience. 

And so in order to change it, you need to do the things that you do with your -- as you change other emotional experiences. 

So if you want to change your feeling of meaninglessness, I think the proper way to think about that is, Well, how would I change it if I'm angry? Or how would I change it if I'm depressed? Like what would I do to change those things? 

24:12
And so different people have different answers, but I think all of them ultimately have the same answer, which is that we are evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to find pleasure in basic survival activities, such as tribal activities, which are very, you know, in human evolution being bonded to your tribe has a very strong survival value. 

So that gives people meaning, like having friendships, having close meaningful relationships. Having intimate partner relationships gives people meaning, that's strongly evolutionary, it's selected for.

And then doing things: in gardening people find it soothing and they find it enriching.. Because not because like, you know, the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog has a, you know, this year's garden Oh for $500. And they feel like they've accomplished something..

.. it's sort of the opposite of that, that capitalist sense of accomplishment, which is you're actually like in the dirt, you know, in the earth, and there is an energy there that I think nourishes us spiritually. 

And so I think that it is not at all coincidental that many hobbies that people have involved that process of using your hands to make something like knitting and needlework, and embroidery and woodworking, and all of these things where people find it just inherently super fulfilling, to do something. 

25:45
And because of the way our society has evolved, we are most of the time disconnected for most of the things that in our human evolutionary history gave us meaning: those interpersonal relationships, the hunting, gathering, growing all of that stuff. 

And so it's not surprising to me that in our little nuclear families, or our one-bedroom apartments or studio apartments, where we sit alone, and like cry and pet, the cat, or whatever, you know, that we search around and go, like, how can I find meaning in my life? 

Because... you're not doing any of the things that you are, I think, hardwired to do to prevent that feeling from arising. 

So you can think of it as hunger. Meaningfulness is like hunger. It is spiritual hunger. And so if your're hungry, you know to eat. 

And so, if you are feeling like your life is meaningless, then you need to go do the things that feed that spiritual hunger. 

And I think, you know, being of service is absolutely a hugely important one. Go help an old lady across the street, buy somebody's groceries, when they can afford it in front of, you know, pay for the cheeseburger, the person behind you in line of McDonald's, whatever, those really touch something deep. 

And I think that one of the problems that people have with that framework or with that concept is that we are so success-oriented, and so achievement-oriented, and so status-oriented, that the answer - that meaning is not found in any of that.

27:32
And in fact, those things are anti-meaning. They destroy meaning. They subtract meaning from your life, because striving for status is a meaning subtractor.

...That people don't want to grapple with the fact that really, the implication of all that is that we should all really just walk away from our lives and go live in the woods in communities in which we take care of each other and sustain each other. 

[Michal] 27:55
That would be beautiful. I also heard you saying earlier that, you know, you can really just look at a person's life, what they're doing with their time, and get an understanding of what brings them meaning.

[Kit] 28:08

And you in fact, if you walk into a law firm, you know, I mean, it's practically a cliche that lawyers are the unhappiest people on earth. 

And so I think it's really interesting that, you know, at these big law firms, you can find people who are absolutely at the top of the power status, money privilege game in the world, and yet who are just deeply miserable, you know? Really miserable.

[Michal] 28:35

Yeah. That's why I like to ask people -- because "What's the meaning of life" is also such a big question. It could take days, it could take years to even come up with like, some general answer.  

But I like to say, well, how do you define your meaning and what lights you up and what fuels you? Or, what are some common themes that you've seen throughout your life that have felt spiritually nourishing? (Just to go off that phrase "spiritual hunger".)

[Kit]  29:07

So, for me, friendships are, you know -- I'm a very, very social person. Although, right at this moment in history, I'm very disappointed in humanity and not feeling like I love everybody in the same way that I like to think I do. 

I can get along with most people. As long as we don't talk about politics.

But I feel like I can go through the world and I can make friends with whoever I encounter, more or less, if I want to. And my friendships are very important to me, and they're very spiritually nourishing for me. And my relationship with my husband is very nourishing.

