Life & Work with Carmen Serano-Gingles of Sherman Oaks

Today we’d like to introduce you to Carmen Serano-Gingles.

Hi Carmen, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I often say I’ve lived several chapters in one lifetime. I began my career as an actor, earning my SAG card in the New Line Cinema film Next Friday, and later appearing in projects including recurring roles on Breaking Bad and Marvel’s Runaways.

Acting has always given me a meaningful way to explore the complexity of human emotion through storytelling. I’ve been especially drawn to portraying complex characters who reflect the hardships we all face in life. One example was the role of Roberta in the short film Roberta’s Rules, a character navigating love, family, and profound loss. The performance was later honored with several Best Actress awards, which felt incredibly humbling.

Alongside my acting career, I’ve also been on a long personal journey of healing and self-discovery. Like many people, my life has included both beautiful successes and painful chapters that required deep inner work to understand and transform. One of the most meaningful outcomes of that journey was learning how to truly love and accept myself — something that didn’t come naturally to me earlier in life.

Over time, the process of healing and transforming pain into something meaningful through storytelling, creativity, and self-expression became a central theme in my life’s work.

Today I work as a trauma-informed life coach, writer, and creative focused on helping people reconnect with themselves and transform their pain into meaning, growth, empowerment, and beauty.

I’m currently writing a memoir titled The Beauty Between the Breaks, which explores how the most difficult moments in our lives can become portals to healing and self-discovery. The project is also evolving into a creative collaboration with artists and healers of color who, in their own ways, have transformed pain into beauty through their work — including my daughter, Nya Serano, a painter whose art explores similar themes of healing and emotional truth.

At the heart of everything I do is the belief that when we learn to hold our stories with compassion, the broken pieces of our lives can become something unexpectedly beautiful — not just for ourselves, but for the people our stories might help along the way.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. Like many people, my life has included both beautiful moments and very painful chapters. For a long time I carried wounds from my past that shaped the way I saw myself and the world around me. At one point, everything I thought I understood about my life seemed to fall apart, and I found myself navigating deep trauma that left me struggling with anxiety and PTSD.

Rebuilding from that experience required a great deal of honesty and inner work. I had to confront parts of my past that I had spent years trying to outrun and slowly learn how to rebuild my life from the inside out.

A career in acting also comes with its own set of challenges. It’s an industry where you’re constantly being evaluated, and it can be easy to tie your sense of worth to the approval of others. One of the most important lessons I’ve had to learn is that how you see yourself matters far more than how anyone else sees you. Developing a deep sense of self-acceptance became essential — not only for my personal healing, but for sustaining a creative life.

Creative work itself requires vulnerability. Whether through acting or writing a memoir, putting your work into the world means allowing yourself to be seen in a very honest way. Sharing parts of your story that once carried pain, vulnerability, or even shame can be incredibly challenging, but it’s also where some of the most meaningful connection happens.

In many ways, those challenges helped shape the work I do today. They pushed me to slow down, look inward, and transform my own experiences into something meaningful. That journey ultimately became the foundation of my work as a trauma-informed coach and writer.

Today, when I speak about healing or support others in their own journeys, I’m not speaking from theory — I’m speaking from lived experience. And I believe that honesty is what allows people to feel seen, understood, and less alone.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My work lives at the intersection of storytelling, healing, and creative expression. As an actor, writer, and trauma-informed life coach, I’m deeply interested in how our life experiences — especially the painful ones — can become sources of growth, meaning, and connection. Through my coaching work, I support people who are navigating their own healing journeys, helping them reconnect with themselves, develop self-compassion, and move toward a deeper sense of self-love and wholeness. Much of what I share comes from my own lived experience and the inner work I’ve committed to over many years.

Many people know me from my recurring role as Principal Carmen Molina on the Emmy-winning show Breaking Bad, but in my coaching and creative work I’ve become known for approaching healing through honesty, storytelling, and lived experience. I’ve always believed in telling the truth about my own journey, even when it reveals my imperfections, because that kind of openness reminds people that healing and growth are not a destination to be reached, but an ongoing journey and process for all of us.

What sets my work apart is that I’m not teaching from theory alone — I’m sharing what I’ve learned from walking my own healing path. I believe we don’t have to be perfect or fully “arrived” in order to support others. I’m still learning, still growing, and still evolving, and I think that honesty is what allows people to trust the work.

