A TRANSFORMATIONAL LIFE
- Germana Rovinelli
- Dec 19, 2025
- 9 min read
I was raised by European World War II babies.
My mother from East Germany and my father from Italy.
I grew up in an apartment on Newport Avenue in Oak Bay.
We were poor.
The messages I received as a child were filled with blame, hostility and fear of everything.
I grew up to believe that I didn’t make mistakes; deep inside I believed that I was a mistake.
The commands that accompanied beatings were, “Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t talk.”
I shut down at around 18 months of age when my father strangled me to the point of being blue, and my eyes rolled up in my head.
My mother threw cold water on me and did what she could to get me to come back. I was a third class person with little to no rights. The beatings caused me to want to grow up as soon as possible and never have children. I escaped through television, food, beachcombing, visiting Sealand and playing in Windsor Park. I loved walking through puddles in the rain. I also enjoyed the Oak Bay Rose Garden.
I would pretend that it was my sacred place.
My parents beat each other, and us, without provocation. Some peace came to our lives after my father finally left. I was six years old and still recall perfect strangers attempting to take us away from him when we were in public because of his aggressive and insulting tendencies. When they confirmed with us that he was our father, a look of shock and fear would come over their faces.
We lived in a war zone.
My mother worked far too hard for very little money. I would see her cry herself to sleep and wonder why. When she told me “I’m bad. It’s all my fault,” I believed her. I didn’t know what I did wrong, or how I could change it.
I was filled with shame and self-rejection.
We did also have some wonderful times horseback riding and looking for treasures at the Tillicum Drive-In Swap ’n’ Shop. We also had a one-room cabin at Shawinigan Lake.
So we were blessed with moments of calm.
I did what most hurt, afraid, worthless people do. I took over as the abuser in my life when I got older. Self-criticism became my internal dialogue. Forms of abuse became a way of life for me.
This was what love was, wasn’t it?
I indulged in overeating, alcohol, drugs and shoplifting. I developed an eating disorder, and as I unraveled my history in recovery, I discovered that I was a survivor of years of sexual abuse, which I had repressed to protect both my mother and my abuser. I
took the shame of the abuse on, with the core belief of it was all my fault.
Whenever I got close to my ideal weight and someone commented, I would binge-eat to the tune of 20 pounds. I would then attempt to get that weight back off.
Years of this pattern consumed my life. I got into martial arts, which built my confidence, when I was 18 years old. I started teaching fitness classes, where it was so nice to be in a position where people were happy to see me. They listened to me and didn’t care if I was husky, as my boyfriend at the time would refer to my body shape.
I lived with people who earned their living via the drug trade, and it kept me from being vulnerable on the street. We practised martial arts, and I got my black belt and won many trophies for sparring, and eventually we parted ways. They too were victims of incredible poverty, abandonment and neglect. They were German as well and I understood their pain.
I was neither free nor happy, very much like my childhood.
I ran away from the mainland back to Vancouver Island. Within a short period of time I met and married a man who I thought would rescue me.
Little did I know this man would beat me almost to death in less than a year.
His energy was identical to my father’s. He had the same type of tension during one particular bloody beating. He said the same things to me that my father would, and that got my attention. I charged him after I managed to get away from him. He went to jail, I filed for divorce, and I then took a look at my drug and alcohol history. Little did I know it would go all the way back to my childhood and learning not to think, feel or talk as a little, innocent girl.
I realized that I did not make good decisions when I used anything.
A friend and I both worked at Mom’s Cafe in Sooke, B.C. She introduced me to a 12-step program that became the beginning of a life of transformation. I am alive today, 22 years later. My friend has passed away, may her soul rest in peace.
First, I made my recovery my number one priority and nothing else mattered.
I decided that my life meant something to me, and I held onto my chair for all it was worth. I knew that my hard-wired coping and thinking could get me into trouble.
For the first time in my life, I was encouraged to feel my feelings.
Feel Everything and Recover became a slogan to staying honest. I had shut down and disassociated from my feelings and my needs. My parents’ way of getting me to stop crying as a child was to put my head under running cold water so I couldn’t draw the next breath to cry.
So if you understand that what you don’t heal and feel comes out sideways.
Those suppressed feelings collect interest like a credit card that’s not been paid off. I had 22 years of suppressed grief to release. I cried a lot and knew if I didn’t feel my feelings, my behaviour of shutting down would kill me. I attended Victoria Life Enrichment Society. The problem there was that I had issues around men, and it was a co-ed facility.
I discovered that I was pregnant, which absolutely terrified me. I was poorly equipped to know how to look after myself, but decided that this was a gift, and I vowed to heal to give my baby a better life. I went into a women-only treatment home called Maiya House that used to be in Nanaimo. It helped me to be emotionally honest and available, and taught me how to stand up for myself. I was going to be a single mom, and in spite of my past, worked very hard on my issues before my baby came.
He was born on Mother’s day in 1992 in Nanaimo. I couldn’t believe how perfect and smart he was. I did everything I could to give him what I never had. I went back to school, back to work, taught fitness classes at every gym in town, studied to become a personal trainer and became one, even before we had a Canadian Certifying Body. I was certified through The American Council on Exercise (ACE).