[Maayan]  29:48

How long have you guys been married for?


[Kit] 29:50

We got married as soon as basically as soon as it was legal again. So we've been married since 2013 in California. 

So we've been around seven years. But people have a lot of unrealistic expectations about how the other person can heal their wounds or whatever, can fill their voids. 

And people think that their partner should be a jigsaw puzzle piece that fits exactly into their puzzle piece, and that there are no gaps. 

And I don't think it's realistic or really healthy. And so, you know, part of it is understanding that, in long term relationships, there will be times when you really don't like the person. 

And there'll be times when you kind of hate them, there'll be times when you really want to leave them. 

And what makes a long term relationship possible is to recognize that those are temporary things, and that if you stay there, there's another side of it. 

30:55
And we've been together enough that I'm very comfortable that when things are not great, that it doesn't mean that the relationship isn't valuable or worthwhile, or that I don't love my husband or anything that it just means we're having a rough time. 

And a lot of the time it does. I mean, sometimes maybe you know, therapy or doing the work is useful. But sometimes it's just time. 

I mean, sometimes, sometimes you just need to have a little spot where you're not so intertwined or not so connected, maybe to take care of your own autonomy, and then you can go back together. 

[Michal]  31:26
Yeah. I can understand that. I like that. 

[Kit]  31:29

Relationships are --  there's a lot of ups and downs. And that's okay. 

I mean, that's.. right? If it were just one thing, it would be like one note, you wouldn't have music, it would just have a tone. It'd be like a dial tone instead of a symphony.

[Michal]  31:42 
Yeah, exactly. sibling relationships can be that way too. 

[Kit] 
Indeed, they can.

[Maayan]  31:50

Yeah. Kit, you have a sibling. 

[Kit]
I do. I have an older brother.

[Michal] 
And?

[Kit] 31:59

We have a... challenging relationship.

As a person gets older -- and this is just my experience, so it may not be yours -- I think that when I was your age, Maayan in particular, I had a perception of myself as being an individual, me, I'm me. 

And the older I get, the more I see that I am just smushed up, messed up, mélange of my parents' good and bad characteristics. 

And that the things that make me crazy about my parents are the things that make me crazy about myself. 

And so my relationship with my brother can be challenging because he can push my buttons, that he can behave in ways that remind me of things that are triggering to me about my parents.

 And they can be ways that I strive not to be myself. And that I'm reactive to and I'm sometimes embarrassed with how reactive I am. 

I'm like, I feel like I'm a fully grown man, I should not be... 

[Michal] 33:13
Snaps to this. 

[Kit] 
Like I'm so... it's like zero to a hundred. But you know, I love my brother. He's a very smart guy. He's a very complicated guy. 

Though, he can be interpersonally challenging, And I think the exact same way that I suspect I can be interpersonally challenging. So the two of us just...

And you know, I think that there's all sorts of stuff that triggers that maybe takes decades to start to recognize what's going on. 

I don't think I'm anywhere near done with this process of figuring out like, why I react the way I do, why some things make me very angry or emotional or frustrated very quickly, in other situations don't at all.

There's so much stuff to unpack there underneath it.

[Michal] 34:03

Emotional wounds. They're just always going to be there, aren't they?

[Kit[ 34:07

Yeah, I think they are. Yes and no.

[Michal] 34:11
Maybe I shouldn't say always. I know, we have to get rid of that word always. 

[Maayan]

They may or may not.

[Michal] 
They may or may not always. Just kidding.

[Kit] 34:22
Well, it's interesting, because I have talked with people sort of frequently about this idea. 

And these people are feeling that they need to sort of fix their emotional wounds in order to get back to their authentic self. 

And, you know, what  if that wounded thing IS your authentic self? 

I mean, I'm not sure, like what, you're going to become like an uncarved block of marble or uncarved bar of soap? Like with no blemished in you? That's not going to work. You're gonna be like an alien. 

[Michal] 34:53

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's important to learn how to integrate that, you know, and not be like a constant trigger bomb, I guess. But you know, at the same time, I do think that having those reactions or explosions, I think that's a really good opportunity to go back inward.

