Dr. Linda Sandel Pettit, Licensed Psychologist, has opened a counseling and coaching office, WisdomSources PLLC in Morgantown, WV. She has also joined the staff at Phoenix Psychological and Counseling Associates, a private practice of mental health professionals located in Quiet Dell, West Virginia, just south of Clarksburg.
Dr. Pettit offers individual, couples and group counseling to adults age 18 and over. Although she works with a spectrum of mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, grief, compulsive behavior, and stress, she especially enjoys working with couples.
“When I do work stress and leadership trainings around the country, it never fails that people want to talk about how and why their personal family relationships are not as harmonious as they would like them to be, “ Dr. Pettit reflects. “All of us want our life at home, what I sometimes think of as our ‘base camp’, to be peaceful and loving. Stress at home tends to show up in every area of our lives.”
Dr. Pettit says that her first goal when working with a couple is to help each partner begin to move out of a stressed state of mind from which they are innocently tending to bring out the worst in each other. She teaches her clients that they create their experience of stress from the inside out, moment to moment, via their use of the gift of thought.
“Unlike many other therapeutic approaches, the focus of my work is NOT on changing what we think,” Pettit explains. “It’s focused, instead, on learning how thinking works so that we can cooperate more gracefully with it.”
Once partners see how they stress themselves out, their minds naturally quiet and they begin to calm down. “In a calmer feeling, we become less “me-focused” and reactive.” Dr. Pettit explains. “Then we are more able to access the love and creativity at the core of our beings. As soon as we’re connected with our wisdom, insights about how to solve the challenges in our relationships flow more easily.”
Dr. Pettit states that she often finds that couples put off coming in for counseling because all the talking they have already done about their problems has left them exhausted and hopeless. Their legitimate question is “how can more talking help?”
“We often just don’t see that when we talk about problems from a troubled state of mind, we actually are at high risk of making them worse. Because of this, I focus couples away from a lot of problem talk, rehashing of the past and techniques that feel artificial,” Dr. Pettit explains. “Once hope is rekindled and people begin to trust again that they can solve their own problems, counseling can quickly become a shorter-term, creative and even light-hearted process.”
Even when couples decide they cannot stay together, Pettit continues, they can certainly access wisdom for moving apart in a way that is respectful.
Dr. Pettit asks that all her client couples read, The Relationship Handbook by George Pranksy, Ph.D. “It’s a little gem of a book that distinguished “high mood therapy” from “low mood therapy” and is filled with good common sense about how to have nice relationships.
Through counseling, coaching, speaking, training and consulting, Dr. Pettit has worked for 25 years in mental health, hospital, university and business settings to help people develop healthier relationships. She can be reached via email at linda@wisdomsources.com. To schedule an appointment, call Phoenix Psychological and Counseling Associates at (304) 622-6404 or WisdomSources PLLC at 304.777.4848.
A comment about transitions from Joan Borysenko’s audiotape Inner Peace for Busy Womencaught my attention. Joan observed that it’s popular to talk about “transitions” as discrete units of time that have clear beginning and clear endings. Sometimes you’re in them and sometimes you’re not.
But Joan observed that, to her, life seems more like a permanent state of transition! I couldn’t agree more. Maybe it’s because I’m in my early 50’s, but it seems like the impermanence of life is more and more “in my face.” I’m ALWAYS letting go of something!
Right now I’m letting go as I watch my Dad cope with new developments as he struggles with a complex of neurological disorders. I’m letting go as I watch my daughter plan for a new chapter in her life that will take her to new locations and vistas. Frankly, I’m letting go as I recognize that I need more rest than I used to! I want to let go of my period, but THAT doesn’t seem to want to let go of me! I think I’m going to enter the Guinness Book of Records as a woman whose monthly cycles last into her 70s!
Which brings me to ONE of the biggest assets I’ve found for riding the waves of transition with more delight than dread: HUMOR! My husband has funny bones beyond his elbows....they are in every part of his body. HE is great at telling jokes and has a huge store of funny stories. I am not. But, I am good a poking light fun at myself and life.
