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Warren woman heals through forgiveness

Tribune Chronicle / Burton Cole Dianne Pela-Melillo of Warren, who grew up in Niles before becoming a psychotherapist in Arizona, wrote a book on forgiveness based on her studies. It’s titled, “God is Not Catholic: A Recovery Journey for Adult Children of Parochial Schools.”

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a Trumbull County resident, contact Features Editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com.

WARREN — Dianne Pela-Melillo likes to think positive.

She said she learned the power of positive thinking after she was stricken with a neurological disorder, she felt it when she let go of long-held hurtful resentments, and she taught it over a variety of careers, from aerobics instructor to psychotherapist.

Pela-Melillo — an essayist and playwright — also wrote a book about it: “God is Not Catholic: A Recovery Journey for Adult Children of Parochial Schools.”

It all begins with forgiveness, she said.

“This book is not about Catholic bashing,” Pela-Melillo said. “It’s geared toward forgiveness for those who went to parochial schools where they used fear, shame and guilt as teaching tools.” The sense of failure stuck to her as an adult, she said.

“I, myself, was very anti-Catholic for many years before I realized that I was the one losing out,” she said. “As badly as you want peace of mind, you may cling just as stubbornly to your self-righteous anger.

“When we carry the burden of hatred, the payoff to us is cynicism and a hardened heart. We cannot live life to the fullest because we have become embittered.”

Her journey began as a kid from Niles in the 1950s and early 1960s whose family attended Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church. She went to Mount Carmel School.

In a Christmastime reflection, Pela-Melillo wrote about Niles: “This was a safe place for kids to grow up. This was a place where I’d learned to ride a bike, sold lemonade with my best friends, played ‘Wagon Train’ with my cousins, received my first kiss.”

The family moved to Phoenix in 1963 when she was 16 to find a better climate for her brother’s asthma. Pela-Melillo spent most of the rest of her life in the Phoenix area, with some time in Michigan and California, before moving back to Ohio last year to marry former Mount Carmel classmate Philip Melillo.

“Looking at our area as an adult, what I really appreciate is the way that we’ve venerated our cultural roots. It’s honored and kept alive,” she said. “I took it for granted.” She said she didn’t see that respect for traditions in other places she lived.

Pela-Melillo said she seems to reinvent herself every decade or so. In 1980, needing to support herself after a divorce, she taught seven women aerobics choreography she created and sent each newly trained instructor to a different franchise site. “Plus, I taught my own aerobics classes 16 hours a week,” she said.

She sold the business, Fresh Approach Aerobics, in 1983. She had begun developing symptoms of the neurological disorder myasthenia gravis.

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “Myasthenia gravis is a chronic autoimmune neuromuscular disease that causes weakness in the skeletal muscles, which are responsible for breathing and moving parts of the body.” It was the condition that claimed the life of billionaire Aristotle Onassis, husband of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“I learned from a mentor that cancer patients could heal themselves by visualizing their good cells eating the cancer cells, like Pac-Man,” Pela-Melillo said.

She set about developing a series of visualizations of herself getting healthier as well as writing and recording affirmations that stated it could be done.

“I put myself in a 22-and-a-half-year remission just from positive thinking, affirmations and visuals,” she said.

“I wanted to share this, how positive thinking plays a part and how negative thinking can tamp down healing.” She sent out fliers and went wherever people gave her a podium.

“For years, I was a motivational speaker in the field of self-help way before I got an alphabet soup behind my name (Dianne M. Pela, MAPC, LPC). … I said, ‘God, you spared my life for a reason. What is it that you want me to do?’ He led me to psychotherapy.”

She said that over the years, she also learned how it wasn’t just physical diseases that needed healing.

“I felt really bitter and angry at the nuns and priests who I felt had helped ruin my childhood, and I wanted to hang onto that bitterness and anger, thank you very much,” she said.

“So why forgive? What’s the payoff? It’s simple: For you to be born anew, you must shed the heavy burden you have been carrying around all these years in order to experience a renewal of your former innocence. Along with that innocence comes peace of mind.”

In 2012, when she retired from her private practice, Life Empowerment Therapy, she published a 10-year project, her book that discusses the journey to forgiveness using the neuro-linguistic programming approach of visual, auditory and kinesthetic cues.

“There are three main ways we are able to forgive,” she said. “It’s through something you heard them say (auditory), something you saw the person do (visual) or a gut feeling (kinesthetic)” or a combination of two or all three of those cues.

A person has to find what his or own cues are, then use those to visualize times, places and feelings that will help release the pain, she said.

What’s the next “reinvention” of Pela-Melillo? Recently, she’s been scripting plays. This past week, she’s battled her way through learning how to establish her new website for affirmations, www.lifeempowermenttherapy.com. She’s also looking forward to what she calls her Midwest book launch of “God is Not Catholic,” 6 to 8 p.m. Nov. 7 at Leo’s Ristorante in Howland.

“I was born to be what I became. I remember my grandmother, she came over one day. I was lying on my bed, staring at the ceiling. She said, ‘Dianne, what you do?’ I was figuring out my life.”

Whatever comes next, she’s positive it will be right.

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