Free Minds Counseling

12/30/2025

Do not be the male in this picture. Do not let your sons grow up to be this either if you can help it. I am proudly a Gamer Momma.

12/30/2025

12/30/2025

We’ve all heard the quote, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. It’s stitched on motivational pillows, gym walls, and more than a few coffee mugs. But let’s translate it into gamer language where it really lands.

If you never press any buttons, your character just stands there doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, safe, because if you go nowhere and do nothing you definitely will not get offed by random monsters. You also won’t enjoy much because that gets boring quick.

Not taking the shot feels safer. Not joining groups for raids and keys will protect you from any possible errors in front of others but it severely crimps your ability to develop. No XP for hanging out in Ogrimmar while your guild is doing progression.
Every time you don’t apply, don’t ask, don’t speak up, don’t try, don’t say the thing you’ve already locked in the worst possible outcome. The miss is guaranteed. The boss doesn’t even have to fight you.

Taking the shot doesn’t promise a win. Sometimes you whiff. Sometimes you pull aggro you weren’t ready for. Sometimes you faceplant dramatically and need a rez and a snack. These scenarios give you valuable experience and knowledge you can use your entire life.

The thing to remind yourself constantly is: Sometimes you not only land the attack, you score a crit. Sometimes you reveal doors you couldn’t even see from the starting area. The possible payoff is absolutely worth the risk.

Progress doesn’t come from perfect aim. It comes from actually firing the arrow.
So take the shot.
Send the message.
Apply for the thing.
Say yes.
Say no.
Click the button.
Because missing after you tried still gives you data, XP, and a better build. Missing because you never acted just gives you the same screen. Forever.
Press the button. The game doesn’t play itself.

12/30/2025

A pessimistic mindset looks at a problem and says:
“Welp. That’s impossible.”
Quest abandoned. Controller dropped.

An optimistic mindset looks at the same problem and says:
“Okay… this is hard. What are my options?”
Map opened. Abilities checked. Creative problem-solving engaged.

Here’s the key difference:
Optimism keeps your options open.

When you believe something is unsolvable, your brain stops searching. No new paths. No alternate builds. No weird-but-brilliant workarounds. You declare a wipe before the fight even starts. But an optimistic mind assumes there might be a solution even if it’s not obvious yet. And that single assumption unlocks flexibility, creativity, and persistence.

In gamer terms:
Pessimism says, “This boss is overtuned. Devs messed up. This game is trash.”
Optimism says, “Okay… do we respec? Change gear? Swap roles? Try a different strategy? Pull fewer adds? Cheese the mechanic?”

Same boss.
Very different outcomes.

Optimism keeps you experimenting instead of sulking at the respawn point. It turns frustration into curiosity. It transforms “I can’t” into “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

And no, optimism doesn’t guarantee a win. Sometimes the solution is retreat.
Sometimes it’s asking for help. Sometimes it’s realizing you’re in the wrong dungeon entirely. But pessimism guarantees one thing every time: zero progress.
So if you want more solutions, more movement, more forward momentum, train optimism like a skill. Because the moment you decide something is unsolvable,
you stop trying.

Keep the menu open. There’s always more than one way to play.

12/30/2025

This is becoming a habit I need to change. Twice in 2 weeks I have failed to follow my own advice and got swamped. Time for an end of the year assessment of what changes I want to build into the new year.
No RESOLUTIONS folks - just a few rule changes for your day to day life.

12/30/2025

In a world obsessed with appearances, clout, and highlight reels, honor and integrity don’t always get the spotlight they deserve. They don’t sparkle or trend. You don’t get a dopamine hit for quietly doing the right thing when no one’s watching. Yet this is the gear that determines whether your character can survive the endgame.

Honor is how you treat others.
It’s your code of conduct. It’s choosing fairness over convenience, respect over domination, and dignity over ego. Honor shows up in how you speak to people who can’t do anything for you, how you handle disagreement, and whether you keep your word when it becomes uncomfortable.

Honor says: “I will not win at the cost of my humanity.”

