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How can a deeper understanding of mental health help us see our world, and ourselves, differently? Hosted by therapist Kurt White and journalist Mary Wilson, each episode of Unravelling explores a complex mental health topic with insights from both professionals and people with lived experience. Whether you're trying to make sense of the world or just the slice of it inside of your head, Unravelling is here to foster a more compassionate and informed perspective on life.
The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a qualified health care professional for any health concerns. Take care of yourself out there.
Mary:Welcome to Unravelling. This is a podcast that sees the world through the lens of mental health. I'm Mary Wilson, a journalist.
Kurt:And I'm Curt White, a social worker and psychotherapist, and maybe part time woodworker.
Mary:And this is something I didn't know about you, Kurt, that you have dabbled in woodworking. Tell me more.
Kurt:Well, my middling skills here come from middle school, maybe. Gluing together a cutting board and making a little spreadable spoon and I think another kind of spoon too. But but I remember those classes were a break from the thinking part of my day and social studies and English and reading, and it was a nice change of pace. And similarly, as I've let myself sink into Vermont life in the last twenty years, I spend a lot of time in my head and talking to people and thinking and feeling about things. But I also have a weird old house and my wife and I spend a lot of time trying to fix it up and have some people that have shown us things.
Kurt:And we've accumulated saws and pieces of wood and projects and have done framing and work on all kinds of pieces of the house. That's pretty interesting and different than what I do the rest of my nine to five.
Mary:Yeah. You choose to do a lot of this work yourself.
Kurt:That's true. I'm gonna go home tonight and work on a floor, to be honest with Yeah, And it's hard, but there's a satisfying element of it too when you sort of get something right, create something, make something. There's something about that that feels good deep inside. And sometimes it can be the difference between a good day and a bad day. Maybe it sets you off on a different path.
Kurt:It's tangible, and it's nice to learn something new.
Mary:And there's a local celebrity of sorts who has this passion for woodworking as well, although you might know him for his very long career in broadcasting and radio, and that's Tom Bodett.
Kurt:Yeah. Tom is a local to the area here and has created a place in town, a community woodworking space called Hatch Space, which has grown and grown since the time that he started it, even survived the complicated COVID pandemic years and grew during that time, where they do classes and all sorts of things. And we were really wanting to talk with him because we learned that he was doing some work in the substance abuse recovery space with this woodworking.
Mary:And it is recovery month, and so we wanted to hear from him how people are really benefiting from this work of doing and making things with wood instead of some of the other traditional things that we hear about when it comes to recovery.
Kurt:Yeah. I sometimes wonder if we overdo it as a field as a psychotherapist with the thinking and the talking. I mean, it's very good stuff. But what about the doing part of things? What about the making?
Kurt:What about all of that? And so we had a really interesting conversation, and and I'm excited to bring it to our Unravelers today.
Mary:Yeah. He has made a really big impact in this community.
Kurt:So Tom Bodett is a lifelong carpenter and woodworker. In addition to his successful forty year career in publishing and broadcasting, he devotes himself to serving the rural communities that he's lived in, right here in Brattleboro, Vermont, but also Alaska and other places. He appreciates especially the beauty and bounty of our natural landscape and the indomitable spirit of the communities that occupy it. He's committed to giving back through hands on effort and philanthropy, and his work at Hatch Space is a real example of that, and he's going to tell us all about it today.
Mary:Let's take a listen.
Kurt:Well, Tom Bodett, welcome to Unraveling.
Tom:Well, thanks for having me, Kurt. It's good to be here.
Kurt:Absolutely. I'm really excited to talk with you in, if you're listening when this airs, in recovery month, September, partly because of your own personal story that you've shared of recovery and work that you've done at Hatch Space and Brattleboro, Vermont, and in various places in your life to help others who are also struggling. And I wonder if we maybe could just start with your own story and how you how you came to this kind of work.