I wanted more for my son and me.
My biological family were threatened by my transformation.
I wasn’t the scapegoat, the black sheep or the crazy one any longer. I confronted my mother at some point. I let her know that I knew what happened and that I was not crazy, and I was forgiving her. As I became the voice for my little girl and said it like I experienced it, she downed about 16 ounces of wine like Kool-Aid. I thought how sad it was that her whole life had been about denial, blame and running. I felt like an orphan after I left my family’s dysfunctional system.
I believed in a loving source that became my source of courage and divine right order.
I discovered that I am moderately clairvoyant and intuitive. I can feel people’s feelings, and even as a child I had solutions to other people’s problems.
I spent years in therapy. I still had all of the nervous twitches and reflexes. I just understood them better, and that it was because of my upbringing.
I bought Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life at 16 years of age. I was not capable of comprehending what that meant at the time. What I did take out of her work was the continued reference that the unconscious mind was responsible for all of our disease processes.
Now I knew that addiction was a running away from oneself.
I had a colourful past and still had all the messages of being evil, bad, worthless, dirty and good for nothing inside of me. Like ghosts, they traumatized me and got me to second-guess and sabotage areas of my life. Counselling didn’t fix that for me, but it helped me to understand why I was compromised.
A co-worker whom I admired at the gym was taking a hypnotherapy course and was finishing her program and wanted clients, so she offered both my boss and me a free session. I thought, Hey, why not?
My history set me up for certain sensitivities;
I knew when I was being played. I also had had enough therapy to know what was abuse of power. She used an induction where my arm was floating in the air and hit me in the face, and as it hit me, I was told to sleep. I went down like a stone. I loved the feeling of being out of my body. In fact, it felt like being in the womb again. I grinned at how nice that felt. When she said, “You will come to me three times a week for the next three weeks,” I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had no respect for her business-building strategy and went on my way to find my answers.
I dropped myself in front of numerous hypnotic therapists, who, 99% of the time, were as poorly trained as she was. I found one, Lance Tomlin, who, in one session, helped me clear out so much shame and emotional pain that I slept for three days. He told me to take my training from a teacher from Vancouver who taught Ericksonian Hypnotherapy. Sheldon was nothing like my past teachers and he resembled Charlie Brown in some strange way. I began to see how our upbringing creates our programming.
I began to understand what no one could help me understand in traditional therapy.
I knew I was onto something that could and would change my life. I became a member of the Canadian Hypnotherapy Association as a resident hypnotherapist. I was lucky enough to have a man called Fatta Taylor as my mentor. It was the first time in my life I met a man who could unconditionally love, with no strings attached.
He made it very clear that if I wanted to help anyone else, I had to do my own inner work every morning and meditate. Just like winding a clock, they only work properly for the next 24 hours when you wind them up. I learned how to deprogram my subconscious conflicts. I slowly became confident and secure.
I blossomed.
I became a certified clinical hypnotherapist over an eight-year term working with mentors and a doctor who prepared me to know that I was helping people and doing no harm. After some nudging from my favourite past life regression teacher, Di Cherry, who is 82 years old now, she said, “Who will teach this when I am dead?” I gulped and registered my school, Heart Song School Of Hypnotherapy. I see my students over the course of 10 months on weekends; one Saturday or Sunday, twice a month.
My life experiences became the backdrop for my education.
I instinctively knew that self-honesty must come first, followed by learning how to grieve for one’s losses and ultimately how to forgive others. I got much better at listening to my intuition and living universal law.
The first law is that the universe only supports you to the degree that you support yourself.
When we do what brings joy to our hearts, we are doing our soul’s work. When we withhold love from anyone, including ourselves, our life does not work. Last but not least, the Earth Plane is really a school for our soul.
Are we willing to learn the lessons regarding our part, or do we need to stay stuck in the victim blame stance.
It is a part of grief and loss, yet we lose our true potential if we stay there. What we don’t heal and feel we pass onto others.
I understand pain and the feeling of rising above that pain.
Seeing injustices as lessons has helped me to become a better person. I do what I do to bring healing and dignity back to my clients.
I know what it feels like to turn lemons into lemonade.
I still have people come to me saying, “Germana you changed my life,” while grinning from ear to ear. Although I played a part in helping them let go of their baggage, I humbly believe that I am a facilitator and not all-powerful, but an instrument for change. I still meditate every day and ask for guidance, and sometimes I still think the lesson that I have, is bigger than I think I can handle. That’s when my mind goes into fear.
Fear is an acronym:
False Evidence Appearing Real,
or
Feel Everything and Recover or F*** Everything and Run.
We can run, but we can’t hide.
If we refuse to heal, we take the damage forward into the afterlife and it gets scripted into our next incarnation. So I have done my best to forgive people, places and things. I have done my best to learn how to love myself, even my little flaws. I have learned how to reclaim my innocence and power after having it shredded.
Maybe I turned lemons into lemonade?
Maybe that’s my message of hope.
If I could do it, so can you.
By Germana Rovinelli . First Published in Island Gals Magazine . 2012 . Volume 2 . Issue 1 .