Danielle Austin, LMFT, Shine Counseling Services, LLC

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

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.

11/03/2025

For everyone hurting as we approach the holiday season:
Your health may be a threat to your dysfunctional family system, but living in your truth is what gives you the power to create a beautiful life for yourself. Hang in there. Keep growing and healing. It gets better. 💙

11/02/2025

Lord, there are seasons when it feels like I’ve disappeared — when doors stay closed, opportunities pause, and the world seems to move forward without me. I look around and wonder why everyone else is being seen, celebrated, or called forward, while I’m standing still in silence. But slowly, You teach me that hidden isn’t forgotten. Hidden is often holy. Sometimes You pull me back, not to punish me, but to protect me.

You know the weight of visibility before I can carry it. You know the dangers that come with rushing ahead too soon. You know that what’s growing inside me — faith, character, endurance — needs time to strengthen beneath the surface. So You hide me, like a seed beneath the soil. It looks quiet on the outside, but deep inside, something sacred is happening.

Thank You, Lord, for the hiding places — for the seasons when You cover me, when You slow me down, when You teach me in private what will later sustain me in public. Thank You for loving me enough to prepare me before You reveal me. Because sometimes exposure too early can destroy what You’re still growing.

When I feel overlooked or unseen, remind me that You never lose sight of me. That being hidden is not being abandoned — it’s being held. You’re guarding me from distractions that would steal my focus, from pressures that would crush my peace, from paths that aren’t ready yet. You see what I can’t: the timing, the preparation, the alignment that still needs to happen.

Lord, help me to trust the seasons where You call me to be still. Teach me that rest doesn’t mean regression. That obscurity isn’t a sign of insignificance. Sometimes You hide me because You’re building something stronger than applause — integrity, depth, humility, endurance. You’re teaching me how to find worth in being Yours, not in being noticed.

The world tells me to always be seen, to stay loud, to prove my value. But You, Lord, remind me that some of Your greatest work happens in the quiet — in wildernesses, in waiting rooms, in hidden places where pride fades and faith grows deep roots. Moses spent years in the desert before he led a nation. David learned to fight lions in private before he ever faced a giant. Even Jesus lived in obscurity for most of His life before His ministry began. Hidden seasons are not wasted ones — they’re sacred preparation.

And when I grow restless, when I long to be known or to see progress, whisper to my heart that I’m not behind. I’m protected. That Your timing is not delayed; it’s deliberate. You’re shielding me from battles I’m not meant to fight yet, from noise that would drown out Your voice, from people who wouldn’t yet value what You’re forming in me.

So instead of asking, “Why am I hidden?” help me to start praying, “What are You building in me while I’m here?” Help me to honor the quiet. To be faithful in small things. To grow deep roots so that when the time comes, I’ll stand steady in whatever You call me to.

Sometimes being hidden is how God protects you.
Protects you from pride.
Protects you from pressure.
Protects you from paths not meant for you.
Protects you from rushing into blessings not yet ready.

Hidden doesn’t mean forgotten —
it means guarded, nurtured, loved.
It means God sees the full picture
and is keeping you safe inside it.

So if I’m hidden, Lord, let me rest here.
Let me learn here.
Let me grow here.
And when You decide it’s time to step forward,
let me walk out not restless — but ready.

Amen.

10/31/2025

For your nervous system to feel safer with emotions, it needs to unlearn to source safety from patterns like:

1. Overcontrol
2. Overthinking
3. Perfectionism
3. Performing
5. Fantasizing
6. Over-responsibility

Over-control gave a sense of stability in the face of emotional unsafety.

Performance ensured a sense of belonging when a genuine connection was absent.

Perfectionism protected you from rejection.

Overthinking kept you disconnected from pain.

Fantasizing provided a temporary escape when reality felt too heavy.

Over-responsibility made you feel needed and safe.

These patterns served a role. But as your capacity grows, these same patterns start to feel like cages — limiting and exhausting because their purpose is to keep the system in survival, not move the system closer to self-connection.

The risk of staying in survival isn’t only burnout. It’s self-abandonment.

Eventually, you want your system to source safety from trust, self-connection or presence, but this might feel like a big leap now.

So start with something that may feel a bit more accessible, even if uncomfortable.

Maybe

1. Being with what's here instead of immediately going into fixing or analyzing mode.

2. Showing your nervous system, through experience, that you can feel something without knowing or understanding why you feel the way you do.

In survival, you need to know "why" and then you allow yourself to feel. Explore the opposite for a week and see how it feels.

Each time you stay with what’s felt — without needing to fix, find the why or explain — your system learns to couple emotional safety with your own presence, attunement, permission...This is what brings you closer to yourself, not keeping your system in survival.

Module 3 of my new course, Safe To Fee, walks you step by step through this and so much more.

Comment Safe or visit my profile to join us inside.

Love,
Ally.