Lauren Auer LCPC

01/16/2026

When your trying to give some unconditional positive regard but you’re not an unconditional positive regard kind of therapist 🫣

01/15/2026

How can I rest when people are dying? How can I look away when this is happening? How can I enjoy my life when the world is burning?

If these questions live in your head, you have injustice sensitivity. And right now, it’s probably destroying you.
You’re watching war footage. Reading about genocide. Tracking every act of governmental cruelty. Your nervous system is trying to process mass atrocity while also showing up for work, being kind to your partner, remembering to eat.

And then you snap over something small and think: what is wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system wasn’t designed to hold this much suffering at once. Especially not one already shaped by trauma or wired differently.

The same awareness that makes you care also makes it feel morally wrong to protect yourself. But chronic exposure to global violence doesn’t make you more effective. It just empties you out until you have nothing left.

01/13/2026

But THIS one is DEFINITELY the one that’s going to fix my entire life.

P.s. the dopamine is BUYING the planner and imagining the result. Not actually USING the planner… I know this but somehow do it anyway .

01/12/2026

Your body isn’t broken.
It’s just done pretending everything is fine.
Unexplained symptoms. Normal test results. Doctors who say “it’s just stress.” This is incredibly common and most people never get the full picture of what’s actually happening in their nervous system.

I think understanding this connection is going to be one of the biggest shifts in how we treat trauma and chronic health issues. It’s the future of healing.

New post on nervous system shutdown, chronic symptoms, and why fighting your body’s signals keeps you stuck longer.

Read the full article on my Substack. Link in bio.

01/07/2026

What do you wish they taught you in grad school (or maybe what they DID teach you, that you could have done without)

Let me know below 👇🏼

01/06/2026

there’s a massive difference between emotional avoidance and conscious containment. Between suppression and strategic delay.

Your nervous system has an incredibly sophisticated triage system. During active crisis, it redirects all resources to immediate survival. The deep processing gets put on hold

I think about the clients I’ve worked with who were managing eldercare while grieving, navigating divorce while parenting through a pandemic, dealing with job loss while keeping a household afloat. They’d come in apologizing for “not feeling anything yet” or “being too functional.”

But that functionality is not numbness. That’s your system doing what it evolved to do.
The emotional work will come. It always does. But it comes when your body signals that you have the resources to hold it. When the immediate danger has passed. When you’re no longer in triage mode.
Give yourself permission to wait for that moment instead of forcing it before you’re ready.

traumarecovery

01/05/2026

Starting the year writing about what happened when the worst year of my life collided with twelve years of being a therapist, and learning there's a massive difference between witnessing grief and drowning in your own. If you've ever been the "strong one" who suddenly couldn't access a single thing you know helps, this might hit.

A year-end reflection on living through what I used to just witness

12/29/2025

Your phone overheats in a hot car and shuts down completely. You can’t override it. You can’t convince it to work harder. You have to let it cool down before it will function again.

Nobody looks at their phone in that moment and thinks “what’s wrong with it? Why is it being so difficult?” We understand it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do.
But when your body does the same thing, when it forces rest through pain or fatigue or symptoms no doctor can explain, we treat it like betrayal. Like it should be able to keep going if we just find the right supplement or push through harder.

Your nervous system doesn’t care about your to-do list. It doesn’t care that you’ve always been able to handle things before. When it’s been running hot for too long, it will shut you down to protect you.

Fighting that shutdown actually keeps you stuck longer. Your phone can’t cool down if you keep trying to turn it on. Your nervous system can’t regulate if you keep forcing it back into the same patterns that overheated it in the first place.

Sometimes the fastest way forward is letting yourself actually stop.

12/24/2025

To every parent who forgot to move it at least twice this month and had to gaslight their child about elf magic: you made it. Rest. 🍾

12/23/2025

If you’ve spent years learning to set boundaries, remove yourself from harmful dynamics, or simply survive, the holidays can still surface old activation. Not because you aren’t healing, but because sensory cues, ritual expectations, and the sheer volume of demand don’t care about your timeline for healing.

You’re allowed to approach this season exactly as you need to. Low contact. High boundaries. Minimal effort. Whatever keeps you regulated.

Getting through it counts.

12/19/2025

Understanding rumination as a physiological blocker rather than just a mental habit shifted everything for me. We talk a lot about stress management, but we don’t talk enough about stress completion.

Your nervous system wants to return to baseline after stress. It’s designed to adapt, to learn, to get more efficient at handling repeated challenges. But rumination essentially jams that process. It’s like trying to heal a wound you keep reopening.

This is why some people can go through incredibly stressful situations and bounce back quickly, while others get stuck on smaller stressors for days. It’s often not about the size of the stress. It’s about what happens in the hours after.

The research shows this isn’t about willpower or positive thinking. It’s about understanding how your nervous system works and working with it instead of against it. Your body already knows how to recover from stress. Sometimes we just need to stop interfering with that process.

Research: Gianferante, D., Thoma, M.V., Hanlin, L., Chen, X., Breines, J.G., Zo***la, P.M., & Rohleder, N. (2014). Post-stress rumination predicts HPA axis responses to repeated acute stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 49, 244-252.