Featured Interview With Lauren Tobey
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m a Texas girl through and through. Born and raised here, left for college in Virginia and grad school in Colorado, and then came back home where I belonged.
These days I live in Texas with my husband Scott, my two kids Madison and Damian, and three dogs who run the house: Wolfie the husky, Willow our mixed breed, and our newest addition Reese, a pitbull puppy who is still learning that shoes are not toys.
When I’m not writing or coaching, you’ll usually find us by the pool in the summer or dealing with the chaos that comes with a full house of kids and dogs. It’s loud. It’s messy. It’s exactly what I needed on the other side of everything I write about.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started reading early, and I loved stories because they made sense. A beginning, a middle, an end. For a kid whose brain craved structure, books were the safest place to land.
My older sister was never much of a reader, so my mom made me a deal to encourage the habit: if I read, she’d buy me more books. She regretted that decision very quickly. I burned through everything she handed me and came back asking for more.
Back then, I wanted any book with a horse in it. If there was a girl and a horse on the cover, I was sold. As I’ve gotten older, my taste has shifted to psychological thrillers and fantasy, but the pull is the same. I still love getting lost in a story that takes me somewhere else.
Writing has always been part of my life in some form. I’ve had blogs, journals, random outlets where I needed to put words somewhere. But Spiraling Into Control is my first full-length book. It took living through the material before I had something worth saying at that length.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I read a lot of psychological thrillers and fantasy for fun, the kind of books that pull you in and don’t let go until the last page. But the writers who shaped how I think and how I write are in a different category.
Mel Robbins taught me that practical tools matter. That you can talk about real struggles without making people feel broken. Brené Brown gave me permission to write about shame and vulnerability without softening it into something palatable. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score gave me the science I needed to understand what my own body had been trying to tell me for years. And Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know showed me what it looks like to write about trauma with unflinching honesty while still making it useful for the reader.
These writers influenced Spiraling Into Control because they all do the same thing: they name what’s actually happening without pretending it’s simple, and they respect the reader enough to give her real information instead of empty reassurance. That’s what I wanted this book to be. Not a self-help book that talks around the hard parts. A book that sits in them with you and gives you language for what you’ve been living.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Spiraling Into Control took about six months to write. But I was living it for fifteen years before that.
This isn’t a book about trauma in the abstract. It’s the story of what happened when I lost myself inside a marriage that looked fine from the outside and felt like slow erasure on the inside. The numbness that crept in so gradually I didn’t notice until I couldn’t feel anything at all. The moment I finally said out loud, “Oh, shit. I literally can’t feel anything,” and realized something in me had gone offline in a way I couldn’t override with willpower.
The book follows my journey through what I now call the Spiral Framework: the four states your nervous system moves through when you’re surviving, waking up, and rebuilding. Ashes, when you’re shut down and running on autopilot. Ember, when you start to recognize what’s actually happening. Flame, when you burn away what no longer serves you. And Rise, when you finally start living as the woman you’re becoming instead of the one you were trained to be.
But this isn’t just my story. It’s a map. I wrote it for the woman who is Googling “why do I feel so numb” at 2 a.m. The one who looks like she has it all together while feeling completely hollow inside. The one asking the question I couldn’t stop asking myself: Who am I when I’m no longer who I was?
If that’s you, this book is the answer I wish someone had handed me fifteen years ago.
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