Danielle Austin, LMFT, Shine Counseling Services, LLC

05/08/2026

05/06/2026

Rejection disconnects you from yourself. It makes you question your worth. Your voice. Your right to exist. But healing starts when you reconnect. Not with the person who rejected you.

With YOURSELF.

Next time you feel rejected, pause.

Ask yourself: "What am I actually feeling underneath this?"

Is it loneliness? Sadness? Disappointment? The sensation of being unseen?

Take 30 seconds to name it specifically.

Not "I'm rejected." But "I feel dismissed and abandoned."

See how different that feels?

One feels like your identity.

The other feels like a specific pain you can actually work with.

05/04/2026

We say this all the time in the trauma field, “trauma lives in the body.” But that’s not actually accurate.

As Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it,
“The body doesn’t keep the score. Your brain keeps the score and your body is the scorecard.”

That distinction matters more than we think.

Trauma is not stored in muscles, fascia, or organs. It is encoded in the brain, in prediction, memory, meaning-making, and learned associations. The body is where those predictions get played out. Heart rate changes. Muscle tension. Breath shifts. Gut responses. Urges to act. Not because the body is holding trauma, but because the brain is running a pattern it learned to survive.

When we collapse trauma into “the body,” we risk oversimplifying what is actually a complex, brain-based process involving perception, context, and prediction. And clinically, that matters.

Because healing is not just about “releasing” something from the body.
It’s about updating the brain’s model of the world.

The body isn’t where trauma lives.
It’s where trauma shows up.

05/02/2026