Chapter 29 - THE GIFT WRAPPED IN WRECKAGE

THE GIFT WRAPPED IN  WRECKAGE 

What if the life you’re living isn’t happening to you… but responding to you?

In this powerful episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica explores the idea that life isn’t random—it’s responsive. The patterns, setbacks, delays, and loops you keep finding yourself in? They may not be bad luck. They may be feedback.

Erica breaks down the concept of life as a structured system—a game with layers—and what it really means to understand how it works instead of feeling stuck inside it. Through raw personal stories, hard-earned insight, and real-life examples, she walks you through the six levels that shape your reality: physical, mental, energetic, archetypal, collective, and source.

This episode is about:

•  Why you keep repeating the same patterns (and how to break them) 
•  The difference between reacting to life vs. understanding it 
•  How awareness changes everything 
•  What self-sabotage really is—and why it’s not your fault 
•  How to shift from survival mode into true alignment 

This isn’t about “thinking positive” or forcing change.
 It’s about seeing the game clearly… so you can finally play it differently.

If you’ve ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, or like you’re doing everything right but nothing is changing—this episode will open your eyes.

Because once you understand the structure…
 you stop feeling trapped.
 You start seeing patterns.
 And you realize—you were never powerless.

This episode is also a deeply personal reflection—dedicated to Erica’s journey, her family, and the moment she chose to take her life back after believing it was over.

If you’re in a dark place right now, hear this:
 There is a way forward.
 You are not broken.
 And your story is not finished.

This episode is part of the Chickology podcast collective—Real Women. Real Stories. Real Transformation.

