Germana Rovinelli: Loving the Child Within

Ross Tayler: Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Germana Rovinelli. Germana has an extensive background in holistic health and the journey of healing. Drawn to understand the power and usefulness of the subconscious mind, as a teenager she knew this was her best option for healing herself. She was taught by incredible teachers who gave her support and permanent results to clear and heal generational trauma and live a spiritually based life. Germana broke the cycle of trauma, addiction, abuse and poverty by utilizing the spirit of the subconscious mind. She lives in Nanaimo, BC, and is a successful healer, trainer and mind-body therapist with over 30 years of experience. Welcome, Germana.

Germana Rovinelli: Thank you for having me, Ross.

Ross Tayler: So good to have another conversation. I met you through the Metaphysical Network here in Nanaimo, and I interviewed you for that podcast. I enjoyed the conversation so much that I thought, let's have another one.

Germana Rovinelli: I'm honoured.

Ross Tayler: I'm excited for the tangents we might go on and the places we can explore, because I think you and I have a similar perspective on healing and our journey of healing, and definitely different experiences. Maybe you could start with how you entered this work. How did you enter this passion you've followed?

Germana Rovinelli: Wonderful question. When I look back, I really think that on some level, even as a very little girl, it was in me and it was part of my hidden path. I was saying to someone just yesterday, a school teacher, that when I was in grade one I remember saying, "I'm going to be a teacher, but not like Mrs. Walker, because she's not happy and she doesn't like her job." I knew that at the tender age of five. For whatever reason, someone would come up to me with some kind of challenge, and I would say something, and they'd ask, "How did you know that?" and I'd say, "I have no idea," and they'd sneak off. I think it was either an agreement I had given before I came, because I was plunked into a very toxic family and had to survive that, or a defense mechanism to navigate these bizarre things and not understand that it wasn't my responsibility or my fault. I kind of stuck with it even though I didn't understand it.

Ross Tayler: And you feel part of that was that you had to do what you could to shift the environment you were in? Did you try to show up as a teacher for your parents or in that system?

Germana Rovinelli: Here's an example. When we moved to Canada, I spoke fluent German. My father spoke seven languages. He was very, very intelligent. My mother just spoke German, I believe. I went to school, I learned English, I came home, and by myself, as a child, I taught my mother English. Then I refused to ever speak German again. It was my only protest to not be like my parents, because I didn't like them. They were very sick, immature people. It was thrust upon me, or I could turn into a numb potato-head kid and just bounce around. But I could see there was a problem, so I did what I could. Most of what I was put into was completely age-inappropriate pressure and stress. There was nobody else. I had to become the adult in the room at a small age, which is kind of sad.

Ross Tayler: I can relate to that. In my history, my parents were both alcoholics. They both grew up through the Second World War, and back then we didn't have this kind of exploration of ourselves and personal growth. They used alcohol to numb the pain of what they went through, and the byproduct was a toxic environment in all sorts of ways. It definitely impacts us in big ways.

Germana Rovinelli: What's left is what they call, in one of the 12-step programs, an abandonment rupture, because you have to not be who you are to survive. Then you're like, who am I? And then comes learning to not take responsibility for other people's challenges, and to say, no, this is your opportunity to grow. I'm holding you responsible to do your heavy lifting. I can support you silently, but I'm not doing your work for you. That's one of the pieces that has really come into fruition for me. The danger of having that as your baseline was feeling responsible to help other people when they were suffering, because I couldn't stand it. I would feel the pain as if it was mine, and then I would be in so much pain that I would either have to go numb, dissociate, or fix it. And you can't. You could try, but they still have a job.

Ross Tayler: That's what so many of us face. I'm thinking of that five-year-old little girl who had such fortitude to say, I'm going to be a teacher. I wonder what she knew. She must have been connected to something most of us become disconnected from. But she also had the strength to try to change her environment, and I think that's what most of us try to do. I can't handle what I'm feeling, so either I need to change myself or I try to change the people in front of me. That becomes the original pattern we carry into everyday life, and it just doesn't work. I remember years as a manager in the restaurant industry trying to please everybody and make everybody happy, and guess who was unhappy? Me. It was unsustainable.