Sometimes we wake up at 3 a.m. in the morning, responding to bladder calls. He says something or I say something. One or the other catches a pun. We end up laughing helplessly...and feel so close to each other. I live for those moments!
I don’t think humor has to be developed. It’s natural to us when we relax and learn not to take our lives and thinking too seriously. I found out a long time ago, as a therapist, that when I could have a good laugh with my clients, when I could keep a nice, easy, good feeling in a session; we would naturally seem to SEE more about how to get them back to health.
My colleague and friend, Priscilla, gave me a card a long time ago with a message I that I took to heart. It read, “Angels fly lightly because they don’t take themselves too seriously.”
For those of you not familiar with Joan, she’s an internationally known speaker and consultant in women’s health and spirituality, integrative medicine and the mind/body connection. Her website is www.joanborysenko.com.
Early in the book, Joan shares a poem she wrote called, “I Am a Woman Telling the Truth.”
She describes having lofty goals in her younger years to be a woman who has it all and does it all in terms of herself, family and career. And, she shares the process of becoming a 50-something woman who accepts herself as having done the best she could to make wise choices among competing priorities. I resonated with much of the poem, which is poignant and funny.
Joan suggests that it’s unlikely we’ll ever find a stable balance among external demands while we “make a life and a living in a world that never sleeps”. Our failure to achieve that illusive goal increases that chance that we’ll find ourselves worshipping at the altar of “Our Lady of Perpetual Guilt.”
Instead, she counsels us to make inner peace our topmost priority. This peace can be gained by cultivating “powerful hearts and strong minds” that enable us escape entanglements with THOUGHTS about our lives that can lead us astray. Joan encourages us to learn “Mindfulness” as a way of staying calm and wise in the face of the cyclone of our lives and thoughts.
Let’s talk more in coming days about mindfulness and other ideas about living from wisdom and peace....
Last night, participants in the our Artist of Life Inspiration TeleCircle shared “wisdom” from various “sources”—books, teachers, classes—that has truly improved their happiness and satisfaction. Here’s a sample from the diversity we came up with:
stay in wonder, joy and curiosity no matter what life hands you
find joy in sharing a skill you love
we make our own happiness
when troubled, change your perspective
let go of perfection
be polite
when the student is ready, the teacher appears
act, don’t react
be present
learning and fun are compatible
connect with the natural world
meanness is rooted in fear and insecurity
In the introduction to his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Haidt suggests that all the world’s GREAT IDEAS address two basic questions:
How does the mind work?
How can our social lives be improved?
Think about the many teachers you’ve encountered in your life. What LASTING, PRACTICAL and TRANSFORMATIVE wisdom have they shared? Into which of the two categories does the wisdom fall? What can you do today to REMEMBER, IMPLEMENT and APPRECIATE that wisdom?
We tapped into our memories of wisdom during a guided imagery, attempting to let the intuitive mind rather than the rational mind serve up the information.
We simply asked ourselves to remember important teachers and their wisdom. We waited until thoughts appeared, without trying to force any memories. You might try your own version of that. Let your mind quiet and wait to see if an insight about an important truth you’ve heard floats into your conscious awareness.
I was surprised that I remembered something about anger from the book The Dance of Anger by Harriett Lerner. It was in that book that I first remember hearing the wisdom, “act, don’t react.” The notion that being in reaction gave away my personal power AND tended to have messy self-defeating consequences was life-changing for me. Interestingly, I had a reason to remember that wisdom today!!!! I’m glad the reminder was fresh—it certainly did improve my social life!
Has anyone else out there had trouble getting back into the swing of things after the holidays?
I’m still trying to finish my Christmas cards and pick up all the threads of my business, including this blog!
The FREE Fully Alive NOW! Inspiration TeleCircle Call starts up again tonight at 7 p.m. EST. You’re invited to join us. Just email me for the telephone number and access code.
