Counseling In Green Country

09/08/2026

09/03/2026

He broke the argument down beautifully…

09/01/2026

A message from Soonercare:

Starting on Jan. 1, 2027, a new federal law (H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) requires some SoonerCare members ages 19-64 to work, go to school or help in their community. This will ensure those members keep their SoonerCare health coverage. Members can review the Work Requirements Screener to see if they may be impacted.

Please advise your patients to make sure their information is up to date in the MySoonerCare.org member portal. Tell them to be on the lookout for mail from SoonerCare or the Oklahoma Health Care Authority. Members will get a yellow letter if they are impacted.

https://oklahoma.gov/ohca/individuals/mysoonercare/work-requirements.html

To learn about SoonerCare's citizenship requirements, view our eligibility guidelines. Para obtener más información sobre los requisitos de ciudadanía de SoonerCare, consulte nuestras pautas de elegibilidad.

09/01/2026

Trauma doesn’t always end when the danger ends.

Sometimes the event is over, but your nervous system never quite gets the message.

You may know logically that you're safe while your body is still scanning the room. You may react strongly to something that seems small, avoid things you don't fully understand, struggle to sleep, feel disconnected from people you love, or suddenly find yourself right back in a moment that happened years ago.

That can be part of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

But prolonged or repeated trauma—especially trauma that happens in relationships, during childhood, or in situations where escape wasn't possible—can sometimes affect more than memories of what happened.

It can begin shaping how you understand yourself, other people, relationships, and safety itself.

That's where the concept of Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) becomes important.

Someone experiencing complex trauma may have many of the traditional symptoms of PTSD, while also struggling with things like:

🌿 Chronic shame or feeling fundamentally “wrong”
🌿 Difficulty regulating intense emotions
🌿 Feeling disconnected from yourself
🌿 Trouble knowing who you are outside of survival
🌿 Difficulty trusting—even people who have given you no reason not to
🌿 Fear of abandonment or rejection
🌿 Relationship patterns that seem impossible to escape
🌿 Feeling unsafe when everything around you appears safe
🌿 Automatically people-pleasing, shutting down, fighting, fleeing, or freezing when you feel threatened

And sometimes those behaviors get labeled as personality problems, anger problems, “attention seeking,” being dramatic, difficult, overly sensitive, or simply making bad choices.

But behavior makes a lot more sense when we ask:

“What did your nervous system learn it had to do to survive?”

That doesn't mean trauma explains or excuses every behavior.

It means understanding where a pattern came from gives us a much better chance of changing it.

One important technical distinction: PTSD is a DSM-5-TR diagnosis; Complex PTSD is not currently a separate DSM-5-TR diagnosis. C-PTSD is recognized as a distinct diagnosis in the ICD-11, and clinicians may still use the concept of complex trauma when understanding someone's symptoms and treatment needs.

And neither diagnosis requires you to have experienced the stereotypical version of trauma people sometimes imagine.

Trauma isn't a competition.

You don't have to prove that what happened was “bad enough” before you're allowed to be affected by it.

Most importantly:

Healing isn't about becoming the person you were before trauma.

Sometimes that person doesn't exist anymore—or never had the opportunity to exist without survival being part of the equation.

Healing can mean learning that the coping strategies that once protected you don't have to run your life forever.

Your nervous system learned how to survive.

It can also learn safety. 💚

🌳 Counseling in Green Country
📍 1 W 41st St STE D | Sand Springs, OK 74063
📍 1418 E 71st St Suite H | Tulsa, OK 74136
📞 918.215.2444
🌐 CounselingInGreenCountry.com

This post is for education and awareness and is not intended to diagnose. If trauma symptoms are affecting your relationships, work, sleep, sense of safety, or ability to function, a trauma-informed mental health professional can help.

08/27/2026

Sometimes parents hear about a therapy session and think:

“Wait… you played UNO for an hour?” 😂

Fair question.

From the outside, therapy with children or adolescents can sometimes look an awful lot like playing cards, drawing, building something, tossing a ball around, or absolutely destroying your therapist at a board game.

But what looks like play can give a therapist a lot of information—and create opportunities to practice skills that are much harder to recreate through conversation alone.

Imagine a game of UNO.

