Healing Through Self-Love: Gina Cavalier’s Journey from Suicidal Ideation to Empowerment on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger

energy around you, and the energy just starts to get darker and darker, almost like you’re going into a tunnel. And then when you you start to get a disconnection. And I call it like almost a severance of the light, a severance of hope, and that’s where it becomes dangerous, because you, all of a sudden, you go into massive suffering, and you just want that suffering to end so bad. You want it so bad to go away. I’m sorry. I’m getting chills all over my body as I describe it, because I remember it. You just want to go so bad you almost want the pain to end. And that’s split second decision. You know, you you can’t do anything about it after that, you know you can’t try anything else, you know. So it was like walking all of that back and learning first learning I did not love myself, and then when you do love yourself though, all of a sudden, the people you have in your life, you’re like, I’m not putting up with that. This job like a job where you’re like, it’s soul sucking or whatever. Maybe it’s not, you know, you look at it, you’d be grateful for what it does give you, but try to make plan steps to get you in a place that’s going to make you live the life you want to live if you’re in toxic relationships, recognizing that, figuring out and breaking it down, just saying each single thing you have to break down and look at it and you know, and you don’t have to do it all at one time, but you’re like, I’m constantly working on whether it’s relationship with My sister, my mother, or different things. You know, there’s never a perfect thing, but it’s just like a little bit of work at a time. But you have to fall in love with your first and change that programming in your mind, and then also connect the mind and the heart together again. Because what happens when you when you’re in that state, is there separation from your heart. You can’t even feel it beating anymore.

Manon Bolliger  12:45

I mean, they you know, how do you or put it this way, it is said that, you know, about 80% of our thoughts are negative, right? That’s in the subconscious, right? So we’re programmed, apparently this way, you know, saying apparently, because I don’t know that to be true by my own experience. You know, I’m extremely positive person, so I may be programmed that way, but I wouldn’t know it, you know. But when you have that these ideations, do you see them as, as thoughts as well, like thoughts that you could say to yourself, you know, let’s say when you’re down on I’m not good enough, or I’m this, or why do I miss out? Or whatever your issue is, then, do you question the validity of that. Do you ever go into that sort of cognitive thinking through or because you talk about a spiritual root? I’m just wondering if you could sort of dance us through what your dance was.

Gina Cavalier  13:58

Well, it actually is. I’m actually putting together a documentary, because it’s kind of interesting, because it’s very cultural based, too. So for example, people in Japan, you know society and culture and how you are seen in the society is a really big deal. So if you lose your job, it’s very shameful, and if you are in debt is very shameful. So, um, it and so there’s different cultures that have different things, right? So, but I feel like probably it all feels the same when you actually whatever starts to bubble around you, whatever that dialog is that makes you feel disconnected and separate from self is, is is that’s whatever that it is. It’s just like, it’s all of a sudden you can’t feel anymore. You go actually, completely numb. Go numb. You have to go numb pretty much before you do something. You can’t feel anything. If you were to put a pin in your your hand, you probably couldn’t feel it, because you all the synapses are. Completely, like, I don’t know, like, closed down, you’re starting to, like, leave your body years. I feel like you’re actually, are kind of leaving the body in a way, you know, you’re forcing the soul out of the body. You’re like, you know. And you you’re really trying to give a temporary solution, you know. And, but it’s a permanent solution, right? You know? And that’s that’s also a thing to think about, that you don’t want to do a permanent solution to something that’s a temporary problem, right?

