About Melissa
I created Silk Mountain to help leaders develop and maintain positive, sustainable company cultures to attract, engage, and retain top talent. My services have evolved over time to meet the needs of the leaders I work with to include executive coaching, leadership development, and meeting/workshop facilitation, as well as professional speaking.
With over 20 years of senior HR leadership experience, I am well equipped to help you take your own leadership to the next level, using the PQ (Positive Intelligence) assessment as a springboard.
I can do the same with your leadership team.
I worked directly with Kim Chestney, best-selling author of Radical Intuition, to earn my Professional Intuition Certificate. As an intuitive myself, coaching me is a bit different as I show you exactly how to tap into and use your own intuition to drive growth and profitability in your business through better decision-making, gaining new insights, and increased innovation. (This does not get you off the hook for doing your homework and using your critical thinking skills. Sorry about that!) I’m also a contributing author to The Everyday Woman’s Guide to Doing What You Love. My chapter is titled “Your Intuition Is Your Superpower”.
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Connect with Melissa
Melissa Porterfield, Founder, and CEO of Silk Mountain
Tel: 832-305-7061
Email: melissa.porterfield@silkmtn.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theleadershipvibe/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/silkmntn
Melissa’s Episode
Melissa was born in Spain and lived there until the age of 4. Her father was in the military, and when she was 5 years old, her family moved back to the US, and her parents divorced. Her father immediately remarried a verbally and emotionally abusive woman who didn’t want Melissa around as a kid. Her father was passive about that. Melissa carried a lot of early childhood trauma from these experiences.
At 20 years old, Melissa married an alcoholic and gambling addict, who was a lot like her stepmother in the way he treated her. It felt familiar to her, as she didn’t start her healing journey at that time. She stayed with him for 5 years. This man was in the military, like her father, and he got an order for Germany. She just graduated from college, had a 3-year-old girl, and decided to move to Houston instead of Germany because she definitely preferred living out of the abuse of her now ex-husband rather than in Europe where she always wanted to live, but with him whom she didn’t want to be around anymore. She got a job as a teacher. This was the only way she could think of to safely break up the relationship.
You would think she would learn from that first failed marriage… not so much (in her own words). She remarried a cookie-cutter copy of her first husband. With this second traumatic experience in a marriage, she started to do the inner work and heal, even though there was still the early childhood trauma that was playing out in her adult life.
She basically spent her entire life chronic
The reason why early childhood trauma is so bad is that the prefrontal cortex has not fully developed yet, and takes these first years of life experience as the reality to build on their entire life, even though it may be all wrong and not serve a good purpose at all.
The majority of the traumas that we can experience relate more to the way we feel about the event and the meaning we attach to it rather than the event itself as bad as it can be.
Melissa believes that it takes a professional to help you release the trauma out of your body and your cellular memories before it piles up too much and completely messes up with your life at a subconscious level.
EMDR - Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is a unique, empirically validated approach that is recommended by the World Health Organization as a "first line treatment for post traumatic stress disorder in adults."
Shock
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Reconstruction
Acceptance
These are the "7 Stages of Grief."
How do you experience grief?
The 7 Stages of Grief, published by Iris Lin and Nhi Huynh, delves into this question by extending it to interdisciplinary artists. Through a curation of different forms of art, this book explores how artists of all mediums experience each stage of grief. Whether it be through photographs, poems, music, or drawings, each one of these pages tells a unique story about each individual artist.
S2E32 How To Release Trauma So That It Doesn't Build Chronic Illness with Melissa Porterfield, MEd