🌸 About Chickology™
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✨ Join the Movement
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💫 Because when women rise together, we change the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if the thing that shattered you was actually sent to save you? What if your worst chapter, the one you can barely talk about, the one that dropped you to your knees, was actually the exact thing the universe needed to do to get you out of the wrong life and into the right one. Because here is what I know to be true. And I know it not from a book and not from a therapist's office, but from actually living it. The moments that broke me the most completely were also the moments that rebuilt me into someone that I actually recognize, me, somebody that I actually respect. I came back to myself. The betrayal that cracked me open, the addiction that brought me to my knees, and the marriage that ended. At the time, every single one of those things felt like proof that my life was falling apart. And it was. It was falling apart so it could fall into place. That's not toxic positivity. This is not a coffee mug quote. There's actual science behind what happens to us when we walk through the fire and come out on the other side. And today we're gonna get into all of that. But more than that, I want to talk to you about how you can start to rewrite the way you see the hard things while you're still in the middle of them. Because that's the shift. That one single shift is perspective, and it's everything. Stay with me. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again. Because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. I'm Erica, and this is my story, told one chapter at a time. Not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the power that was buried beneath it. I share it boldly because I know I'm not the only one. Too many of us carry stories like mine of trauma, silence, survival, and shame alone. But healing isn't just about surviving what hurt us. It's about becoming the people we were meant to be, how we can transform pain into purpose and rebuild a life on our own terms that shows what is possible when we rise to the strongest version of ourselves. If you hear yourself in my words, know this. You're not crazy, you're not broken, and you're definitely not alone. This podcast is a part of Chickology. Real women, real stories, and real transformation. We're here to break cycles, rise higher, and create lives that radiate power, purpose, and passion. So if you've walked through hell and you're ready to grow, evolve, and rebuild, then stay with me. There's hope here, there's healing here, and there's an army of us rising with you. Now, let's begin. Hi guys, welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again. This is Erica, and I just wanted to take a second to say thank you, genuinely. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of this community that we are building together. Because this is not just a podcast. This is a reflection of my soul and my life. And it's something that I genuinely want to give back to people because, you know, people probably get sick of hearing me say it, but I am truly, truly happy. I have never been this happy. I have never been this whole. And there was a time that I literally thought my life was over. I tried to end my life and I almost died from addiction. And I came back from such a place of brokenness. So I know of which I speak, right? This is a gathering of people who have decided that they are done being held down by the weight of what life threw at them. People who are choosing, like myself, like you, every single day to elevate, to move towards something more whole, more creative, and more alive in body, in mind, and in spirit. That is who you are. If you are here, it's who I am. And I don't take that lightly. And I really value the fact that you're taking this journey with me and that you choose to spend your time with me. So welcome and I thank you. And if this podcast, by the way, has meant something to you or you're enjoying it, I would be so grateful if you would just take a couple of minutes, wherever you're listening right now, whatever platform, leave us a star rating and a review. It genuinely helps make a difference on the algorithm so it can get recommended to more people. I'd love to see the growth happen there, and it's gonna get these conversations into the ear of people who need them. So if you've got a moment, uh you're you're helping other people, please do that, and it helps me too. So thank you. Okay, so before we get into today's subject, I want to get into my challenge of the week. And I'm trying to keep it real with you always, and this week I am in it, you guys. I am gonna be finishing up a nine straight days of work, and we're not talking short days, you guys. My days sometimes they're supposed to be, you know, seven and a half, eight hours, but they get pushed nine, nine and a half, even ten. And I'm on my feet in a high volume retail sales environment, a lot of pressure, performing, selling. And I mean, I really need to show up fully for that job, fully, fully. And on top of that, I'm running my life, and I think it's a pretty busy one. I'm usually up at 4, 4:30, walking my dog, getting to the gym. I'm doing my Amazon content for my uh side hustle. I do my peptide protocol, the shots, all my supplements, the whole stack. That takes a lot of time. And I'm doing all of this before I walk in for a shift that doesn't end. And I usually get home about 10:30 at night based on my schedule now. So when I come home to go to bed, I'm exhausted. And then I get up and I do it all over again the next day. And then days off, I'm doing what we all do, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, right? So my life is nonstop. What I want to be honest about in my challenge is that level of discipline, it is something that I'm proud of at almost 56 years old. I'm impressed with myself sometimes that I can do it, but I'm also human. And this week the challenge was not some big dramatic thing. It was just fucking holding it all together, keeping the structure, not letting exhaustion make decisions for me. Last night I got home, I had an 8:30 to 4 shift, and I went straight home and I literally drove up to my house and I felt myself like ready to fall asleep as I pulled up. It's exhaustion just hit me. And I was also starting to feel sick. I, you know, felt like my throat was a little sore and a little scratchy voice. I literally fell asleep by like 5:30. I got up around 7:30 long enough to eat something because my body was like, okay, eat something. I took a shot of thymosa alpha one and a little bit of uh GHKCU because I could feel my throat, you know, took a couple of ginger lemon shots that I make, you know, and keep in my fridge. I wasn't gonna let that take hold. And then I went