http://STEADFASTCOUNSELING.COM/, https://linktr.ee/steadfastcounseling

Lauren Auer LCPC, 204 C. 6035 N Knoxville Avenue, Peoria, IL (2025)

11/26/2025

These people aren’t looking for understanding or resolution. They’re looking for fuel. Your reaction, your defensiveness, your hurt, your anger… that’s what they came for. When you just refuse to play it breaks the entire script they had in their head.

It has nothing to do with you. Not your worth, not your value, not whether you deserve to be heard. It has everything to do with them and what they’re getting from the chaos.

Let them yell into the void.
Your nervous system will thank you for it.

11/25/2025

Daylight savings. Political trash. The cost of eggs. 100 New Black Friday Sale emails a day. Holiday gatherings. Seasonal depression. Countdown to deductibles restarting… everyone’s nervous systems are just out here playing the ultimate game of chicken.

11/21/2025

You are allowed to heal even if they never apologize, even if they never admit what happened, even if they die before acknowledging the harm they caused.

I know that’s not the closure you wanted. It’s not fair. And it’s okay to grieve what you’ll never get.

But waiting for their apology and changed behavior or acknowledgment, keeps you tethered to people who already took enough from you. Your healing can’t be held hostage by someone who may never be capable of giving you what you deserve.

The truth is your nervous system doesn’t need their confession to know what happened. Your body already knows and it’s ready to heal without permission from anyone who hurt you.

This doesn’t mean what they did was okay. It doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. It means you get to stop waiting and start living.

11/20/2025

You are allowed to heal even if they never apologize, even if they never admit what happened, even if they die before acknowledging the harm they caused.

I know that’s not the closure you wanted. It’s not fair. And it’s okay to grieve what you’ll never get.

But waiting for their apology and changed behavior or acknowledgment, keeps you tethered to people who already took enough from you. Your healing can’t be held hostage by someone who may never be capable of giving you what you deserve.

The truth is your nervous system doesn’t need their confession to know what happened. Your body already knows and it’s ready to heal without permission from anyone who hurt you.

This doesn’t mean what they did was okay. It doesn’t mean you have to forgive them. It means you get to stop waiting and start living.

11/18/2025

Your brain constantly scans for danger, mostly without you knowing. You’ve driven somewhere while your mind was elsewhere and arrived safely because your nervous system monitored everything. When a car suddenly swerves into your lane, everything sharpens instantly before you’ve consciously processed what’s happening.
That’s anxiety functioning as designed.

The Yerkes-Dodson law shows moderate arousal can enhance performance up to a point. That nervousness making you prepare thoroughly for the presentation is not a malfunction.

But here’s where it gets complicated, research shows people with clinical anxiety actually have reduced working memory accuracy. When your system is already in overdrive, it stops being helpful.

Your nervous system learned to be this vigilant. Usually because at some point, that vigilance kept you safe. Maybe you grew up monitoring mood shifts constantly. Maybe something taught your body the world isn’t safe. Your threat detection isn’t broken. It’s just calibrated for a level of danger that doesn’t match your current reality.
Trauma therapy helps your nervous system recalibrate.

You’re not overreacting. Your system is just incredibly sensitive. And it can learn new patterns.

11/17/2025

If you are somebody who can’t seem to turn off, who functions better under pressure than in peace, who’s always brace for something to go wrong even when things are fine? The coffee thing might be pointing to something deeper.

When your nervous system has been running on overdrive for so long, stimulants can have this paradoxical effect. They don’t wake you up because you’re already awake, activated and already scanning. Your baseline is so elevated that adding a stimulant just brings you to what your body has learned to call normal.

I’m not diagnosing anyone via Instagram, but I am saying that if you heard anything in this video, especially in the list of other symptoms I talk about, and felt seen. It might be worth getting curious about what your actual baseline is. Because when you’ve been in survival mode long enough, you stop noticing it.

11/12/2025

The audacity of my brain to keep ruminating when I literally teach people how to stop doing this.

I spend my days explaining how creative stuff interrupts those repetitive thought loops. How it shifts your nervous system, lowers cortisol, all of it. And I mean it when I say it. I can explain how making something with your hands shifts your nervous system out of threat response.

