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Erica Bonham, a licensed counselor and embodied leadership coach, addresses what it means to have a “badass nervous system,” emotional alchemy, and tips for listening to your body.
About Erica
Erica Bonham is a licensed professional counselor, speaker, best selling author and embodied leadership coach. Her work bridges individual transformation and collective healing. She leads trainings on EMDR, ancestral trauma, and embodied, heart-led leadership.
Turning Lead into Gold: Reclaiming Your Internal Medicine with Erica Bonham
There is a specific kind of electricity that enters a room when someone is living fully in their own truth. I felt it the moment I began talking with Erica Bonham for our latest episode of Just Like Nana. If you haven’t had the chance to listen to the episode yet, I highly recommend you find a quiet corner, grab your favorite tea, and settle in. Erica’s energy is contagious. She is a licensed professional counselor, a best-selling author, and an embodied leadership coach.
As always, I want to start our time together with a gentle reminder: I am not a mental health professional. What I am is a passionate curator of information regarding ancestral trauma. My goal here at Just Like Nana is to provide you with threads of wisdom. You are the absolute expert in your own healing and in your own family line. I invite you to take what resonates with you today and simply ignore the rest.
The Myth of High-Functioning Resiliency
In our community, many of us pride ourselves on our resiliency. We have survived things that should have broken us. We have pushed through difficult childhoods, challenging family dynamics, and the heavy weight of ancestral wounding. But one of the first things Erica and I touched on was the difference between fake resiliency and true capacity.
Erica pointed out that many high-functioning people are actually living in a chronic state of high-alert. This isn’t true resiliency; it is a trauma response that looks like success to the outside world. When we are over-functioning, over-achieving, and constantly “on,” we aren’t actually grounded in our power. We are running on the fumes of fear.
True capacity, as Erica describes it, is the ability to stay present with yourself even when things are difficult. It is the ability to have a regulated nervous system so that your strength comes from a place of choice rather than a place of survival. If you feel like you are doing all the things but still feel frayed on the inside, this episode is encouragement for you to stop pushing and start embodying.
The Art of Emotional Alchemy
We spent a lot of time discussing what Erica calls Emotional Alchemy. In historical terms, alchemy was the quest to turn lead into gold. In the world of ancestral healing, it is the process of taking our most difficult emotions—the grief, the rage, the leaden weight of our past—and transforming them into the gold of our medicine.
Erica reminded us that we often spend so much energy trying to avoid the hard things. We avoid the courageous conversations, the boundaries, and the messy emotions because they feel like they will swallow us whole. But the alchemy happens when we go toward the hard thing. When we stay present with the discomfort, we learn that it is often how we step into our leadership and our impact.
Worthiness as a Bone-Deep Practice
If you have spent any time in the self-help world, you’ve likely been told to repeat affirmations. “I am worthy. I am enough.” While these are beautiful intentions, Erica challenged us to go deeper. She noted that many of us are repeating affirmations while our bodies are still screaming that we aren’t safe or valued.
At Just Like Nana, we believe that healing has to be a bone-deep practice. Worthiness isn’t a mindset hack or a thought you can simply think into existence. It is an embodied state. Erica’s work helps people move that sense of value out of the head and into the cells. When your worthiness is a fact of your physiology, the game changes. You stop playing small. You stop seeking external validation. You start trusting your own internal medicine, that unique gift that only you can offer the world.
Your Medicine is Needed
Erica has a workshop coming up in June 2026 called Embodied and Unstoppable: Badass Activation for the Fully Expressed Leader. I’ve already told her I’ll be there, and we will have the link in our show notes for you to join us.
I want to leave you with a thought that Erica shared during our closing: You have medicine in you that only you can offer the world. You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to be too much. You are allowed to be fully expressed.
Resources Mentioned
- Kim Krans The Wild Archetypes Deck
- Kasia Urbaniack’s Book, Unbound
Connect with Erica Bonham
Website: https://www.avoscounseling.com/
Embodied and Unstoppable Workshop
Erica’s Book: Always Enough, Never Done
Connect with the Show
- Website: justlikenana.com
- Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.