Germana Rovinelli: It also makes you sick, because now you're stealing from your own life force. These things funnel and take your vitality, and that's how we get sick. That's how we get cancer and autoimmune conditions and all of it, because we need to fill our own bucket. A lot of us have been taught, "I have no needs, I have no identity, but if I'm taking care of you, I'm okay." One of the things I really needed was to give a voice to the "is this good for me?" conversation. What about Germana? Most of the time I wouldn't have an answer. I couldn't tell you what I wanted, but I knew what you wanted. That is trauma. I'm just going to deep-six my true self, manage this, be of service, and then things might be okay. That is a trauma response for me. Now, when people show up toxic or struggling, I silently remind myself: this is not my responsibility, it's their development. I'm not going to damage their development by jumping in, because all I've done is take away part of their dignity, subtly saying to them, "Don't believe you can do this." Now I go, it's actually not my problem. That's freeing, and that's been somewhat new for me.

Ross Tayler: I'm wondering about the impact that has on you and the clients you work with. That must be a really great place to work from.

Germana Rovinelli: It makes my heart happy. I feel more fulfilled and more in touch with love, because it's a space of holding somebody in the light of "you have the capacity to do this." I can sit with you and remind you, instead of you going into your inner child victim or wound, or "the world is a terrible place and I'm helpless and useless," because that's a script. Versus "you have the capacity to be your own hero and I'm just here holding that light with you. I believe you can do this." One of my teachers, who has long since passed, taught me how to have a loving relationship with myself. That sounds corny, but he gave me the tools and then it was up to me to use them. That was at least 33 years ago. So to hold somebody else and say, I'm here to help you take care of yourself and love you, but I'm not doing it for you, I'm not changing your underwear, you are. It's a stance. I'm holding space, and I'm offering you the opportunity to take power or not. That's where a person's development is either stunted or goes to the next stage. I won't say that's easy.

Ross Tayler: Oh, it's not. You're reminding me that I used to work at a wellness centre in Squamish, as support staff and in other roles, and I would notice how the support staff wanted to fix people. I realized through that process, all I need to do is be with them. That's it. It doesn't take effort. I don't need to fix anything or figure anything out. They just need someone to be with them. It's such a foreign experience.

Germana Rovinelli: And there's no message of defectiveness or shaming. If you run in and say, "Clearly you don't have the capacity, so I'll just do this for you," there's intention in that, but it also holds the person in the message that I don't think you have it in you. If they accept that, now you've got learned helplessness, a sense of being powerless, flapping and folding in the corner going "I give up, but someone is going to bring in my food," like a helpless child. I think we all have that. I do. I've phoned people and said, "I'm really struggling, can you come and just hold me for 20 minutes?" It's asking for help, not assuming. My challenge was that I felt if I couldn't fix it or help it, I was bad. I was trying to mitigate my own inherited shame. Fix it or your life is screwed. And it's not my responsibility.

Ross Tayler: One of the cornerstones of the coaching model I use is that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole, which speaks to that piece. They have all their puzzle pieces. They're not missing anything. If we hold them in that way, it shifts outcomes, because we're resourcing them instead of trying to fix them.

Germana Rovinelli: Yes, instead of giving them band-aids.

Ross Tayler: Exactly. And it's not easy, because so many of us think we need to offer something and shift those things for people.

Germana Rovinelli: It's exhausting. At the end of the day, the person will only step in when they're ready, and if they're not ready, they're not ready. That's not on you or me to decide. You can ask, do you feel ready to actually do this? But a lot of people don't even believe in their mind that they can take that next step, because they don't see an image of themselves in the future doing well. They're still stuck in a muddy message they may have adopted or inherited or picked up online, that the world is so terrible. There's that old saying that the grass is greener where you water it. I can't control what's going on somewhere else in the world, but I have the dignity and the right to make the space I live in loving and heavenly so I feel nourished. When I go to be around another human being, I'm not contaminating them. I'm bringing some love. That's just an energy and an opportunity, and it's one of the nicest things I've manifested at this time in my life. But I can't control the world. If you want to hurt yourself, I'll give you a hammer. Would you like a brick? Let's keep going, let's see how much you can take. Most people only change when they've had a horrible experience. I didn't make different choices until I'd had enough.

