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Abby is a trauma recovery coach, leadership mentor, speaker, published writer, and mama of four. She grew up in a home shaped by addiction, violence, abuse, fear, silence, and later navigated her own recovery from alcohol addiction. Today, through Reclaim & Rise™, she creates spaces where women and femmes can come together for honest conversations, collective healing and embodied leadership. Read on to learn how Abby is breaking the cycle of silence and creating a different legacy for herself, her children and generations to come.
How do you define a "Cycle Breaker?"
A cycle breaker is someone who has the courage to look at what has been normalized in their family, lineage, culture, or community and ask, "Does this end with me?" It’s someone willing to tell the truth about what happened, grieve what they didn’t receive, unlearn survival patterns, and consciously choose something different… not only for themselves, but for those coming after them.
What adversities or experiences have you lived through?
I grew up in a home shaped by addiction, violence, abuse, fear, and silence. I survived childhood sexual abuse, a high-control religious environment, complex trauma, and later my own struggles with addiction. There were years when simply staying alive felt like an accomplishment. My healing has also required grieving relationships, breaking family silence, and accepting that choosing myself and speaking truth sometimes comes with tremendous loss.
What is a cycle, belief or pattern you’ve worked to break or challenge in your life?
SILENCE. The belief that keeping the peace was more important than telling the truth. That love required self-abandonment. That I needed to tolerate harm, make myself smaller, forgive endlessly, or remain quiet in order to belong. I decided that cycle ends with me. I want my children to know that their voice matters, their boundaries matter, their intuition matters, and love should never require abandoning themselves.
What helped you begin healing, growing, or changing that cycle?
Choosing recovery from alcohol addiction changed the trajectory of my life. From there came years of trauma healing, nervous-system and somatic work, therapy, coaching, spiritual reclamation, reconnecting with my body and ancestry, and, perhaps most importantly, learning to trust myself. Community has also been medicine. Healing stopped being something I believed I had to accomplish alone.
What are your proudest accomplishments?
My greatest accomplishment is the life I have built after believing for so long that I wouldn’t have one. I’m a mama of four, approaching 12 years alcohol-free, a trauma recovery coach, leadership mentor, speaker and published writer. I’ve transformed much of what I survived into work that helps other women reclaim their voices, trust themselves, break generational patterns, and step into leadership. But beyond any title, I’m proud that my children are growing up experiencing a different legacy.
Is there a message, quote, lesson, or reminder you’d like to share with others who may be struggling along their healing journey?
Your wounds were never the medicine. The medicine is what you cultivate as you learn to tend them: the compassion, courage, discernment, boundaries, wisdom, self-trust and capacity to choose differently. You don’t have to be grateful for what happened to you to be deeply proud of who you’ve become.
Do you have any projects you're working on that you'd like to highlight?
I’m continuing to grow Reclaim & Rise™, my free community gatherings created to bring women and femmes back into circle for the kinds of honest conversations, witnessing, healing and collective remembering that were never meant to happen alone. I’m also expanding my work around voice, visibility and embodied leadership, weaving trauma-informed coaching, nervous-system work, Human Design, Gene Keys, ancestral wisdom and my own lived medicine to support cycle-breaking women who are ready to move from healing into expression, purpose and impact. At the heart of everything I create is one conviction: Our stories can become medicine when we are supported to reclaim the voice to tell them.
Connect with Abby:
- Instagram: @speak.the.truth.with.abby
- Community gatherings: Reclaim & Rise™