A lot of you have known me for more than twenty years as the guy who built and led big systems at Microsoft and Amazon. What most people don’t know is that I grew up with a perfect 10 on the ACEs test and spent much of my life inside high-control, performance based religion. I was designing global technology while the system inside my own body was still trying to survive.
I never really talked about what that actually cost me.
I’m talking now.
The book traces a nervous system shaped by early chaos that walked into church looking for safety and found an almost perfect mirror of what it already knew: love that could vanish, belonging you had to earn, fear dressed up as devotion.
It’s about how survival responses got mislabeled as sin, how the body spoke truths we were told to ignore, and how we eventually come home to the wiring we were convinced was defective.
Working title: Outsourced.
I’m releasing the chapters raw as they’re written. No publisher yet. Just truth finding its way onto the page, one chapter at a time.
If any of this resonates, you can read the chapters as they drop at rosscharles.substack.com.
Or you can step straight into the healing side of the conversation at exvangelical.net, which points to the same work.
No pressure to read. I know this isn’t everyone’s story.
I’m still the same guy who will talk mysticism, rebuild your identity platform, or unpack quantum entanglement tomorrow.
I’m just finally telling the part I kept quiet for twenty years.
— Mike