Tom:Well, I guess, you know, any sobriety story has to start with the problem. So I came to my drinking problem, honestly, and and the usual way by drinking too much. And I had a magnificent twenty year drinking career. I was living in Alaska and building houses, and then I got into, my radio and writing career took off, which exacerbated my my issues. I didn't even really know I had a drinking problem in Alaska because there's always six people in the room are drinking more than you are, and it's very much a drinking culture.
Tom:And it wasn't until I sort of removed myself from that day to day culture in the work environment I was in building houses and and things that, it started to be clear that I was not a normal drinker. And, and it became a problem in my life, and in my marriage. And, about the time that marriage was in crises, irredeemable crises, I decided to get sober, that it was like this was unsustainable. As I think many alcoholics realize, there's always someone in their life who is their anchor, and my ex wife was my anchor. And I recognize that the only control I had over my drinking at the time was the fact that she hated me doing it.
Tom:And I cared about her enough to try to control it. And I recognize that once we split up and we were in a trial separation that, I was gonna I was gonna die, essentially, because I had no I had no governor of my own. So I checked myself into a program and, came out twenty eight days later sober. And I'm an unusual story. I at least unusual in my experience in the last thirty four years of sobriety is that I've never once, wanted a drink.
Tom:Yeah. You think about things. You have dreams. You have some of that usual stuff. But it's never ever called to me again.
Tom:It's not normal that people struggle. Sobriety is hard. And, stopping substance use is probably one of the most difficult things that we do as humans because you're trying to rewire your own brain at a time when you are least capable of of doing it. It's like solving a puzzle with half your brain tied behind your back. It started to dawn on me about ten, fifteen years ago that there's a reason why it was not that hard for me to stay sober, and that's because when I stopped drinking, I started woodworking.
Tom:I'd always been a carpenter ever since I was a kid, helping my dad fix up our old wreck of a house in Michigan. And I went to Alaska, and I got into building there. And I was a contractor building housing for for about eight years. And so I put all that away when my writing and radio career took off. And once I, stopped drinking, for some reason, I just pulled my tools out again and started doing little, you know, little odds and ends projects around around the house.
Tom:And I had no intentions about it whatsoever. I never it was just it just naturally did it. And then I started, buying more and better tools, wood fine woodworking tools, started reading more about it, and I started to recognize that I was actually pretty good at it and getting better. And I was thinking about it, like, all the time, what I could do next, what I might try next. It was totally absorbing for me in a way that nothing else in my life really was, where I could go in my shop and sort of forget to eat.
Tom:I could forget I had a dog, whatever. I could just time would go away. And it wasn't until, like I say, about ten, fifteen years ago, I read a bit of scholarship on, trauma and addiction recovery. And this particular article was talking about how art therapy has been recognized for a long time and as being an effective way to treat trauma and and abuse and and addiction. But that woodworking in particular seemed to have more efficacy than other methods.
Tom:And the opinion of the writer was that because what addiction does, it damages our our frontal lobe of our brain. And that's where our executive function is. That helps us make better decisions. It's also where our our spatial reasoning is. And when you're working with your hands and you're doing something with just picture a block of wood, it's completely spatial reasoning.
Tom:It's all this Euclidean exercise in front, back, side, square angle. It's very basic. And when you're doing that work, you're exercising that lobe of the brain without even really recognizing that you're doing it. So the way I look at it, it's like you're you're taking the medicine and you don't know it. And I recognize that I spent twenty years repairing my damaged brain with woodworking.
Tom:And it wasn't until I read that article that I thought, I'll be damned. I wonder if that's why.
Kurt:That's exactly what was going on.
Tom:Yeah. Yeah. And it was about that time I met my Hatch Space cofounder, Greg Goodman. He's not in the, recovery world, but Greg's fascination with woodworking was the same as mine, which is like when we're making something, we feel fully alive. Like that is our happy place.