Tonight, we’ll begin a year-long discussion designed to inspire us all to live more fully as we explore ideas from the book, “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom” by Jonathon Haidt. You can get a sense of the book’s content by visiting www.happinesshypothesis.com.
In the book’s introduction Dr. Haidt muses, “"We might already have encountered the Greatest Idea, the insight that would have transformed us had we SAVORED it, taken it to HEART, and worked it into our lives.”
That comment prompted me to think about ideas that have had a transformative impact on my life. What ideas have done that for you? I’ll be sharing mine in coming days....
Nine women created and held the energy of a telecircle on our Fully Alive NOW! call last night. What an awesome, loving group of creative women with diverse intererests and lifestyles!
I am in total amazement and gratitude for this bridge phone line technology that now makes connections like this telecircle so easy and inexpensive.
Our group last night consisted of women from Michigan, Virginia, Ohio and all corners of West Virginia: Morgantown, Parkersburg, and Huntington.
We talked, among other things, about new beginnings and goals. Some of us (including me) have “doing” goals. Some of us have “being” goals related to staying more peaceful, humble and honest.
Personally, I think the “being” goals are where any “doing goals” that really matter begin.
It comes to this: do you believe the world you experience is an outside-in phenomenon or an inside-out creation? In other words, can you only have peace when your outer world matches what you think you want? Or, are inner peace and happiness situation-independent. Can you be at peace regardless of outer circumstances?
I know that I can be at peace internally even when outer circumstances are threatening, painful and challenging. I’m still learning how to stay in a quiet state of mind. The process of learning to live from the truth that life is an inside-out creation is as beautiful as the dawn opening up the sky over the mountains.
From a place of BEING at peace, calm and happy, “doing” goals form up and are achieved with much, much less effort. You don’t have to look for meaning and purpose: it just IS! It simply unfolds.
I love December. I love the holidays. I love the sense of anticipation I feel that the New Year brings with it a clean slate, a fresh start, a whole new blank page in life.
Right now I feel pregnant with the possibilities I could birth in the New Year.
The metaphor of pregnancy seems an apt one for the change process.
In the first trimester of my pregnancy with my daughter I was both excited beyond belief that I was going to have a baby! And, felt a little (maybe more than a little!) “off” as my body adjusted to the hormonal changes of gestation.
Then, the second trimester brought a wonderful feeling of health, expectancy and energy.
The final trimester, on the other hand, brought a sense of slowness and discomfort as I lumbered (at least it felt that way) toward labor and delivery.
And, in my tradition of doing things slowly and cautiously...it took me 22 hours to actually give birth! I remember outlasting three shifts of nurses at Toledo Hospital!
There are three things I want to bring to birth in 2006. I want to get my weight under control. I want to birth my new website/blog and niche marketing program (toward women who are recreating their lives after loss). And, I want to complete my first trade book.
Right now, in the first phase of the change process I’m feeling excited about the scope of these new beginnings and a little “off” as I consider what they will demand of me. I know, however, as I get underway with them, I’ll experience energy and excitement. And, inevitably, as I progress toward completing the birth of my new body, business and book (my 3B Plan?) I’ll probably experience delays, plateaus, and other hitches in the process.
If I can just HOLD ON, HOLD OUT and keep myself focused on what it will feel like when I bring my plans to birth! My experiences teach me that all births and rebirths are utterly enchanting!
This has been a busy month for me and seems to have flown by. How about for you?
My major accomplishments for the month include writing a new e-course which will be available soon on my website called: Transcending Loss: Eight Ways to Find Wisdom and Feel Fully Alive Again.
I also hired a designer to retool my website, blog and the look of my “brand”. And I hosted two successful meetings of my free Fully Alive NOW! Inspiration Telecircle, both focused on gratitude.
As I planned for and hosted those TeleCircles and as I wrote postings to this blog on gratitude, I have, indeed, felt very grateful. I turned 52 this month, am healthy, love my work, have an exceptional husband and a beautiful family.
