Thursday, February 21, 2008
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.
Posted by Linda Sandel Pettit on 02/21 at 06:22 PM in |
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