(2020) Sylky Resnicoff - Discussing Pia Mellody's method of treating our childhood wounds

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I am excited to re-air this episode with Sylky Resnicoff- all about Pia Mellody's work. The last episode I aired with Rachel Lebowitz- she actually referenced this when speaking about her work with codependency. So go and give it a listen! Don't forget to like and share this episode! It really helps me continue to make this podcast possible!

In today's episode, I spoke with Sylky Resnicoff.

Sylky is a certified family life coach and specializes in relational trauma. She has extensively studied Pia Mellody’s work, who is an expert in codependency, now called developmental immaturity. Pia Mellody believes that we are all born whole, as experts about ourselves, but as life goes on we lose this confidence in ourselves. If we're not given what we need in childhood, our growth can get stunted. She also helps women whose husbands are struggling with pornography addiction. She offers support groups, consultations and educational lectures because it’s traumatic to discover your husband has an addiction like this. There is a lot of shame involved. Sylky empowers women to educate themselves and see that they have choice instead of feeling helpless.

Sylky became a family life coach and thought it was fascinating. She thought she could reinvent herself with everything she had learned but began to realize that this wasn’t enough. She needed to go to the parts of her that were broken. Sylky learned that you’re only as strong as your foundation is deep and she realized she was lacking in her own foundation. She was learning a lot about healing, yet she felt a void that wasn’t getting filled. She hit rock bottom at a certain point and a therapist introduced her to Pia Mellody’s work. Pia’s work comes with a lot of training so Sylky went and did an intensive workshop. For the first time, she really got her family history straight;  what she needs, what her children need and what her role in the family really was. Mellody teaches that anything less than nurturing is abusive to the child whether it’s overt abuse or covert abuse. You may not realize abuse walking into someone’s house. The parents may be very well respected but emotionally there may be neglect or harm done. Most people are not trying to hurt their children on purpose. For example, using the silent treatment can make a child feel like he doesn’t exist, so this can be a form of abuse for a child. This may affect a child later on in life. There are so many people who think that they are made wrong while in reality there’s nothing wrong with me but with the messages I was given as a child. We work through this our entire lives.

When many parents learn about this they get nervous that they’re making mistakes and covertly abusing their kids. However, when parents act in a genuine fashion and are good role models for their kids, their kids will see this. Your children just need to build up a good image of you. Pia’s work is all about being human but being able to grow and change. If we nurture our inner child, parenting will become a much more natural process. Parents nowadays need more guidance. Every person who works on themselves knows that parenting is about growing yourself as a person. You can do certain things to help remind you who you want to be, like checking in on your kids everyday, but it’s also about doing your own work. When we do our own work we relate to our marriage differently, we are more open to have harder conversations, we can own up to things and we’ll have more strength to hear our children without taking things personally. 

(See the full blog post on my website www.gilaglassberg.com)<