Endings and Beginnings with Marti Peck
Episode 9
Endings and Beginnings: Retirement as Reinvention with Marti Peck
-
Marti Peck, Ph.D. obtained her doctorate in clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology, San Diego in 1991, and is certied in Adult Psychoanalysis by the American Psychoanalytic Association. She maintained a private practice in San Diego for over thirty years, also instructing rst-year medical students in psychological aspects of medical practice from 2013-2016 at the University of California, San Diego as an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry, until her retirement in 2022.
In 2021, she co-authored a book with her husband titled "So Hard To Die: A Physician and a Psychologist Explore The Mystery of Meriwether Lewis's Death", in which she created a psychological prole of this famed co-captain of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, using as her template the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, 2nd Edition (PDM-2), co-edited by Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D.
-
Among the myriad of beginnings, endings, losses and changes that punctuate our lifetimes, few are as challenging as the act of bidding farewell to a long and rewarding career. Over the years, substantial time, labor, and heartfelt devotion are invested, forging identities and finding purpose. So when the familiarity, the comforting sense of routine, and the deep relationships we have nurtured come to an end, we can experience emotions reminiscent of grief and loss.
But the end of a career also signifies the dawning of a new chapter, brimming with possibilities to explore untapped passions or embark on new adventures. For analysts, the transition to retirement entails discovering who they are once they have left the analyst's chair. For Marti Peck, it was a true opportunity for reinvention. Marti began her journey in the field at the tender age of 18, commencing an illustrious career that would span over 40 years, including 30 years in private practice. Recently, Marti gracefully said her final goodbyes and retired from the distinguished career she built in psychoanalysis.
In this episode of The Art of Listening, Marti walks us through the thoughts and feelings that accompany this profound life transition. Marti shares her wisdom on the intricate and profound relationship that therapists develop with their patients, exploring the challenges of releasing the responsibility and connection that comes with it. She depicts her own journey of introspection, emphasizing the vital importance of listening to oneself, discerning limitations, and recognizing individual capabilities.
Join us as we discuss Marti's life long career, and explore how she continues to harness her psychoanalytic wisdom even in retirement, as the practice never truly ends.
Chapters
1 - How Marti approached her retirement, and the emotions that follow change
2 - The responsibility therapists feel for their patients
3 - Marti’s life after retirement, and the separation of personal and professional identity
4 - Viewing retirement as a new beginning
Links
Eileen Dunn
-
Marti: [00:00:02] The way my analyst listened to me, helped me learn to respect and value and listen to myself more closely, and listen to both sides of anything, and helped me to integrate the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, so as to be able to not be such a black and white thinker about things.
Eileen: [00:00:30] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth talk therapy. In each episode, professional listeners, seasoned clinicians, share stories about their personal journeys, their professional experience, and how they bridge the gap between receiver and giver, patient and therapist. We discuss the challenge, the wisdom, and the transformative power of listening within ourselves and with each other. Today's guest is Marti Peck. You might not know when you first learnt it, but it's the truth. You can never doubt that you were born once and that your life will end. That somewhere in time, blind but foreseeable death is there waiting for you. Patient. Unshakeable. The final passage to your last transformation. We all welcome this thought differently, but never without emotion, be it fear, sorrow, relief, determination, or a newfound appreciation for the moment we're living together now. Death awakens us to the truth of our nature, that we end and begin in all kinds of ways, all our lives, and for a limited span of time. So how do we make use of this? How do we continue to bear responsibility for our lives while knowing that all things ultimately cease to be? How does awareness help? I put these questions to my friend and colleague Marty Peck, who I knew could speak plainly and soulfully about this truth.
Marti: [00:02:16] We know we're going to die someday. We know our life is going to end. We can spend a lot of time denying that reality, defending against it. But I think there was a part of me that in my late 60s said, how do I want to spend the rest of my life? Do I want to give myself more time in that state of good health and sound mind?
Eileen: [00:02:42] Our conversation today is an exploration of possibility, looking forward and looking back. I first met Marti during the Covid pandemic through a virtual peer group we were both a part of. Times were extra uncertain then, but through our conversations within and beyond our group, we built a friendship I have come to treasure. Listening to her speak, I am often mesmerized by her ability to distill emotional life, to name the feelings, and to accept vulnerability like a gift with no strings attached. In this episode, Marti tells us about her lifelong vocation as a psychologist and analyst, and about her decision to discontinue professional practice. We explore how endings can free us from limitations and give us a chance to live in a new way. So as you listen today, I invite you to consider the cycles of your life and ask yourself, how do you see your beginnings and endings? What was born out of closure? And when you think about the end of your lifetime, what token of yourself would you choose to have and to hold? Without further ado, let's welcome my friend Marti Peck. She is a retired clinical psychologist, a certified psychoanalyst, and the co-author of So Hard to Die, an exploration of the mystery of Meriwether Lewis's death. When you started your studies, you went straight into psychology as an undergrad. What drew you to studying psych?