Integrity is how you treat yourself.
It’s alignment between your values, your words, and your actions. Integrity means you are the same person in public and in private. No secret alts. No shady shortcuts. No mental gymnastics to justify behavior you know doesn’t match who you claim to be.

Integrity says: “I can live with myself when the screen goes dark.”

You don’t get to fake either of these long-term.

You can talk a good game.
You can cosplay competence.
You can convince people for a while.

But when pressure hits - when you’re tired, scared, angry, or desperate - your real build shows up. That’s when honor and integrity stop being abstract virtues and start being active choices. And yes, they cost something.

But what they buy you is priceless:

Self-respect that doesn’t evaporate under stress
Trust that compounds over time
Relationships that aren’t built on performative niceness
A nervous system that isn’t constantly on fire from living out of alignment

Acting with honor and integrity doesn’t mean you’re perfect, no such thing chummers. It means when you screw up, and you will, you own it, repair it, and do better next time. No blame-shifting. No “that’s just how I am.” No pretending it didn’t matter.

That’s real strength.

Because in the long run, life isn’t testing how clever you are. It’s testing whether you can be trusted by others and by yourself.

And that’s a stat worth leveling.

12/30/2025

Your mind is an incredible tool. It can plan, imagine, problem-solve, create, and help you survive actual danger. But let’s be honest, it can also be a menace.

Left unchecked, your mind will replay old failures like it’s grinding a boss, forgetting you already beat it and have moved on. It will predict worst-case scenarios with cinematic detail. It will turn a minor awkward moment into a full-blown “everyone hates me” side quest. And that is just before lunch. (check you blood sugar btw)

Same mind. Different programs.
When your mind is your best friend, it:
Helps you learn from mistakes instead of weaponizing them
Notices patterns so you can make better choices
Talks to you with curiosity instead of cruelty
Focuses on what’s possible, not just what’s painful

It is all about:
“What can I do with this?” not “What’s wrong with me?”

When your mind becomes your worst enemy, it:
Rewrites the past to shame you
Catastrophizes the future like it’s a scripted wipe
Assumes thoughts and feelings are facts (they’re not)
Drains your energy worrying about things you can’t control

Your internal narrator is running on outdated code and is buggy as hell.

You are not required to believe every thought your mind generates. In fact, that is a losing strategy in the game of life.

Thoughts are suggestions. Some are useful. Some are noise. Some are leftover trauma scripts running in the background because no one ever taught you how to close the app. The real skill, the one that changes everything, is learning to observe your mind instead of being dragged around by it.

You don’t silence it.
You don’t fight it.
You learn when to listen and when to say, “Thanks, but no.”

Like any powerful tool, training and maintenance are important:
Feed it better inputs
Challenge distorted thinking
Practice self-talk you’d actually use with someone you care about
Rest it instead of running it at max capacity 24/7

Mastering your mind doesn’t mean constant positivity or pretending life is easy. Rose colored glasses and toxic positivity are just as debilitating. It means choosing thoughts that help you move forward instead of keeping you stuck in fear, regret, or self-attack. At the end of the day, the most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one happening between your ears.
Make sure it’s an alliance not a war.

12/30/2025

There comes a point in life where doing “more of the same” just doesn’t work anymore. The rules you learned. The role you mastered. The version of yourself that kept things running for years. At some point, that build stops being effective. It can even become detrimental.
Reinventing yourself isn’t about pretending your past didn’t happen or throwing everything away in a dramatic montage. It’s about recognizing when the person you had to be to survive is no longer the person you need to be to move forward.
Sometimes reinvention is necessary because:
The environment changed
You gained new information
You outgrew the expectations placed on you
You finally got tired of carrying armor you don’t need anymore

This is adaptation. As humans we are masters at this.
Reinvention is rarely loud. Most of the time it happens quietly with small changes in behaviors and life rules:
Choosing different habits
Setting new boundaries
Allowing yourself to try something new
Letting go of identities that once kept you safe but now keep you stuck

Yes, it can feel terrifying. Humans are wired to prefer the familiar even when it hurts. The old version of you may be uncomfortable, exhausted, or unfulfilled but at least it’s known. Growth asks you to step into uncertainty with intention and open eyes.
Reinvention doesn’t mean erasing who you were. It means integrating what you’ve learned and upgrading how you live. You keep the wisdom. You drop the dead weight. You respec your skill points. And you avoid the mental trap of thinking you must design your build around the expectations of others. You don’t owe anyone consistency at the expense of your well-being.
If the old you can’t take you where you want to go, it’s okay to build someone new with compassion, clarity, and purpose. Sometimes moving forward doesn’t require pushing harder. It requires becoming someone who no longer needs to work so hard.

