Developing Meaning

#8: 2023 Year End Review: How a Meaning Inventory Can Guide Us Into a Better New Year

• Dirk Winter • Episode 8

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In this episode I discuss how a year end review can help us prioritize and plan for the year ahead.  I review what I have learned from this podcast so far and look ahead toward upcoming episodes and topics in 2024.

Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff

Theme Music by The Thrashing Skumz

Dirk:

C churches, even dirt. Hello, welcome back to Developing Meaning. It's 2024. Happy New Year, holy cow. We are almost a quarter century into this new millennium. Welcome back to our podcast, where we search to find meaning and heal trauma by scouring the world of mental health treatments, and mainly trauma treatments. Really, I'm thinking that the subtitle for this show could be healing trauma by creating meaning, and I'll get back to that. But welcome to the show.

Dirk:

I want to do a beginning of the year episode in which I discuss an idea that I really like, and then I got from Tim Ferriss and I think he got it from someplace else, but the idea is to do an end of year review. So instead of doing a New Year's resolution, our idea, or his idea, is to just look back at our past here, look through our iPhone photos, our calendars, look through our journals and I would suggest scanning for meaning. So the question that we are asking is well, what do we optimize our lives for? But if you're here, you probably agree with me, at least in part, that it might be a good idea to optimize our life for meaning and sense of purpose, and one way to do that is at the end of the year or at the beginning of a new year to look back and see what events in the past year were most meaningful and what were at least meaningful. Take a blank page, draw a line down the middle and then just go through and list any particular events that stood out either positively or negatively. So for me what stood out was a family camping trip in New Hampshire and I have been really wanting to connect with nature and connect my family more with nature. I joined the Appalachian Mountain Club on suggestion of somebody that I met at a dinner party and that was a great suggestion. So big shout out to Appalachian Mountain Club. They organize amazing hikes. They have this great lodge and these cabins in the White Mountains of New Hampshire but also in many other places. And getting a bunch of teen and almost teen kids and my wife away from cell phones, away from the internet, out into nature, that was really amazing. And another amazing event that I experienced was our most recent big family get together at the end of the year in Maui, near Lahaina, which is the town that had that horrible fire, and we have a family connection to that town. We've been going there for all of my life. Intermittently, my grandparents had a condominium there, so we got to reconnect there and that was quite a memorable and meaningful experience. So a big shout out to Appalachian Mountain Club.

Dirk:

Component of meaning for me is relationships and family and loved ones that are close, and I had some great experiences, family experiences, and I would like to use that to queue maybe setting up some more similar experiences in 24. In my professional life, if you're listening to this show, you know that one of the most meaningful experiences that I had was my ketamine training, or training in ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and that has turned into a really exciting new area for my clinical work. I have been working with clients in my practice using ketamine and ketamine assisted therapy and that has been satisfying and rewarding and I've had positive experiences there and also the training experience has led to some really amazing personal connections that have continued throughout the year and we had a really amazing get together in the Catskill Mountains in the fall. Also, I joined an IFS internal family systems training group for the level one official training and that was a immersive, intense experience which I will talk more about in the coming year. It was a week in October in Chicago in this convention center outside of Chicago and then another week online the next month I think that was in November and then another week just now. I just finished it in January back in Chicago and it was about 50 of us doing an immersive training in parts work, which I will talk more about going forward. But I have been going through a professional transformation and have embraced opportunities to learn and connect with people and have met some amazing people now in the IFS community, which is a community that is now also very near and dear to my heart. So I would say that, professionally, the ketamine training and the IFS training have been probably among the most or the most meaningful experiences of this past year because they have given me new tools to work with clients and also to look at myself and have connected me with some really interesting communities that I value a lot.

Dirk:

And then maybe at the top of the list professionally even though I don't know if it's directly professionally related is actually launching this podcast and having it go pretty well and be pretty well received. So I remember in 10th grade I believe it was I had an English teacher who at the end of the course I forget what grade I got. It may have been an A minus or a B plus, but I got a comment back, a written comment, which was that Dirk keeps his light securely under his bushel, and I will always remember that, and I think he picked up on something, and that's something that I've been struggling with with a long time, which is overcoming my inhibitions in putting my ideas out into the world and mixing it up and putting my two cents. And I have been holding back and I keep staying in this role of perpetual student, learning new things, doing more trainings and not becoming an expert and really taking the lead. So I have been working on this podcast for 10 plus years maybe, or at least had the idea a long time ago and to actually put episodes out into the world even when I'm not sure that I like how my voice sounds, even as I realize that each episode I could have done things differently, I could have done things better I do feel like completing an episode and putting it out into the world is a type of a metamorphosis for myself, and so I'm excited where this is all going.