And....yet....I’ve been aware of feeling slowed, unfocused and even a little blue lately. What’s that about?
More and more, I’m learning NOT to analyze my moods. Analysis only causes me to try to pin the blame on some outside source or circumstance.
I know this low mood does tell me that I’ve been attached to some difficult thoughts about three areas of my life: my family, my weight and my business.
It’s funny, though, even just writing that aloud—admitting that I’ve been a little lost in my thinking about my concerns—somehow helps to break the energy of the attachment. Take the weight issue, for example.
Yeah, yeah....I have been putting energy in quite a few spiteful, hateful, fearful thoughts about my relationship to my weight. How did I ever let it get out of control AGAIN? What am I going to do about it since the menopausal shifts taking place in my body seem to be confounding any weight loss effort I make? I hate that my clothes are tight! I hate what the mirror reflects back at me!
Even as I write those words, I am aware that there is an energy underneath them that wants to bubble up; a focus that is entirely different. It’s gentler, hopeful, curious and, yes, even excited. Above all, it’s powerful.
I’m not sure what to call that energy. Maybe it’s “innate health.” Maybe it’s grace. Maybe it’s a feminine soulfulness. Personally, I like the name Wisdom.
This wisdom energy, when I tap into it, seems to power a whole new set of thoughts about my weight. My body has been so healthy! I want to feed it well. I want to love it back to a feeling of greater litheness, lightness, and graceful movement. I can take my time and enjoy the challenge of slowly freeing myself from this heavier overcoat. Maybe the challenge of menopause can open the door to a whole new, interesting awareness of the best fuels for my body at midlife.
I love living from the energy of Wisdom. From this space, I experience hope, solutions, wonder, curiosity and unbounded optimisim.
I look forward in December to embracing the birth of some new beginnings in my life: the freeing of a more slender body, the revamping of my business niche and a relationship with family free of ANY judgment.
How can we use this blog and our inspiration telecircle to put a tender, protective circle around the tiny shoots of our new beginnings?
Today, a friend (Thank You!) sent me a link reminding me about research suggesting that for women, friendship is an essential component to avoiding the experience of stess. Reading the article reminded me how grateful I am for my friends!
Essentially, the link will take you to a well-written, thoughtful article by Gail Berkowitz about research done at UCLA suggesting that when women link in caring ways with other women and with children, they experience a cascade of hormones that protect them from the neurobiology of stress.
Although I was familiar with this “tend and befriend” research, what really caught my eye in this article were the references to research suggesting that friendship among women fosters longer, happier, healthier lives and helps us weather major losses with less distress and less vulnerability to illness.
In the last paragraph of the article, the author notes that when we’re feeling stressed, many of us tend to put our friendships on the back burner… which is highly counterproductive to our health.
Tell a friend how grateful you are for her today! Both of you will likely experience a body bath of oxytocin...and that feels good!
As you prepare for the holidays, may I invite you to GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF TIME to participate in the FREE Inspiration TeleCircle I host on the first and third Tuesdays of every month, 7-8 p.m. EST.
We will meet this month at 7 p.m. EST on Tuesday, December 6th and 7 p.m. EST Tuesday, December 20th. Mark your calendars!
As usual, I’ll send out a reminder, with the phone number and PIN a few days before the call. To join us simply {embed="Linda@wisdomsources.com" title="email me"}email me and I’ll put you on the notification list for the phone number and access PIN.
Our focus in December will be:
THE GIFT OF NEW BEGINNINGS....
Let’s join together to help each other focus on the FORM of the new creations we HOPE to bring to life in 2006! These forms could include finding a new job; releasing a more fit, more slender body; de-cluttering your house; managing an illness with grace; becoming a more peaceful parent...the possibilities are endless.
New Year resolutions are often made in the spirit of frustration and force and will. Let’s try to bring a gentler, joyful, more feminine energy to the process. The holiday season is a natural time to focus on welcoming, receiving, birthing and celebrating. What gift do you want to prepare to welcome into your life in 2006?