Manon Bolliger  15:32

Yeah, yeah. But, but do you see you’re saying you’re numb, literally numb, what happens like, what is the process that you’ve used in those moments that has given you the hope, and not just the hope, the actual transformation so or to recognize this, and tonight, they Go, there, what’s, what’s the first step, or, you know, whatever for you,

Gina Cavalier  16:04

for me, and I don’t it’s also in the book, I created almost a second self, and there’s a lot of therapists that use this technique, but I created an adult self and then a child self that was separate, and I used to when I would be stuck in there, I would send in this other self that would come in and talk to me and hold me actually, physically, see a version of myself go in and put their arms around me and feel our hearts beating together and telling me it was going to be okay, that we’re going to get through it, that I’m a beautiful soul. I got so much more to learn and do and that, you know, you know, things like that. And sometimes it would bring in the child self. It was if it was a childhood wound, because, you know, I had a very violent father, you know. So I would go back into those moments of being hit and abuse a very young age, right? And I would have that child look in her eyes, and it was me, but I would look at her eyes, and she would just be crying, and I I wouldn’t go, and I’d hug her, and I would tell her it was going to be okay. And then, you know, kids, they just, they’re so resilient. And she me would get like, a smile on my face, and I would brush her hair away, whatever I didn’t get in those moments, right? I would do that for myself. And it’s like having that, like I said, like so, for example, if you love animals and you can’t like you love your dogs and you can’t imagine anybody hurting them, right? It’s that, that level of love and fight and compassion that you get for yourself, you have to go get it for yourself.

Manon Bolliger  17:46

Yeah, yeah. You know, I see people with

Gina Cavalier  17:49

like that are really into politics, right? And they’ll fight to the death on their side of politics, right? But they won’t do that for themselves, right? You know, they wouldn’t do that for you know?

Manon Bolliger  18:02

Well, I think if people came from themselves, it would be a very different political scene. Yeah, yeah, because it’s, it’s true self love first, right? And yeah, and then so, so that is definitely a method using the the inner child or the adult, or the giving yourself what you didn’t get. Yeah, somebody’s coming to the rescue. Of course, it’s you, but that’s and now

Gina Cavalier  18:29

I use it all the time. Um, when I’m in a moment, I don’t have those thoughts anymore. But of course, like something terrible will come in, and I’ll have this that, you know, a moment or whatever. And a lot of times it’ll say, that’s not you anymore. I go, you know, that’s right. You can be upset right now, you can be angry, you can be frustrated, but you got so much more to learn and do. And I almost like the dialog now. I’m so used to doing it. It kicks right in. It’s just like going to the gym and working out. It’s like in the beginning, it’s really painful, and it’s slow and it hurts, and then all of a sudden, get to the place where it just becomes natural. So I’m in that phase, and that’s why I believe it can that’s that healing phase where it’s just natural to protect myself. Now I put myself first before anything else, and that’s so weird.

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Gina Cavalier  20:31

I always put myself last. Yeah, I’m getting chills again, like, I don’t know what, if there’s somebody out here. I’m feeling some kind of energy, but I put myself first. And it was hard, because you feel very guilt. You have to get over the guilt of like, certainly putting yourself first, even above children, above animals, above anybody in your life. And but, but the people that love you, they want you to put yourself first, yeah, well, that’s you. They want you to put, you know, because

Manon Bolliger  21:03

that’s what you would want for them. Yeah, right. So that’s another way of kind of doing the inversion is kind of go, you know. And a lot of people you know that are are real carers and givers tend to forget what they would do for the other to and they don’t do it to themselves, right? And so reminding them, you know, also in that moment could be helpful as well, you know, to what would what would you say? If this was

Gina Cavalier  21:33

I do have extreme PTSD, to be honest. I still do use my tools every night I go to sleep listening to meditation music or a sleep hypnosis. I love Joe Dispenza, or there’s different ones that I really like. If sometimes I don’t need it, but almost always I need a little bit. I put it on, and soon as I wake up, it just calms me. It just brings me into my body. Because I got so used to leaving my body that my I love to be in outer space energetically, you know. And the only way that you can make real changes in your life is to be more into your body. Is to be more present as much as possible. Be here, be now, whatever’s happening, you know, just you know, look at it with a loving state and you know, we always get through it. You always get through it somehow. You know, I always and sometimes I watch videos on people that have been have had things that I couldn’t imagine happening to me, like I watched this kid who had a tractor fall on him and he lost his whole lower body and his arm. He’s only got one arm and and he was sitting, he’s sitting there in the in his now living a whole full life. Just got married to the wonderful woman. Doesn’t even have a lower half their body, big smiles on their face. It’s like, how does that spirit? How does that spirit, yeah, through all that, still with a giant smile on the face, you know, with now planning a full family. So me, who haven’t, hasn’t had that kind of extreme strategy. How come I’m sitting here, like in the corner, you know, I’m just, it’s hard to compare, but sometimes it’s like finding hope in other people’s stories and saying, Wow, yeah,

