Lauren Auer LCPC

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Peoria, IL
Lauren Auer LCPC

Therapy should be one of the best parts of your week. Illinois based therapist

04/02/2026

Maybe ‘keeping the peace’ looks responsible. Mature, even. Don’t make a scene, don’t make it weird. Absorb it and move on.

Except sometimes you don’t really move on. You just move it somewhere else. Into your body, your sleep, your low grade irritability that shows up three weeks later over something completely unrelated.

Silence has a cost. It doesn’t always announce itself right away, but it does accumulate. At some point the weight of everything unsaid starts to feel like evidence that you were never allowed to take up space in the first place.

04/01/2026

There are very few topics that will get me on a soapbox faster than this one. And after yesterday‘s Supreme Court ruling, I’m not staying quiet.

If you haven’t heard, the court ruled 8 to 1 that states can no longer use professional licensing laws to ban talk therapy conversion therapy on minors, which means the laws that were protecting LGBTQ plus kids in 23 states and DC are almost certainly going to fall.

Watch the full video then share it with every therapist, Parent, advocate etc. in your life who needs to understand what this ruling actually means. I’m not just talking about legally. I’m talking about clinically.

We need people who know the whole story right now
tag a therapist or mental health advocate below.

This is the moment to be loud.

03/31/2026

Not everyone who speaks fluently about their healing is actually healing.

I see this pattern a lot. Someone has done enough reading, enough therapy, enough podcasts, that they can explain their patterns really well. They know the words. They have the framework.

But knowing the word for something is not the same as working through it.

The tell for me is always the friction. People who are genuinely changing bump up against themselves. They’re annoyed. They contradict themselves sometimes. Something is visibly being challenged.

When everything has a clean explanation, I start paying closer attention.

03/27/2026

Some of these will surprise you. some won’t. either way, this is just me being honest about who I actually am versus who the mental health space sometimes expects therapist to be.

I’d rather lose followers being real and keep them by being palatable. Stick around if that resonates, and if nothing else, the hot dog content is worth it IMO.🌭

03/25/2026

Wrote this hungry. Probably not a coincidence.

But I mean it. We’ve gotten really good at one of two things: letting our feelings run the whole show, or treating emotional suppression like it’s a personality trait worth being proud of. Neither one is actually working.

The idea that discipline means not feeling things is one of the more exhausting myths out there. Hunger doesn’t go away because you ignore it. It just gets louder and starts making worse decisions on your behalf.

Feelings are the same way. They’re information. Not a verdict.

03/23/2026

I wrote the piece I wish had existed when that article came out. It’s on my Substack right now. It covers what actually happened, what the research says about KAP done properly, and what questions you should be asking any provider before you consider this treatment. Link is in my bio (and story on Monday 3/23).

Paid subscribers get it now, free subscribers get a new post from me every other week, and I’m grateful for both.

03/19/2026

One thing I wish more people understood: the person you become during conflict isn’t the real you.
It’s your most dysregulated you.

I had a client once tell me, “I don’t even recognize myself when we fight. I say things I don’t mean. I shut down when I want to stay open. It’s like someone else takes over.”

That’s exactly what’s happening. When your nervous system detects threat, a different part of your brain takes control. The version of you that can think clearly, communicate thoughtfully, and stay connected to your values gets temporarily locked out.

This is why people can be so confused by their own behavior in conflict. “Why did I agree to that when I knew I didn’t want to?” “Why couldn’t I think of a single thing to say?” “Why did I blow up over something so small?”
Because your survival brain was driving, not your thinking brain.

What makes this harder is that the people we have the most difficulty communicating with are often the people who matter most to us. High stakes make our nervous systems more reactive. The more we care about the relationship, the more threatening conflict feels.
This is also why “just communicate better” advice falls flat. You can read all the books on nonviolent communication and still go completely blank when your partner brings up something difficult. Because the issue isn’t what you know - it’s what your body believes about safety.

The good news is that your nervous system can learn new patterns. With practice, you can start to notice when you’re getting activated and intervene earlier. You can build capacity to stay more regulated during difficult conversations. But it requires working with your body, not just your communication skills.

Be patient with yourself. The version of you that shows up during conflict is doing the best it can with a nervous system that’s trying to keep you safe.

03/17/2026

The bear is not coming to apologize.

I know that’s hard to sit with. Because part of healing from trauma does feel like unfinished business. Like there’s a conversation that hasn’t happened yet, and until it does, you can’t quite put the thing down.

And maybe that conversation would help. Maybe if they just admitted what they did, or explained themselves, or said the words you’ve been waiting years to hear, something in you would finally exhale.

But here’s the thing I’ve watched play out in my office over and over again, even when people get the apology, it often doesn’t do what they hoped it would. Because the wound isn’t actually in the other person’s hands. It never was.

Waiting for the bear to make it right keeps you in the woods. And you deserve to be out of the woods.

This isn’t about bypassing accountability, or pretending what happened didn’t matter, or forcing yourself to “forgive and move on” before you’re ready. Some situations genuinely require confrontation for safety, legal, or relational reasons and that’s real. But even then, your healing can’t be contingent on what the bear decides to do.

Your peace has to belong to you.

03/16/2026

Something I keep coming back to in my work is how rarely the original wound is the one that lingers the longest.

It’s the after. The silence. The people who changed the subject or quietly sided with whoever caused the harm. The institutions that responded with more concern for their own reputation than for the person sitting in front of them, trying to be believed.

I’ve watched this play out so many times in my office that I started paying attention to the pattern, and then I started noticing it everywhere. In families. In organizations. In the public response to harm that happens at scale.

The psychology is the same regardless of size. What changes is just how many people are carrying it.
I wrote about this on Substack this week. Jennifer Freyd’s research on betrayal trauma and institutional betrayal is part of it, but honestly, the piece came from something quieter than that. It came from watching what happens in someone’s body when they realize the people who were supposed to show up didn’t.

Link in bio if you want to read it.

03/12/2026

The fear that therapy means sitting across from someone in narrating every painful detail keeps more people out of the room than almost anything else.

It’s not uncommon at all that people can’t access memory or they believe that healing isn’t available to them because they can’t access memory, and on the flipside people who remember everything way too clearly wondering why they can’t just move past something they can still describe in detail.

Both of these things are trauma responses. There’s no correct way your nervous system was supposed to handle it and you don’t need the full story to heal. Good therapy meets you exactly where your memory is, not where you think it should be.

03/10/2026

I’ve been thinking about how many of us are walking around completely exhausted but unable to actually rest.
We lie down and our minds race. We take a day off and feel guilty the entire time. We know we’re burned out but we can’t seem to stop moving.

Your body thinks rest is dangerous AND your mind is trying to catch up on processing you wouldn’t let it do during the day.This is why you reach for your phone the moment you lie down. Why you clean the kitchen at midnight. Why lying still feels more uncomfortable than just pushing through.

The way through isn’t to force yourself to relax or to keep outrunning your thoughts. It’s to work with your nervous system. Give yourself processing time before you try to rest. Move your body first to discharge activation. Let your brain do what it needs to do instead of constantly distracting from it.

And separate rest from worth. You don’t have to earn the right to restore your body. Taking care of it and letting your mind process isn’t selfish.

03/06/2026

Little reminders on my desk.

Address

204 C. 6035 N Knoxville Avenue
Peoria, IL
61614

Website

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

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