Lauren Auer LCPC

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

Little reminders on my desk.
03/06/2026

Little reminders on my desk.

This one hits different when you realize how many of us were trained to believe that caring means carrying.Maybe you gre...
03/03/2026

This one hits different when you realize how many of us were trained to believe that caring means carrying.

Maybe you grew up in a household where your job was to manage everyone else’s emotions. Where love meant absorbing someone’s anger so they didn’t explode. Where being good meant making yourself small so others could be big.

Your nervous system learned early that other people’s comfort equals my safety. So now, decades later, when someone shares their pain with you, your body doesn’t just listen, it absorbs. It takes on their stress as if it’s a threat to you personally. Because once upon a time, it was.

The exhaustion you feel after these conversations is your nervous system trying to solve a problem it thinks is yours. It’s flooding your body with stress hormones, activating your threat response, keeping you in a state of hypervigilance about someone else’s situation.
And you can’t actually help anyone from that place.
The most supportive thing you can offer someone isn’t your collapsed, anxious, depleted presence. It’s your grounded, regulated one. When you’re able to stay in your own body while they’re in their distress, you’re actually giving them evidence that it’s possible to be okay even when things aren’t okay.

That’s what holding space actually means. Just being stable while they’re not.
This doesn’t come naturally if you learned the opposite. It takes practice to stay present without absorbing. To care without carrying.

03/03/2026

My trainer has been certain I could work myself up to a handstand. I’ve been certain I would die. We were both a little right.

TBH, I can’t turn down a challenge, and I trust her. She’s seen enough bodies do hard things to know what’s possible even when the person attached to the body has zero faith in themselves. So I kept trying. And falling. A lot. You saw.

It hit me afterward though. That’s kind of exactly what I do for a living.

I’ve sat with clients who were completely convinced they couldn’t do something. Couldn’t survive leaving. Couldn’t trust themselves again after everything. And I could see it clearly because I wasn’t inside their fear, I was just sitting across from it. I’ve watched enough people do the hard thing to know it’s possible even when they can’t see it yet.

Sometimes the belief comes after the trust, not before.

You don’t have to be convinced you can do it. You just need someone in your corner who has seen enough to know.

Also my battle wounds on my face make me look kinda like a badass.

As promised from my video last week, here is my full take on the polyvagal theory debate. This one was important to me t...
03/02/2026

As promised from my video last week, here is my full take on the polyvagal theory debate. This one was important to me to get right. I didn’t want to come into it with a predetermined conclusion, so I spent time genuinely researching all sides of the conversation before sitting down to write, and this is honestly where I landed.

I also decided to make this one free even though it was supposed to be a paid week. This felt like a conversation that should be accessible to everyone, whether you are a clinician, someone in your own healing journey, or just a fellow nervous system nerd who fell down the same rabbit hole I did.

Full article at the link in my bio.

I’ve been on my office floor for an hour. Everything spread out around me, holding things up, moving them, setting them ...
03/01/2026

I’ve been on my office floor for an hour.

Everything spread out around me, holding things up, moving them, setting them down. My grandmother’s old recipe card next to a hotdog I painted in oil pastels, a “might as well go ahead and have the audacity” print that felt mandatory. Watercolors I made myself on a random Tuesday when I needed something to do with my hands.
At some point the hard part of divorce gives way to this other thing. This genuinely fun, slightly chaotic process of figuring out what you actually want on your walls. What says you, just you, without negotiation.

I’m in that part now and I kind of love it.
The challenge is I want to frame all of it. The recipe card for sure. The postcards. But also: the hotdog. Definitely the hotdog.

How do you even choose?

02/25/2026

The polyvagal theory debate has been all over therapy spaces lately and I have a lot of thoughts.

But what it really comes down to for me after years of sitting with clients is that healing is less about having the perfect theory and more about what actually makes sense to the person in front of you.

Yes, science matters, frameworks matter AND the thing that moves people forward is rarely the neuroanatomy.

My full breakdown of this is going up on my Substack this upcoming Monday, which will be linked in my bio, but I want to hear from you. Has Polyvagal theory been part of your healing or your practice? Did this debate shake you at all? Let me know in the comments.

Notes to myself.
02/24/2026

Notes to myself.

02/23/2026

Cumulative grief is one of the most disorienting, least talked about experiences I see in my work.

Your nervous system can only process so much at once. When losses stack faster than you can make sense of them, your brain goes into survival mode. The numbness, the fog, the guilt about not grieving the right way... all of it makes sense when you understand what’s actually happening underneath.

You don’t have to earn the right to fall apart over multiple things at once.

Full breakdown of this over on Substack this week, link in bio. And if you’ve chosen to support my work over there, genuinely, thank you. It means more than I know how to say.

therapistsofinstagram

02/17/2026

TikTok told them they have (wildly inaccurate diagnosis)

ChatGPT agreed

I have a masters degree, an established therapeutic relationship and 14 years of clinical experience telling me otherwise.

But sure… *takes long drag of the hypothetical cigarette*

Address

204 C. 6035 N Knoxville Avenue
Peoria, IL
61614

Website

https://linktr.ee/steadfastcounseling

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