Kurt:I'm curious if it's a there's a psychologist in Chicago that's written a lot for decades about the idea of flow states and this is sort of states where you lose yourself totally in some activity.
Tom:Yes. I know who you're talking about. He has a long rush. Yeah. It's a very yeah.
Tom:Impossible I always wanna say Bukowski, but it's not him. But I did, I read his think it was called Flow. Flow, yeah. And exact exactly And so Greg and I began our friendship. We didn't know each other previously talking about woodworking.
Tom:We were trading books. There's Richard Senate has this wonderful book called The Craftsman, talking about how humans were we evolved to make first and foremost, that we had the manual dexterity and the cranial capacity to make and use complicated tools before we developed the musculature in our throats and necks to make
Kurt:Yeah. Homo fabins. Right? Homo faber.
Tom:Yeah. Or faber. Right. Yeah. It's actually man is maker.
Tom:Man is maker. That's right. And we were doing that for hundreds of thousands of years before we began speaking and telling story, which is what we usually point to as what separates us from the beasts in the the woods is the fact that we we tell story, and we have this incredible incredible capacity for, abstract reasoning and things, which, again, all comes into play with with making things. And so I recognize that the two things that I do best are tell stories. I made a living at that for a good long time, still can do it, and I make things.
Tom:And when I'm doing either one of those things, it walks away with me. So that's how Greg and I came up with the idea of hatch space. It was one of those, man, doesn't the world need more of this?
Kurt:So what is hatch space? You've mentioned it a couple times.
Tom:Well, what it is is a little different than what we thought we were doing. What we thought we wanted to do was open a community woodworking space where we would put together a shop where people could walk in, use the tools, work together, help each other, learn from each other. It was community workshop. I mean, that's still what we are. When we opened the doors, we quickly realized that it wasn't woodworkers coming in using, you know, taking advantage of our facility.
Tom:It was people who wanted to be woodworkers. We couldn't keep up with what people wanted from us, which was knowledge. They wanted to learn. I want I've always been interested in this. Can you show me?
Tom:That wasn't on our it was, you know, looking back on it, it's just like, duh. Why not? But so within a couple months, we had to start doing classes. And we very quickly had a full slate of classes that were full, and we had members who just wanted to come in and work on the tools. And within our first year, we had every single hour that that shop could be scheduled was scheduled either with classes or member open shop.
Tom:And you couldn't do the two together because if members were working, running boards through planers and things, you couldn't have a class going on. And, so we needed an a different space. We needed more space. We needed space that we could do more than one thing at a time. And, we purchased the building that we're now in.
Tom:It's a 38,000 square foot building right in Downtown Brattleboro, which is important because we wanna be right in the middle of our community. And since then, we have grown. We've tripled our membership. We have classes going all of the time. And it's classroom space and shop space and CNC space, bench room space, meeting spaces.
Tom:It's it's a lot. The intention in the beginning was was really related to woodworking. It was. In in particular. Right?
Tom:It's and it still is. Our our mission is still, paraphrase it, is to sustain the traditions of woodworking and the art of working together. One of the programs I'm I'm very proud of, we're in our second year now, is what we call recovery boards. And that is, woodworking for people in early recovery. And we're partnered with the Turning Point facility here in Brattleboro.
Tom:They bring us our candidates. They help us screen people who they think would do do well with the program. We get all of these seconds from the JK Adams cutting board company over in Dover, Vermont, or is it Dorset? I always do that. And so we take these seconds, which are just, you know, boards that their machines chewed up one way or another, and we fix them.
Tom:We turn them in the first. So we love the metaphor about it. So I teach that course myself. And, I have two or three assistants now. It's very popular with the Turning Point community.
Tom:It's very popular with our community. I have no, lack of help. People say, hey. Do you need help with recovery boards? I'd love to come by.
Tom:A lot of people, again, who are quietly in recovery themselves who who step forward, and they're part of the help squad.
