Hi, everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host, Kristin Maxwell, and I am so excited you’re here. In this podcast we are going to give you tools and strategies you can use right away to master your mind, connect to your personal power, and transform yourself and your world. My guest today is Abby Rohrer, and we are going to be talking about accessing personal power. Abby is a gifted, master, anxiety healer, and coach with over two decades’ experience. She helps individuals neutralize fear, worry, anxiety, and stress. She’s the author of three books and the creator of six programs that help women resolve anxiety and the negative habits that interfere with their confidence and success in life and business. I’m so happy to share Abby and her wisdom with you today. She has this ability to listen to what you are saying and to really get to the base of what is going on with you. It’s an amazing gift. Abby, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thanks, Kristin. I’m so happy to be here with you today. Thanks for having me.
Oh, it’s great. It’s our pleasure. And my first question on the podcast is always what super power did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
The superpower I discovered was my own truth.
Well, I guess the superpower that I discovered was my own truth. And in fact, I would say that it has helped me to master my mind as opposed to coming first. Mastering my mind has really been the result of finding the way to face my truth.
Wow. So this is the process you followed, or one of the tools that actually helped you. Can you tell us, what do you mean by facing your truth?
I mean getting real with oneself about how you really feel, what’s really going on with you, as opposed to really being swayed too much by outside voices and outside opinions.
Aha. Yes. I’m raising three teenage daughters myself, and this would be a very good skill for them to learn. So can you tell the listeners, how did it come about that you started looking at your truth and realizing that that’s what you needed to do?
Yeah. Well, in a way I kind of fell into it, but basically I found this in the mid ’90s, in 1994, and I was somebody who was … Even though I had a professional, corporate career in those days, I was racked with self-doubt, and feelings of not being enough, and a lot of anxiety. So anxiety was always this foundation in my life, and had been since I was a child. And I spent many years in that prior to 1994 looking for outside answers for my inner pain, and I was even struggling at that time with a, probably it was 26 year, compulsive behavior, and that was compulsive hair pulling.
And so in the process of basically just trying to find a way to survive in my life and in my body, and find a place of peace and calm, I happened to stumble into a way to face my own truth. And that happened when I came face-to-face with a question, and the question was did I really, really want to end my compulsive behavior? I was telling myself back then that I really wanted to because I was so ashamed of it, and of course it wasn’t “Normal.” And so if the world thought I should want to end it, then I should want to end it. What happened that one day is that a voice in my head, some, I think, wise part of me said, “Are you sure that you want to end it?” And all of a sudden my truth just showed up in me, and I said, “No. I don’t think that I really do. I think … ” And then of course the next question arose which is, “Well, what are you getting out of it? What’s the benefit of it?”
And in this process of these questions, I found a way to get real with myself, and I stopped being afraid to listen to myself. And I began more and more to follow a process that helped me to always look to myself first, then to look outside to the world for answers to what was going on for me internally.
Wow. That’s powerful. Maybe walk us through a little bit more about how recognizing that you really didn’t want to, at some level, end your hair pulling, how that ended up really helping you transform how you live your life, and actually, ultimately end up stopping that behavior.
I stopped being afraid to listen to myself.
Yeah. So that was really the beginning of the actual healing of my hair pulling. Compulsive behaviors are … They’re not medically curable. There is no known medical cure for compulsive behaviors like the one I struggled with. And what happened was that as I became honest with myself about not wanting to end it, and acknowledging that it was some kind of benefit for me in it, I then began to do a couple of things. The first thing was … And I don’t know how I knew to do this, since my truth had just shown up, and since I recognized that all those years I had been trying to make myself stop this deviant behavior. So two things happened.
One was that I had to recognize that for some reason I need it, and I discovered that underneath it were volumes, and volumes, and what I call storehouses of anxiety that I was carrying. And this compulsive behavior helped me to distract myself. It helped me to be alone. I only ever did this in private. It helped me to take space for myself. It helped me to be alone without having to acknowledge that I was alone or face that I was alone. So that was one thing.
The second thing was that … And again, I don’t know how I knew to do this, but once I identified what my truth was, then I let myself have it with compassion and without beating myself up. In other words, I just said, “Okay, this is the way that I feel. I’m not going to resist it because I’ve spent all these years resisting my own truth.” So in the letting myself have not wanting to end it, I actually ultimately found a way to end it, if that makes sense to you.
It does. That is really recognizing what you were getting from it was able for you then to say, “Okay, now I’m going to figure out other ways to get what I need,” instead of hiding it.
Yeah.
And you know what? I want to go to explore how facing your truth has allowed you to change a lot of things in your life, but we’re gonna take a break first. Before we go, can you tell people where they can go to find out more about you?
Sure. They can go to my website abbyrohrer.com.
Great. Thanks, Abby. When we come back, we are going to talk to Abby more about how facing your truth can help you to access your own personal power.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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