Chapter 36 - What If Your Worst Trait Is Actually Your Greatest Gift?

What If Your Worst Trait Is Actually Your Greatest Gift?

The Wound Is the Door: How Your Greatest Weakness Becomes Your Greatest Strength

What if the thing you've spent years hiding, apologizing for, or trying to overcome was never actually the problem?

In this powerful episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica explores one of the most transformative ideas in personal growth: the possibility that your greatest weakness may actually be your greatest source of strength. Drawing from her own journey through alcoholism, depression, divorce, healing, and reinvention, she shares how the very experiences that once filled her with shame became the foundation for her purpose, resilience, and ability to help others.

Through the wisdom of Carl Jung, Brené Brown, Rumi, post-traumatic growth research, and real-life examples, Erica breaks down why our deepest wounds often contain our greatest gifts. From people-pleasing and sensitivity to isolation, overgiving, and emotional pain, she reveals how the traits we often criticize in ourselves can become our superpowers when we learn to understand and direct them.

If you've ever felt broken, damaged, too much, or not enough, this episode will challenge the story you've been telling yourself and offer a new perspective on your healing journey.

Because the goal isn't to erase your scars.

It's to discover the strength they created. 

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Transcript

0:00

What if the thing that broke you, the thing that you spent years trying to hide, outrun, or apologize for, was never actually your weakness? What if it was the point? My mom used to tell me, your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength. I thought that was just something moms say to make you feel better about falling apart. But it turns out she was right. And psychology, neuroscience, and some of the most brilliant minds in human behavior have been saying the exact same thing for a long time. The wound isn't the problem, the wound is the door. Stay with me, because we're going to talk about this today. It's an important one. 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 women we were meant to be, how we can transform pain into purpose and rebuild life on our own terms to show 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 part of checkology, real women, real stories, and real transformation. We're here to break cycles, rise higher, and create lives that radiate power, purpose, and passion. If you've walked through hell and you're ready to grow, evolve, and rebuild, then stay with me. There's healing here, there's hope here, and there's an army of us rising with you. Now, let's begin. Hi guys, it's Erica. Welcome back. And if you are new here, welcome, welcome. I just want to say I'm so glad you found this place. This place is a place for healing, exploration. We talk about all kinds of things here: manifestation and what it means to grow mentally, physically, and spiritually. And most importantly, reclaiming our lives as women. This podcast is for anyone. Anybody could listen to it, but it really is geared for women. Women are a source of amazing strength. And I believe that we need to celebrate each other and lift each other up as women. I see so many women that are just the backbones of their family. They have raised the kids when the husbands have left. They have conquered every battle and they leave nothing left for themselves. And sometimes they just don't know how to rebuild their life. That's where I was. I felt like I had given absolutely everything to a marriage and a family, and that marriage failed me. And unfortunately, because of my codependent habits that I had developed growing up, I really didn't know what identity looked like outside of my marriage. It caused me to crash and go into desperate alcoholism and depression. I did obviously recover from that. And this is the journey. I don't go back and beat on my ex-husband. And yeah, we had a rough marriage and he had his problems too. I'm great friends with my ex-husband today. I chose to forgive and I chose to move on, and he chose to forgive me too. I'm sure my alcoholism was not a walk in the park for him. There were extenuating circumstances on both sides, and I think that's a thing. For my kids, I made a decision to heal and to forgive and to try and have a relationship with him, and that has not failed me. It's been uh the best thing, honestly, for my kids that I could have done and for myself in a lot of ways, too. But more importantly, I figured out through this whole process who I was and that I literally could rebuild a life that I never dreamed of. And I'm actively doing that now. And I want you guys to know it's possible. I am a 56-year-old woman that is better and stronger than I have ever been. I have all kinds of things in the works. I'm working on a couple of side ventures, a business with my best friend, which we're gonna get into more next week. I'm actually gonna invite her onto the podcast to talk about. She'll be my first guest. Most of my podcasts are kind of monologues, right? But um it's just because I don't have the time to get guests and to like set that up. It's hard. But she's gonna be my first guest. One, because I want to talk about our friendship. I want to talk about her healing journey. She is an incredible woman. Uh, her name is