Kurt:Is there someone, in particular that you think of when you, think of someone that's gotten a lot out of it? Maybe this has come back in that way.
Tom:There's there's one woman who, she she came in pretty new to her sobriety, not entirely new, unhappy with a lot of the what's the oh, you hear you know, people in early recovery, you know how we all are. It's it's always somebody else's fault and all this goddamn cop, you know, my parole officer this and all that. You know, it's like the whole world is is is has got their boot on their necks. And it started that way with her, which is, again, it's not unusual. And it's not bothersome either, to tell you the truth.
Tom:It's just what it is because it goes away. And it went away for her about four weeks in. She saw a poster on the wall, which was about our intensive cabinet making class, which is one of our professional level classes. And and she said, wow, I'd really be interested in that. I used to be with a guy who did that work, and I used to help him sometimes.
Tom:And I couldn't stand him, but I really like that. And I'd love to get back to that. What do you think? Is that possible? Because I said, well, like, you know, I let me find out because it's expensive.
Tom:I turned the that over to our executive director, and she went to work on it. And she got a full scholarship for this woman. She completed that course last spring, this spring. She did wonderfully. And she is like a different person.
Tom:I get emotional talking about it because I remember at the graduation night of the cabinet program, she was talking she was excited, she was smiling and laughing, and there was a lot of people there looking at their wonderful work. And I was looking at it, I thought, my God. You know? Even her skin looked different. Everything about her looked like health and success.
Tom:And so we've seen a lot of improvements in everyone who's come through. Not every I mean, people fall off. You know? I'd say if we have 10 people that start a co op of the pro seven week programs, usually six finish. That's about right.
Kurt:That's pretty good, actually. I mean, are folks in
Tom:very And early
Kurt:recovery, like you
Tom:we don't let go of the ones who drop out because we keep bugging them. You know? We'll call them, hey, we're starting our next one. Now you wanna come back? So it's an easy thing to sell, if you will, because it is fun.
Tom:We do. We have a lot of fun. The only recovery thing we do is we start off each session with, you know, just basically, let's settle down, pay attention here, put your phone away, put all your crap away. We're gonna make some sawdust tonight. Okay?
Tom:And and then we just make stuff. And they walk away at the end of the night with these beautiful boards, and they give them, oh, I wanna give this to my mom, and I'm gonna give that to my and that. And for some of these people, it's the first win they've had in a long time. I mean, if you're coming to us through Turning Point, you've pretty much messed up everything. Right?
Tom:Yeah. Your family's had it with you. Your friends have had it with you. The police have had it with you. And and to hand someone a win like that, like something where they can say, hey, mom.
Tom:Look what I made. That's powerful. Changes a person, doesn't
Kurt:it? It really does.
Tom:It does. It does.
Kurt:I'm interested in the, you know, the what parts of this you think are most healing for folks as they go through it. I I I sort of I'm developing my own hypotheses even hearing you, touching something tangible in the world of psychodrama treatment. In some ways, we talk about concretizing something. You take something hard and you make it, you show it in a way with something physical. And that can really help.
Kurt:Or it can have an element of distraction that you get into a flow state and all of a sudden all of these automatic thoughts about wanting to drink and being no good and feeling guilt and shame and loss fade a little into the background. Or the communal element of it, mentioned, which is one maybe a lot of people don't think about. Right? It's that you're you're not alone even if you're working on a project that is partly your own project.
Tom:Yeah. That's that's right. And I think that because, you know, addicts are so crafty about working their way out of help. You know what I mean? And one of the things oh, no.
Tom:I don't wanna go to that group because I'm not a joiner. I don't you know, just oh, those people, you know, they they're they're not like me, like I did for years. I can't relate to that. So I don't wanna I don't wanna join a community. And no, I'm not a woodworker.
Tom:I don't do woodworking. All of these things that we do to cross, you know, possibilities off our list, the way around that is to don't even talk about that. Oh, you should come join our group. No. I don't do that.
