New Year’s Eve 2013 becomes an occasion for taking stock. Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, shares her year working with combat veterans and their families on PTSD, and Armand reads an open letter from Christina McDowell confronting her father’s fraud. Callers reflect on loss, loneliness, and the quiet sustaining power of memory.
Medicine was never meant to be a collection of procedures and tools. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, physician and UCSF professor, describes her course The Healer’s Art, now taught in half of American medical schools, which helps first-year students reclaim the values of compassion, service, and human connection that drew them to medicine in the first place.
Can a person who distrusts or dislikes others learn to open up again? Armand DiMele takes calls from listeners wrestling with resentment, false accusations, childhood neglect, and the habit of performing friendliness to win approval, tracing each back to early wounds and pointing toward gratitude and genuine closeness as the path out.
Most people love timidly, hiding thoughts and swallowing resentments. Armand DiMele, joined by co-host Giullian Gioiello, argues that real love demands emotional courage far harder than physical bravery, and walks listeners through what it takes to say the things we only tell cab drivers or therapists.
Generous people live with a sense of unlimited possibility while stingy people hoard out of fear, including fear of death. Armand DiMele argues that giving can be an act of aggression and withholding an act of love, and that wealth has almost nothing to do with which type you are.
Esther Armand, producer and WBAI colleague, brings a Ghanaian Ashanti perspective to the question of why Americans struggle with mentoring. She argues that supporting others is not a special act but a natural function of community, and shares her work helping formerly incarcerated young women discover their own strength through media and storytelling.
Therapy can release old wounds, but can it bring you fully alive? Psychiatrist-turned-retreat-leader Dieter Middleston Scheid and his partner Baccha Schwartz describe their immersive silent retreats in Italy, where open sensory attention, slow-motion movement, and ten days without speech help participants rediscover a wordless inner home.
Female orgasm, concealed ovulation, and the biology of attraction get a lively treatment as Armand DiMele revisits recorded programs made with co-presenter Roberta Ati. Drawing on evolutionary biology and anthropology, they walk through three competing theories of why human females experience orgasm and how women hiding estrus may have saved the species.
Most people live on autopilot, repeating their parents’ patterns without questioning them. Armand DiMele argues that self-examination accelerates wisdom, and walks listeners through two practical exercises: a daily mood-rating chart and a “love game” that reveals what you and your partner need most.
Long-term love requires peeling back the projections we bring to romance and confronting our own patterns, not just our partner’s flaws. Workshop leaders Robbie Gass and Judith Gass join Armand to discuss self-responsibility, the deadening of passion, and simple practices like eye-gazing and shared breath that rekindle genuine connection.
