Hi, I’m Erica

Where I Come From

I grew up in an Italian American family where loyalty ran deep.

The mentality was:

Family comes first.
Respect your elders.
Keep your business in the family.
No matter what happens, we stick together.

There’s beauty in that kind of loyalty.

But there can also be a cost when loyalty becomes silence, when asking questions feels like disrespect, and when seeking help feels like betrayal.

I grew up in a home shaped by dysfunction, emotional neglect, financial stress, instability, and aggressive conflict.

Love often felt transactional.

I learned early how to read the room, stay alert, handle things myself, and keep going because I had no other choice.

Like many cycle breakers, I learned how to survive before I learned how to feel safe.

I battled my weight from early childhood. I lived through seasons of lack, loss, family crises, divorce, and the effects of emotional and financial immaturity.

For a long time, I carried patterns I didn’t create into areas of my life I desperately wanted to change.

I knew certain things just weren’t right.

But knowing something needs to change and knowing how to actually live differently are not the same thing.

When I Couldn’t See a Way Out

There was a point in my life when I could barely force myself to get out of bed.

I felt hopeless and there was zero evidence things could change…

I couldn’t see a way out. I didn’t have a roadmap. I didn’t have proof that life could become something different after carrying so much for so long.

For years, survival was the only thing I knew how to do.

And when you’re working through generational trauma, you’re not only healing what happened directly to you.

Sometimes you are also untangling beliefs, fears, coping mechanisms, emotional patterns, and stress responses that were passed down through generations long before you had words for them.

I need you to know, you can love your family and still name what hurt.

You can honor where you came from without repeating everything you came from.

In my family, therapy was viewed as something for “crazy people.” When I began healing, there were times it felt like choosing myself meant disappointing the people I loved.

But healing was never about turning against my family.

It was about learning how to stop turning against myself.

It was about understanding what I had carried, grieving what I didn’t receive, naming what needed attention, and deciding that certain patterns no longer got to control my life.

Your past does not determine your future…

What Healing Has Looked Like for Me

My own healing journey has included years of therapy, EMDR, faith, nervous-system work, personal development, lifestyle change, coaching, and a whole lot of real-life practice.

It’s also required going back to the basics.

Learning how to pause.
Learning how to notice.
Learning how to sit with discomfort.
Learning how to respond instead of react.
Learning how to build routines that support the life I want to live.
Learning how to begin again without turning one difficult day into a reason to give up.

And this is what I learned:

Healing isn’t just something you understand.

There is no finish line in healing.

Healing is a lifestyle.

It’s slow. It’s messy.

And it doesn’t mean you’ll never struggle again.

But change is possible.

By the grace of God, I have watched Him rebuild parts of my life I once thought were too far behind, too damaged, and too deeply ingrained to change.

I have learned how to care for my mind, body, faith, health, home, and future in ways I was never shown.

I have learned that the basics aren’t beneath us.

They’re the foundation.

The life I live now wasn’t built through one breakthrough.

It was built through faith, fundamentals, repetition, sweat, tears, pivots, grace, and thousands of ordinary choices that no one else could see.

Change doesn’t come from knowing more.

It comes from what you do with what you know.

My Relationship With Christ

I grew up Catholic and made all the sacraments. So faith wasn’t entirely foreign to me.

But in the middle of my healing journey, something changed.

I came into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

It was nothing like the religion I inherited.
It wasn’t something I practiced because it was expected of me.
I was building a real relationship.

And as my relationship with Christ deepened, I began to understand that He wasn’t standing at a distance with his arms crossed, impatiently waiting for me to get everything right.

He was meeting me in the places that hurt.
Walking with me through the rebuilding.
God showed me what love, grace, truth, and safety not only looked like but felt like.

He is good; his love endures forever!

Three months into reading the Bible every day, I made the decision to be baptized — this time as a believer. It wasn’t because I felt like my Catholic baptism or the faith traditions I grew up with meant nothing. I made the decision because I wanted to make a personal, intentional declaration of the faith I had chosen for myself. To honor my God.

My relationship with Christ has become the foundation of my whole life.

Healing.
Rebuilding.
My coaching ministry.
And the Spirit-led life I am continuing to create.

All Glory is His— as it was, is, and forever will be!

A Little More About Me

Outside of coaching and podcasting, I love spending time with Louella, my fur-child, tackling projects around the house, cooking, working out, reading Scripture, listening to sermons, meeting people and hearing their stories, learning, growing, catching sunsets, and doing my best to support my mitochondria.

Yes, really.

I believe healing can be deep and meaningful without losing room for humor, real life, and the small things that make us feel like ourselves again.

Training & Lived Experience

• Certified Life Coach

• Master NLP Practitioner

• Host of The Lifestyles of the Determined Podcast

• Thousands of hours invested in personal healing work, including therapy, EMDR, learning to regulate my nervous system, lifestyle changes, and real-life application

• Lived experience rebuilding mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually

• Lived experience with cycle breaking, generational patterns, lifestyle changes, and rebuilding from the inside out

I am my own case study