Ross Tayler: I also worked at an addiction treatment centre in the Okanagan, which was very different from the wellness centre. One thing I found heartbreaking was that people were often showing up at treatment because their family wanted them to. The family didn't know what else to do. They couldn't change the behaviour, so they said, let's take this person to treatment. That person doesn't want to be there and isn't committed to doing the work. Sometimes something happens and it shifts, but a lot of the time they're not there of their own choice. It's hard to watch, because there's a lot of money involved and a lot of hope on the family side. These people already know the scripts playing out, and it creates tremendous pressure that they need to leave in four weeks and be different. On some level it's an impossible ask, because you don't heal that in four weeks. I question that model, and I think it is changing. People need some sort of intervention, and being with like-minded people can be really supportive and healing, but sometimes it's not enough.

Germana Rovinelli: I came from that world as well, and it kind of saved me, because I didn't know how to live. What was really disturbing to me was that I was so damaged, with no self-worth and no tools, that I basically destroyed my life, and I was pissed off that I wasn't dead, which sounds like a terrible thing to say. I had entered the death phase more than once and for whatever reason got plunked right back into my body. All I know is that when I went for help, I didn't know there was help, or another way. I believed I was a worthless piece of garbage, and my behaviours matched that. I was really reliving my childhood in those behaviours. I had to divorce myself from my biological family, because they wanted to keep me in the "you're bad, you're the black sheep, you're a piece of garbage" role, and the story that the reason we suffer is your fault. The way I could have any identity of my own was to get away from them.

One of the teachers I had, who was just amazing and has also passed, had me read a book called The Unquiet Dead by Edith Fiore. I don't know if you've heard of it. She has an odd view of the whole thing, and I actually think there's some truth to it, so this might be way out there in crazy land. When people are under a lot of stress, or depressed, or traumatized, their energy or aura is very weak because they don't have a strong sense of who they are. They're kind of shattered. This can happen as a child, or through assaults. This woman concluded that some people stuck in these cycles, not in all cases but in some, have a disembodied soul attached to them, using the body for drugs, for chaos, for other things. I was taught how to work with that, and I know how to do it. It's like a deep possession, not with a demon but with an attachment of a spirit. As I watched different people and listened, sometimes I'd think, this isn't about you being dysfunctional, this sounds like you've got a guest, an unwelcome guest. There's a very simple process to have this being transition to the other side instead of living like a parasite through this human being. So now when I see people relapsing, and this is going to sound really awful, I don't automatically assume they're just under the control of the substance and their brain's been hijacked. I've also had moments where I think, there is a dark force attached to this person, using this person, and it might kill this person. That might sound really awful, but I don't think it's that far off the mark.

One of the teachers I love is Caroline Myss. I'm sure you're aware of her. She says, we all talk about angels but we sure don't talk about demons, and make no mistake, if you have an angel you also have a demon sitting there manipulating. If you don't know what you're dedicating your energy or your life to, it's up for debate. People do things that are horrific. I don't believe they're just dark and evil. Sometimes they're gullible enough not to protect themselves from the negative energies that are part of this world called planet Earth, and they can be contaminated. Sometimes I call it cross-contamination. You hang out with people who are kind of icky and you start to take that on. I notice when people I know who have been clean and sober are suddenly out there going down that crazy path, that's not the same person. It is not.

Ross Tayler: Working at that treatment centre as a program facilitator, I sat with all the clients all day long. People would share horrific stories of things they'd done, and yet I could so clearly see the loving, kind, gentle person underneath that story. It was not them, if that makes sense. It lines up with what you're saying, because I would see that light within them, and they're trying to reconcile how they could have done this thing when they were under the influence. It also supports how we can't necessarily figure some of this out in the ways we try. When people have triggers, we think, we'll just think our way through it. Well, no. There's so much going on physiologically that to try to override that urge is a lot more than snapping your finger. Yeah, the elastic band, right?

Germana Rovinelli: Yes, get the elastic band, go snap, you're better, good luck. When I have a trigger, of course it's going to happen, and it's usually because I'm afraid. Then it's how do I create a feeling of solidarity and safety in my ecosystem so I'm not making up a story and bringing an old wound alive now? One of my teachers said, Germana, if you really want to help people, you must do your own work every day. He was very specific. I asked what that meant, and he said meditation, prayer, journaling. You must create this message, this imprint, on your subconscious, because you're most suggestible first thing in the morning. That's when you're capable of breaking up some of that iceberg.

