Free Minds Counseling

Free Minds Counseling Life is a game! Learn the rules and the skills to thrive. Game and grow!

Individual, family and couples therapy with an emphasis on education, skills training and lifestyle changes to support long term health. I utilize an eclectic blend of talk therapy interventions, nutritional counseling, lifestyle coaching and neurofeedback to help you bring your life into balance.

02/03/2026

A small language shift can completely change how you relate to your past. Instead of asking, “What was I thinking?” try asking, “What was I learning?” The first question assumes stupidity, carelessness, or failure. The second assumes process.

At the moment you made that choice, you were acting on the best information, skills, emotional capacity, and self-awareness you had at the time. That doesn’t mean the outcome was good. It means it was instructive.

“What was I thinking?” shuts the door. “What was I learning?” opens a notebook. It turns regret into data, shame into feedback, a closed loop of self-reproach into forward motion. This reframing doesn’t excuse mistakes. It contextualizes them. And context is what allows growth without self-flagellation.

If you can extract the lesson and release the self-contempt, you get to keep the wisdom without dragging the emotional scar tissue forward with you. That’s integration. And it’s how you stop repeating the same lesson under different costumes.

Be curious about your past self.
They were learning how to become you.

02/03/2026

We tend to think of happiness as something that happens when we finally “win.” When the boss is dead, the achievement pops and the server first banner unfurls and angels sing. But happiness doesn’t actually work like that as anyone who’s ever raided seriously can tell you.

When your raid wipes 30 times in Phase 1, morale is usually in the basement. People are tired. Repairs are expensive. Someone’s internet mysteriously starts “acting up.” The boss feels impossible and a 10 minute break feels like the minimum to reset.

Then something shifts.
Cooldowns line up. Movement gets cleaner. No one panics. And suddenly, Phase 2.
No loot yet. The Boss is still alive. You may even wipe 10 seconds in but the feeling in the raid changes immediately. Happiness, in that moment, isn’t about victory. It’s about evidence of progress. Getting to Phase 2 is a win because it proves the story “we can’t do this” was wrong.

And when you eventually clear the raid, even if you weren’t server first, even if no one outside your guild ever knows, it still feels good. Because you know what it took. The wipes. The learning. The adjustment. The growth.

That’s how happiness works in real life, too.

It’s not a permanent state you unlock once everything is perfect. It’s a perspective you adopt when you notice progress instead of demanding instant mastery.
If you only allow yourself to feel good when the boss is dead, you’ll miss:
• the Phase 2 moments
• the cleaner pulls
• the nights where you played better than last week
Happiness lives in the story you tell about where you are.

If you’re stuck telling yourself “I should be further by now,” try asking:
👉 What phase am I actually in today?
You might already be doing better than you think.
And if you want help learning how to spot progress when your brain insists on only seeing failure, that’s work I do every day.

02/03/2026

People often talk about “finding balance” as if it’s some mystical state you stumble into once you’ve finally cracked the code of adulthood. In practice, balance is usually much less dramatic. It’s the result of consistently following a small set of rules that quietly dictate how you behave when you’re tired, stressed, bored, or emotionally spicy.

Not hundreds of rules.
Not a life manifesto carved into stone tablets.
Just a handful of defaults you return to when your brain is unreliable.

Things like:
• Don’t make big decisions when hungry, angry, lonely, or exhausted
• If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no
• Sleep fixes more problems than willpower ever will
• When in doubt, choose the boring healthy option

The trick is this: rules only work if you actually remember and follow them.

And the human brain is far more likely to comply if the rule is:
Simple
Emotionally sticky
A little amusing

A rule like “Prioritize nervous system regulation” is technically correct and completely forgettable at 10:47 pm when you’re doom-scrolling and eating cereal out of the box.
A rule like “Don’t negotiate with your brain after 9 pm put the phone down”?
Much easier to remember. Much harder to argue with.

Humor lowers resistance. It turns self-management from punishment into cooperation.

Balance isn’t about being rigid or joyless. It’s about reducing the number of decisions you have to make when you’re already depleted and giving those decisions names your brain actually likes.

If your life feels chaotic, it may not be because you lack discipline or insight. You might just need better rules and better packaging for them.

If you want help identifying the few rules that would make your life run more smoothly, and framing them in a way you’ll actually use, I can help with that. DM today.

