Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Pattie Williams
‘Still, small voice’ guides destiny
“I know what makes Pattie effective in this kind of work. I believe diversity and inclusion are so sensitive and so necessary — you have to have a heart for it … When you are committed to it because you are a compassionate person, you will continue to create progress. When you do what you love, you don’t call it work.” — D’Andre Jones, activist
Pattie Williams has built her life by listening to her in within.” tuition — or, as she refers to it, the “still, small voice Anyone in town who knows her is happy that she listened to that voice when it led her to Fayetteville in 1978, but her awareness of social issues almost kept her away.
“I didn’t want to come because of Central High School,” she says, referring to the turbulent integration of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, only 20 years prior, but “there’s no question that [coming to Arkansas] turned out to be the best move.”
At the time, Williams was well into her career as a therapist and was working at an Austin, Texas, mental health clinic, but when she was fresh out of college, she had originally been a teacher.
“I didn’t like it at all,” she admits, laughing. “I lasted three years. It was an endurance [test]. Of course, I [also] had tuberculosis in the middle of my years of teaching.”
It is a measure of Williams’ optimistic, glass-half-full personality that she is able to frame this event in her life as a positive.
“I had a nodule here,” she says, pointing to the side of her neck, “and they thought it might have been Hodgkin lymphoma, so they took it out, and immediately whisked me off. I didn’t go home. I went to a sanitarium.
“One thing with TB is that you’re very tired. I sort of welcomed the respite. I just sunk into it. And it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life because … that was my first experience of being with different cultures. We had a good time.
“I had a hole about that big in my lungs,” she says, showing a size
of about two inches with her fingers. “It is kind of scary, now.”
BACK TO SCHOOL
She returned to teaching after her stint in the TB ward, but she never quite found a love for the occupation. When Williams’ husband at the time graduated from seminary and was assigned a church in Austin, Williams began to substitute teach part-time while raising her newborn son, Chris. She went back to school to study vocational rehabilitation counseling through a grant program and took enough psychology classes in the program to qualify for a position at the Austin Mental Health Clinic.
This time, Williams was working full-time as a mother. It was, perhaps, this new start that caused Williams to look more closely at the fabric of society. Feeling the first stirrings of her interest in social justice, she soon started therapy groups centered on women’s issues to allow women to share their frustrations and challenges. She also joined the Women’s League and the League of Women Voters in Austin.
“Since I was of the ’50s generation when I married, I assumed that I would express myself as wife and mother, which I truly looked forward to,” she says. “That was at the time in our culture, however, that so many traditional ways of being were questioned. My husband … definitely supported me when I began working on my Master’s. That was a first step for me out of the traditional role of wife/mother.”
“Several years later, I was a single mom, and that is when I truly embraced changes in myself and how I lived. I was able to move through the world on my own.”
Williams credits her rise in social consciousness to the Human Potential Movement, a psychological theory popular in the 1960s and 1970s that posited that exceptional quality of life can only be achieved when one accesses the full human potential that lies, largely untapped, in all of us. For her, the movement was, she says, “liberating.”
It was during this time of personal and social upheaval that Williams started seeing her soon-to-be-husband, David, a fellow therapist at the mental health clinic where she worked.
“We [had done] a group together, and he [had done] something that really made me mad, so I didn’t talk to him for a year,” she says, laughing. “So, one day, I’m walking about the center, and I see he’s got his beard shaved off, and I said, ‘Gosh, you shaved off your beard,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m scuba diving, and you ought to come and be with us some Saturday morning.’ Now, always before, he would say, ‘You ought to come be with my family,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’”
When Williams found out later that day that David was going through a divorce, the dynamic in their relationship changed, and the two were soon dating.
“I married him, and I said, ‘I don’t want to leave Austin. I love it. It’s where I grew up and came into my own,’” remembers Williams. “So we were married six months, and [then] there was a political upheaval at the center.”
Williams says that it had become clear that the change in administration wasn’t going to be satisfactory for either of them just about the time David was offered a job at Ozark Guidance in Springdale.
“This is what I believe about life: A door will open. He said, ‘You know, I really need to consider this job.’”
She packed for Arkansas, Williams says, “somewhat reluctantly,” but she soon grew to love her new community.
“Little by little, and then all of a sudden, it’s like — I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
FINDING THE PERFECT PATH
Assisting in the adjustment period was the fact that, three years into their life in Fayetteville, Williams discovered a path to a more meaningful counseling career.
“I was working on a project for the University [of Arkansas], and, all of a sudden, I learned that Arkansas [was] going to have counselor certification,” she says. “I’ll be darned, but I had enough hours that I got ‘grandmothered’ in, and I could start a private practice.
“Now, talk about doors opening. It was like, ‘Pattie, look what’s happening!’ You know, it was just wonderful.”
