Catherine Quiring Counseling

Catherine Quiring Counseling I am a Licensed Counselor, reformed people-pleaser, and neurodivergent exvangelical. Individual counseling
Assertiveness and healthy boundaries group
Adults

I help people who feel and care deeply to reconnect to their inner wisdom, reclaim their playfulness, and liberate through collective care.

11/13/2025

Secret Places of Solitude by Catherine Quiring, catherinequiring.com/books

11/12/2025

The inhale by Catherine Quiring, catherinequiring.com/books

11/11/2025

Feel by Catherine Quiring, catherinequiring.com/books

11/10/2025

Our souls sigh by Catherine Quiring, catherinequiring.com/books

"If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission"This hit different when I realized how much of my life I'd...
11/09/2025

"If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission"

This hit different when I realized how much of my life I'd spent waiting:

Waiting for approval before I pursued what I wanted.
Waiting for validation before I trusted my own knowing.
Waiting for someone to say "yes, you're allowed" before I took up space.
Waiting for permission to be fully myself.

Here's what I've learned:

Greatness doesn't come from asking permission.
It comes from trusting yourself enough to move without it.

The people who changed your life didn't wait for approval.
The art that moved you wasn't focus-grouped first.
The ideas that shifted culture came from people who acted before anyone said they could.

If you're waiting for permission to:
- Start the thing
- Leave the thing
- Create the thing
- Be the thing
- Say the thing
- Trust yourself

This is it.

You don't need anyone's approval to pursue what's calling you.
You don't need consensus to follow your knowing.
You don't need permission to be great.

You just need to stop waiting and start moving.

What are you waiting for permission to do?

Drop a 🔥 if you're done asking.

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You don't have to choose between deep connection and staying intact đź’™If you're an empath or highly sensitive person, you...
11/08/2025

You don't have to choose between deep connection and staying intact đź’™

If you're an empath or highly sensitive person, you know what it's like to absorb everyone's emotions. To lose yourself in relationships. To be chronically exhausted from taking on what isn't yours.

**The goal is flexible boundaries you consciously control—like a dial from 1-10:**

**1-3 (Very open):** Safe intimate relationships, therapy, chosen spiritual practice

**4-6 (Moderately filtered):** Friendships, work, familiar social situations

**7-9 (Significantly filtered):** Crowds, strangers, overwhelming environments, when depleted

**10 (Closed):** Active protection during crisis, trauma processing, recovery

Most people with porous boundaries stay at 1-3 all the time by default.

The work is learning to consciously adjust based on safety, context, and your current capacity.

**In this comprehensive guide, I share:**

**Somatic practices:** Daily grounding, post-interaction reset, energy shielding, somatic "no" practice, breath as boundary

**Advanced frameworks:** Juliane Taylor Shore's Three Boundaries (External, Psychological "Jello Wall," Containing) and Ora North's Energetic Boundary work (Voluntary Blindness, Shadow Work)

**Identity anchoring:** Morning pages, core values documentation, solo practices to prevent codependency

You can keep the profound connection, spiritual depth, intuitive knowing, and healing capacity.

AND you can stay intact. You can know who you are. You can protect yourself.

Full guide on the blog (link in bio) with specific practices you can start today đź’™

For empaths and HSPs: Where do you struggle most with boundaries?

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"my creative life is my deepest prayer"— Sue Monk KiddWhat if prayer isn't something you DO—it's something you ARE? Some...
11/08/2025

"my creative life is my deepest prayer"
— Sue Monk Kidd

What if prayer isn't something you DO—it's something you ARE? Something you CREATE?

What if the prayers that matter most aren't the ones you learned to recite, but the ones that pour out when you:

- Put pen to paper and the truth spills out
- Move your body and feel connected to something larger
- Make something with your hands and lose track of time
- Sit in sacred silence and listen to what emerges
- Create beauty from pain, meaning from chaos, connection from loneliness

What if THAT'S prayer?

Not the performance.
Not the script.
Not the approved words said in the proper way.

But the creative act itself—
the making,
the expressing,
the allowing something to move through you that's bigger than you.

You don't need permission to pray this way.
You don't need theology.
You don't need to call it prayer if that word doesn't fit anymore.

But if your creative life is where you feel most connected—
to yourself, to others, to Mystery, to the divine, to life force itself—

then yes.

That's your deepest prayer.

And it's already holy.

What does prayer look like for you? 🎨✨

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Identity fusion is a psychological phenomenon where personal identity and group identity become so deeply merged that cr...
11/07/2025

Identity fusion is a psychological phenomenon where personal identity and group identity become so deeply merged that criticism of the group feels like a personal attack.

This helps explain M*GA loyalty—and much more.

The markers of fusion:

**Visceral defense response:** Criticism of Tr*mp triggers the emotional intensity of someone whose family has been insulted—because psychologically, it is personal.

**Tribal symbols as self-expression:** The M*GA hat signals "This is who I am," not merely "This is who I'm voting for."

**Relationship ruptures:** When politics are fused with identity, someone rejecting your political views feels like they're rejecting you.

**Reality distortion for group coherence:** Contradictory information doesn't update beliefs—it triggers defensive reasoning.

**Why fusion happens:**
- A leader who validates identity threats
- Shared sense of persecution
- Repeated collective experiences (rallies as fusion rituals)
- Clear boundaries and opposition
- Identity under threat narrative

**The self-reinforcing cycle:**
External criticism → Defensive response → Group solidarity strengthens → Identity becomes more fused → Criticism feels more threatening → Stronger defensive response

Each cycle makes fusion deeper and more resistant to outside influence.