Elise. You'll meet her next week. She just literally took healing to the next level. And I have nothing but absolute admiration for the kind of mother she is, her drive, her determination, her kindness, her empathy, her backbone. I mean, she's the whole, she's the whole deal and her intelligence. She's she's amazing, and I'm proud to call her my best friend. But we're gonna talk about our healing journey together, and then you already know my story, but we're gonna talk about her story. And then we're gonna talk about what her life looks like now and what she wants her life to look like. And then we're also gonna talk about our new business venture, which I'm super excited about. It was kind of born during my illness while I was sick. She came up with this idea, which I loved, that we would do kind of a travel and experience page based on our friendship and some of the things that we do because we've had a lot of adventures together. She named it uh Take Us With You Official. So we are live on TikTok and Instagram. We have a web page, we actually link to an Amazon account where we have lists of things for travel. For example, if you're going to Europe, what should I bring to Europe? Like, what are the things that I need? Electronics, suitcase, like what do I need for a trip? What does that look like? All kinds of stuff. And we have lists that you can click on for that. And then, of course, we do fun videos. We do videos on experiences. We're gonna do our first long series YouTube coming up soon, too. We've got that in the works. But anything from restaurants to experiences that we've been on, we post that. It's pretty exciting, and we've got a lot of followers in a short amount of time. So I invite you to look for us. We are on YouTube, we are on Instagram and TikTok under Take Us With You Official. At any rate, we're gonna do that next week. The whole point is not to plug the new venture, although it is exciting, but it is also bringing it home here. It's to show you that I my life did not stop. My alcoholism and my depression were so severe that I actually did try to take my life half-heartedly, albeit, but when I was at the worst of this, how can you do that, Erica? You're the mother to four kids. But when you're that far gone, you just don't see a way out. My apartment looked like a hoarder. I mean, God, I could paint a picture for you guys to a life that is super successful. I own my own home, I have a great job, I have an amazing relationship with my kids, and I love my life. And more importantly, I don't feel like I'm ending up. I feel like I'm starting out. So no matter where you are, the point is, you guys, you can get there. And I'm gonna provide information on the tools that I use, what I believe, books that I read, my thoughts on the whole thing. And this is a place where you can just listen like as if I'm a friend, which I am on the other end of this microphone. Even though we don't know each other, probably some of you I do, but I'm here. I'm here to show you it can be done and to be your cheerleader and also to be a realistic cheerleader, right? I'm not gonna blow smoke. I definitely am gonna speak truths, but I swear to God, it can be done. So that is the point of this podcast. And so I do hope you'll join me next week when I invite Elise to come on here and we're gonna have such a good time. If you're new, I want to welcome you and I'm really, really glad you're here. Real quick before we dive in, I have a quick ask. Whatever platform you're on, whether it be Apple or Spotify, iHeart, Amazon, do me a favor, give me a star rating and give me a comment. It would mean a lot, not because I need ego validation, but because I am looking to get this podcast to more people that need to hear it, and that's how the algorithm picks it up. So if you could do that, I would sure appreciate it. Maybe forward it to somebody that you think it might help. I appreciate that. Before I get started on today's episode, I want to talk about my challenge of the week. So if you guys have been following me, you know that I have been very ill. Now I am a very high-powered woman. I do live life going Mach 10 all the time. I've always got stuff that I'm doing, whether it be business ventures, working my job, going to the gym, my peptides, my health. I'm into it all. But in April, I got very, very sick and I just didn't get well. I ended up initiating a leave of absence and had this medical nightmare journey where nobody could really figure out what was up with me for a little bit. But I it turns out I was diagnosed with bronchitis, which turned into walking pneumonia, and then a fungal infection, which basically was preventing me from healing. And that is just born from airborne dust and stuff that where I live here in Las Vegas. Long story short, I've been off work for quite a bit. My energy is definitely coming back, but it is very nonlinear. In fact, I had an appointment with my pulmonologist yesterday, and I was just complaining to him. I go, what is happening? Like I have a great day, and then I crash for two days where I literally am non-functional. And he said, Erica, this is going around everywhere. These things are taking hold of people, and I am seeing so much the past two years, these respiratory illnesses. And he said, You had a particularly bad one because you had the bronchitis and the uh microplasma pneumonia and an undiosed fungal infection. You really had like a triple whammy, and it's taken