Williams opened up her private counseling practice in a small office in the couple’s home, a tidy brick house on Maple Street at the edge of the University of Arkansas campus, later moving to an office building. For the next few years, Williams juggled her small counseling practice with her work in the University of Arkansas Continuing Education department. After a few years of this, she took a “two year sabbatical” to recharge and plan.
“As I reflected on what was ‘mine to do,’” she says, “a friend/colleague and I developed a workshop on intuition. We developed and practiced processes for accessing the ‘still, small voice within.’” Williams and her friend conducted workshops for a while, until those workshops and the constant reminders to listen to that interior voice made Williams realize she missed her therapeutic practice.
So she was soon on to her next project: Soul Matters, a counseling program that, in a way, combined the consciousness raising of the Human Potential Movement with Williams’ own work with intuition.
“Soul Matters would offer a space to reflect, to carefully consider who you are at your deepest core,” Williams writes about the project. “This kind of soul work can assist you in listening to your still, small voice, that wise part of you that invites you to be your fullest, whole, most authentic self.”
Williams ran Soul Matters out of a converted office in a historical house on West Center Street where she worked down the hall from a friend and psychotherapist, Bill Syms. “I knew she would be a great addition to the building,” says Syms. “Pattie is extremely bright and well-trained, with a lot of clinical experience. Her natural personality is to be very patient and calm. She kind of knew how to stand in the eye of the hurricane.”
Soon, however, she was feeling the pull of community organizing and a renewed desire to effect social change. Her involvement with Mayor Lioneld Jordan’s Fayetteville Forward initiative — a multiday summit that brought together Fayetteville residents from every walk of life — shaped the idea of how she could help. The group was charged with suggesting words that helped describe what an ideal Fayetteville would look like. William’s word was “inclusion.”
She was both surprised and delighted when Mayor Jordan used inclusion as the topic of one of 11 action groups that were designed to meet regularly. Williams led the group, whose stated mission was “to raise awareness and facilitate opportunities for growing Fayetteville as an inclusive and compassionate community.”
“From her work as a counselor with clients to her leadership roles in Compassion Fayetteville and Black Lives Matter, Pattie brings enthusiasm to the table,” says longtime friend Peggy Treiber. “I love to watch her lead a group because she is so careful to include everyone, and she listens.”
Williams had been working with the Inclusion committee for around two years when she became aware of Karen Armstrong, founder of Charter for Compassion, an organization that encourages cities to become “international cities of compassion” in which “the needs of all the inhabitants of that community are recognized and met, the well-being of the entire community is a priority, and all people and living things are treated with respect.” Struck by the mission and ideals of the organization, Williams handed over the reins of the Inclusion committee so she could start Compassion Fayetteville with Margot Jackson Lemaster and Vahida Zamani. The trio helped Fayetteville receive designation as an international city of compassion in 2014, when Mayor Jordan issued a proclamation endorsing the charter of Compassion Fayetteville.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
In 2015, with a series of violent incidents between police officers and unarmed black men dominating the news cycles, Williams started steering Compassion Fayetteville to issues of race with the help of D’Andre Jones, activist. The two worked to put a program together, and at a ceremony in January of 2016, the organization designated February Black History Month for the city of Fayetteville. Mayor Jordan, then-Fayetteville Public School Superintendent Paul Hewitt, and 98.7 FM Voices of Diversity founder Reggie Brasfield all spoke at the ceremony.
“We are the only city in the state that has created an opportunity for a Black Lives Matter approach in a city that’s heavily white,” notes Jones of their accomplishment. “Most cities that talk about African American inclusion have large African American populations.”
Also in January of 2016, Williams was awarded the Ernestine White-Gibson Individual Achievement Award by the Northwest Arkansas Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Council. According to the organization, the award is given “in recognition of an individual who has given to his or her community through service, leadership and commitment.”
“It is a learning process for me. I feel very naive about all of this, other than, I guess, what I have to contribute is to keep the conversation going.’”
Jones and Williams were thrilled when, on Aug. 22, more than 500 community members showed up for a community conversation called “Black Lives Matter: The Truth Behind the Movement.” Williams says the goal of the gathering was to help educate the public on the goals of the BLM movement, as well as to foster open communication among members of the community.
“Pattie has a real sense of service to the community,” observes Syms. “She is actively trying to make the world a better place and to do so she really puts herself on the line for her community and her clients.”
“We need to look inside of ourselves and be willing to learn and grow and be willing to listen to people,” says Williams. How are they different than we are? What are their experiences? I love how passionate we all are. We may not agree about all of these things, but we just need to listen to each other. Have empathy for each other. Have compassion. And take action.
“I want my life story to be an example of listening to the voice and following what I think it’s telling me to do.”