Marti: [00:04:19] You know, I think since I was just a little child, it was my nature to be observing, to be curious. And I was always interested in people and what they did and what they said and how they said it. And I think that was always just a natural bent. I remember in my analytic training I had a supervisor and I asked him, you know, how did you get interested in becoming a psychoanalyst? And he said, well, as a child, I read detective novels, and I'd just always be interested in trying to solve the mysteries and find the clues. And I think that's something akin to what I'm saying, that there's always just a natural interest and curiosity I had about people and wanting to understand them and understand what made them tick.
Eileen: [00:05:25] Did that distinguish you in your family group and among your siblings as well?
Marti: [00:05:30] probably in the sense that I think I was the most sort of sensitive child, sensitive to my own feelings, other people's feelings. You know, I often think that can be a blessing or a curse in the work we do to have sort of a accentuated sensitivity. And I think that was what my family would have said about me, that I was a sensitive child.
Eileen: [00:06:03] Before settling into private practice. You spent time working with kids, adults and seniors. How did those experiences guide you?
Marti: [00:06:12] When I first started training, I wanted to have a broad base of working with all ages and understanding different stages of development. And so working with children and adolescents was part of that base. But I think that I found that I just had a more natural affinity to working with adults and older adults, rather than children and adolescents. I learned a lot from them. But I just felt it was a more comfortable fit for me talking with other adults.
Eileen: [00:06:54] You just recently retired from an extensive career in private practice. Coming up on your retirement, how did you feel when you were thinking about leaving the field?
Marti: [00:07:05] Well, I had very mixed feelings because on the one hand, you know, if you consider the beginning of my career started at 18, when I started to major in psychology as an undergraduate. And then when I actually retired, it was about 50 years. So five decades of professional development. So when I retired, I had been licensed as a psychologist for 31 years and had been in private practice for over three decades. So, you know, I think if one is doing something that they feel like has been their calling and their vocation in life, not just their career, there cannot be the absence of sadness about stopping that work and starting a different phase of life, which doesn't include that because it was. I was so invested in being a psychologist psychoanalyst for so many years. It was so much a part of my identity. But on the other hand, I also looked forward to spending my time doing other things. I liked developing hobbies that I said to myself, whenever I retire, I'm going to engage in these other activities which I now have more time to do, and I'm grateful for that.
Eileen: [00:08:51] You know, stopping it means losing, changing, as you say. How could it not have included sadness? How did you know it was time to leave the field? Or did you ever really feel that there was a right time to leave? Or how did you decide to do it at that time?
Marti: [00:09:09] I think there's this there's this reality that's painful in a lot of ways for all of us as human beings, that we know we're going to die someday. We know our life is going to end, and we can spend a lot of time denying that reality, defending against it. But I think there was a part of me that in my late 60s said, you know, it's time for me to move on. How do I want to spend the rest of my life? And I think a factor that was important for me was to say or question to answer was, do I want to still be in good health and travel and have time to do that, or just work and work and work? And then my health has failed, then I can't travel. I know that it's very common for psychotherapists to work into their 70s and 80s and some even 90s, but when I thought about it, I reflected that the older I got, the more I was risking losing my mental and physical capacities or having those diminish more and more over time. And I wanted to give myself more time while I still in relatively good mental and physical shape, to do activities in that state of good health and sound mind.
Eileen: [00:10:49] You know, the awareness that you have of an ending of an era in your life that has been so deep, so involved, so important and so long, and that you're really living in and feeling that. I mean, I've heard it said before that the end of every single hour we meet with a patient is like a little death or, you know, a very important ending of its own. What was it like to let go of long standing relationships you had maintained with patients?
Marti: [00:11:18] That was probably the hardest part. I mean, I still miss talking with my patients and the Long Terme patients that I was seeing when I announced within 6 to 8 months before I actually retired, that let them know that I would be closing my practice. It's a process.
Eileen: [00:11:48] If you've experienced therapy, you know that something happens in the room when we are together. Some kind of magic. An exchange that reveals us to ourselves. For practitioners, the transformative space we create together is not only a place where feelings are unveiled, it's also the bed of our duty to care. To help people bear the unbearable and to support the reach for meaning and freedom and strength, we aim to lift a gentle hand and keep hold as patients discover themselves or uncurl like flowers. So when we leave our work for an hour or a lifetime, we don't forgo our connections, our commitment. We keep them with us as relics of our shared journeys. In this way, the space we occupied together as listeners and speakers continues to be.