people out for you know up to 12 weeks. And so that made me feel a little bit better because I'm going on, gosh, this happened in April and what, we're in June, the beginning of June. It made me feel very weak. Like, what is wrong with me? And he said, look, honestly, if it wasn't for your peptide schedule that you're on, your regime that you have with your vitamins and your exercise, you would have been hospitalized 100%. You like got through this like a champ. And so that made me feel better. But the truth is, my healing is nonlinear and it's super debilitating. The reason I'm not back at work where I would love to be, because nobody wants to be on LOA and you know, short-term disability, not making that much money, is because I can't go back to work. Literally, I'll have a great day. And what does that look like for me? Um, today's a great day. I walked my dog already, I got up, I did some dishes, loaded the dishwasher, I put in a load of laundry, am recording this podcast. And then honestly, after this, I'll probably take a nap. And this will happen throughout the day where I'll take a little half an hour cat naps or an hour, whatever I feel that I need. And I try and do a lot of busy work, work on videos for my side business, whatever. But that is all that I can muster. When I put in too much effort into a day, like if I just do too much, I literally crash. And sometimes I don't even have to do that much, I just crash anyway. And this is the nature, according to the pulmonologist, and from everything that I've read, of these respiratory illnesses that are happening now. Kind of non-preventable. I do believe that I really burned myself out because I am that person, and I know a lot of you are like that too. We just push forward as women because we got no choice. I got nobody else paying my bills, I got nobody else doing anything for me. This is it. I have to take care of my household, me and my household, and I have to be strong for my kids. I'm that way by nature anyway. I'm a pusher-througher. Because of that, it was kind of like what we're talking about today. Your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness, and your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength. What do I mean by that? We're gonna get into that now. But case in point, my greatest strength, my ability to push through and to persevere, is also my greatest weakness because it didn't allow me. I had blinders on where no matter how tired I was, and yeah, I felt tired. There were nights that I went home after a 10-hour shift and I thought, this is a lot for me. I pushed through it anyway. And the result was my immune system, even though I'm a very healthy woman, was weakened and I got sick. What we're talking about today, which is your greatest strength, can be your greatest weakness, and your greatest weakness, most importantly, we're gonna put that positive spin on there, can be your greatest strength. That's a very good example. I'm gonna give you another example of me. I am a recovered alcoholic, and for a long time, that was the thing that I was most ashamed of. It was the thing that felt like proof that I'm too broken to fix, too far gone to rebuild. My drinking, it didn't just affect me. I was super ashamed by the fact that it affected my kids, my relationships with my friends, my sense of who I even was. When it was at its worst, I genuinely did not recognize myself. When I got sober and started putting the pieces back together, I never expected to find the best version of me on the other side of all of that wreckage. I didn't think it was possible. Myself, the actual me, not the numbed-out version that was destroyed by a toxic marriage, not the version that was performing all the time to hold it together for somebody else, but just me, right? And because I walked through that, I know exactly what it feels like to be completely undone and to have to rebuild from zero. I can sit with someone in their darkest moment and not flinch. I don't panic. I don't try to rush them through it. I don't offer bumper sticker advice. That is not something that you can manufacture that directly came from the worst chapter of my life. That weakness became a weapon. So let me give you a few other examples that might hit closer to home for a lot of you because I realize that not all of you are raging alcoholics. The people pleaser. You know who you are. You say yes when you mean no. Does that sound familiar? You shrink yourself so that other people feel comfortable. And you've probably spent years being told or telling yourself that you're a pushover, that you let people walk all over you, you know, that need to grow a backbone. That's the inner dialogue. But here's what's also true about you. You can read people like a book. You can walk into the room, you can feel the energy before a single word is spoken. You know intuitively when somebody is hurting, even when they're performing fine, you can feel it. You're wired for attunement, meaning that you are naturally tuned in to the emotional frequency of the people around you. That is a rare and genuinely powerful, beautiful thing. Your problem was never the sensitivity. The problem was the absence of boundaries to protect it. The second a people pleaser does the work, figures out where they end and where other people begin, they become one of the most emotionally intelligent, effective, connected humans in any room. The weakness was always the gift. They