About Lauren
Parts of me that I viewed as weaknesses turned out to be my greatest strengths. Getting there required taking a deep look at everything I had been taught to believe about myself.
MY JOURNEY
I spent years being my own worst enemy.
Not because something was "wrong" with me, but because I was running on beliefs that weren't mine to begin with.
I absorbed everyone else's emotions like it was my job. I replayed conversations for days, convinced I had done or said something wrong. I said yes to things I desperately wanted to say "no" to and then carried the dread of that in my body until it was finally over. I pushed through until I completely crashed, and then felt ashamed for crashing
.
I had been told my whole life that I was too sensitive, too emotional, too dramatic. And somewhere along the way, I stopped questioning whether that was true and just started believing it.
I tried to be like everyone else. I tried to want what everyone else wanted, do what everyone else did, feel things the way everyone else seemed to feel them.
And, what do you know— it didn't work. It was never going to work. Because underneath all of it, I wasn't like everyone else, and no amount of trying was going to change that.
The whole time, there was a quiet voice inside of me. It was my intuition, my truth, and it kept pointing me in a different direction— toward something that didn't look like what everyone around me was doing. But I shoved it down and ignored it because it felt wrong. I had spent so long being told that my instincts were wrong, my feelings were too big, my needs were too much, that I had stopped listening to the one voice that actually had my best interests at heart.
The exhaustion was real. The self-doubt was real. The feeling of being fundamentally broken was real.
And then I learned the thing that changed everything: I'm not broken. I'm highly sensitive. And those are not the same thing at all.
But understanding that I'm an HSP was only the beginning.
Knowing why you are the way you are doesn't automatically make the patterns stop. I understood my sensitivity. I could name it, describe it, explain it to other people. And I still kept repeating the same cycles. I still kept saying "yes" when I meant "no." I still kept absorbing everyone else's energy and losing myself in the process. I still had a relentless inner critic who had an opinion about everything I did and said and felt.
And here's a really important part: the patterns weren't coming from my sensitivity. They were coming from the beliefs underneath it— the beliefs that had formed so early and run so quietly that I didn't even know that they were there. Beliefs that told me I was too much. That my needs were a burden. That the safest thing I could do was make myself smaller and easier to be around. That what my gut was telling me could not be trusted because it didn't look like what everyone else was doing.
That's where the real work began. Not just understanding my behaviors and patterns on the surface, but clearing the beliefs driving them at the root, and transforming the inner voice that had been reinforcing those beliefs every single day.
And that is when everything actually started to change.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who didn't like herself.
Most people would never have guessed. She smiled. She achieved things. She looked happy. But behind the smile, she was constantly at war with herself. Every mistake became proof that she wasn't enough. Every struggle became evidence that she needed to be different.
She overthought everything-- what she said, how she looked, whether people liked her, whether she was doing enough.
And, somehow, she became her own worst enemy. She said things to herself that she would never say to anyone else.
But there was one thing she never gave up on. The quiet hope that one day, life would feel different.
She had dreams. Big ones. Not because she wanted to impress anyone, but because she knew there was more inside her.
The problem wasn't that she lacked potential (she had plenty of that). The problem was that she didn't know how to stop fighting herself and getting in her own way. And it's hard to build the life that you want when all your energy is spent battling who you are.
Everything started changing when she realized that there was nothing wrong with her. She didn't need to become someone else. She needed to understand herself differently.
The girl in this story was me.
And if you've also spent years feeling like you're your own worst enemy, I want you to know that you're not alone.
What if the thing holding you back isn't who you are, but the way you've learned to see yourself?
Where I am today
I'm a mother of two young children, and I'm able to handle the exhaustion, stress, overwhelm, and general demands of motherhood far better than I could handle anything when I was working forty hours a week before any of this began.
And that's not a coincidence-- that's what happens when you stop white-knuckling your way through life as a highly sensitive person and start clearing everything underneath the surface that's been keeping you stuck (without you evern knowing it).
I have the life I always wanted-- the husband, the kids, the ability to be home with them while doing work that I genuinely love. I know how to set boundaries and actually hold them without the guilt spiral that used to follow. I know how to protect my own energy. I know how to listen to myself and trust what I hear, even when it doesn't look like what everyone around me is doing. When the old patterns try to creep back in (and sometimes they do), I catch them early, without judgment, and I respond to myself with a gentleness that I never would've imagined I was capable of (with others, of course; with myself-- no way!).
I didn't get here by becoming less sensitive. I got here by clearing the beliefs that were making my sensitivity feel like a liability, and by learning to speak to myself like someone worth believing in.
That is exactly what I want to help you do.