Tom:No. Don't even ask me to join our group. It's it's just like you you don't you don't have to join in a group. We got this free cutting board class. You wanna make a cutting board?
Tom:And the community comes with it, but we never call it that. Welcome to the hat space recovery board community. No. We're just here. This is a wood shop.
Tom:Yeah. And here's how you use a sander. And this is what that and this is like dust will kill you. Wear the damn mask. And it's just all of this stuff is it's absorbing, like you say, it's it is a distraction.
Tom:But so is an iPhone, but does that make you better? I don't know. The It's
Kurt:clearly something more than an iPhone.
Tom:It is because of the fact that it's very physical, the dexterity it takes to use power tools and and hand tools, even sandpaper correctly and get the work you want. It's some very fine motor skills. And also wood itself is a puzzle. Every single piece of wood has a character to it. And we talk about that a lot, where you look at the grain.
Tom:Now you're gonna run the plane down it that way? Because if you do, like, go ahead. Do it. Run the plane down it that way, and it splinters all over the place because they're going they're going against the grain. So why do we have to do this?
Tom:You know, there's you always get the one there and say, no. I'm gonna do it the way just like, well, no. If you do it that way, you're gonna make a mess. Let me show you. Yeah.
Tom:And once they start sort of trying it all on, oh, I have to stand this way and move my hand back and forth this way while the other hand is doing what? And all this is going on internally and all of a sudden you got no space left in that head for any of your sad stories. You know? There's like, it's just it's done. The the night goes away.
Tom:And, we end at, 08:00, and I try to, get people winding it down about twenty of because we gotta sweep up and clean clean things and all that. Impossible. People want to stay, and they wanna keep doing it.
Kurt:Mhmm.
Tom:And I always leave I leave time to go over. Like I always tell my wife, you know, what she'll say, what time is your class? And I said, it ends at eight. Don't count on me until 09:30, because I don't wanna chase chase anybody out necessarily, particularly in the first few weeks. I and I also make sure, the first night of a new group that they all have boards to work on that they can finish, that night.
Tom:Like, maybe all they need is some sanding and oil. Like, they're very lightly damaged or maybe not damaged at all, just never got finished. So that everybody walks out that first night with a board.
Kurt:Set people up to have some early success in.
Tom:And the boards are beautiful. That's another reason I think woodworking is so effective is it's easy to get a win out of it. Really, it's beautiful just by itself. All you have to do is really sand it a little bit, throw some oil on it, and it's beautiful. So and then you go from there.
Tom:I mean, at the end of it, you can have a sixteenth century, you know, chest of drawers. You can take it all the way or you can just sand both sides. It doesn't matter. Either way, when you're done with it, you're gonna go, that's pretty cool.
Kurt:That sounds great. And I love the way that you make room for people to learn from their own mistakes experimentation, even even in that kind of stubbornness that sometimes does accompany early recovery states, right? Like, I'm doing it my way. Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt:And you don't you don't fight it. You kinda back off.
Tom:Well, you know, and I'm learning too, Kurt. I got myself into a situation with student. I didn't know the guy. I didn't know his history. He'd spent quite a bit of time in jail, and I liked him.
Tom:He was smart. He was energetic, young, and he was fighting me one night. I was trying to show him how to use the sander properly, and he refused. He says, no. I like to move fast.
Tom:I said, well, if you do that, you're gonna damage the sander, and it's not gonna get the work done. So let me show you this speed. He says, no. I like to move fast. I said, okay.
Tom:So if you like to move fast, let's not use the sander. Let's use sandpaper. You can move your hand as fast as you want with that. So I want to do this. And what I didn't recognize I was triggering him and I was being the man.
Tom:Right? And I was thinking like a woodworker teaching skills and not like a recovery coach teaching skills. And he stomped out. And I said, what what the hell? And and Turning Point does send a coach with him.
