About

My Story

The story about Mike Gingerich is a story about a person on a journey to be all that he was created to be. From childhood difficult experiences and trauma, I was imprinted and wired to believe that I had to prove myself to be loved. That love was conditional. That I had to be near perfect and not make mistakes to be valued and accepted. And that I needed to always be on guard to read my environment and to help those who were volatile and dysregulated around me calm down.

I knew my childhood had impacted me and left scars. However, I didn’t realize how deeply until I was over 50.
Only then did I understand how those childhood experiences wired my unconscious nervous system and left an imprint that affected me daily.

I discovered that those traumas were still stored and stuck in my body. Unconsciously, I was repeating and staying stuck within some of those early childhood patterns. These included people-pleasing, limited self-belief, lack of self-care, and a focus on trying to appease others to feel safe.

As a result, I was repeating cycles and replicating situations in my adult life in the corporate world and in personal relationships that kept me unsafe, on edge, boxed in, and fulfilling self-limiting beliefs.

I finally reached a breaking point through the ending of my marriage and a business collapse, and knew that I couldn’t go on with the same patterns, cycles, and routines. I needed to break the cycles, find healing, and find a new way. I needed to take radical action. I needed healing, and I needed to begin living out what was inside of me and letting go of the expectations of others.

I had tried traditional talk therapy. I had tried Christian counseling of various types. While these offered some value, I was still stuck. My mind was still spinning. Cycles were still occurring. I was still not getting free at the root. I knew I had to go deeper.

This journey was spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical. It led me to the study of our nervous system, specifically Poly Vagal theory, and the dots began to connect for me.

The gaps began to be filled in on why I was repeating patterns, living stuck, and experiencing negative outcomes from relational triggers again and again. I understood my nervous system had been wired from childhood experiences and I was unconsciously following a script that had been written in my childhood. I was living a dysregulated adult life with stress and anxiety in my chest that was not serving my best interests, nor was my default response of trying to ignore these feelings and simply trying to push through.

Instead, I needed to recognize these feelings in my body, allow them, attend to them, learn from them, reassure and show my younger self that I was OK, that I was safe, and that I no longer needed to live according to that childhood wiring.

I was walking a journey of healing and rewiring from the imprint of my childhood.

The root was found.

I was over 50 and yet my subconscious nervous system was navigating my world like I was 8 years old. My wiring was trying to protect me like it tried to protect me as a child:

“Stay out of the way”

“Make no mistakes”

“Monitor the room for your safety and signs of threats”

Yet this was no longer serving me as an adult.

It was limiting me. I was stuck. I was shackled. I was not free.

The journey to freedom and healing was slow and always ongoing, but it was freeing and hopeful.

I was getting unstuck, learning tools and practices to set myself free from the past and to move forward with confidence into a future that was life-giving and empowering.

I was moving beyond the imprint of trauma from my childhood and rewiring my subconscious. I was removing the 8-year-old from the driver’s seat and putting 50+ year-old Mike in the driver’s seat. 

It was a physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental health journey woven together in one.