Danielle Austin, LMFT, Shine Counseling Services, LLC

11/18/2025

11/09/2025

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3 Uncomfortable Truths About Codependency

Many of us don’t realize how deeply we’ve been conditioned to betray ourselves until we start noticing how exhausted, unseen, or resentful we’ve become. Codependency does not mean we are weak. It’s a learned survival pattern rooted in the fear of abandonment and rejection.

1. We struggle to set boundaries
Because as children, we learned that love was earned through compliance and self-sacrifice, not authenticity or self-protection.

2. We suppress our emotions
We discovered early on that expressing our true feelings often led to rejection or punishment, so emotional suppression became our way to stay safe.

3. We have low self-esteem
Without consistent validation, we learned that our worth depended on meeting others’ needs rather than being who we truly are.

These patterns are not our fault—they are the result of childhood conditioning. But once we bring awareness to them, we can begin to heal.

Healing codependency means remembering who we were before the world taught us to abandon ourselves for love.

— Lisa A. Romano
Breakthrough Life Coach
www.lisaaromano.com

11/08/2025

The safety that stays, and you don't fear it slips away easily when life gets intense, comes from:

1. Coupling safety with self-connection.

In survival, safety is often achieved through overcontrol, self-abandonment, or disconnection.

It’s a fragile safety, dependent on keeping the right conditions, moods, or reactions around you. It keeps peace on the surface but pushes you further from yourself.

Coupling safety with self-connection means coupling safety with needs meeting, with honoring boundaries, value and truth, with attuned action, with rest and with emotional permission.

It's the shift from “The more I adapt and disconnect, the safer I am” to “The more connected I am to myself, the safer I feel.”

The moment you reconnect with yourself, you can't lose it so easily. You lost it as a child because, as a child, you depended on others to nurture your connection with yourself.

But now, as an adult, when you connect with yourself, it stays. It's more conscious. Self-connection is the safety.

2. Coupling safety with embodiment.

In survival, our system sourced safety from mental overactivity. rather than embodiment.

The mind exhausted itself with finding safety through survival adaptations like perfectionism, excessive meaning-making or overanalysis.

The shift here is from “The more I think, the safer I feel” to “The more I’m in my body, the safer I become.”

3. Coupling this embodied safety with the nervous system.

The safety becomes also nervous system safety only when the nervous system can recognize it as a felt experience. That's when you'll not need more tools or techniques to feel safe.

If you’re in this phase, deepening your foundation of self-connection and embodied safety, my course Safe to Feel was created to meet you there.

It’s a deeply attuned, guided journey to help you shift from survival safety into authentic safety, so your system can finally feel safe to feel, release, heal, and live.

Comment Safe or visit my profile to join.

With love,
Ally

11/06/2025

You can’t rewrite what you don’t see.
The first step in CBT, and in emotional healing, is awareness. Start by noticing your thoughts, especially in moments of stress, disappointment, or conflict.

Ask yourself:
“What story is my mind telling right now?”
“What am I assuming about myself or this situation?”
“Does this thought feel like truth — or fear?”

You’ll start to spot recurring themes:
“I’m not safe.”
“I’m a failure.”
“No one cares.”
“I have to do everything alone.”

These are echoes of older experiences where you didn’t feel safe, capable, or supported. When you notice them, don’t judge. Just name them.

CBT teaches us that thoughts are not facts. They’re interpretations filtered through emotion, memory, and perception.

When you question your automatic thoughts, you give your nervous system room to calm down and see more possibilities.

Every time you pause, question, and reframe, you’re interrupting an old neural script and choosing a new one.

11/04/2025

Modern research backs this up.
When you experience chronic stress or emotional pain, your brain and nervous system stay in protective states: fight, flight, or freeze.
That impacts your immune system, your hormones, your digestion, even your ability to sleep or think clearly.

But when you start practicing self-regulation, things like grounding, deep breathing, mindfulness, movement, or somatic work, your body releases signals of safety.

The vagus nerve, your body’s main communication line between mind and body, begins to calm your heart rate, lower inflammation, and restore balance.

Your mind says, “I’m okay.”
Your body replies, “I know.”

You can start small.

Step 1: Check in. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling in my body right now?”
Don’t analyze it ... just notice.

Step 2: Breathe slower than you think you need to.
Your exhale is what signals safety to your body.

Step 3: Ground yourself.
Feel your feet, your seat, the present moment holding you.

Step 4: Move gently.
Stretch, walk, dance, or shake to release stored tension.

Step 5: Reach out for support.
Therapists, trauma-informed coaches, bodyworkers, healing is relational.
Co-regulation often comes before self-regulation.

11/03/2025

You’re not here to learn better tools or new somatic techniques to manage your emotions, thoughts and states. You’re here to anchor yourself into the felt sense of safety.

Because safety in the mind can help, but it doesn’t create the embodied change you’re longing for.

3 Practical shifts to support this:

1. Holding sensations in the body instead of energizing the stories in the mind.

The moment there’s a reaction in the body — a tightening in the chest, a wave of sadness, a pulse of heat — the mind rushes in with a story.
“This means something’s wrong.”
“I shouldn’t feel this.”
“I need to fix it.”

The more you energize those stories, the more disconnected you become from your body.
But safety doesn’t grow through escaping the body. It grows through staying with it, gently.

You can’t stop the mind from making stories — it has momentum. But you can relate to those stories differently.

You can let them be there without giving them all your attention. You can stay with sensation without making it mean something about you or what you feel.

That’s how you start orienting energy and building capacity for embodied safety.

2. Seeing emotions as energies to meet, not to fix, release, or calm down.

You’re not trying to feel better — you’re learning to feel safely. When you stop treating emotions as problems to solve and start meeting them as living energies moving through you, something profound happens — your body begins to trust that feeling isn’t danger anymore.

Putting so much energy into trying to change your state creates more pressure than relief.

3. Grounding in what’s real instead of what’s ideal.

Your body doesn’t trust ideals. It trusts experiences that feel possible, accessible and achievable.

Perhaps you cannot fully hold your emotions. Maybe at times your system freezes and the mind takes over. That's ok. You're in a transitional phase.

🌿 And this is the work inside my new course, Safe to Feel, a deeply attuned and experiential path designed to bridge the gap between mentally understanding safety and embodying it.

Comment SAFE or visit my profile to start your journey.

Love,
Ally.