Manon Bolliger  23:21

yeah, interesting. And so after that process, like it’s almost like you’re you’re separate. It’s like you’re the wise self is looking at the other right a little bit and helping. How long have you found generally that it takes to to know that you’re out of that, that you don’t believe your thoughts anymore? Put it that way,

Gina Cavalier  23:50

it’s not a super fast thing, but it will. It’ll start changing almost immediately if you make that commitment to yourself, and it will just get better over time. And I really think even after three months, you’re going to be a different person. Is that? And it’s like our our book has a lot of different exercises, whether, you know, we plan everything out, whether it’s meditation, whether it’s affirmations, whether it’s it’s being a workout, you have to You are your own healer. You have to plan your own treatment plan, cuz you’re the only one that knows what works for you, you know, and you know it. Go to a therapist if that’s what you want. Like you have to make your own treatment plan and and when it’s not working, you know, exit out, have your it’s like, create your own toolbox. You have to become your own physician. You can’t. Nobody’s going to have all the, you know, we used to put a lot of, I we still do have a lot of like respect and all that for people like, like you and in this space. But you have to, you have to make your own. And plan like it’s not you only get to see them for half an hour once a month, or something like that. You’re self 24/7, so you have to plan it out. You have to make the list. You have to you might even make the list of people that are you need to talk to and say, Hey, I’m on a healing thing right now. I can’t engage in X, Y and Z. You might need to quit drinking, you know, if it’s a depressant and you find yourself depressed, or you know what? What are the things that are not helping you? You know, and you know things like that, maybe even sometimes eating better. That’s a thing of self love. You know, you know, as someone who just doesn’t, you know, eat quality food all the time, and they’re, they’re just overeating or whatever. It’s a part of, like them hating themselves, you know, you know all that stuff. It’s like, you know, when you start to love yourself. I mean, I really care about what I put in my body. It’s just another version of, like, life. Just like love myself. Now, you know. And instead, what happened to me is that, you know, I lost a bunch of weight when I when I started healing my suicidal ideation. That wasn’t the main goal. My main goal was, you know, and I actually got felt like I looked younger. I called in different people and friendships that were way more giving. I just, you know, things just started, things just started to align a lot better, because I was exuding a certain energy. And it was, I was getting it back from the outside world, too. So what I mean is, like, You’re doing all this inner work, but you’ll, you’ll have to pay a little bit attention that the world is changing around you, they’re seeing you change, you know, and you walk taller you. There’s different things that happen, and these are the things that that you just want to get through, not having suicidal thoughts, but or are going down and feeling like that extreme suffering, but all of a sudden, and then you kind of look at yourself and look around, you go, wow, I’ve got new great friends. I got new job opportunities, you know, and I feel younger. I have a lot more energy, you know, those are, like, the side effects, but it’s, it’s all related,

Manon Bolliger  27:12

yeah. I mean, the appreciation part is also, it’s a side effect, but it also can be, you know, an acknowledgement, you know, of well, I’ve got, you know, I do have some new friends now, and, you know, all of that, which reinforces, kind of the path, you know, yeah, no, it’s great. So what is your because I’m looking at the time, and I want to know a little bit about your your new book too, like, what’s the difference between the books and how could people be best served getting whichever book