Tom:They there's someone there every night. And I says, what happened there? And he told me then the guy's history was like that, and that he's, you know, he's he's still getting used to being around authority and that. And here I was being the authority and not really being sensitive to where to where he was was coming from. I I was mansplaining the sander, because that's what I do when I'm teaching woodworking.
Tom:Right? Right. So so like I say, I'm I'm I'm learning. I'm I'm learning when, you know, when to let them be wrong for a while.
Kurt:Mhmm.
Tom:We can get a new sander. Right?
Kurt:That's very generous, actually. That's very kind. I'm touched by that. Yeah. Get a new sander if you have to, you know what I mean?
Kurt:Yeah. The person's more important.
Tom:Yeah. Yeah. And I, again, that's another one of those that was a loss for me because he didn't come back.
Kurt:He didn't come back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Tom:And I sent him a note of apology and explanation and no response. So I feel like, damn, he was here, and now he's not. And that was on me. Yeah.
Kurt:Well, on him too.
Tom:Oh, yeah.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah.
Tom:Of course.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's It's hard to help everybody, hasn't it? But Yeah. This is a tough population to even get to come into a room.
Tom:Right. It's also, you know, because another thing that comes with the addictive mind is the perfectionism. Yeah. And we joke about that too. I mean, I don't wanna lose my perfectionism in my woodworking.
Tom:I do not want to settle. And I always am saying that in the class, you know, and they say, how is that? Is that good enough? I said, that's not me. What do you think?
Tom:Is that good enough? You okay with that? And then when you just put it to them that way, nah. I'm gonna fix that. So I never wanna lose that because for me, I don't get I don't get the the buzz out of leaving bad work.
Tom:I get the buzz out of leaving good work, and we're all about the buzz.
Kurt:I love that. That's great. It's a balance though, isn't it? I mean, this sort of what the woodworking pulls you to do and what this sort of recovery work pulls you to do. There's some areas of overlap and some areas of difference and back and forth.
Kurt:It's very it's an interesting dance.
Tom:And, you know, there's another deep aspect of it, which is almost everything on a piece of wood, any mistake you make can be fixed. Almost anything. It can be filled. It can be cut and reglued. It could be reshaped.
Tom:It could be that. It could be repurposed. May be okay. It's not gonna be a cutting board anymore because of that, but what could we do with it? And we do that often.
Tom:We take some of these boards that come, from the factory that are just too chewed up. So we saw them up into pieces, and we reglue them back together. And that idea that no mistake you make is forever. We can fix this. And we do a lot of that in in the class.
Tom:And and there's real learning to that as as well because, I mean, it's true in life as well. We all make mistakes, and we're gonna keep making mistakes. And some of them are horrible mistakes. And yet we move on. We can do we can work with this.
Tom:Mhmm.
Kurt:Do you do you tell that to to folks? Do you let them know that I mean, those words like about there isn't there really aren't any mistakes that couldn't be fixed here?
Tom:I I don't make speeches like that. That will come up in our conversations, like, privately. I try you know, usually, you know, sometimes I'm, like, herding, but now that I we have more help volunteers, I get a lot more one on one time with people. And, yeah, then it can come up naturally, like in in conversation. So, yeah, I I do I do bring that up.
Tom:Because now it's like it's it's so top of mind for me, you know, when I'm in there. I can't not think about it anymore.
Kurt:Yeah. Yeah. I think that was part of, you know, people liked about watching Bob Ross and things on television. You know, the idea that like they're just happy little accidents. Know, just little like something goes wrong and you just sort of go with it, maybe it becomes something else.
Kurt:And I think Yeah. Think that's very you know, but maybe to let people kind of discover that for themselves is the philosophy.
Tom:Right. And and, you know, if we any of us, if we look back in our own lives and the, you know, the things that we've blown, the only ones that bother me are the ones I couldn't didn't address and fix at the time it might have been fixable, and that it's too late. And getting in the habit of cleaning up as you go is really the the the key to it, I I truly believe. And it takes a lot of courage to do that. Yeah.