Dirk:

So I want to review where we are in this developing meaning story and to begin with, I want to say that I still really like the idea of taking Victor Frankel seriously and thinking about meaning as a way of healing trauma and as a North Star for our lives. As you know, victor Frankel went through huge, unimaginable traumas and he feels that connecting with a sense of meaning is the answer, or a big part of the answer, for healing ourselves. And I really agree with him at this point. And so I have been talking now with other clinicians and healers and realizing that meaning is different for each person and it can be different day by day, and as we grow it will change. And so I'm looking back at the sequence of episodes that we did last year, because really what I want to do is assemble a tool set for each of us, for myself and for you, for other people.

Dirk:

And in the first episode I wanted to talk with Annette DeBroyle about Eugene Gentlin. He is the 1970s philosopher who came up with the idea of felt sense and embodied, body-based knowing, as opposed to more intellectual, left brain, verbal knowing. And I believe that there is a lot of meaning in this concept of felt sense, and that comes up and will come up over and over again as we move through and continue to move through different types of therapies. To me the idea of felt sense is a crucial building block, a cornerstone in connecting with meaning. Let's find a way to figure out what's happening in our body. And in the Annette DeBroyle episode even though I kept saying neat, neat, neat during the episode, which annoys me now that when I listen to it I am proud of having a first episode with her that really marks this idea of felt sense, embodied, knowing, which we're going to come back to again and again as we move to other healing approaches.

Dirk:

And then there are other concepts that I think are important for meaning in that episode, including Eugene Gentlin's idea of having a creative system, which he accesses through this approach that he calls thinking at the edge, which means taking one body of knowledge and then another body of knowledge and seeing how they sort of connect at the edges and using that as a means for creativity. And I think the most recent episode with Bruce Hersey, where he combines EMDR and IFS and coherence therapy, uses that. I think perhaps all creativity happens this way, but it's interesting to sort of formalize that and say look to have meaning. One important component really is creativity and in one way to access that is thinking at the edge and that was a highlight for me in the episode with Annette de Broil, as well as her talking about connection with nature and then wanting to be remembered for her kindness, and kindness really comes up again and again for me. So next, I really appreciate Jean Marmarejo's conversation where she talks about her work starting the End of Life Assisted Dying program in Canada and what a powerful thing to go through and to think about and really to add. A second cornerstone in our meaning toolkit is awareness of our mortality, which leads us to appreciate the moment, to be present. It also in our conversation we talk about the importance of letting go of grudges and I like the idea of living wakes, of assembling people while we're still alive and still coherent, and celebrating our lives and our connectedness. And she also wanted to be remembered for her kindness and I think maybe I'm selecting for just kind people. I think that's true. I like people who are kind and I try to cultivate that in myself, not always successfully, I have to say, but I really appreciate Jean's episode.

Dirk:

And then we had a couple episodes on psychedelics. There was the Justin Townsend episode of Michael Meditations and what he's built and all his learning from the psilocybin retreats that he runs in Jamaica and for me the highlights there are expanded awareness and how we filter reality. We are always using some kind of a filter to sort through information and any different. This is what makes us human. We discard most of the information that comes into our system and we filter it and that's really important for being able to function focus on the meaningful stuff. But it also creates repetitive patterns and biases and so using psychedelics to really get rid of our filters and turn off our default mode network and connect with the sense of loss of self connection to a greater. So there's many themes there that I think are important for meaning and I really had fun and that was a really popular episode. That was the most downloaded episode, justin's episode and then also I had fun posting my audio diary of my ketamine training, where I came from a psychedelic, naive perspective and shifted my perspective using ketamine, which was wild and still has changed the way I think and made me more open to perspectives that are much closer to Buddhism and more open to spirituality. And I didn't get addicted to ketamine. I didn't go nuts yet We'll see. No, I'm not really recreating with it, but those were two exciting episodes and then I really appreciated Dave Merrill's episode too, where he talks about importance of story and George Saunders perspective and the Russian perspective of each of us has this story filter and being able to learn from fiction how causality happens, how each item in a fiction story, a Russian short story, has an impact, is there to create an impact and meaning is really connection and an impact and we want to be connected to each other, to important people that we care about, to nature, to something greater than ourselves, and we want to have an impact and approaching that through story is, I think, really critical.