We're not necessarily interested in whether your child can successfully yell “UNO!” before getting caught with one card. 😆

We may be watching:

🃏 What happens when the game suddenly doesn't go their way?
🃏 Can they tolerate frustration without giving up?
🃏 Do they bend the rules when they're losing?
🃏 Can they recover after making a mistake?
🃏 How do they respond to competition?
🃏 Can they identify what they're feeling as it happens?
🃏 Can they pause before reacting impulsively?
🃏 What happens when the therapist models losing, disappointment, or flexibility?

Chess or checkers gives us different opportunities: planning ahead, patience, decision-making, problem-solving, handling mistakes, impulse control, and thinking about consequences.

Creative and pretend play can give children another language entirely.

A child who can't sit across from an adult and explain, “I'm afraid Mom and Dad are going to leave me when they're angry,” may communicate that fear very clearly through characters, drawings, stories, or play.

But there's another distinction that's important for parents to know:

Using play in therapy and providing Play Therapy are not automatically the same thing.

Many licensed therapists appropriately incorporate games, toys, art, movement, or creative activities into treatment within their training and scope of practice.

A Registered Play Therapist™ (RPT) has completed additional specialized education, supervised clinical experience, and credentialing specifically in play therapy.

Neither distinction means that every game used by a therapist is secretly a complicated psychological test. Sometimes UNO really is just a comfortable way to help a guarded kid talk. 😊

The important question is whether the activity has a therapeutic purpose.

So if your child comes home and tells you:

“We literally just played games today.”

You are absolutely allowed to ask their therapist:

“What skills were you working on, and how does that activity connect to their treatment goals?”

A good therapist should be able to tell you. 💚

Because sometimes the game is simply the activity.

The therapeutic work is everything happening around it.

🌳 Counseling in Green Country
📍 1 W 41st St STE D | Sand Springs, OK 74063
📍 1418 E 71st St Suite H | Tulsa, OK 74136
📞 918.215.2444
🌐 CounselingInGreenCountry.com

Educational information only. Therapist training, scope of practice, and credentials vary. Registered Play Therapist™ (RPT) is a specialized credential and should not be assumed solely because a clinician incorporates play into treatment.

08/25/2026

Depression is not always crying, staying in bed, or visibly looking sad.

Sometimes it looks like getting up, going to work, answering texts, taking care of everyone else... and wondering why everything feels so incredibly hard.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) affects much more than mood. It can change the way someone experiences their body, thoughts, motivation, relationships, concentration, sleep, appetite, and even their sense of who they are.

Someone experiencing depression might describe it as:

💜 “I don't really feel anything anymore.”

💜 “Everything takes so much energy.”

💜 “I know I should care about this, but I just... don't.”

💜 “I feel like everyone would be better off without me.”

💜 “Nothing is technically wrong, so why can't I just be happy?”

And from the outside, depression doesn't always look like depression.

It might look like irritability.

Canceling plans.

Sleeping constantly—or barely sleeping at all.

Falling behind on things that used to be manageable.

Not answering messages.

Losing interest in hobbies.

Struggling with hygiene or household tasks.

Or even continuing to function remarkably well while privately feeling exhausted, numb, hopeless, or disconnected.

That's an important distinction because functioning is not the same thing as feeling okay.

Clinical depression is also different from having a painful week or feeling understandably sad after something difficult happens. For Major Depressive Disorder, clinicians look at a combination of symptoms, their severity, how long they've been present, how much they're affecting someone's life, and whether another medical or mental health condition might better explain them.

And you do not have to wait until you can't get out of bed before therapy is appropriate.

If you've noticed that you don't feel like yourself anymore, things you once enjoyed don't feel enjoyable, everyday responsibilities are becoming increasingly difficult, or hopelessness is becoming a regular part of your internal dialogue, that's enough reason to reach out.

Therapy can't promise that every day will feel good.

But it can provide a place to understand what is happening, identify patterns contributing to depression, rebuild connection and functioning, develop coping strategies, and begin creating room for something depression has a way of convincing people is impossible:

Hope. 💚

🌳 Counseling in Green Country
📍 1 W 41st St STE D | Sand Springs, OK 74063
📍 1418 E 71st St Suite H | Tulsa, OK 74136
📞 918.215.2444
🌐 CounselingInGreenCountry.com

This post is for education and awareness and is not intended to diagnose an individual. Depression can have many causes and can overlap with grief, trauma, bipolar disorders, medical conditions, medications, substance use, ADHD, autistic burnout, and other experiences. A thorough assessment matters.

08/20/2026

Autism and schizophrenia can sometimes look surprisingly similar from the outside.