Here's an example. I had a woman living here, a sweet little thing, and I'm naive enough to say, sure, I'll help you get your stuff sorted out, because I do love to help, but I also have to ask whether I'm able to do anything here. This young woman went straight to a man, because that's what we do: I'll get my validation through a man. Well, that doesn't work. They both started using heavy drugs. One day I was meditating in a psychic room that I create and go into, and I saw a demon attached to her. My skin crawled. I actually went out and bought myself a beautiful cross, because I felt I needed to be protected, as that energy was around me. The more spiritual development work I've done, the more they talk about protecting yourself from what they call trickster energy, lower-level energy. We're infested with it, it's everywhere. So how do you keep yourself at a higher vibration? How do you keep yourself healthy amongst this sea of dis-ease? If we don't take responsibility for our psychology and emotional health... I'm very intuitive and very sensitive, which has been a liability and an asset. I know when something's right or not right. If I take responsibility for getting centred, centred in alignment, then I'm pretty good. If I don't, then I'm food. It's like the fleas jump on and start feeding. I don't think I'm special. I've just learned through my own suffering what crazy feels like, and I ask, am I going to invest 30 minutes to start my day? I think that has allowed me to heal a lot and to learn the power of purpose and intention and also self-compassion.

Here's the thing: I'll start my morning, do my little meditation, because we all have multiple voices, I'm not special, and then I'll go into the kitchen and hear a self-attacking voice. Boom. I'm like, there it is, that's my subconscious programming: let's create some crisis, let's find something to feel bad about. The minute I notice it, I step into a place of, and I'm not religious, but there is a loving force that has my back, I'm protected. So I don't lose my power through this thought. It doesn't hijack me. Most of the drugs and things people take, even the phone, the internet, hijack our brain. We're not using it anymore. It's been given away to this other force, and now we're buying stuff we don't need. We're not in our power at all. If you thought about it as a ten-storey tier, we're at three, and most of us live there. Nobody wants to be around us unless it's misery loves company.

With regard to the trigger, can we see the possibility of a better life? I believe it starts now, not tomorrow when I get the money. I listen to people I think are very intelligent. One is Chris Hughes [?], a programmer who did a lot of programming for the CIA and the government, he says. As a practice to reprogram yourself, ask what three things you can do today that would give your future self, tomorrow or this afternoon or next week, a dopamine hit, which is code for being happy. What you're suggesting in your inner world is that your future self can be happy. Then you start to create images of what that looks like, and what you could do today to put an egg in the basket. It builds a pattern. It's a way of reprogramming deliberately by asking questions and offering opportunities. I can get really stuck in reacting, so I love this. He'll put a hundred dollar bill in his winter jacket in the spring, so when he puts the jacket on, bang. It's so simple. For me, I'll get motivated and actually prepare food, because cooking for one person is hard. I'll fill a bowl with frozen blueberries and leave it out for myself so I feel taken care of and supported. Little pattern interrupts, instead of "this is so much work and so awful." I have a high-functioning capacity and then bang, I'm done, so I need to fill in the gaps, because I will go too hard and that's not healthy.

Ross Tayler: There are so many threads to choose from in everything you just shared. I'll mention one quickly, then we'll go to another. These dark energies: I'll never forget that one of the earlier energy healers I worked with was talking about people who use marijuana or drugs in general. Her biggest caution was that if you do that, you're opening yourself up to darker energies, opening a doorway that wasn't open before. What you said reminded me of that, because I don't think we realize it.

Germana Rovinelli: Ooh, I get goosebumps. It's like a soft Ouija board. You're forfeiting your power because you're looking for joy and pleasure through artificial means when you could create that by changing how you look at things. I used to smoke pot to do all that, and I really hated it. I lost the most precious thing in the world, me, because I thought this stuff would make me happy, but I didn't know how to be happy. Then it's from pot to cocaine, or how about this, how about that, and before you know it, and this is a really bad saying, here you go, ready? Active addiction is like having sex with a gorilla: it's not over till the gorilla says so. You've given your power away, you're a puppet on some level, and this stuff is running your life. You're not in the driver's seat anymore. It's like a giant tapeworm, never satisfied. We must have more.

I know what I mentioned is probably a really high-taboo thing, but when you get sensitive to energy, you can feel it. You can look at someone and think, there's something freaky about that person. You can feel it. I had a fellow living with me for two years, another weird story. He was heavily traumatized and abused by his family, and he was doing really well, so successful that he decided he could play around with substances. I said, you've got to go. I heard him in his room, and it sounded as if there were five people in there, like squirrels all high on helium talking in different voices, and he was the only one in there, which was bizarre to me. He had all these attachments and was trying to manage, and he has so much self-hatred and shame that he can't be authentic. Crazy.