02/03/2026

One of the sneakiest traps we fall into is the way we define ourselves by our pain.
“I’m anxious.”
“I’m broken.”
“I’m traumatized.”
“I’m bad at relationships.”
“I’m the kind of person who always struggles with ___.”

At first, these stories feel comforting. They explain things and make sense of chaos. They give us a narrative that says, See? There’s a reason this is hard. And there usually is a reason. But the sticky part is that the moment your identity fuses with the problem, transformation starts to feel like self-annihilation.

If I stop being “the anxious one,” who am I?
If I heal this pattern, what happens to the version of me that learned to survive through it?
If I let this go, do I betray the past me who endured it?

So we stay, not because the pain is pleasant, but because it’s familiar. And familiarity feels safer than the unknown, even when the known is miserable. When you define yourself by your wounds, you trap yourself in that form because identity is sticky.

Here’s the thing most people were never told:
The essential you is not your symptoms, your coping strategies, or your backstory.
Those are loadouts, not character class.

They were assembled under pressure. They worked long enough to keep you alive, functioning, passing as “fine.” That deserves respect. But they were never meant to be permanent. At your core, you are wildly, almost irresponsibly malleable.

Human beings aren’t statues. We’re more like molten glass - constantly cooling into shape, constantly able to be reheated. The main limits on who you can become aren’t moral or biological; they’re imaginative and economic.

Can you imagine yourself outside the problem story? And are you willing to pay the cost of becoming someone new? Because there is a cost.

Transformation charges a toll in discomfort, grief, awkwardness, lost roles, confused relationships, and periods where the old identity is gone but the new one hasn’t finished loading yet.

That in-between phase? That’s where most people turn back because they underestimated the price and it still feels like ego annihilation.

The truth is: you don’t stop honoring your past by outgrowing it. You honor it by no longer needing to live inside it. You are not obligated to remain the person your pain shaped. You are allowed to become someone your imagination forms.

The only real question is whether you want to keep protecting an identity that formed around damage or invest in one that forms around choice.

Ready to explore the possibilities? Drop a DM or email.

02/03/2026

We like to think meaning is something we discover but most of the time, meaning is something we assign. The same event can become a tragedy, a turning point, a warning, a joke, a scar, or a source of strength depending entirely on the story we tell ourselves about it.

Nothing in your life comes pre-labeled with meaning. That meaning is created in the narrative layer you build after the fact.

This doesn’t mean you’re lying to yourself. It means you’re interpreting and interpretation is powerful. It shapes identity. It determines whether an experience becomes a prison you keep revisiting or a chapter that made the next one possible.

Two people can live through the same situation and walk away with completely different lives because of the story that got written around it. Stories that frame you as helpless shrink your future. Stories that frame you as learning expand it.

You don’t need to rewrite your past to change your life. You only need to change the lens you’re using to understand it. The story you tell yourself today becomes the reality you live inside tomorrow.
Choose wisely.

02/03/2026

Almost every time we want something badly, there’s fear riding shotgun. Fear that we’ll never get it. Fear that we’ll get it and then lose it. Fear that having it won’t fix what we hoped it would. Wanting is rarely clean. It comes bundled with anxiety and that fear can quietly handicap us in the very pursuit of the thing we say we want.

We hesitate, overthink and delay starting so we don’t have to risk disappointment. Or we grip too tightly - monitoring every step, every sign, every imagined outcome - until the goal stops being something we’re moving toward and becomes something we’re bracing against.

The mind starts protecting us from pain instead of moving us toward growth. This is why people sometimes sabotage opportunities right before they arrive. Not because they don’t want the thing but because wanting it has made the stakes feel unbearable.

There’s a strange freedom in loosening the emotional contract.
In wanting without demanding.
In moving forward without insisting on guarantees.
In allowing effort without attaching your worth to the outcome.
Goals are easier to approach when they’re no longer carrying the full weight of your happiness.

If your desire feels paralyzing rather than motivating, it may be worth asking:
👉 What am I afraid would happen if this worked?
👉 What am I afraid would happen if it didn’t?
Sometimes naming the fear is enough to stop letting it drive.

And if you find yourself stuck between wanting and freezing, that’s a very human nervous system doing its best to protect you, not a character flaw. Learning how to want things without being owned by them is a skill. And like most skills, it can be practiced.
Ready to name and tame those inner demons drop me a DM or visit my website to sign up for my newsletter

01/31/2026

One of the most underrated life skills is semantic precision - using accurate language to describe what is actually happening, especially when emotions are running hot. Strong emotion doesn’t just feel intense, it biologically changes how your brain functions.