The titles for the December sessions are:
(12/6):
Pregnant with Possibilities: What Wants to Be Born Into My Life?
(12/20):
Delivering New Light into Life: Preparing for Rebirth.
This month, based on your feedback, I plan to shift the format around. I will continue to do an opening guided imagery, but it will be much shorter. I’ll do a brief mini-teach. Then we’ll have a much longer discussion section centering on questions that I will email you to think about BEFORE the call. My hope is that these changes will respond to requests for more participant interaction.
As always, I welcome your feedback.
Let’s make this month’s calls deeply RELEVANT and INSPIRING!
Be there! Invite your cherished women friends! (Though do remember to have them email me for the call numbers and to be put on the TeleCircle mailing list!)
In December, I’ll focus my blog posts, as well, on the topic of “New Beginnings.”
In a recent newsletter from the MentorCoach coach training community (www.mentorcoach.com) I came across an interesting article on successful adjustment in retirement written by academic coach Gina Hiatt, Ph.D. (www.academiblog.com).
Hiatt reviewed longitudinal research on aging done by George E. Valliant which showed that four basic factors contributed to a successful, happy retirement: social activity, play, creativity and lifelong learning.
Valliant studied several groups of people from the time they were in their teens or early 20s until they were 60 and older. Hiatt notes that participants in Valliant’s studies who were most creative in their mid-life were “two to four times likely to be happy and physically vigorous in old age.”
So...more good reason to practice what I call CPR: Create! Play! REST! Did some of all of that become a part of your day today?
The landscape outside my window changed dramatically over the last few weeks. Colorfully-robed trees are now naked. Their discarded leaves form an ochre carpet over the land. Once hidden by the tree canopy, the rolling contours of the hills are now visible.
It seems that the energy of life is retracting, pulling in, going fallow...quieting.
I imagine what life was like at this time of year for my ancestors who lived much closer to the land. The harvest was in. Supplies were stored for the winter. Shelters were battened down in preparation for harsher winter weather. Activity was more survival oriented; more family-oriented, more inward.
In the 18 years I’ve lived in West Virginia, I’ve experience three times when I was without electric power, due to winter storms, for more than eight days.
During those times, I got a taste of life in earlier times. My days were busy—there was snow to melt on the wood stove for water to wash in, a fire to be kept burning for heat, food to prepare without the usual appliances.
But there was also more quiet time—time for reading, time for playing board games with kids, time for visiting with family, time for rest. I slept so much more during those non-electrified times than I usually do!
I’m grateful for the reminder that the approaching winter brings: the natural rhythm of life allows for, no, depends on, times of a slower, quieter, more contemplative energy.
I’ve just returned from a conference in Washington, DC sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute (see www.mindandlife.org) featuring the Dalai Lama and leading medical and psychological scientists, as well as experts in contemplative meditation.
Increasingly, helping professionals are looking for more effective ways to help people find peace, happiness, and contentment. This search is producing new models that incorporate ancient wisdom for helping people to reduce over-thinking and to increase appreciation and GRATITUDE!
In the coming weeks, I hope to share some of what I learned at the conference with you.
Today I’d like to remind you to consider joining me and kindred spirits for our FREE semi monthly inspiration TeleCircle call, Fully Alive NOW! tomorrow night, Tuesday, November 15, at 7 p.m. EST. I’ll be sharing some of what I learned at the conference on the call. If you’d like to join us, please send me an e-mail at {embed="Linda@wisdomsources.com"}. I’ll be happy to send you the conference dial-in number and access code.
One resource that I would like to recommend to you is a book called, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky. This work is a highly informative, scientific and yet very readable discussion of the way our experience of stress affects our bodies. This book certainly provides plenty of reason to learn how to de-stress our lives so that we have a gentler, more healthy experience of being in a physical body!