Ross Tayler: Wow. I think there's a lot more going on than we realize.

Germana Rovinelli: I remember Caroline Myss did a course in Victoria a couple of years ago, and I went. She looked right at me and said, "Your prayers are heard and they will be answered." I just started weeping, because I'd lost faith in that. I had lost faith that there was any awareness or compassion. I just felt this world is horrible. I needed to hear, on some level, that the little "please help me, please help me find my way, please help me do the next right thing" was being responded to. I sometimes listen to her when I need a boost, because she's very no-nonsense, and sometimes a little hard to listen to. I think addiction is a lesson. If we don't learn it and we die, we come back and do it again.

Ross Tayler: Many of the addictions we struggle with, we don't see as addictions. It's not just alcohol and drugs. There are so many other things. I think Gabor Maté says it best: it's not why the addiction, it's why the pain. What is it we're numbing that this addiction is solving? For him it was a shopping addiction. There are all sorts of ways these things show up, social media, all of it. It's all distraction.

Germana Rovinelli: It's also running away from the little boy he was, who was given away to a stranger while his parents were fighting for their lives, praying that he wouldn't be destroyed in World War II. He carried that, and reconciling that is pretty significant. What I've learned is that reconnecting to that little part of us and saying, "I won't leave you. I'm here for you. I'm going to hold you while you cry, hold you while you shiver, and let you know that today you're free, today you're safe, even if it's only for five minutes." I believe that rescuing that part of us, because that's part of our subconscious programming, allows that part to develop and grow up. Developmentally it's frozen, it's stuck, and it keeps acting out. "I have this need to feel safe, and I don't feel safe, and I don't know how to trust that safe exists, because I'm frozen in this iceberg." Some of the most powerful work I've seen is breaking into that iceberg and saying, I'm going to give you what you didn't get. Will you let me be the parent you didn't have? That is very powerful, because then the defence mechanisms go away, then the shame goes away, then the terror, the people-pleasing, the overcompensating, the being a puppet.

I've seen so many women, particularly, though men do it differently, they overwork, who just can't stop running around doing things for other people at their own expense. They usually end up severely unhealthy, overweight, sick, with stroke, cancer, autoimmune conditions, you name it. They look like somebody locked them in the bottom of a well and then pulled them out, exhausted and miserable, and their worldview is completely distorted because they're operating through their broken child. They haven't gone in and said, I have some needs. I need to go to bed. I need some real food. I need a nap. I need some exercise. I need someone to say I care about you. Most of us do it backwards, indirectly: if I worry about you, that means I have some value.

Ross Tayler: That's a perfect segue into your work. You help people work with these subconscious patterns that are playing out, because often we can't see them. That's the biggest challenge I see. When we're in it, we can't see it.

Germana Rovinelli: No, we're in the script, we're in the avatar. I'm in the role of the bad girl, or if I do this then I'm not bad. I remember saying to someone who was interested in getting to know me in a more intimate way: this is what I require. I will not beg for love. Either you'll show up or you won't, and if you don't, you're going to be alone, so enjoy that. I'm not doing your lifting for you, and this is what I'd like. Most of us don't do that. We say, I'll do whatever I can to be accepted or wanted by you, but the price is my spirit and my dignity. Then we use food, shopping, gossiping, as a way of numbing out from that sense of "I did it again." I call it self-betrayal. In my work, I put it this way: if you were to allow yourself to receive love, what would help you feel safe? I always go safe first and then I stack, because you can't heal if you don't feel safe, and most people don't.

Ross Tayler: I've seen it. It's quite the journey. You talk about that frozen child running the show underneath. We wouldn't let a five-year-old drive a bus, and yet that five-year-old is driving our bus and we don't realize it.

Germana Rovinelli: And also make friends with that child. I listened to Jordan Peterson once talking about this, and he said you need to help that child grow up, but you can't if it's feeling bad, shamed, abandoned, ignored, neglected. I've done little meditations where I bring the child into that person's life, or into my life, and show the child the dog, the house we live in, the car, and all of a sudden there's this calm. I also believe the inner child is where the magic comes from.

Ross Tayler: Or where the magic is hidden.