Kurt:What what would you say to somebody who's listening to this and maybe themselves in a hard situation with drugs and alcohol and but is feeling a little inspired by this work and maybe doesn't know exactly what to do next.
Tom:Mhmm. Well, you know, I'm a woodworker, so I can I I will advocate for woodworking as a a way out of your your habit that you're in right now? And it isn't just a habit, it's a way of life. And unwinding that is something that the 12 steps and this entire institution and thousands more is like I've been trying to unravel forever. It is hard, but it doesn't have to be awful.
Tom:It can be difficult and wonderful at the same time. And just like, again, making a chair is the most difficult thing really a woodworker might do. And you do it one piece at a time, and you keep going back to it every single day, and you do a little more. And at the end of it all, you sit down in it. And that's the way it works.
Tom:So if you're listening and you wonder if this might be a way out for you, You should just try it. What the hell?
Kurt:What the hell?
Tom:And that is one thing not to be an advertisement for hatch space because there's lots of places you can do woodworking, but we consider ourselves a no threshold entry to woodworking. You can come in the door and you can be a master craftsman, and we'll find a place for you. You can come in the door and say, wow. I've never held a tool in my life, but I've always wanted to do this. And we'll we have a place for that.
Tom:We don't let we don't let money get in the way. We don't let a lack of skills get in the way. As long as you are are able to show up and be safe, we can put you to work.
Kurt:Well, Tom Bodett, thank you so much for this. You're a special human being and doing this work, and I'm really grateful for it on a on human level and grateful for our wonderful conversation today.
Tom:Well, thanks, Kurt. I appreciate you letting me go on and on.
Kurt:Absolutely. Absolutely. Wonderful. So thank you again to Tom Bodett for that wonderful interview and sharing so much.
Mary:Yeah. It was really great, and it makes me so appreciative of what he's really done. But he's become such a big advocate for our community here in Southern Vermont and really investing, in this area and helping other people.
Kurt:Yeah. People people may not know if they're not from this area that, you know, Northern New England was actually one of the big epicenters of the opioid epidemic. And the way that addiction and substance use disorders affected this community was really quite devastating with many, many people losing their lives and tearing families apart and costs to communities as well at multiple levels. And it was all too invisible a problem until all of a sudden it was everywhere and almost sort of larger than life. A big part of my professional career was in in that world running programs to try to help folks with those problems years.
Kurt:And and it's not always, you know, both rural areas and substance use disorders are sort of issues or sort of topics that don't necessarily get a ton of powerful advocates. And Tom's been a real consistent, powerful advocate. And so has his wife, Rita, who's done so many things in the community with some of the nonprofit boards like he mentioned. And I'm just sort of listening to this again. Really makes me especially grateful for the hands on work that he's done, for the presence, for the advocacy, and and just, for for being here in in what could be one of the forgotten places.
Kurt:And
Mary:you can really hear it in his voice just how much this whole project means to him.
Kurt:Yeah. It it makes me, wish I'd had more of a a hands on experience of it when I was doing more work in our, substance use disorder treatment programs that we used to have here. But it is so powerful to hear about it now, And I hope that others feel inspired to maybe take a risk, maybe try something new, do something physical, find a community like this that might help with whatever you're struggling with.
Mary:And if you'd like to learn more about Hatch Space, we'll put the link to that in our show notes as well as some resources for recovery month.
Kurt:Absolutely. It's good to take care of yourself, as we say at the top of every show.
Tom:And
Kurt:this month is certainly extra reason to do so. Thank you again to Tom and to all of our listeners. We hope you'll join us again next time, fellow Unravelers.
Mary:We will see you then.
Kurt:Unravelling is brought to you by Brattleboro Retreat. Our producers at Charts and Leisure are Andrew Adkin, Hans Buteau, and Jason Oberholzer.
Mary: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.