"If you had 20 minutes to take the center stage on the Oprah show and share an important message, idea or story with the world, what would you talk about?”
Frequently, I ask that question of my classes and coaching clients. It’s fascinating to me that no one has ever answered in quite the same way. The pearls of wisdom that come straight up from our hearts and hint at the purpose of our lives are original and unique.
Your heart sings its own song! Cardiologist and Harvard Medical School professor Ary Goldberger studies heart rate variability. He has discovered that healthy hearts produce beats that are highly variable and diverse.
Just for fun, a colleague once plotted recordings of hearts on a musical score. The results intrigued Goldberger’s son and musician, Zach Davids, who, in collaboration with his father eventually produced a CD of heartbeat recordings entitled “HeartSongs.” The CD is quite beautiful: each heartsong is a composition with a distinct personality! For more details, see: http://focus.hms.harvard.edu/2002/March8_2002/cardiology.html.
Goldberger’s research strongly suggests that when your heartbeat becomes less variable, that’s a problem. Your heart may be losing its natural ability to be responsive and adaptive to what your body is experiencing.
Goldberger says “there is a remarkable consonance of the natural world outside, which is fractal, nonlinear, and nonstationary, and what goes on inside our bodies.”
I translate that to mean we are built for resilience, adaptibility and creativity. Our responses to life are meant to be diverse! We are meant to sing our original song. When we don’t, our hearts suffer, literally and figuratively.
I feel grateful for the original contribution I make to the human symphony. I feel grateful for the beauty of the human symphony and your contribution to it! Are you doing something today to share your music?
I’m so grateful for the power of stories! There are many paths home…
Last night, I finished reading A Million Little Pieces, a riveting story about one man, James Frey, who followed wisdom to freedom from addiction.
I read the first half of the book barely breathing. I took a break in the middle. I finished the second half in one sitting.
In a way, it is every person’s story. That’s what makes it so compelling. We sense the raw, visceral truth in it.
The truth is that love heals.
The truth is that inner wisdom is always available to us and that we have a built-in “b---s---” meter that tells us what is in alignment with it—or not.
The truth is that we are home when we trust love and do not trust any thought, any inner experience, that takes us away from it. The truth is that love is the higher power.
The truth is that we are creating our experience of life from the inside-out, moment to moment. We are solely responsible for our creation.
Behind the voice of addiction in the story, there is ALWAYS the voice of health. That is as it is. Our innate health, our creative spirit, our love is utterly indestructible.
James Frey shares truth with us in the words, experiences and images of a generation. His story is both heart-breaking and hopeful.
There are principles that help us understand truth without having to tread a vicious, horribly painful path. There are principles that help us remember Truth when we have walked a tortured life.
Frey glimpsed them in reading the Tao te Ching. They are simpler than the riddles of the Tao. They are beyond the Tao. They point to the process that created the Tao.
Read A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Read The Missing Link by Syd Banks. Then, let’s talk....
Gratitude is a powerful, highly creative state of mind.
A colleague told me about having to facilitate a contentious meeting. He was looking for an effective way to start, process and facilitate a group toward a successful conclusion. He was feeling stressed, worried and apprehensive.
He was able to find his way to a grateful perspective. He FELT gratitude for the people he was working with. He really FELT gratitude for what they had contributed to the project at hand. He even found a grateful feeling that there was an opportunity in front of him to practice mediation skills. He could FEEL himself CALMING.
Almost instantly after finding a grateful state of mind, he SAW a new way to approach the meeting.
Finding gratitude involves:
QUIETING: Listening for the quiet BENEATH judgment and analysis;
APPRECIATING: becoming conscious of a beautiful feeling related to the situation at hand;
SAVORING: holding the beautiful feeling and quiet mind;
TRUSTING: the wisdom that comes effortlessly in a grateful state of mind, even and especially when it takes you in original directions.
A busy mind is a screen that inhibits the creative spirit. A grateful, quiet mind is a spacious doorway to it. It’s that simple.