Marti: [00:12:52] What I feel sensitized to now that I'm retired is there is a life and death responsibility we have in people's lives. You know, as trained psychologist, analyst, you know, we see people who are depressed, who are suicidal. You know, we have a responsibility to them to help them to take care of them if they are talking about or planning to harm themselves to intervene. And that's a big responsibility on our shoulders. And I think I didn't I was always aware that I had it on my shoulders, but I think now that I'm retired and that responsibility is off my shoulders, I notice that I feel much less anxious about having responsibility over people's lives.
Eileen: [00:13:53] Of course, I know what you're talking about, and I'm thinking the minute you you think about responsibility and for people's lives, people's lives that are in degrees of distress from mild to magnificent. It's like from this vantage point you now occupy on the other side of ending your practice. I wonder how you think about power and responsibility, or the limits, if you will, of power and responsibility for the life of another person?
Marti: [00:14:23] Well, you know, I think as I've gone through my life and always taken very seriously this responsibility to be involved in people's lives in such an intimate way as doing psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, that as I grown over the years, I become more and more in touch with my own and other people's limitations as human beings. I've come to accept much more readily our humanity that we are. None of us are perfect. We all make mistakes. We all do the best we can. I think because of some of the experiences that I've had. In which I've experienced my own errors and my own imperfections. That has helped me to become, I hope, more compassionate toward myself and others. And I think that even as I'm retired now, there's a way in which I reflecting on more and more of my limitations, especially entering a phase of life development that is characterized by being on the downhill slide, so to speak, or in the fourth quarter of the game saying, here's what's upcoming diminishing capacities. It can be depressing, or we can look at it as like how we listen to people. And I think in the art of listening to patients, empathy is so foundational. To all the work that we do. There are two sides to a coin, and there's the integration of what can I control and what can't I, and learning to be realistic and say, well, you know, as my physical abilities diminish and maybe I can't walk as well, I don't have control over that to some degree, but I do have control over, you know, I can sit and study Italian by watching YouTube videos.
Eileen: [00:16:53] Recognizing our imperfection, the limits of our power, and the inexorable nature of loss is an ongoing lesson. It points to our contradictions that the best things in ourselves sit together with the worst two sides of the same coin the sources of joy and sorrow, what we call right and wrong, the light and the dark. This is what makes us human. We say the truth of our limits. It's what makes us sick too. When we can't accept, can't allow all of our experiences to be integrated. And this is what helps us to connect most naturally in the space between us, where we share the challenge of being human. You know, I'm wondering how as a psychologist, as an analyst, having left the day to day work in the way that you had known it, do you notice that you're living in the world differently, or how are you seeing and experiencing the world differently? You don't stop being an analyst whether you're working full time or not.
Marti: [00:18:03] That's a really good question. And I think I definitely. See and experience the world differently on this side of retirement. And I've been retired for about 14 months now, and I would say the first year was a process of sorting out and trying to integrate, you know, what professional connections did I want to maintain and which ones did I want to let go of? And I'm happy about the connections that I've decided to maintain and develop. Like I'm still a member of my local San Diego Psychological Association, and I decided to stay active on a couple of committees. We have once a month zoom meetings for the Addictions Committee and the Aging Committee, and I attend those meetings, and I'm able to connect with colleagues I've known for many years in those ways. I have a peer consultation group that means a lot to me of other therapists, analytic therapists, analysts that I meet with once a week. And that's very enriching for me.
Eileen: [00:19:27] Well, we're both members of that peer group. That's the way that's the way we met. And I imagine that 14 months is not long at all, as we both know. And it's going to be amazing to see just what evolves, what goes on evolving inside you, I imagine.
Marti: [00:19:45] Yes, there is definitely because.
Eileen: [00:19:47] You've made a space.
Marti: [00:19:48] Yes. And there definitely is an evolution. And there are a lot of books that have been written about aging successfully and keeping one's mind and body active and stimulated. And one way that I see the evolution is in a very specific way is there is an organization in San Diego that's called Oasis Adult Learning Center. They offer courses to seniors, older adults on every topic imaginable how to play the piano, how to do ballroom dancing, learning about literature, the concertos of Tarkovsky, you name it. So my husband and I, in 2021, self published a book called So Hard to Die. A physician and a psychologist explore the mystery of Meriwether Lewis's death. We are very interested in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and my husband, who's a retired physician, wrote a book about 20 years ago about the medicine of the Lewis and Clark Expedition during the bicentennial of the expedition, 2003 to 2006, and in the ensuing years, we have read a lot of other historians writings about the death of Meriwether Lewis, who died at the age of 35 of gunshot wounds only three years after the expedition ended. And it's always been a controversy. Was he murdered or did he commit suicide? And so we read other authors theories and they we could see a lot of misunderstandings of medical and psychological principles in that. So we decided to put our hat in the ring and write this book about our ideas. So we've given presentations at Oasis Adult Learning Center on our book. We've given book presentations along the sites along the Lewis and Clark Trail states in Montana, mostly, but so that's how my psychological training is evolving.