right back to sleep. And I think I slept like 13, 14 hours. And you know what? I feel good today. I woke up and I was able to do my morning routine. I got to be to work in two hours and I'm recording my podcast. I'm not ashamed of that, right? My body is human and it is telling me exactly what it needs. And I listen. I listen without guilt. But this week's challenge for me and for you is can you hold the structure of your life together without losing yourself inside of it? Because sometimes I think that is the challenge for me. Sometimes all you can do is show up, uh, show up fully if you can and keep the discipline and keep the pace. You also have to know when it's time to surrender and rest because both of those things are part of the work and the grind is fucking forever and it never ends, you guys. It's never gonna end. The output and the recovery, man, you need them both. So that is my challenge of the week to us both. You know, stick with your discipline, do the best you can on any given week. And if you're in a season of full throttle like me, nonstop, non-stop, doing it all. I see you guys. Keep going. I feel that. And get rest and get sleep when your body screams for it. Do not ignore that. That's not weakness, that's wisdom. Okay. Let's get into today's episode. So I want to talk before we get into the episode about what sparked today's topic. I was gonna do something else on loneliness, but this really hit me because it came from a conversation that I had with a real person going through something really painful right now. Uh, someone that I know very well just found out that their partner of many years had been cheating on them. And the part that makes it more complicated is that deep down, I think they already knew. We had even talked about it, but the relationship had been sitting in this lukewarm in-between place for a long time. No real commitment, no real growth, but comfortable enough to stay. They knew each other, they had fun together, and that that comfortable, man, that is a powerful trap. Then the, of course, the truth comes out. And I don't think that person is shocked at all. I think that they're just standing at a precipice because it sucks to feel that way. Let's face it, it just fucking sucks. It hurts, right? But just kind of trying to make sense of all the emotions that are running through them. So when I talk to them, the first thing I wanted to say is the place that I have from the deepest place of personal experience, which is I know it doesn't feel like it right now, but this moment might be the best thing that ever happened to you. And of course, nobody wants to hear that when they're going through it. So you have to acknowledge, hey, you're human. I get it. This is how you feel. But that is the truth. If you you're gonna look back at one point, and honestly, I think you and I are gonna be having a different conversation because had you talked to me at the height of all my stuff, I would have been like, oh, woe is me, right? But looking back, I'm like, damn, if those things hadn't happened, I would not be where I am now. And because I was in that place, that specific kind of pain, that humiliation, the disorientation, the way your whole sense of reality shifts. And when you know the things that you feared, that little voice turned out to be true. And that's why we got to listen to those little voices, guys, because they usually are true. But I know how easy it is to get completely swallowed up by that emotion of it, to live inside that feeling until the feeling becomes the whole story. And what I've learned after a lot of life and after a lot of so-called disasters, is that these things turned into the biggest blessings that ever, ever happened to me. The first thing that I have to let myself do when I'm in a situation like that is we have to feel it. We have to feel all of it. We don't get to skip that part. That's the human part. But the next part is what I call doing a full Spock. If you remember Spock from Star Trek, he had no emotion, but he really did, but he didn't. But what he did do, the fact, even though he says he was suppressed that human side of him, that human side, which was the emotion, he had the bulk inside, which was just all logic. You we have to be able to separate the emotions from the facts because if we don't stop, the emotion will literally run us into the ground, run, run over us, run us flat. We have to look at the situation clearly, not the emotional part. We have to go into that Spock mode because when you're drowning in that feeling, you cannot see what the moment is trying to show you. Usually that does happen with retrospect anyway. What I reminded my friend and what I want to remind you guys today is this look back honestly at your own life and look at the things that felt unsurvivable at the moment, the losses, the betrayals, the endings, and ask yourself honestly how many of those things needed to happen and turned out to be the door that led you to something better. And for most people that I talk to, it's almost every single one. Obviously, if there's a tragic death or something like that, that is something that is more difficult and more complicated. But I do know people that have come out of horrible losses like that, and it turned into a mission which allowed them to help change others. So again, you know, not toxic positivity here, but the truth is the mind is going to believe what we tell it. And if we stick ourselves in a place of pure emotion, poor me, woe is me, that victim mode, man, guys, we got to turn it into the victor mode. And that is walking through the feelings, feeling those human feelings of emotion, pain. We have to feel those. We can't, you know, forget that part of it. But then we have to go into Spock mode and we have to look at the situation analytically as if we were a third party sitting completely unemotionally attached from the situation and the reality of what we are looking at. Very, very important. We have to carry that all inside of us. And the more I talk to women, whether it's through this podcast or my work or just in life, the more I realize that this is universal. This is something that all of us go through, and men too, of course. You know, most of us, we go through it completely alone, though, without any framework or any language for what's happening to us. So I'm gonna give you some language today because there is an actual, real, scientifically documented phenomenon called post-traumatic growth, PTG. And before you roll your eyes, guys, this is not the same as toxic positivity. This is not someone telling you to look on the bright side when your whole fucking world is going up in flames. This is literally the opposite of that. This is a science saying the breakdown is the mechanism, the collapse itself, that is the process. It has to happen for the growth to occur. My God, that is profound, right? Two