Germana Rovinelli: Absolutely, because children are beautiful and intelligent. One of my other teachers who has passed was a ninth-dan black belt from Okinawa, Sensei Richard Kim. He was the most loving man I'd ever met, very humble. He said, to see the world through the eyes of a child opens your life to magic, because children don't have all these filters and buffers. We give those to the child, and the child adapts to survive, to not be abandoned, betrayed, thrown away like trash. But there's magic there, and the spirit speaks through that. The more work I go into, and the more I allow myself to explore and learn in my own way, the more I feel my power grows. It's not a physical power, it's an energetic power.

Ross Tayler: That word, power, I find fascinating, because early in my journey I had a channelling reading and was told, step into your power. I couldn't relate to that word, because the only power I had seen was abusive power, power that caused problems. I realized that to be myself, to allow all those things you just described, I had to give myself permission to just show up as me.

Germana Rovinelli: One of the things I love, I call it a love shower. I envision above me a waterfall of love being absorbed into my brain, my heart, my nerves, my bones, my psyche. That's the feeling safe piece. Then I don't have to be afraid of what other people think, because it's none of my business. The passion, the purpose, the soul's highest calling is attached to that child. Once we access and love and celebrate that part of us and allow it to be truly who we are, and that has to come from love, not a punitive position, then all of a sudden we're allowed to be creative, to be artistic, to find the things that make us happy. Maybe it's baking cupcakes. It doesn't have to be grandiose. But our ego mind will keep us out of that. It will keep us in conflict and hurting. The more pain somebody is in, the more I know they're listening to a painful story their mind is telling them that they're not questioning, which is the so-called dark part of the human, trying to keep them weak. Either they're listening to a painful story that keeps them weak, or they're not getting a need met: a need to feel comfortable and safe, to know I'm allowed to relax. I never had those. I was organizing the deck furniture on the Titanic as a two-year-old, and it was never enough. That's addiction: I'm not good enough, not pretty enough, not young enough, on it goes. That's the subconscious wound that comes from the child. The child received that message and locked it in, and the child's worldview stays that way until somebody comes in and says, I'm going to be the parent you needed. What do you need to know? And then, granularly, daily: here's this basket, here's this love.

I'll share a really short story. In my early recovery, in my early 20s, I was invited to a codependency group, and I didn't even know what that meant. We had to stand in two lines, and a person would step forward, and we were to speak when we wanted them to stop. All I could hear was screaming "stop" before that person even moved, and I couldn't talk. I was so shut off, it was ridiculous. Then we did a meditation where we brought a gift to our inner child. I went deep, into a field where we used to go when we rode horses as children. We were poor people, but my mother did have us have horses. I brought a basket of strawberries for this beautiful little girl. I go around the tree and there she is, in a white dress, about three and a half, in Buster Brown shoes. We were supposed to ask this child, what do you want from me? She reached over, looked me in the eye with all the intensity of a beautiful, innocent, magical little girl, pressed her finger into my thigh, and I swear to God I could feel it go in, and she said, "Just love me." I started to weep, to tremor, to shake and wail, and I couldn't stop crying, because I didn't know I had that much pain in me. I had just gotten out of a relationship with a man who was my husband and who almost beat me to death. I had been surrounding myself with people just like my family, because that was home, and this little girl was looking at me going, please love me. I had to leave the room. I drove home for about two hours, crying the whole way, wailing. I cried for about two weeks, because I had no idea I had that much pain in me. My commitment to myself after that was to learn how to love this little girl, because I didn't know how, and I certainly wasn't taught that I was worth loving. I was taught that I was a worthless piece of shit, and my worth came from my ability to take care of other people. Is that not a setup? The whole thing for me was how to give that little girl what she never got: a safe place, a voice, the ability to say no. My God.

Ross Tayler: Wow. I know you have to go, so we'll have to end it on that note, but I really appreciate you sharing that story and sharing yourself, and speaking so openly and honestly. One of the things I appreciate about you is the level to which you speak what needs to be said. I imagine that's a powerful part of your work, because most of us need to be confronted in some ways to see what we can't see or don't want to see. I'd call it fierce honesty, in the way you share and speak.

Germana Rovinelli: Thank you. My perspective is, if anything I've gone through gives somebody permission to believe they too can have some version of their own healing and recovery, then my suffering has not been in vain. There were many times in my life I wished I could take my life, and I didn't, but I sure wanted to.

Ross Tayler: I hear you. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I'll share your website links in the show notes.

Germana Rovinelli: Thank you so much for having me.

Ross Tayler: You're very welcome. Bye for now.