Social withdrawal. Sensory overwhelm. Difficulty communicating what is happening internally. Unusual or highly focused interests. Flat or unexpected emotional expression. Feeling disconnected from other people.

But similar-looking behaviors do not necessarily come from the same internal experience.

That distinction matters.

🧩 With autism, differences in social communication, sensory processing, routines, interests, and patterns of thinking are neurodevelopmental. They begin early in development—even when they aren't recognized until adulthood.

Someone may retreat because the environment is overwhelming. They may rely heavily on routines because predictability helps regulate their nervous system. A rich internal world, imagination, scripting, or intense interests may provide comfort and structure.

🧠 With schizophrenia spectrum disorders, there can be a change in how someone interprets or experiences reality.

A person may experience hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, disorganized thinking or speech, difficulty organizing behavior, or "negative symptoms" such as decreased emotional expression, motivation, speech, or engagement.

And this is where differential diagnosis becomes incredibly important.

An autistic person avoiding eye contact is not necessarily experiencing paranoia.

An autistic person's intense interest is not automatically a delusion.

Talking aloud, scripting, internal dialogue, imaginative thinking, sensory experiences, or unconventional communication should not automatically be interpreted as psychosis.

At the same time, autistic people can also develop psychotic disorders. Having one diagnosis does not make someone immune to another.

One of the most helpful questions is:

Is this the person's longstanding baseline—or has something meaningfully changed?

New hallucinations, fixed beliefs that aren't consistent with shared reality, significant disorganization, marked deterioration in functioning, or a noticeable change from someone's usual way of thinking and interacting deserves careful assessment.

And careful really is the key word.

Good diagnosis isn't simply matching a behavior to a symptom list. It means understanding developmental history, context, timeline, culture, sensory experiences, communication style, functioning, and what the experience actually means to the person having it.

Two people can appear remarkably similar from across the room while experiencing completely different things internally.

That's why we should approach both autism and schizophrenia with curiosity rather than assumption—and compassion rather than stigma. 💚

🌳 Counseling in Green Country
📍 1 W 41st St STE D | Sand Springs, OK 74063
📍 1418 E 71st St Suite H | Tulsa, OK 74136
📞 918.215.2444
🌐 CounselingInGreenCountry.com

Educational information only. Autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders require individualized assessment; this graphic is not intended to diagnose or rule out either condition.

08/18/2026

Anxiety is something we all experience—but Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is more than having a lot to worry about.

For someone living with GAD, the brain can feel like it has a dozen browser tabs open at once... and every single one is asking, “But what if...?”

What if I forgot something?
What if something goes wrong?
What if they're upset with me?
What if I made the wrong decision?
What if this feeling means something is wrong?
What if I’m not doing enough?

And even when one worry gets resolved, the brain can be remarkably talented at finding another one. 😅

GAD can show up emotionally through persistent worry, irritability, difficulty relaxing, or constantly feeling “on edge.” But it can also show up physically—muscle tension, headaches, stomach problems, exhaustion, disrupted sleep, restlessness, and difficulty concentrating.

From the outside, someone may simply look like an overthinker, a perfectionist, someone who needs a lot of reassurance, or someone who has trouble “letting things go.”

But internally, their nervous system may be working overtime.

One of the important distinctions with GAD is that the worry tends to spread across multiple areas of life and becomes difficult to control. Work, relationships, finances, health, family, things that haven't happened yet... sometimes even worrying about how much you're worrying.

Therapy isn't about teaching someone to never worry again. Worry is a normal human emotion.

Instead, therapy can help someone learn to recognize anxious thought patterns, tolerate uncertainty, regulate their nervous system, challenge catastrophic thinking, and develop a different relationship with the endless stream of “what ifs.”

And you don't have to wait until anxiety becomes completely debilitating to ask for help.

If worry is regularly stealing your sleep, concentration, relationships, enjoyment, or ability to feel present in your own life, it's worth talking about. 💚

🌳 Counseling in Green Country
📍 1 W 41st St STE D | Sand Springs, OK 74063
📍 1418 E 71st St Suite H | Tulsa, OK 74136
📞 918.215.2444
🌐 CounselingInGreenCountry.com

This post is for education and awareness and is not intended to diagnose any individual. Diagnosis should consider the full clinical picture, including other conditions that can cause similar symptoms.

08/15/2026

True Story 🌻

Art of Parenteen