just needed to put a fence around it, right? Okay, here's another one. The person who can't say no. Similar energy, slightly different flavor. You overcommit, you spread yourself thin, you end up exhausted and resentful and wondering how you ever got here. Classic pattern, guys. Most of us have lived some version of this. I know I have. What is underneath that inability to say no? Usually it's a genuinely huge capacity for generosity, a desire to contribute. People who can't say no are more reliable than most humans in someone's life. Those are the ones that actually show up, who follow through, who don't disappear when things get inconvenient. Once that person learns that saying no selectively actually protects their yes, once they understand that generosity becomes sustainable, once they understand that boundaries aren't walls, they're filters, that is someone people trust with their actual problems. So the weakness was always generosity without a container. Here's another one: the person who isolates. When things get hard, you go quiet, you pull back, you stop answering texts, you disappear into yourself, and the world outside gets very small, very fast. Isolation can become a trap that's really hard to climb out of. But what's actually happening in that stillness, you are processing, you're going inward. The people who know how to go inward, when they come back out, they come back with clarity, perspective, a depth of self-awareness that people who never slow down simply don't develop because they're so busy. The introver that gets pathologized as antisocial or avoidant is often just an inner life that runs very deep. The work is learning not to let the stillness become permanent, to use retreat intentionally and then bring back what you found out in that little period of hibernation. When that person figures that out, they are often the most grounded, thoughtful, clear-eyed person in any group. The weakness was depth without direction. Give it direction and it becomes wisdom. Do you see the pattern? The weakness and the strengths are not opposite, living on different ends of the spectrum. They are the exact same thing, pointed in different directions, same trait, different relationship to it. And that is what my mom was trying to tell me. So my mom was somebody who learned this by example. She was just a woman who had seen enough of life to understand something that takes most people decades to figure out. And she used to say it to me when I was struggling, when I felt whatever I was feeling or going through was too much. If I felt like I was too sensitive, I was too broken, too intense, too complicated. She would tell me, hey, your greatest weakness can become your greatest strength. And I remember thinking, oh, thanks, mom, you know, that's nice, but I didn't really get it. Because when you're in the middle of something that hard, oftentimes you can't philosophize. You're the one who's feeling everything so deeply. Your wound is exposed, it's open, and you are falling apart. It's hard to absorb that. What I didn't understand then, and what I want to unpack today, is that she wasn't telling me to spin my weakness into something positive so I'd feel better. She was telling me a great truth, something that is really true at a structural level. The same wiring that makes certain things hurt you more, the same wiring is what makes you capable of things that other people are not. It's actually your superpower. It is a fact. Science backs this up. There is a concept in psychology called post-traumatic growth. We've talked about this before. Post-traumatic growth is the documented phenomenon where people who go through significant adversity, they don't just recover. If they do the work, they actually come out operating at a higher level than before trauma, more resilient, more empathetic. They have more clarity about what actually matters, more capacity for meaningful connection. To Jeski and Calhoun, who developed this framework around post-traumatic growth in the 1990s, found that the struggle itself, wrestling with it and being forced to rebuild your worldview, that is where growth lives, not around it, through it, which means that your mess isn't a detour from your path. For a lot of us, myself included, it is the path. It's been my path. I can be a better mother, I can give better advice, I can be a more solid friend because of the troubles that I've had. Now there's a concept of the wounded healer, which basically goes back further than modern psychology, all the way to Carl Jung. The idea is that the healer's own wounds are not disqualifications. They're actually the source of the healer's power. And this is so true because someone who has been in the dark knows how to navigate it in a way that somebody who never has simply cannot. You've got the flashlight all of a sudden, right? And you can help other people out of the dark. Think about that in your own life. Who do you actually want to talk to when things fall apart? Somebody who has a perfect life, a cotton candy life, and you know, they've never really experienced that stuff, or somebody who can look at you and be like, yep, I know exactly what that feels like. I have been on the floor of the same room. There is no substitute for that. That's why alcoholics go into meetings, for example, with AA, because they need to be around other alcoholics. There's a science to that. You can't fake that. You can't study your way into