Gina Cavalier  27:48

this surviving suicidal ideation. This has a little bit of my personal story in it, and it was co written by Dr Amelia Kelly, who was a trauma informed therapist, so she has a lot of medical things in there, because I, I was like, I’m just a girl who heal my suicidal ideation. I need more to get to the people. So the first book, and I’m really proud of this, and the first book, I really wanted it to have a little bit more of a PhD behind it and all, and some of that information. The next book is called Planet walking a handbook for the living. And I kind of stole, I kind of reverse stole Tim Burton’s handbook for the recently deceased movie buff. I worked in the film industry for a really long time, and I thought, well, what’s the handbook for the living? You know? So I channel, I kind of channeled this book, I say because it just kind of fell out. One of the other publishers asked me who didn’t get to publish this book, if I had anything else to me? I said, Yes, I do. So, of course I do. So I wrote it in seven weeks, 70,000 words, and what it is is I kind of had the millennials in my mind, just because they, or people that you know, have short attention spans, they didn’t want to they want to know a little bit about energy. They want a little know a little bit about how to find your life purpose, a little bit how to heal. Instead of, like a whole, this is a whole book on how to heal suicidal ideation. This is a basically like, Hey, you’re here on this planet. Here’s how you know, here’s how it works. Here’s how you find your life path. Here’s how you find your themes. How do you feel your gifts? Here’s how it dark energy works. Here’s how light energy works. It even goes into angels and but just small, you know, couple pages, and then I do artwork in it that illustrate how energy moves through the body. So you just want to look at the artwork. You can see how, when two people come together, how the energy vibrates. I drew it out for them, how the energy comes in. Moves through the chakras and things like that. So people can get a visualization of, oh, now I get

Manon Bolliger  30:08

it interesting. Something you said that got me there. Um, one second I lost. I lost the thought, No, I was thinking the, I mean, so the the art and all that was always your skill, right? And it’s more just your experience that’s kind of you, you expressed yourself through your your art to your your skill, right? Is that?

Gina Cavalier  30:38

Well, I used to doodle a lot, right? And the doodles were messy and manic and crazy, and it was just, you just look at it was, what is that? And then people would say, Can I have that? It’s gorgeous. And I’d be like, This is my doodle, you know? And I could remember just being like, and I still use the same pen, this is the what I do most my art with. And it would just be very intense, right? What I realized when I’m doing my healing is that I needed a way to let the anger out and the frustration out, and I couldn’t do with my voice, because I’m not a yeller, and I needed to get it out. So I got it out for my fingers. But then people were like, as telling me it was art, and I was like, I’m not an artist. This is just, you know, doodles. And they’re like, Well, I want to buy it. And I think someone bought one of my doodles for $800 and I was like, hmm, okay. And I was like, here I got a whole box of doodles. Look at all my doodles. And then people, it just started to turn into and I realized that’s how I was. It was a part of my survival mechanism that my soul created for myself to put that pain through my hands and onto a piece of paper. And it was just something I you don’t I didn’t realize that was like it was my own healing that was happening. And people see all kinds of different things in them. And I think because I wasn’t a trained artist, I felt like, you know, sort of, I didn’t give it value for a really long time, even after people bought like, I would have art shows and all of my art would be gone by the night and right away, and I still didn’t give myself value. You know, it was that part of that self love. I was like, I’m not an artist. They’re like, they just made all that money, you know. So I’m really trying to even go back to do more art nowadays and realize that that is my Avenue, and that it resonates with people. And oh, my God, it was my it was my healing companions all along, ever since I was a child, I’ve done this, and I feel like we get these tools and these skills that we think are not even anything, and they’re really there to say, I bet you it saved my life.

Manon Bolliger  32:52

Yeah, well, I’m going to share something that you might find interesting. So I’m just going to share it, because it may help somebody else understand the potential. And of course, if you disagree, please say so. But what I’m feeling strongly is that in the art, right, you’re you’re basically mimicking the what you’re experiencing, but it’s expressed through something. So if we look at homeopathy, it’s like the law of similars, and in homeopathy, like cures like so in other words, if you can resonate with a field or an energy, which, in the end, that’s what homeopathy is, right? It goes through the water system, but it’s, it’s an, it’s a, an electric, you know, physical physics type of energy, right? And it’s like somebody who identifies with that doodle is feeling that, oh, this, there’s a part of me that can heal through this