Then I pick up some art supplies and my brain’s like “but remember that thing from Tuesday? Let’s think about it seventeen more times.”

But it still helps, even when it doesn’t completely stop the thoughts. My brain might be replaying that conversation, but at least my hands are busy. At least there’s color happening. At least I’m not just sitting there letting it loop.

You don’t have to be good at redirecting your thoughts for it to count. Sometimes the win is just noticing you’re doing it again and deciding to paint anyway.

So yeah, I still negatively ruminate. And I still recommend creative activities to manage it. Both things are true. Do as I say AND as I do, apparently.

11/11/2025

I’ve watched clients spiral over short text responses, delayed replies, someone’s tone in a meeting. They’re convinced they’ve done something wrong. Usually they haven’t. But their nervous system is just doing what it learned to do, which is to stay alert, stay ready, and don’t miss the warning signs.

There’s research behind this particular kind of exhausting. Dr. Stephen Porges’ work on the autonomic nervous system shows when you grow up having to constantly monitor others’ emotional states just to feel safe, your ventral vagal system (the part responsible for social engagement) gets wired differently. You become extraordinary at reading subtle shifts in tone, facial expressions, those tiny micro-movements most people miss entirely.

That same system doesn’t know how to recalibrate, though. It keeps scanning for threats even when you’re actually safe now. Studies on adverse childhood experiences show that kids who had to predict adult moods to survive carry that hypervigilance straight into adulthood. Their nervous systems can’t tell the difference between real danger and the normal interpersonal static that just exists between people.

Your hypervigilance isn’t a character flaw. It’s evidence of how hard you worked to stay safe.

11/10/2025

Many of us have been taught that anger makes you difficult or unreasonable or too much. These messages have often covertly and overly been nailed into us for most of our lives.
The anger isn’t actually the problem. Anger is an emotion that you don’t get to choose. It’s automatic and it’s actually really wise information that can lead you towards healing.

Sometimes it’s your body just saying something isn’t right ,pointing you to a boundary that’s getting stepped over, a conversation that needs to be had, or signaling you to treatment that doesn’t match your worth.

When we think about anger I think people often think of the actions that can be associated with anger, but the emotion itself is just a signal. It’s quiet. It’s clear and it’s wise information if you let yourself listen to it.

11/06/2025

Last week I had back-to-back client sessions while fighting off a migraine. My body was screaming at me to stop, but someone was already in my waiting room counting on me to show up. I had to p*e, hadn’t eaten more than a granola bar that day and that was five hours ago.

I ended up taking three minutes in my office before the next session (after a bathroom break). Sat in my chair, put my hand on my chest, and said out loud, “This is really hard right now. You’re doing your best.”

It didn’t fix the migraine. But something in my body relaxed enough to get through the rest of the day without completely falling apart.

There’s this idea that self-compassion is indulgent or soft. But in my experience, it’s actually the most practical tool we have when we can’t stop but desperately need to.

The repair doesn’t always come from resting. Sometimes it comes from how we speak to ourselves while we’re still in motion.

11/06/2025

Something I see all the time is people who’ve done the hard work of healing, who are finally starting to feel good again. And they don’t trust it.

Someone loves you well and you wait for the other shoe to drop. You laugh and part of you is already bracing for the crash. Your nervous system learned that good things don’t last, that safety is temporary, that joy is just the setup for disappointment.

Learning to let good things land, to let them be real without waiting for them to turn, that’s part of healing too. It feels uncomfortable at first. But your body will catch up.

The more you practice letting good things stay, the more your nervous system learns this is allowed now. This gets to be real.

11/04/2025

The person says something that feels like an insult wrapped in concern or a criticism disguise as a joke and you’re left standing there wondering if you’re overreacting, or if you imagined it.

Try this.

It’s not really about confrontation. It’s more about refusing to be complicit in your own diminishment

A simple technique that can make a big difference.

Lauren Auer LCPC

11/26/2025

11/25/2025

11/21/2025

11/20/2025

11/18/2025

11/17/2025

11/12/2025

11/11/2025

11/10/2025

11/06/2025

11/06/2025

11/04/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Share