[Maayan] 35:19
Kit, I'm just like, everything you say, my brain is just like Yes, yes. And like sparks and neurons are flying everywhere. 

I love the way you narrate your life and life in general and reality. And I'm thinking, I'm still like processing how you define the meaning of life in general, and your own, of course, but in general, it really resonates with me. 

I'm thinking about the people that are hungry, a little too much. Or codependence and that whole realm of people. I remember you told me about the broken wing syndrome. Can you describe it? Because you're better at it.

[Kit] 36:00
Yeah, it's the person who always comes home with the baby bird with a broken wing that they found on their way home, and then spends the next two weeks feeding it with an eyedropper every two hours. 

And suddenly their needs are put to the side in what is arguably a beautiful way, but which is not healthy for the person who doesn't.

[Michal]  36:21 
Right. Right. I like that: "Broken Wing Syndrome".

[Maayan]  36:25

Yeah. And sometimes, you know, it's, while being of service is so important, it really does give meaning, it's also important to have that balance. 

Be of service to yourself before you can be of service to others. 

And so I want to ask the last question, because I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours.

[Michal]
Me, too. This is a really great conversation. 

[Maayan]
I know, I'm so thankful that you got to meet Kit through these important questions. 

I guess the last question is kind of heavy also, so it's okay to take a pause. This is a podcast also about normalizing grief and death. And I guess we're curious, what is your perception about death?

[Kit]  37:04

So, I feel like, I typically attributed it to having lived through the AIDS crisis, but I'm not even sure that's right anymore. Because I know as many people who have died in recovery, from overdose, relapse, overdose suicide, heart attacks from cocaine, or crystal meth, things like that. 

So I, I think I have experienced more death in my life than most people my age, certainly, than most people your age, probably I could identify 50 or 60 friends, who've died, of mine over my life. 

And so. So I feel like I have a lot of experience with loss and grief. And it is, you know, I think our society is very sick... when it comes to death and grief... we try to hide it. 

We're very neurotic about dead bodies, and we don't like to see dead bodies around. And it's a big crisis. 

And so they're like, you know, people used to have their grandma lying in the parlor for a couple days, so we could come by and say goodbye. And I know Judaism has different traditions. 

But in general, our society likes to get rid of that evidence, you know, of a life, pretty quickly. 

And so I think that, you know, people -- and we're so focused on... 

I don't know, there's something very sinister, I think about, in some ways, our, our focus on like, mental health, there's something in it, that seems feels to me, maybe it's just because I'm cynical, as being ultimately driven by the desire for people to heal, so they can be productive again. 

And not by actual concern about people's grieving, you know, it's like, we care about mental health, because we want you to be mentally healthy so that you can do the things we want you to do.

[Maayan]  38:55

So we can function in a capitalistic society. 

[Kit]  38:59

Yeah. And so, I think that sometimes what people need for their grief for their mental health is to not function for an extended period of time, a year, you know, two years. 

Like that's how loss is. And I think that we should do better about honoring people's, what we would say "poor" mental health, like honoring people's depression, honoring, honoring people's grief, honoring people's sadness, honoring people's inability to function.

And not trying -- you know, yes trying to support them and love them and care for them and be their tribe and you know, all of that stuff -- but not try to get them better so that they can go back to work, you know,

[Michal]  39:46

Exactly. Meeting them where they're at in their grieving process, and allowing for that process to happen.

[Kit] 39:55
Yeah. I think life has rhythms of growth. And you know, it's not like Ericksonian stages or Piaget -- it's just it's more kind of like Gestalt rhythm, stuff.

And the way that our culture is constructed does not allow for people to experience their life rhythms in a natural way, on a natural scale.

40:32
Because it's always trying to put them back into the matrix of: go to work in the morning, go to lunch in the afternoon.

And so, I hope as -- I think that one of the positive things I hope about the COVID-19 crisis and this whole pandemic, is that people are -- because a lot of people are away from work, that they're starting to rediscover that their lives have a rhythm that doesn't require work and that feels better in some way.