that. You have to have had experienced it. You have to have lived it yourself. And that means you can walk through it with other people and help them get out of their pain and their mess. That means that your pain, it gave you access to a level of human connection and understanding that is genuinely rare. And that's not for nothing, guys. That is everything. But let's talk about the flip side when the wound becomes the wall. I gotta be honest, because this is not just a feel-good episode, and I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that everything painful is secretly a gift and you should just be grateful for your trauma. That's just not true, right? But the same thing that can be your greatest strength if you don't do the work will absolutely become your greatest liability. And so the whole thing that my mom used to tell me is, honey, your greatest weakness can become your greatest strength, and your greatest strength is often your greatest weakness. I'm I really didn't get that. I'm like, what? The person who feels deeply and never processes it doesn't become empathetic. They become reactive. The person who reads every room wrong because they're filtering everything through the lens of their old wounds, they become the person who pushes people away and genuinely can't figure out why they push people away. I know somebody like that. They become the person who self-sabotages the good things that show up, not because they're broken, but because the wound is still running the show and nobody ever taught them how to take the wheel back. Sensitivity that hasn't been worked through doesn't make you powerful. It makes you a live wire. And live wires don't connect with people, they shock them and drive them back, right? So the distinction my mom was saying or pointing at is everything. It is that the wound itself is neutral. It is what you do with it and what you learn from it and how you apply it through growth and really doing the work. That's where the story splits. One road is avoidance, numbing, and performing like you're fine, building walls that are high enough that nothing gets in and nothing gets out either. The other road is the one that I want to focus on today in this show. You go in, you look at it, you stop running from the version of yourself that got hurt, and you actually sit with her for a minute or two or 10 or a year, whatever it takes. You got to go through that process. That's where the alchemy happens. That's where the weakness becomes the weapon. I spent a significant part of my life feeling like I was unheard, too sensitive, too emotional, all of these things, all of my weaknesses, an alcoholic, I wasn't good enough. Oh, there was all things that I need to apologize for all the time. I spent my life basically feeling like there was something wrong with me. And what I know now is that the same sensitivity that I have is what makes me a good mother. My power is in my journey. My power is the fact that I actually walked through and Created something after understanding my journey. And that's hard, guys, recognizing, ooh, this journey hurts. You got to walk through the pain, right? You got to do the work. But that is what made this podcast possible. You cannot create something like this or really help people from a place of being untouched. You need the material, right? And the material came from the hard stuff. It's going to be the same thing in your life. You can turn your worst shit into your superpower. That's the truth. The things that I was the most ashamed of, the way I fell apart, that my marriage field, all the choices I made from a broken place, my alcoholism, the years I spent not understanding my own worth. I don't hide those. I turn that into something that I can share with people. And another great case in point, I have a friend named Annum who has gone through a lot in her life. I know she's gone through a divorce and a bunch of other stuff. And she made a community page on Facebook. I will, if I get her permission, I'll share it. I just wanted to mention it because I saw it today. I had dinner with her a couple of months back. She took her wound, her experience, and turned it into a way to help others, to open up a conversation, a place that women can step in and be like, that happened to me too, and share that with other women. That is incredibly brave, Autumn. Good for you. And you are doing what we need to do. We need to take the broken parts of our life, assimilate it, and turn it into a way that we can help the woman standing next to us. That is what it is all about. You know, Brene Brown talks about this extensively: the idea that vulnerability, which most of us were taught to suppress, is actually the birthplace of connection, creativity, and courage. I love Brene Brown. The research that she spent decades building lands in the same place my mom landed with me in one sentence. The wound faced and processed becomes the bridge. There is also a concept worth knowing called the redemptive narrative. We all have to have a narrative as a human being, whether it be I'm a loser and therefore my life is going to follow suit, or I'm a winner, whatever our interior dialogue is with ourselves, our inner dialogue, that is our narrative. It's a psychological pattern with where people frame their lives around their experiences. Specifically, where people reframe their lives around their hardest experience as a formative rather than purely destructive. That