Dirk:

And Dave Merrill also highlights themes of creativity, of nature, of slowing down and kindness and approaching our unconscious mind and our filters through psychoanalysis, which is that's my roots and I really enjoyed being able to explore that with David. And then the most recent episode episode with Bruce Hersey, who talks about combining three different therapy approaches to heal trauma EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, where this is a really interesting way of looking at our mind that we can access traumatic memories and reprocess, trigger a relaxation response and connect those frozen memories that activate our fear system with sort of more healing, normal memory system that then really shifts our traumatic memories in ways that heal, help our system heal, and then IFS, which is internal family systems therapy, which is a way of it's another DIY, do it yourself kind of therapy. I mean it's. I will have some episodes coming up on IFS, but but basically the idea is that we have many filters through which we look at the world and any kind of strong emotion or intense desire we can sort of embody that, personify that and then think of ourselves as sort of a collection of little people that all have some kind of a good intention but can be in conflict. And by being kind to all of the little pieces inside of ourselves and really understanding them and hearing them out rather than picking sides and killing off the ones that are less acceptable, leads to a just a calmer, healthier way of being, and I will have a lot more to say about that. But I really value that episode and I really like his approach. I did his three part training in his CISG model. I loved it. I've done separate trainings in EMDR and I'm finishing up an IFS level one training now.

Dirk:

And then I do want I have read a bunch on coherence therapy, which coherence therapy is another important concept from Bruce Ecker, which is that each symptom has an internal logic that makes sense, that there's a coherence for each symptom, the idea that we can really rewire pieces of our neural system that are causing problems, bring them up, access them through talk therapy or embodied approaches, and then change them and heal them, rather than just laying down a new pathway that overrides a fear memory. And so that was a recent discovery, and a really important recent discovery that if we have some kind of a phobia, a fear response, we don't need to just build some kind of a new skill, new pathway. We can actually bring up that old memory and change it and heal it. And so I'm proud of these episodes, I'm excited about where we're going. I feel like we have a bunch of tools that we're going to keep working with and looking across modalities to kind of see what are the tools and how can we work with them. So we have memory reconsolidation and neuroplasticity. We have the default mode network and we have ways of turning that on and off through psychedelics and through meditation, for example. We have do it yourself, diy type therapies, which don't necessarily involve years and years of work. There's free peer to peer therapy approach which is focusing Eugene Gentlin's focusing that's described in the net to prologue episode, and there's also, I feel like IFS is something that we learn and can practice on our own and it's helpful to have a therapist who's sort of a guide and a teacher very helpful at the beginning, but it's also a tool set that then gets transferred, and so there's also sort of other concepts that overlap, which include dual attention in healing.

Dirk:

So if we want to heal some aspect of ourselves, we want to access that memory network in an embodied way. But then we want to shift back into sort of this bigger brain state ventral vagal, relaxed, optimal. So I haven't talked about ventral vagal state and polyvagal theory. It is basically the connected flow state that the ventral vagal branch of our vagus nerve, which is the wandering nerve that goes through our intestines, connects. It wires our heart, our lungs, our voice, our facial muscles. It's the social branch and learning how to access that and making sure that's turned on can be really helpful. There's many ways we could do this through breathing, through meditation, through IFS, through running. There's a lot of different ways, but we have this tool set that's coming together and so I'm really excited.

Dirk:

Now I have a number of episodes that are recorded that I think are going to continue this theme in interesting ways. The next one is going to be a very interesting psychiatrist, playwright, analyst, dr Richard Brockman, who is an expert in suicide and just wrote a book about his own life in which he talks about how he found his mom when he was seven and she had killed herself, and this is obviously a unimaginably horrible event and he has really overcome that and become a great friend and mentor to me and also helped so many other people through creativity and through his work as a clinician and a teacher. So that's going to be an exciting episode. And then, episode after that is another great mentor, april Mungaris, who, dr Mungaris, is an expert in EMDR, but also much, much more, and so we're going to have, we're going to go through a wide variety of people and perspectives. We're going to get into IFS, we're going to get into breathwork.

Dirk:

I would like to talk about nature-based therapies. I would like to talk about animal-based therapies, also want to talk about hypnosis. I'd like to talk about music. I really value Dan Siegel's work with interpersonal neurobiology. He is super interesting and I'm hoping to have some discussions with him or with somebody who's an expert in his modalities. So there's a lot to explore. There's a lot to learn. I want to do a lot more to build connection across different healing communities. I want to get to know and introduce you to really interesting people and what they figured out. I'm excited to have you along and I want to also do something to make this a bit more interactive. I'm looking into ways of building a discussion group where we can have offline discussions. That's hopefully something that I can get done in 2024. So a lot to look forward to. Very exciting interview coming up next month with Dr Brockman. And until next time, as always, I hope you have a wonderful, meaningful and meaningful month and if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know.

Dirk:

Stop tarts. Parmigranes dance the way it costs to earn a jubilee chest Masculine pumpkins to kill the needy. Revive their teached desire and what should we think? She says as she turns on the canvas, no particular tonic voice. So on and on and on. They spoke no discernible tone. Some, please, would have been pleased as they looked at matters reflected on the wall, arya.