When your nervous system is flooded with fear, anger, or outrage, the parts of the brain responsible for nuance, reasoning, & impulse control get quieter. That’s not a personal failing - it’s how humans are wired. Emotional arousal narrows attention, simplifies thinking, & pushes us toward fast reactions instead of careful analysis.

This is exactly why imprecise language becomes dangerous in emotionally charged situations.

When complex issues are reduced to vague, loaded words (always, never, evil, threat, unsafe, enemy) the brain fills in the gaps with emotion instead of logic. Once language becomes sloppy, thinking follows. And once thinking degrades, self-control goes with it.

This isn’t accidental.

Throughout history, authorities of every kind (political, religious, cultural, even corporate) have understood that emotionally activated people are easier to steer. Fear and outrage make people compliant, reactive, and willing to accept oversimplified narratives they would normally question.
Semantic precision is a form of resistance. Carefully defining terms. Separating facts from interpretations. Distinguishing feelings from reality. Refusing to let emotionally charged language replace clear thinking.

This doesn’t mean suppressing emotion or pretending not to care. It means recognizing when emotion is present and choosing language that reflects reality rather than amplifies panic. The more precise your language, the more agency you retain. The less precise it becomes, the more easily your reactions can be guided by someone else.

Clarity keeps your nervous system regulated. Precision keeps your thinking intact. Intact thinking is a prerequisite for real freedom.

Words shape perception. Perception shapes behavior. Choose your words carefully especially when emotions are loud.

01/31/2026

As Trump-deployed agents pervade the region, students struggle to carry on with lessons while carrying grief and fear that they or their loved ones will be taken

01/31/2026

What's your stim?

01/31/2026

The mind has a bad habit of treating everything like it’s a courtroom drama. Every mistake is Exhibit A. Every awkward moment is a life sentence. Every uncertainty gets framed as Very Serious Business. The thing is: life is rarely as dire as your inner narrator makes it sound.

That voice evolved to scan for danger, not to curate joy. It catastrophizes, rehearses, and overinflates meaning because it thinks it’s keeping you alive. Most of the time, it’s just exhausting you.

Humor is the pressure-release valve.

A little whimsy loosens the grip of fear. A well-timed laugh reminds your nervous system that you’re not actually being chased by a tiger. Playfulness interrupts rumination. It creates space. And in that space, sanity slips back in.

This doesn’t mean dismissing pain or pretending things don’t matter. It means refusing to let seriousness become your default operating system. You can care deeply and laugh. You can face hard things without turning every moment into a solemn ritual.

Sometimes the most emotionally intelligent response isn’t analysis. It’s levity, a shrug, a snort-laugh, a quiet “welp” and moving on.

Life is weird. You’re allowed to find that funny. A sense of humor won’t solve everything but it will keep you human while you figure things out. And honestly, that might be the point.

01/31/2026

It's all about avoidance motivation.

01/30/2026

Psilocybin doesn’t just alter perception—it temporarily erases the brain’s unique signature.

New brain-imaging research shows that psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, profoundly disrupts the patterns that make each human brain recognisable as an individual. During the psychedelic experience, these patterns become so scrambled that different people’s brain scans are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Using an advanced approach known as precision functional mapping, neuroscientists scanned the brains of seven healthy adults before, during, and for up to three weeks after psilocybin administration. For comparison, the same participants were also scanned after taking methylphenidate (Ritalin), a commonly prescribed stimulant.

The results were striking. Psilocybin caused widespread desynchronisation across functional brain networks, with the most dramatic effects seen in the Default Mode Network (DMN)—a system closely linked to self-reflection, autobiographical memory, and the sense of identity. As the DMN lost its usual coordination, the brain’s “neural fingerprint” effectively disappeared.

Even more intriguing, some alterations in brain connectivity persisted for weeks after the experience, long after the drug had left the body. This lasting rewiring may help explain why psilocybin is being intensively studied for conditions such as depression, addiction, and PTSD—where rigid patterns of thought play a central role.

Rather than simply “turning off” the brain, psilocybin appears to loosen its most deeply ingrained structures, temporarily dissolving the boundaries of the self and opening the door to long-term psychological change.

Source:
Siegel, J. S., et al. (2024). Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain. Nature.

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Wales, WI
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