psychologists, Richard Ted, I hope I'm saying this right, Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, coined this term back in the mid-90s. And what they found was that the people who actually endure real psychological struggle following adversity, not just hardship, like actual adversity, they don't often just bounce back. They come back different, they come back better, not in spite of what happened to them, because of it. I want you to sit with that for a second because that is really profound. But there is choice involved in the matter, guys. If you choose to stay in the victim mindset, why did this happen to me? This always happens to me. We all do that, right? We but we gotta step the fuck out of it and take ownership, and that is the that is the shift. There is a difference between resilience and post-traumatic growth. And I think that distinction matters. Resilience is like bouncing back, it's returning to who you were before the thing happened. PTG is something else entirely. That is when you come back beyond where you started. It is transformation. It is not just okay, I survived. It's fundamentally different. I would not trade who I am now for who I was before, even though I would never choose to go through that again. Guys, I have to say that. What I went through, the betrayal, the collapse of my marriage, the loss of the four love of my former life, as I call him, my former life, it was catastrophic for me. It triggered my addiction, it triggered depression, suicide attempts. Even my kids and my family members, nobody thought I was going to make it out alive, but there was a shift. And I look back at the reality of that marriage where I was financially secure, I wasn't gonna have to worry about retirement, you know, had all of these things. I was covered and into the place that I'm now where shit, my certainty is like any given paycheck. I'm saving and everything, but I don't have that security anymore. And I will never marry again, I can tell you that. We've talked about that in former podcasts. I'm just too damn happy with my own life and and what I'm doing. But guys, make no mistake, I work hard for it and I live paycheck to paycheck, just like most of us do. Um, there's some savings involved. Yes, I get to travel and I get to do things, but it is a balancing act. But I would not change that for anything, and certainly not for the life that I had before. I would never go back. Does that resonate with anybody? Because, you know, that is my entire story. Think about the worst thing that's ever happened to you. Not a bad day, not a rough patch. I mean, the thing, the one that you thought was going to end you, one that, you know, you genuinely did not know how you were gonna get to the other side. And I've had a few of those guys that alcoholism, the end of my marriage, you know, watching everything that I thought my what my life was supposed to look like, it just dissolved. And then in those moments, you know, I could not see anything on the other side. There was no gift, there was no lesson, there was just pain. I felt sorry for myself. It was raw, humiliating, disorienting. It took the life out of me. And I, it's important to say because it's not about rushing past that pain. It's not about pretending it didn't hurt. I mean, shit, I wallowed in it. It absolutely hurt. It broke me open, but the breaking, that is the point. Those scientists, Tajesky and Calhoun, they describe it like a seismic earthquake. Think about that metaphor. An earthquake doesn't just shape the ground, it fundamentally restructures the landscape. The things that were underground come to the surface and everything gets moved around. And the things that were built on unstable foundations, they fall. And what gets rebuilt after that has to be built differently. It has to be built stronger with some earthquake proofing because now you know what the ground feels like when it moves. And that's what trauma does. It shatters your assumptions about the world, about your world, about yourself, about what you thought your life was supposed to look like, about who you are, who you were. And that shattering, that is as much as it sucks, that's where you get to rebuild. Sometimes you're forced to rebuild, but when you do, you actually do the work. And what gets built is more authentically you than anything that came before it. This is how I operate. You know, when something happens to me now, when a door slams in my face, when something I wanted doesn't work out, when there's resistance, my first instinct is no longer to collapse or get sad about it. My first instinct is to get curious. I want to understand the circumstances, I want to look at the facts and I want to remove all emotion. Not because emotion isn't valid, but it does not help. I acknowledge stings. If it's something that's really painful, I do allow myself to feel it, but very quickly I go spock. I start to separate the sting from the facts. I don't live in that pain. I observe it almost as a third party. And then I ask, okay, you know, what is this showing me? You know, what attachments did I have attached to it? What is this redirecting me towards? And sometimes I don't know where it's redirecting me. You know, that what's on the other side of that closed door, I have no idea, but I trust because history has shown me in my life that these moments, these shakeups are the best things that could happen to me. And so I just go with them. And that shift going from victim to victor, that's not, you know, mindset fluff. That actually has a name in psychology too. It's called cognitive exploration. And research suggests that it's a major driver of post-traumatic growth. It's this ability to genuinely get curious about confusing or painful situations and to approach them with flexibility rather than rigidity. To ask, what does this mean instead of asking, why is this happening to me? And I said to my friend, I look back now and I can say, what happened to me at the time, I could see it was actually happening for me now. That's the shift. So the victim energy asks, why me? Where the victor energy says, what now? That sounds a little too simple, especially when we're going through it. It's work, I know that. It is that daily, intentional, sometimes excruciating work to walk through that pain and to be able to separate ourselves. Because your brain goes default into victim mode. It just will because you're overrun by your emotions. Your nervous system is wired to protect you from threat, and pain feels like a threat. It is a threat. So it's going to want to contract, to protect, and to catastrophize. And you have to consciously override that. You have to train yourself to pivot. And it is a training mechanism. You gotta pivot. My alcoholism at the time, it was the thing I was the most ashamed of. I tried to hide it. Of course, I didn't hide it very well in time, but it was the thing that