Ep 167 // When God Rebuilds What Trauma Tried to Destroy | Part One with Gina Birkemeir
What if some of the patterns you struggle with today began long before you had words to explain them?
And what if healing doesn’t require minimizing what happened (or blaming God for it) but learning to name your story honestly and discover where He was in the midst of it?
In Part One of this powerful conversation, Megan sits down with licensed professional counselor, trauma specialist, professor, and Generations Deep author Gina Birkemeier.
Gina shares her deeply personal story of adoption, family dysfunction, addiction, neglect, abuse, people-pleasing, and the painful belief that something must be fundamentally wrong with her. She also shares how those experiences shaped her early understanding of God as punitive and untrustworthy and how God slowly began rebuilding that picture.
This is a story of God patiently meeting Gina in the middle of brokenness, providing for her when everything seemed to fall apart, and teaching her that He could actually be trusted.
Megan and Gina also explore an important question for anyone who has experienced pain: If God is good, why did He allow this to happen?
Together, they discuss the difference between God's character and the harmful choices people make, why healing involves our mind, body, spirit, and relationships, and how therapy and faith can work together rather than compete with one another.
The conversation then turns toward understanding trauma itself—including the experiences we often dismiss because they don't seem "bad enough" compared with someone else's story.
In this episode, you'll hear:
- How childhood trauma can shape identity, relationships, and our understanding of God
- Why Gina once believed, "I believed in God, but I wasn't sure He believed in me"
- How people-pleasing and survival strategies can develop in childhood
- Why God's character should not be confused with the harmful choices people make
- How Gina began learning that God could be trusted
- Why emotional health and spiritual health cannot simply be separated
- How faith and trauma-informed therapy can work together
- The difference between a traumatic event and the trauma that remains afterward
- How "little-t" trauma can accumulate over time
- What it means to be "parentified" or "spousified" as a child
- Why comparison can keep us from acknowledging our own wounds
- A practical first step when you begin recognizing unhealthy patterns from your past
One of the most important reminders from this conversation:
You can't heal something you refuse to name.
Your story doesn't have to look like someone else's for it to matter. Healing can begin when we become curious about what happened, what we came to believe because of it, and what God might want to restore.
And this is only Part One.
In Part Two, Megan and Gina go deeper into generational trauma: how patterns get passed from one generation to the next, how trauma affects our brains, bodies, and relationships, and what it looks like to intentionally break unhealthy cycles.
Connect with Gina Birkemeier
- Book: Generations Deep: Unmasking Inherited Dysfunction and Trauma to Rewrite our Stories Through Faith and Therapy
- Specialties: Trauma, generational trauma, family patterns, faith-integrated counseling
- Website: ginabirkemeier.com
- Instagram: @myoutloudvoice
Connect with Megan
- Website: meganbnilsen.com
- Social: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
- Grab the Book: Untangled Faith+Companion Journal
- Free Gift: 30-Day Grace + Truth (Daily) Devotional
- Book a free discovery call to see if Kingdom Life Coaching could help you unlock your next right step!