shows measurably better mental health outcomes, stronger relationships, and a greater sense of purpose. I have such a strong sense of purpose, and I did not have that before. Even as a mother, all of those things, this journey brought me home to the strongest, most kick-ass version of myself. Dan McAdams at Northwestern has studied this extensively in the context of identity and life story. The story that you tell yourself about your pain matters. Not because positive thinking is magic, but because your narrative shapes how you're going to move through the world and life. So if you're still telling yourself a story where the hard thing that happened to you is proof that you're damaged, that story is going to work against you and it will for the rest of your life until you change it. You have to change it. The rewrite isn't denial. The rewrite is this happened, it was real, it really cost me something, but it also made me something. Both things are true. You gotta hold both. My mom gave me that line: your greatest weakness can be your greatest strength. And I did carry it for years without really understanding what she was pointing at. And it took me burning a lot of shit to the ground before I could look back and actually see it. She wasn't telling me to pretend that the hard stuff was fine. She wasn't like doing toxic positivity. She was telling me to stop treating myself like I was the defective one. Right there. Stop treating yourself like you're the defective one. You're not. Your scars, your weaknesses that you think are weaknesses. Really look at it, write it down on paper. Even things like alcoholism and depression and things you think, well, what's the redeeming quality in that? Everything, guys, is what you make it. Rumi, one of my absolute favorite. I've got Rumi all over my house. He was a 13th-century Persian poet. He was a Sufi mystic, and he's been dead for what, 800 years now? He was so profound. He wrote something that I think is probably the most precise way to say what my mom was saying in one sentence. The full version goes like this someone asks him about pain and sorrow, and he doesn't say it'll get better. What he says is the wound is the place where the light enters you. Right there, you guys. The wound is the place where the light enters you. I've got this all over my house because it's true. That is the whole instruction. Not to fix it, not to reframe it in a way that basically makes you out to be the villain, not to perform your way around it, but you got to stay. And you gotta stay and do the work because staying, walking through that pain, feeling that pain is where the shift happens. Whatever you've been running from, whatever you've been managing and medicating and just keeping just far enough away that you don't have to fully face it. I'm not saying to go blow up your life and you know try to excavate every single wound you've ever had. But what I am saying is when it shows up for you and it's there, do not be afraid to walk through it. The thing you're most convinced is your liability is realistically one of the most powerful things, if not the most powerful thing, about you. You won't find that out until you stop treating it like a problem to be solved and start treating it like information worth understanding. You got to do the work for yourself. My mom was right. Ruby was right. And hopefully now you'll be able to apply this into your own life. Whatever it is, I suggest that you sit down with a simple notebook and write down what flaws, what things you think are standing in your way that have to do with your personality, things that you see as defects. And then I want you to try and apply what I've said today and look at it. Well, what is the core of that? We always have to ask, what is the core? What is the core emotion that's involved with that? What does it say about myself? For example, that people pleaser who can read a room, who understands what people are going through without anybody saying anything, you will find that your best quality, you can write that in a separate column, actually, your worst qualities and your best qualities, you can generally draw a straight line from your best qualities to the worst qualities, and you can see exactly how they correlate. That's actually a great exercise for you. Well, that's what I've got for you today. And something, a concept that really just started with what my mom sent, and I spent years not understanding, but I really feel like this is something that's applicable to anybody that's going through a hard time. And mostly I just want to remind you guys, you are not as fucking broken as you think. Believe me, you can turn it around no matter where you're at. You just have to commit to yourself doing the work and being fearless, guys. Healing is about being fearless, and that is what I will leave you with today. Don't be afraid, pluck up your courage, do it for yourself, do it for the people that love you. Get your big girl panties on and get out there and find the courage to face the things that you don't want to think about, that you have that psychological resistance to. And I promise you, you will find out the things that you hate the most about yourself, the things that you feel are your greatest weaknesses, will lead you to your greatest strengths. Thank you for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please don't stay in silence. 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.