Understanding identity fusion doesn't mean accepting its consequences. But it does suggest that presenting facts or better arguments won't dissolve these bonds.

You cannot reason someone out of an identity they didn't reason themselves into.

Full post on the blog (link in bio) about the psychology of M*GA loyalty—and what it means for democracy.

Have you experienced identity fusion in your own life? Where?

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For those of us who learned to stay silent—to swallow our words, to make ourselves small, to believe our voice didn't ma...
11/07/2025

For those of us who learned to stay silent—to swallow our words, to make ourselves small, to believe our voice didn't matter—speaking can feel like a radical act.

But here's what I've learned:

Your voice is a healing instrument.
Not just for others. For yourself.

When you speak:
- Soothing words that comfort and calm
- Presence and power that claim space unapologetically
- Healing and wholeness that name what's true

You become medicine. For yourself and for others.

Your voice carries weight.
Your spirit has presence.
Your words create worlds.

You don't have to be perfectly healed to speak.
You don't have to have it all figured out.
You don't need permission from anyone else.

Just be here. And speak.

What needs to be spoken through you right now?

What truth, what grief, what joy, what boundary has been waiting for your voice to give it form?

Drop a 🗣️ if you're reclaiming your voice.

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Why you can't trust yourself after religious trauma đź’”If you were raised in high-control religion, one of the most profou...
11/06/2025

Why you can't trust yourself after religious trauma đź’”

If you were raised in high-control religion, one of the most profound losses you experienced was trust in yourself.

You learned that:
- Your instincts were sinful and needed to be "taken captive"
- Your desires were dangerous
- Your judgment couldn't be trusted
- Trusting yourself was prideful and idolatrous
- Your value depended on compliance and conformity
- "Dying to self" meant erasing your authentic desires, needs, and identity

This systematic dismantling of self-trust served a purpose: it kept you compliant, controllable, and dependent on the religious system for direction.

When you can't trust yourself, you must constantly look outside yourself for guidance, approval, and permission to exist.

This creates fertile ground for:
- Enmeshment (your wellbeing tied to others' wellbeing)
- Codependency (constant scanning for what others need from you)
- Chronic people-pleasing (survival through compliance)

Recovery involves three interconnected processes:

**1. Learn to Trust Yourself**
Rebuilding confidence in your perceptions, feelings, and judgment through five cyclical movements: Reflect, Release, Reconnect, Reclaim, Re-emerge

**2. Learn to Know Yourself**
Developing a clear sense of who you are apart from who you were told to be

**3. Learn to Express Yourself**
Using your voice to communicate your truth, needs, and boundaries

Full post on the blog (link in bio) about why you can't trust yourself after religious trauma—and how to rebuild self-trust 💙

For empaths, sensitives, intuitives, and people-pleasers who've experienced religious trauma: where do you struggle most with trusting yourself?

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I wrote this poem after discovering the vibrant "Black Lives Matter" street mural in my city had been painted over—erase...
11/06/2025

I wrote this poem after discovering the vibrant "Black Lives Matter" street mural in my city had been painted over—erased.

I happened across it one day, not realizing it was part of the same sweep of erasure that blotted out the rainbow crosswalk in front of Orlando's Pulse nightclub.

When I first found the mural covered over, I was stunned and heartbroken.

It feels like it needs to be the site of a vigil and protest. I want this loss to procreate new artwork that proclaims Black Lives Matter in other places—yard signs, T-shirts, murals, everywhere.

Right now, it feels like a burial ground.

But here's what erasure cannot do:
It cannot erase the truth.
It cannot silence the movement.
It cannot undo the meaning those luminous letters held.

When they paint over Black Lives Matter, they reveal exactly why we need to keep saying it.
When they erase the rainbow crosswalk at Pulse, they show us why we must keep creating visible reminders that LGBTQ+ lives matter.

Erasure is violence.
And our response must be to create again.
To speak again.
To paint again.
To insist again: Black Lives Matter.

Have you experienced something similar in your town? What has been removed, covered over, or erased?

How are you responding to erasure with creation, with resistance, with refusal to be silenced?

Drop a 🖤 if you're committed to making Black Lives Matter visible—in your words, your art, your actions, your life.

You can find this post, poem, and link to the related article on my Substack (link in bio).

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Your nervous system was trying to protect you 🛡️If you grew up in high-control religion, you know this experience:Religi...
11/05/2025

Your nervous system was trying to protect you 🛡️

If you grew up in high-control religion, you know this experience:

Religious environments are built on demands:
- You must believe specific doctrines
- You must attend services regularly
- You must pray and read scripture daily
- You must evangelize
- You must submit to authority without question
- You must suppress doubts and maintain certainty

For someone with PDA (Persistent Demand for Autonomy), these demands don't just feel burdensome—they trigger nervous system crisis. The more pressure to comply, the more internal resistance builds.

But here's what you need to know:
Your PDA nervous system was responding appropriately to a controlling environment. The anxiety and shutdown you experienced wasn't spiritual weakness.

It was your nervous system saying:
"This is not safe."
"This is too controlling."
"This threatens your autonomy."

That response deserves respect, not shame.

The trait that was labeled as rebellious and sinful was actually protecting you. Your nervous system's resistance to controlling demands was appropriate. Your inability to comply with arbitrary authority kept some part of you autonomous even under intense pressure.

You weren't broken.
The system was.

Full post on the blog (link in bio) about religious trauma recovery for neurodivergent individuals—including PDA experiences in high-control religion 🧠💙

For PDAers and others: Did you experience this? How are you healing now?

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Address

6706 N 9th Avenue A1
Pensacola, FL
32504

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

Website

https://linktr.ee/catherinequiring, https://catherinequiring.com/

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