Happy Mindz PLLC

10/27/2026

10/20/2026

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🚨 According to Research about our Brain:

This is for the person who chose gentleness when hardness was easier and more available.

Who has been through enough to justify the closing. Who has the specific and personal evidence, accumulated across enough genuine experiences of what the world and the people in it can do, that a more defended and less open orientation would be a reasonable and perhaps even intelligent response to the available data.

Who has looked at that data and made a different choice. Not because the data is wrong. Not from the innocence of someone who has not yet been tested. From the specific and deliberate decision of someone who has been tested and has found, in themselves, a specific refusal to allow the testing to produce the version of themselves that the testing was oriented toward creating.

Who has remained soft in the specific and chosen sense of someone who has the scar tissue and the intelligence to be otherwise and who has decided that the otherwise is not the version of themselves they are willing to become.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, whose research on the neural basis of compassion and its maintenance found that the sustained extension of genuine warmth and openness in people who have experienced significant personal pain required the continuous and active engagement of the prefrontal cortex's regulatory systems to override the amygdala's learned threat responses, found the biological cost of what this person is doing.

The sustained gentleness after genuine hurt, Davidson found, is not a passive state. It is an active and metabolically costly choice that requires the ongoing engagement of the neural systems most associated with prosocial behavior against the pull of the systems that were calibrated toward self-protection by the experiences the person has been through.

Researcher Dacher Keltner at the University of California Berkeley confirmed that the neural systems most associated with genuine warmth and openness required active daily maintenance in people whose threat responses had been significantly activated by personal experience and that the maintenance constituted genuine neural work regardless of how effortless the gentleness appeared from the outside.

The softness is not weakness.
It is not naivety.
It is the most specific and most demanding form of strength available to a person who has enough information to be otherwise.

And the daily choosing of it, against the pull of everything that the experience has calibrated the nervous system toward, is a form of courage that does not announce itself because it wears the face of ordinary warmth.
But it costs what it costs.
Every single day.
And it deserves to be recognized as exactly the demanding and deliberate and specific form of strength it actually is.

09/18/2026

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09/09/2026

The Family • The Trauma • The Child (2)

One of my favorite tools for tracking multigenerational family trauma, and helping families heal, is called a genogram. It’s a family tree with a twist or two.

The process is tailored to whatever specific issue you want to investigate, and, most uniquely, it assesses for how one’s multigenerational family members (can include friends and step family), reinforced your own behavior and emotional patterns. It’s notably geared towards “self discovery” through the lens of how members of one’s family dealt with, or didn’t deal with, the same issue that you or your loved one struggles with today.

Let’s say for example, we want to work on divorce and infidelity. That sounds fun right?

We would do a deep dive and explore one’s maternal and paternal line of marriages, through family interviews where possible, exploring your own parents, grandparents and great grandparent’s marital patterns. Asking questions such as:

How did couples in your family handle arguments? Did they yell, shut down, or talk it out? Two. Who usually had the final say in decisions? Three. How were roles divided, like finances, chores, or childcare? Four. Was divorce talked about, stigmatized, or quietly avoided? Five. How did the couple show affection or did they not show it? Six. How did they handle stress? And maybe for you it’s how did each sibling cope with the divorce, did they take sides in the divorce?

This process can uncover some painful memories and emotions, where perhaps starting on lighter topics might be a better starting point in your healing journey. If you or your loved ones are struggling and need support, please reach out and I’d be happy to explore referrals tailored to your specific mental health needs. We at Happy Mindz realize much of life isn’t happy. Healing doesn’t mean being happy all the time. Sometimes it means just feeling a little lighter together.

C Scott Baker @ Happy Mindz PLLC
918 951 9523

09/08/2026

The Family • The Trauma • The Child
This topics scope is endless. I’ll attempt to limit the scope to adult emotional wounds:

Loving and raising children can be both the most rewarding thing on the planet, while also triggering some of the family’s most profound personal wounds carried throughout a lifetime as primary caregivers, parents, grandparents and extended family. The woundedness carried by each of these members, directly or indirectly, affects the children for the good, and the not so good; this reality is perhaps why we work as hard as we can to protect the children from what we see as a threat to them. Yet, if we haven’t done the hard work of healing our own trauma wounds, we can unintentionally perpetuate the wounds. It starts with us, doing our own work, pursuing our best mental, spiritual, and physical health. If we don’t do that, then WE are hurting the children AND we’re hurting ourselves.

It’s easy to say “I won’t allow anyone to be around my kids who cuss at them and smokes crack cocaine,” or “I’m never putting my kids in a situation where they are bullied,” or “grandma steals my kids piggy bank for her heroine addiction, so we’re not encouraging the kids to call grandma and invite her to the birthday party,” or “my step mom calls only when she’s drunk, she’s never spent much of any time coming over to see the kids, so I’ll definitely be staying close to my kids and not leaving them alone with her if she’s coming to family movie night.”

…but much of family life is way more nuanced than that! It’s possible that unresolved trauma filters out the positives. It’s possible that you have family that loves you more than you know, that the kids are lucky to have as much support as they do. But one’s trauma lens just sees everything as extreme (threat/safe)(but mostly threat).

This is where doing the difficult work of healing from our trauma comes to play. Even if it wasn’t clinically traumatic, if it hurt you in your childhood, if it causes ongoing family tension, if it causes anxiety and depression symptoms, I want to encourage you to be courageous and do more than a Tik Tok self help program every evening. Please reach out, if not to me, to someone, a counselor, a pastor, an elder that’s been through some major battles and overcame them. There’s more of life to live today than you might even realize. The family children in our care deserve our best foot forward. Depression is real, trauma is real, abuse happens and is real, BUT SO TOO is Hope and healing!

Happy Mindz PLLC Counseling
918 951 9523

09/08/2026

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During a violent storm, an old man filled his pockets with rocks so the wind wouldn’t knock him down.

The wind tore through trees, ripped branches from the ground, and nearly swept people off their feet. But the weight in his pockets kept him steady.

The storm eventually passed.

The sky cleared. The wind died down. Life returned to normal.

But the man never took the rocks out.

“What if another storm comes?” he thought. “They saved me once. I might need them again.”

So he kept carrying them.

Days became years, and years became decades. Thirty years later, the rocks were still in his pockets.

As he grew older, he walked more slowly. His back ached. Every step felt harder than the last.

“Life has become so heavy,” he would often say.

But it wasn’t life that had become so heavy.

It was the weight he had been afraid to put down.

The rocks had once protected him. In the middle of the storm, carrying them had made sense. But when the danger was over, what had helped him survive became the very thing that made his life harder.

Sometimes, you don’t need to become stronger.

Sometimes, you simply need to empty your pockets.

Not everything that once helped you survive is something you need to carry forever.

Some habits, fears, defenses, and ways of protecting yourself may have been necessary during a difficult season of your life. But that doesn’t mean they still belong with you today.

The storm may have ended a long time ago. Make sure you’re not still living as if it never did.