Gina Cavalier  34:04

absolutely, oh, 100 100% I mean, I look at it now. I mean, I have, like my ex husband, you know, on a mattress, you know, like sitting there, and he was a big drinker, you know what I mean. And like I was, you know, getting rid of my fear, my anger and about late, losing that relationship and things like that. Yeah, it’s like, that’s why it’s like, if you can write a song or pull out a a drum machine, do, you know, create a song or write something like, it’s such a great way to you have to get it out. It’s, it’s, it’s, we’re like pressure cookers, if we don’t, and that’s when the tea kettle explodes. I mean, when you have 10 year old, you know, I asked counselors at schools. You know, with little kids, my brother is a counselor for like, 30 years. He’s just like, it’s unbelievable. Six year olds coming and saying they’re suicidal, you know, so that I go to that cause. So even if all that doesn’t even matter, if you don’t want to hear about the chitter chatter of anything, and there’s political stuff, but what about the these children? You know, if we’re, if we’re not going to do it for the kids, then what kind of, what kind of community and society do any of us have?

Manon Bolliger  35:23

Yeah, 100% agree. I mean, I, you know, I’ve seen kids cutting themselves young, you know, six, eight. I mean, I don’t think I even knew how to use a knife properly.

Gina Cavalier  35:39

That’s all to me very I think we have a little bit of that in our book, but a lot of that that’s all related to wanting to self harm, is that you don’t self love, yeah, yeah. And you’re in pain, and you want to feel some pain, and that’s that numb feeling I was telling you about, because you want to feel something, because there is like a numbness that comes over when you get to point where you’re really bad. If I’m one person that can raise my vibration and change my story at this level, you know, I’ve already won. To me, you know, even whatever happens moving forward, whatever countries do or people do, or companies do, or how much money you have in the bank, it’s like to me, I’ve already won because to overcome something that big in your life, you know, and be able to, you know, what else happens to do when you fall in love with yourself is, do you really start to like you? You see colors differently. You start to, you start to live more in the world, yeah, you know. And, and it just keeps getting better and better and better, you know, you start to see the beauty in all things, like even the flow of water, like a river, like you have just more appreciation. Because when you’re in the thick of suicidal ideation, you can’t feel a mountain, you can’t feel an ocean, you can’t you can’t appreciate that stuff you’re you feel really dead inside, you know, and so once you heal that, you really get to truly feel alive again and recognize that there’s always going to be problems, and you’re not one of them anymore, in a way you know

Manon Bolliger  37:15

exactly well. Thank you. That’s our time, but it’s wonderful, inspiring, and I really think somebody will be hearing this that needs this. So I really appreciate your time.

Gina Cavalier  37:28

Thank you. And if you have any questions for me, I’m at the liberatedhealer.com or Gina cavalier.com and wishing you all a beautiful day.

Manon Bolliger  37:38

This interview with Gina Cavalier is really makes me happy for myself as well, for the Listen program, which I’ve been so behind. And you know, many, many of the students, at least all the recent ones, have taken the program as part of what I teach in Bowen college. But she really describes that first step is that loving yourself, and I think we need to, as as long as we’re helping other people, we’ve got to understand that their ability to love themselves, to see themselves to you know, to embrace themselves is is crucial to their healing. So, yeah, I just it just so reminded me of the importance of the bigger context to healing. It isn’t just about doing something that helps people, it’s really getting them fully on board with their self appreciation, self love and all of that. And I really do agree it is about the children, because we’re living in a strange society where, yeah, children are, are not being looked after by our society in general, the way that they could be. And I think, you know, we don’t have to go into all of the reasons of this. We just got to notice that there’s a huge problem, and we do need to talk about it, not the politics, not all of that stuff, just the reality that, you know, kids are hurting themselves, cutting themselves, killing themselves, and that really shouldn’t exist in in our society. The degree that it does is shocking. So anyway, it was a very enlightening interview.

ENDING: 

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