Looking back on it now, Erin Miller realizes that anxiety has always loomed large in her life, even when she was a child. “I was an overachiever,” she says. “I was really stressed out if I achieved under. It’s just how I’m wired.” But the racing thoughts and sleepless nights really reared their head after Miller became a mom (two times) and was running herself ragged trying to get a new business off the ground. It was only after she had the courage to take a step back and hit the reset button that Miller was able to heal herself. Now she’s helping other moms do the same.
Miller grew up in central Bucks County. She says she was always inquisitive and asked a lot of questions. “I always wanted to understand ‘why,’ so I could understand the root of things,” she says. Later, she became interested in how a shared experience can elicit a variety of responses. She uses her own family as an example. “I was a child of divorce,” says Miller, who grew up with two biological brothers and one stepbrother. “We all experienced it differently and coped with it differently.” She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from West Virginia University in 2005, followed by her master’s in counseling from Holy Family University in 2010. By that time, Miller and her husband, Dustin, an Emmaus native, were living in the Lehigh Valley. They welcomed a daughter, Hannah, in 2013. Miller was on maternity leave from her job as a school counselor at an elementary school when she realized she had to make a change. “I just had this nagging gut feeling that I could not go back,” says Miller. “I was feeling this was not my path. This was not my course.”
She took a leave of absence to figure it out. During that time, she became pregnant with her second child, a son, John Paul, and began to get serious about photography. What began as a hobby to document her daughter’s earliest days was emerging as a new career opportunity as friends began to take notice of her artistic eye, and Erin Joyce Photography was born. Miller says she found her services in high demand, and she was eager to oblige: “I took on every single job that came my way.” And yet there was a dark side to that success. “I built this photography business in a very hustled way and burned myself out,” she says. “I really drove myself into the ground. But no one knew it.”
Never was that more apparent than on a March day in 2016. Miller was on her way to a photo shoot when she feared she was suffering some kind of serious medical episode. “I physically just could hardly function,” she recalls. “My hands went cold and numb and so did my face.” She had dealt with invasive symptoms of anxiety before, but this seemed different. She told a friend, “I think I’m not OK,” and then drove herself to an urgent care facility, where she was diagnosed with a panic attack. She was given prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications and sent on her way. But even as that very red flag was waving in her face, she was unsure about how to change her day-to-day reality. After all, she was still a wife and a mother with a long list of responsibilities inside and outside the home. Miller remembers jumping back into mom mode as soon as she returned home from the medical center, giving her two children a bath and starting the bedtime routine.
The following month, Miller finally sought help, beginning with a visit to her primary care doctor. She also began talk therapy, and later enlisted the guidance of a hormonal nutritionist who helped her understand the correlation between what she was eating and how she was feeling. “I knew in the back of my head, I’m not feeding myself the right way,” Miller says. “My lunch was like the two chicken nuggets my kids didn’t eat.” Miller says it took about six months for her to start feeling better; ultimately, she spent about two years on self-help. “Through my journey, I was so alone,” says Miller. “I was so ashamed. It seemed like everyone else had everything together.”
But conversations with other mothers revealed cracks in that façade. Miller realized that, despite the stories being told by carefully crafted social media posts, there were lots of other women who were suffering in silence. “We’re conditioned to get straight A’s, get the perfect job, the big house,” she says. But the pressure that comes with the pursuit of perfection can be exhausting. Miller found a kindred spirit in Heather Chauvin, an author, podcast host and CEO and founder of Mom Is In Control, which aims to empower mothers to live joyfully and become leaders at work and at home. In 2018, Miller launched a Facebook group called Same Boat Huddle—a virtual safe space where women could find support from peers who were in the (yep, you guessed it) “same boat.” The “huddle” part of the name conjures up an image of a sports team coming together to talk strategy before breaking away for a big play. Miller says the same approach can be applied to motherhood: “We’re all living our individual lives, but we still have each other.”
Miller later started a podcast of the same name and moved into the world of coaching and mentoring with a four-week curriculum designed to help women manage their schedules energetically, rather than just slogging through what can seem like an endless to-do list. Currently, she offers a five-month program that she’s dubbed the Layered Growth Academy, which tackles everything from self-care to nutrition to setting boundaries to creating achievable goals. “It’s restructuring how you’re showing up in your life,” Miller says. More information can be found at erinjoycementoring.com.
Miller expands on the Layered Growth Method and shares her own struggles and triumphs in her first book, Motherhood Stripped, which was released in November of 2020. As she helps other women better manage the highs and lows of motherhood, her healing process continues as well. She’s constantly working with her own coaches and taking courses to further her personal growth and understanding of how women can take control of their own destinies. “You teach what you need to learn,” she says. “I’m growing and learning just as hard as I’m teaching.” But she’s come a long way from those days when prioritizing everything but her own well-being was the norm. “I learned that my worth is not in the laundry pile,” Miller says. “My worth is how I love myself and love my children.” And she wants other women who are standing where she was a few years ago to know that joy is very possible. “Sometimes we have to go through some bad things to get us to the peak of the next thing.”