kind of defined me as broken. My marriage also defined me as broken when it fell apart. One day I woke up and I realized that I was sitting in front of a microphone and talking openly about it and helping other people change their lives. Now, I would have laughed you out of the room had you told me that I would be doing that in the heart of the whole situation. No way, but because it was my shame and my secret. But man, guys, here's what I know now. Looking in retrospect, that chapter of my life, that messy, painful, humiliating, horrible, catastrophic chapter, was the chapter that taught me what I was actually made of. I am pretty fucking unbreakable. That's where I found out that I had not just a backbone, but a backbone. That's where I stopped the performing version of my life and I actually started living the life that I wanted. Not the life that was assigned to me, not the life that my ex-husband controlled because you know he controlled the finances and he was the head of the household. No, I'm living my life, and I could not have gotten here without going through all of the things that I did. My marriage ending, that was the same deal. I was so devastated. I thought it was my ultimate failure. I felt like I would never recover. And I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Now I look at that as one of the greatest gifts of my life because it forced me into myself again. It forced me to figure out who Erica actually is and what I want and what I'm capable of. And the answer is I am capable of and I want so much more than I ever would have discovered had I stayed in that situation. Victor Frankel, who was a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, he wrote about this. He talked about how the one thing that could not be taken from him was his ability to choose his response to his circumstances. That is the kind of essence of what we're talking about here today. We don't always get to choose what happens to us, but we absolutely get to choose what we do with it. That's the whole game. That's it. Now, research shows that somewhere around two-thirds of trauma survivors experience some level of post-traumatic growth. Here's what's interesting: the people most likely to experience post-traumatic growth are the ones who approach uh approach challenges rather than avoid them, the ones who lean into the discomfort instead of numbing or running out from it. That's what I was doing with the alcoholism. I was numbing and running away from the whole situation, and I had to switch that. And that's critical because a lot of us, especially women who've been through real trauma, we are trained to cope by avoiding. We use alcohol, we use food, relationships as distraction, staying busy, another great distraction. So we never have to sit with the pain. I think we all do that to a certain extent. We can see that in our own lives. All the beautiful ways we've learned not to feel the thing. We've learned all these things. I'm not judging because God knows that has literally been my life. And sometimes I even still catch myself doing that with certain things. But the truth is that avoidance is what walks growth. Growth lives on the other side of the thing that you're avoiding. And you gotta face it. Uh, something else that research keeps pointing to, and I think it's beautiful, is that women are actually more likely to experience post-traumatic growth than men. Isn't that something? Like we are literally wired for this. We are built for transformation. Our biology, our emotional processing, our willingness to reflect and be in a community. It's actually our superpower when it comes to rising from the ashes. We weren't designed to stay in the fire. We were designed to be forged by it. So here's what I want you to walk away with today. I want you to think about the thing in your life that happened to you that you're still calling the worst thing that ever happened to you. Maybe it's something that you've carried for years. It could be current. Maybe it's something you've never spoken out loud, something uh that's been hidden. And I want you to ask yourself, what if that isn't the end of my story? What if that chapter, this is the chapter right before everything changes? And if I'm not facing it, what do I need to do to live out loud to make those changes and so I can transform? What if that door that just slammed in your face is the universe's way of rerouting you or that horrible thing that happened to you is the universe's way of getting you to look in a different direction because you were on the wrong path. And what is on the other side of that redirect is something that you could not have ever imagined or asked for. Uh, guys, I am not telling you to be happy about the pain, and I'm not telling you to rush past it or to pretend it isn't real. That actually is gonna stand in our way. We need to feel all of it, and it could be a daily thing. Maybe you fall apart and then you're like, okay, now I'm going into Spock mode. And once you felt every bit of it and you've had your cry, when you're ready, you're gonna shift and you're gonna ask those questions and you're gonna stop asking why this happened to you, and you're start asking what it could be preparing me for. Because I promise you, and I don't say it lightly, guys, every single thing in my life that I thought would break me permanently, that did break me at the time, every single closed door, every period of darkness, every single loss, every bit of depression, everything. It brought me here. I have never been more whole, more clear, happier, more joyful, more at peace with who I am. Do I have issues and struggles in my life? Of course. But look at life so much differently than I ever did before. I'm so at peace with who I am. The breakdown was always on the way to be the breakthrough for me, and I see that now. You just have to be willing to walk through it. The gift is wrapped in the wreckage. Don't throw it away before you open the gift because I promise you, every single thing that happened to you is the universe's way, God's way, if you're a religious person, of lining you up. And if you keep going back to the same things that broke you, then it becomes your fault because you are being shown clearly. I am not meant to be here. Okay, this sucks, it hurts. It changes everything that I thought that I was, everything, the direction I thought what my life was gonna take. And this is where we gotta fucking get resilient. Brush off the dust, get up, and keep moving. And if you don't have an answer right away, that's okay, because it's gonna come. Just be watching for it. Thank you so much for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you're walking through your own fire right now, know this you are not too broken, you are not too late, and you are never ever alone. This is Burn It Down and Begin Again. I'm Erica, and I'll see you in the next chapter.