That it just feels better to just live in your own rhythm. And so, hopefully, that will result in some change for our society.

[Michal] 41:16
Yeah. I'm hopeful about that, too.

[Kit]
You know, grief is weird. I feel like I didn't really process -- I felt like I carried around a lot of unprocessed grief about the people I lost to AIDS, until I got some really good therapy, probably about 10 years ago now.

I carried it around for like 20 years. I didn't really know I was carrying it out. But boy, once it came out, once it got processed, I knew that it had been there.

[Michal] 41:45
Yeah. Yeah. I think carrying it around is very common. Everyone has a different reason for what brings them to therapy or what brings them to the point of saying, "Okay, wow, I need to look at this now. I have no choice but to look at it before moving forward. Or as I'm continuing on with my life."

So, I think that being able to take that time, whether it's in therapy or some other form, to really go inside yourself and really dig deep into those times where life wasn't what you thought it would be.

Or where you had this dramatic shift in perception of reality because of an external event -- another way to define trauma.

And aside from the science part about that getting stored in our bodies, it's an event that changes your life. It changes your life and you didn't have any control of that change as you might have in a career setting or school setting -- applying to school and getting in, etc.

So I appreciate you sharing about all of that and just talking about your personal experiences with grief and loss and death.

[Maayan] 43:16
Yeah, thank you so much. It's really hard to -- I think that this is also something that inspired our podcast in the sense that we're not the experts of death and grief and we're just searching for the answers.

We're searching together in a community for the answers.

It really just turns out that everyone has a different view based on their context, based on their background, like you said..

And I really admire you, Kit. You're so brave and you're soldiering on despite the insults life has.

I wish you met our dad. Everything you said about the meaning of life, the hunger part, he would be like, "Yeah, our hunger is for reaffirmation."

 Reaffirmation was his meaning of life, and everything you said, my brain was like, Is that Reaffirmation? Is that Reaffirmation?

I'm thinking a lot about what he said. 

[Kit] 44:15

Yeah, so can you tell me a little bit about the reaffirmation thing? I'm curious. Did he feel like to have your true self be seen by the people who care for you and validated is the meaning of life?

[Michal]
Yeah, I think it was also -- It was Reafirrmation of Self, which he would say a lot, but as we had more conversations with him, I got from him that it was Reaffirmation of self and other. 

Basically to say that we all need validation and, exactly, we all need to be seen and heard. So if we can receive that in our relationships with people and give that, we're golden in this world.

[Kit] 45:03
Do you think your dad achieved that? Do you think he felt that?

[Michal]
Absolutely. Absolutely. He loved his career, he loved his family, he had some good friends and he -- He talked a lot about his career. That was really his number one, was medicine. His life in medicine. 

[Maayan] 45:24
I think he was also super curious about death himself. He was an Oncologist and I think he was so fascinated by death and people's reactions towards it. And the fact that it's so common. 

The number one question people would ask was, "Am I going to die?" And he would say, "It's not IF you're going to die, it's WHEN." And a lot of times, death is a fear of people's. 

It's probably a really common fear that a lot of people have in this world. And it makes complete sense.

I'm fascinated by the fact that it wasn't a fear of our dad's.

[Michal] 46:00
He really normalized death. And he filtered a lot through humor. One of my favorite things that he would say to his patients was -- when they would say, "How long do I have?" He would say, "I don't know; I failed Fortune Telling class in Medical School." 

He would make his patients laugh. Humor is so important. I would say that that's a huge part of his meaning that got passed down to me, for sure, to Maayan, for sure. To filter life through a curious lens and also to be able to laugh. 

[Kit] 46:44
Yeah. For sure. Agreed. 

[Maayan] 
I love that.

[Kit] 
Here here.

[Michal]
Here here! 

[Maayan]
Thank you so much, Kit.  It was such a pleasure talking with you.

[Kit]
Great talking to you both. Thank you. 

[Michal]
Thank you so much.

46:55 OUTRO