Eileen: [00:22:32] As Marti leaves the therapist's chair, she continues her reflective way of being. Not surprisingly, but from a distinctly different vantage point, which is why I find myself wondering what can Marti see from the other side? Does she cast a new gaze on her sensitivity, her challenges? And of course, the question that intrigues me most. Does she listen differently in this new life? You know, thinking back to the beginning of your private practice and what you learned over time about about listening, about the art of it, you know, about the skill of it. Can you think of 1 or 2 pivotal, challenging moments where you felt yourself learning how to use that sensitivity that is, was, is yours your native temperament? To listen and hear and connect. But learning how to do it in a way that does respect that, you know, difference between you and the patient, you and the other person.
Marti: [00:23:42] Yeah. Let me answer that question this way that I think the art of listening involves so much, just like you were saying, listening to ourselves and our bodies and our minds and respecting ourselves and paying attention and not dismissing feelings we have or thoughts or behaviors, but reflecting on them. And I think that my own psychoanalysis was very influential in a positive way, helping me hone the art of listening, because I think I was fortunate enough to have the helpful, beneficial analysis, a long analysis, many years as they are. And yeah, and I think that my analyst, I was fortunate to have an analyst who I felt like, listened very carefully and deeply to me, and I experienced an acceptance of me by him, a valuing of me that I don't think that I realized so much consciously. That I lacked in myself. But I think, um, the way my analysts listened to me helped me learn to respect and value and listen to myself more closely and listen to both sides of anything, and helping me to integrate the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, so that I and I think that's a lifelong process of learning to better integrate and mature in that ability, so as to be able to not be such a black and white thinker about things so helpful, such a helpful capacity to have in listening, because I think that helps us when we listen to our patients and they talk about their painful experiences of abuse and suffering.
Marti: [00:26:15] You know, if they're very angry and they talk about the bad person, like, what's the reason you feel so angry at this person? All the questions, you know, what did they do? How did they do it? Why do you think you feel so angry now? Today when x, Y, or Z happens? And to be able to accept and respect and say, oh, no wonder you feel so angry about this seemingly small thing when someone gives you this certain look as they pass you in the hallway, it's a trigger for you. It reminds you of. It represents this deeper pain and suffering that you experienced at the hands of some earlier caretaker, for example. You know, to have that acceptance, that there are reasons why we feel what we feel and believe what we do and not to be judged.
Eileen: [00:27:32] At the start of the episode, we asked, how do we come to accept change? By letting go of judgment, says Marti. Such a simple yet appeasing thought. Here I'm also reminded of the words of Francis de sales, the theologian known for his confidence in God's love. Love is stronger than death. Listening. Making the space to attend is to love and value each other and the ever shifting space between us. There is no need or room for judgment when we are free to be, to feel the way we do. This act of kindness allows us to stay if it's right to leave when we're ready. Letting intuition and the promise of more take the lead. For Marti, there was never an alternative. Since childhood, she has called on her beating, sensitive heart to accompany people in pain. She gave herself to the care of others for over 30 years. As professional listeners, we can only give as good as we've gotten. Marty's appreciation for the man who helped her hear the music in her soul is as palpable as the involvement she brought to the lives of her patients. The connections we make this way cannot be lost. They take root with which we grow. Listening with deep empathy. Marti also learned to navigate her life and the inevitability of death. She is giving herself time now to make a new beginning. With Marty, we are reminded that as we grow, we must shed our skins.
Eileen: [00:29:15] And with this petite mort, this 'little death' of what once was, we come to value what lived in the space between us. It might have been a mutual commitment to learning, the relieving sense of being known, the need to challenge each other. So as you look for closure, hold on to these tokens of your past, your present and future. Reconcile the parts of yourself and your experiences, the good and the bad, the ecstasies and the agonies, the new and the aging. Keep them close to your heart as you make your way. Tomorrow and tomorrow and in time from now. I feel Marti's lead in respecting death and the losses that anticipate it. I also feel her courage in speaking this fear we all have. Her living appreciation of our shared humanity. I bask in the calm she has found. And I hope you do too. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, if you enjoyed the show, please leave a review in a five star rating. It helps us to grow so that we can keep bringing you new conversations. And we'll see you next time.
We’re looking forward to reading your comments and thoughts.