One of the things I’m most proud of is my commitment to continuing that growth, both personally and professionally. The inner work I’ve done over the years has shaped not only my career, but also the way I try to show up in my personal life. I’m incredibly proud of the role I continue to grow into as a mother and wife. My children have taught me as much about humility, accountability, and love as anything else in my life, and I try to model for them what it looks like to take responsibility, keep learning, and continue healing.

As a creative, storytelling has always been central to how I process and understand the world. Acting allowed me to explore human emotion through characters, and writing has become another powerful way to reflect on life’s deeper truths.

One of the projects I’m most excited about right now is my forthcoming memoir, The Beauty Between the Breaks. The book explores how the difficult chapters of our lives can become portals to healing and transformation.

Beyond the book itself, my hope is to bring this work into the community through storytelling, creative collaboration, and shared healing spaces that invite people to reflect on their own journeys. I want people to see that the painful experiences they’ve lived through don’t have to define them. There is often unexpected beauty, wisdom, and growth waiting to be discovered in the spaces between the breaks.

Ultimately, my hope is that when people encounter my work, they feel seen, understood, and reminded that even the most painful experiences in life can be transformed into something meaningful.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I’ve come to realize that taking risks has simply been part of how I move through life. I’ve always been curious about the world and willing to try things, even when I didn’t know how they would turn out. I tend to learn through experience — by exploring, making mistakes, and growing from them.

That instinct has been with me since I was a child. I was the little brown, audacious kid organizing neighborhood adventures and knocking on doors to see which families might let us swim in their pools. Looking back, I can see that I’ve always been someone willing to put myself out there, no matter what the outcome.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t grow up in an environment that encouraged big risks or creative careers. Most people in my family worked practical, stable jobs. No one worked in the arts, and pursuing a career in entertainment was not the obvious path — especially after I became a mother at sixteen, the same age my own mother was when she had me.

When my son was born with cerebral palsy, my focus shifted to caring for him and making sure he had opportunities I hadn’t had growing up. As a child I had dreamed of becoming an actor myself, but those dreams felt far away while I was navigating the responsibilities of young motherhood.

When my son was three years old and showed an interest in entertainment, I took him to a modeling agency in hopes that he might be represented. Unexpectedly, they decided to sign both of us. That moment became the doorway to a career I never could have planned.

Experiences like that taught me something important: sometimes the very things that seem like obstacles become the paths that lead us forward.

Choosing to pursue acting after that was certainly a risk. It’s an industry filled with uncertainty and constant evaluation, and you quickly learn that your sense of worth cannot be built on the approval of others.

Over the years I’ve taken many different kinds of risks — starting businesses, designing and building my own home, and creating my own skincare line. After the end of an eighteen-year marriage and losing much of what I had built, I found myself beginning again in many ways. One of the greatest risks, and greatest joys, was choosing to open my heart again and marry my best friend, writer and director Terry Gingles, in 2023.

Soon after, we made another leap together. We stepped away from our normal routines and spent a year traveling abroad on a modest budget. We documented the experience on our YouTube channel, Nomadic Journey with Carmen and Terry, with the hope of showing that world travel can be accessible and meaningful for people of color, even when resources are limited.

That season of exploration deepened the foundation of our marriage and gave us the space to reflect on our lives, our work, and the direction we wanted to move toward.

Writing my memoir, The Beauty Between the Breaks, has been another meaningful risk. Sharing personal stories and being vulnerable in a public way requires a great deal of courage, but I believe those moments of honesty are where real connection happens.

What I’ve learned over time is that growth almost always requires some form of risk — whether it’s stepping into a creative path, telling the truth about your story, or choosing to transform pain into something meaningful. Many of the most meaningful things in my life have come from moments when I was simply willing to try.

Pricing:

• $150 per hour coaching session
• Sliding scale options available
• Donations to The Beauty Between the Breaks project support the development of the memoir and help fund pro-bono & sliding scale coaching for those who cannot afford services: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-beauty-between-the-breaks-a-memoir

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carmenserano
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nomadicterryandcarmen
• Other: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-beauty-between-the-breaks-a-memoir

Image Credits
Damu Malik
Carell Augustus