Your Kids Are Watching: What Your Resilience Is Teaching Them.

In this deeply personal episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica shares something powerful and rarely talked about: our children are always watching — even when they’re grown.

This conversation weaves together menopause, exhaustion, resentment, work-life pressure, and the quiet battles no one sees… with a bigger truth about legacy. Not the money we leave behind — but the emotional blueprint we pass down.

Erica opens up about navigating midlife changes, migraines, demanding work schedules, and fluctuating energy — and how easy it is to slip into resentment when your body and life feel harder than they used to. But instead of pretending she’s floating through life enlightened, she tells the truth: resilience isn’t perfection. It’s showing up anyway.

More importantly, she reflects on what her children witnessed during her darkest years — addiction, collapse, rehab, divorce — and how what they remember most isn’t the fall… it’s the fight back.

In this episode, she explores:

• Why kids learn resilience from observation, not lectures
• The difference between trauma-dumping and emotional transparency
• How hiding your struggle can create confusion and shame in children
• Why repair matters more than perfection
• What your children will reach for when life knocks them to their knees
• How modeling recovery becomes generational wealth

Whether your children are five or fifty, they are absorbing how you handle stress, disappointment, failure, and growth. One day, when you’re not there to guide them, they will lean on what they watched you do.

This episode is about legacy — the kind built through honesty, repair, courage, and the willingness to rebuild when everything falls apart.

Burn It Down and Begin Again is part of the Chickology™ podcast collective — real women, real stories, real transformation.

You don’t have to be perfect.
You just have to keep rising.

🌸 About Chickology™
Chickology™ is more than a podcast brand — it’s a collective of strong, real women telling real stories. Together, we’re reclaiming our narratives, breaking cycles, and lifting one another up through truth, laughter, and raw conversations. Every show under the Chickology™ umbrella is created by women, for women, with love.

✨ Join the Movement
We’re always looking for bold voices and powerful stories. If you’re a woman ready to share your truth or host your own podcast with us, reach out! One honest truth at a time, we’re helping one isolated woman at a time feel less alone.

📍 Find Us

• Explore all Chickology™ podcasts at [Buzzsprout Podcast Directory link or Chickology website]
• Email us at: ChickologyPodcasts@gmail.com
  
  

💫 Because when women rise together, we change the world.

Chapter 20 - Was He a Narcissist—or Were We Trauma-Bonded? Inside a Narcissistic-Codependent Marriage (and How We Healed After Divorce)

What does it really feel like to live inside a narcissistic-codependent marriage—and what happens when the story you told yourself during the divorce starts to evolve?

In this deeply personal episode, Erica opens up about her marriage through a new lens: one shaped by sobriety, healing, and the hard-earned ability to tell the truth without needing a villain. She shares what abuse can look like when it’s not obvious at first—how control can masquerade as love, how your nervous system adapts to chaos, and how you slowly lose your sense of self without realizing it.

Erica also explores a question so many women are asking right now: Are they truly a narcissist… or are we using that label to make sense of pain that’s actually rooted in trauma, attachment wounds, and survival patterns? This isn’t a diagnosis. It’s an honest look at how childhood conditioning can shape adult relationships—and how healing can change what you see.

Most powerfully, Erica shares what her family looks like now: how she and her ex-husband learned to coexist as parents, how resentment became release, and how it’s possible (yes, really) to rebuild after an “impossible” divorce—without hatred.

If you’ve ever loved someone who felt safe one minute and terrifying the next… if you’ve struggled to reconcile love with harm… or if you’re wondering whether healing after divorce is even possible—this episode is for you.

Burn It Down and Begin Again is part of Chickology™ — Real Women. Real Stories. Real Transformation.

🌸 About Chickology™
Chickology™ is more than a podcast brand — it’s a collective of strong, real women telling real stories. Together, we’re reclaiming our narratives, breaking cycles, and lifting one another up through truth, laughter, and raw conversations. Every show under the Chickology™ umbrella is created by women, for women, with love.

✨ Join the Movement
We’re always looking for bold voices and powerful stories. If you’re a woman ready to share your truth or host your own podcast with us, reach out! One honest truth at a time, we’re helping one isolated woman at a time feel less alone.

📍 Find Us

• Explore all Chickology™ podcasts at [Buzzsprout Podcast Directory link or Chickology website]
• Email us at: ChickologyPodcasts@gmail.com
  
  

💫 Because when women rise together, we change the world.

Chapter 19 - “You’ve Always Had the Power, My Dear” — Reclaiming the Strength That Was Never Gone

In this powerful chapter of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica returns to a truth that changed everything for her — you have always had the power… you just had to learn it for yourself.

Through raw storytelling and lived experience, Erica explores the difference between performing strength and actually living in your power. She reflects on growing up in an environment where power was taken, silence was survival, and peace depended on appeasing others — patterns that quietly followed her into adulthood, marriage, and identity.

This episode unpacks how control doesn’t always look loud, how powerlessness can disguise itself as competence, and how losing yourself is often the painful doorway to finally finding yourself. Erica shares how trauma, codependency, addiction, and collapse stripped her down to nothing — and how rebuilding from the ashes taught her something no permission, approval, or “fix” ever could: agency comes from within.

Inside this episode:

• Why power is not granted — it’s remembered
• The hidden cost of living inside other people’s expectations
• How the nervous system adapts to control and why freedom can feel terrifying
• Why rock bottom is often the birthplace of clarity and courage
• How belief, action, and responsibility rebuild a life from the inside out
• What it truly means to be a cycle breaker

This is not a motivational pep talk. It’s a testimony of becoming — through fire, fear, loss, and the long climb back to self-trust.

If you’re rebuilding after abuse, addiction, divorce, or identity collapse…
If you feel small, stuck, or unsure of who you are anymore…
If you’re ready to stop waiting for permission and start choosing yourself…

This chapter is for you.

Burn It Down and Begin Again is part of the Chickology™ podcast collective — real women sharing real stories to break cycles, reclaim power, and remind each other what was always true.

You are not broken.
You are not behind.
And you have always had the power.

🌸 About Chickology™
Chickology™ is more than a podcast brand — it’s a collective of strong, real women telling real stories. Together, we’re reclaiming our narratives, breaking cycles, and lifting one another up through truth, laughter, and raw conversations. Every show under the Chickology™ umbrella is created by women, for women, with love.

✨ Join the Movement
We’re always looking for bold voices and powerful stories. If you’re a woman ready to share your truth or host your own podcast with us, reach out! One honest truth at a time, we’re helping one isolated woman at a time feel less alone.

📍 Find Us

• Explore all Chickology™ podcasts at [Buzzsprout Podcast Directory link or Chickology website]
• Email us at: ChickologyPodcasts@gmail.com
  
  

💫 Because when women rise together, we change the world.