Believing You’re Never Too Old to Try Something New,
Longtime RSF Psychotherapist Shines in Senior Pageants
By Arthur Lightbourn

One thing’s for sure.

Wendy Hill is a lady who’s not afraid to take on new stuff.
Take singing, for example.

She was 47 when she began doing that.

And then there’s the thing about entering beauty pageants.

She began doing that early this year, at age 61, and has the trophies to prove it. She was crowned Ms. Senior West Los Angeles County and placed fourth runner-up in the Ms. Senior San Diego Pageant and third runner-up in the Ms. Senior California Pageant.

She also happens to be a psychotherapist who specializes in helping people “transform self-defeating core beliefs into beliefs that empower.”

“Life,” as she says, “is an adventure, especially in coming to know who we are.”

We interviewed Hill in her comfortable ranch-style home, where she loves to take long, quiet walks with Joey, her large, black Standard Poodle, or just hang out with other best pal, Tinkerbell, a gray Cornish Rex cat.

As might be expected, Hill is a very youthful-looking senior. She is 5 foot 7, has brown eyes and wears her dark brown hair loose and shoulder length. On a wall in her dining room, by contrast, there’s a painted portrait of her when she was 12 with her hair cut short and looking like a young Joan Baez.

Hill was born in Palo Alto, Calif. She was the second of four children. Her father was a surgeon.

Although, as a child, she couldn’t have predicted the career path she would eventually take, she remembers thinking, probably before the age of 6, “that if I had one of my daddy’s surgical knives, then I could cut a hole in the fabric of the universe, poke my head through it, and see what was behind the dream I knew we were all living in.

“That was really metaphysical, I realized later, for a child to have such a thought.”

She also recalls being “sensitive to a point that I could feel other people’s energies. Some people call that being psychic, in other words, I can sense and know things about people...it was not an easy way to be...

“I remember my parents having a social gathering in their home, everybody was laughing and smiling and talking, and I could feel what was going on underneath all of that. It was frightening for me, to see what people were really feeling.”

She sensed, “There was a lot of anger and frustration that people have that they don’t express. Children are very strange. They’ll think there’s something wrong with them, rather than say that an adult has a problem. So, as a child I thought, ‘Well, maybe they’re angry at me.’

“Later in my practice, as I do now, I specialized in identifying and transforming subconscious, self-defeating core beliefs that originate in infancy and childhood into core beliefs that support the adult experience. Hence, I work with a lot of inner child, shall we say, issues with people, how their childhood experiences affect them in the present and how that can be changed.”

Although she considers her work a “calling,” she is not a religious person per se. “I was raised around a lot of religion, but I would describe myself now as a spiritual person. My grandfather was a Baptist minister; my uncle was a minister; my great grandparents were evangelistic ministers that came across the Prairie in a covered wagon and they would do these tent shows where they would have religious revivals.”

In between her undergraduate studies at Whittier College, majoring in speech and history, and earning her master’s in human behavior at U.S. International University in San Diego, she taught high school “communication arts” in Poway. In 1975 she entered private practice as a marriage and family therapist, or, as she jokes, “if you want to be informal, a ‘shrinkette.’” She maintains her practice in Encinitas.

Her entry into the “Ms. Senior America” beauty pageant world was at the urging of a friend whom she had performed with in senior activities at Balboa Park over the past several years.
“It was something so unusual for me to consider, I said, ‘Sure,’ especially since it gave me an opportunity to sing which I’m always looking to do because I love doing that.”

In February of this year, she placed first in talent and fourth runner-up in the Ms. Senior San Diego Pageant. In August, she was crowned Ms. Senior West Los Angeles County. And in September, she was third runner-up in the Ms. Senior California Pageant.

“Everything in these pageants is [the same as] the Miss America Pageants, with the exception, thank goodness, of no bathing suits. So that means you have to speak in front of an audience stating your philosophy of life, you have to have a talent, which in my case is singing and I write my own songs, you have to have a private interview in front of a panel of judges, and then you have to do the ramp or model walk in a formal gown.”

Hill confines her singing and song writing mostly to inspirational material she produces for her therapy work.

“I started singing when I was 47 and I couldn’t sing a note on pitch, not a note... So I started taking singing lessons and I even had one teacher, when I said I wasn’t progressing as fast as I want, he said ‘You’re no great talent.’ But I continued to persevere...”

She recently produced a self-help workshop package that contains two movies on DVD that she shot and edited, plus a multi-song CD titled “The Call to Adventure” (www.thecalltoadventure.com). She is also the author of the book The True Seeker’s Guide to a Better Life.

Her clients are adults, evenly split between men and women. “They are normally everyday, highly productive people who have run into a life challenge or a life transition,” she said.

“Relationships are probably the biggest challenge. Typically, between about the ages of 36 and 55, there comes a time when all the things we did to avoid our healthy suffering come to a head and appear in some kind of a problem, often manifested in relationships.

“In other words, all the things that we didn’t pay attention to and take responsibility for, because we were too busy making money or having fun, begin to bubble up.

“That, in my view, is an opportunity...because it’s only then that you’ll cry out for truth and your new life can begin.

“People have tremendous potential, much more than they think they do to connect with each other and to connect with themselves, and once they start doing that, it’s a wonderful adventure.”