12/30/2025

Growth Without Discomfort Is a Myth
If you’re trying to grow and everything feels comfortable, you’re probably just rearranging furniture in the same room. Real growth requires discomfort. It is coded into our firmware.

This isn’t because life is cruel, but because growth means doing something you haven’t mastered yet. It means stretching beyond familiar patterns, questioning beliefs that once kept you safe, and taking actions before you feel ready. Discomfort is the signal you’ve left autopilot.

When you avoid discomfort, you don’t avoid pain. At best you postpone it. The pain of staying stuck, repeating the same cycles, and wondering years later why nothing changed is far heavier than the temporary unease of learning something new.

Awkward first attempts
Fear of being judged
Letting go of identities that no longer fit
Sitting with emotions instead of numbing them
Making choices that don’t come with immediate validation.
All uncomfortable even when you’re headed in the right direction. Taking purposeful action involves energy and effort.

Comfort says, “Stay where it’s safe.”
Growth says, “Go where you’ll become stronger.”

This doesn’t mean forcing yourself into burnout or ignoring your limits. There’s a difference between productive discomfort and unnecessary suffering. Growth asks for courage, not self-punishment.

You can move forward gently. You can go slowly. Small changes are more likely to persist. But you can’t grow while refusing to feel uncomfortable. Discomfort is the tuition you pay for change. Once you stop treating it like a warning sign and start treating it like a compass, everything shifts.

Lean into it. That’s where the expansion happens.

12/30/2025

Let’s clear something up that a lot of people are quietly suffocating under. You Are Not Obligated to Live Up (or Down) to Anyone Else’s Expectations. Not your family, friends, coworkers, random strangers or uninvolved authority figures. Not even past versions of yourself that made plans with insufficient data.

Expectations are often just unspoken agreements you never consented to. They’re built from other people’s fears, values, limitations, and comfort zones, not from your inner truth. And what REALLY sucks - You can meet expectations and still feel completely misaligned.

Living “up to” expectations can cost you your authenticity.
Living “down to” expectations can cost you your confidence.
Either way, you lose when someone else is driving your life.

You are allowed to change.
You are allowed to disappoint people.
You are allowed to choose a path that makes no sense to anyone but you.

That doesn’t make you selfish. Your responsibility is not to manage how others feel about your choices. Your responsibility is to live in integrity with your values, your capacity, and your reality. People may project who they need you to be in order to feel safe or validated but that projection is not your assignment.

Growth often looks like this:
Letting go of approval you once depended on
Releasing guilt that was never yours to carry
Choosing alignment over applause
Standing firm even when misunderstood

And yes, it can be uncomfortable. Boundaries always are.

But here’s the quiet freedom on the other side: When you stop living for expectations, you finally have the energy to live on purpose. You are here to be a real, evolving human not an NPC filling an assigned role. The right people will adjust.

12/30/2025

Let’s talk about something every gamer knows but most people forget: you can’t skip a level. You can’t rage-quit life just because the terrain is ugly, the loot is low, or the boss fight is absurdly hard.

Acceptance isn’t about giving up or saying, “Cool, I love being stuck in this quest with terrible rewards forever.” It’s saying: “Okay… this is the map I’m on right now. Let’s figure out how to get the XP and loot anyway.”

Think of your current circumstance as your starting area. Maybe it’s messy, frustrating, or full of NPCs you didn’t sign up for. That’s fine. Trying to pretend you’re in a high-level dungeon when you’re still in tutorial mode only wastes stamina and mana. Acceptance is noticing your environment, inventory, and skills for what they actually are - not what you wish they were.

Once you accept it, you can:
Use the resources you do have
Upgrade skills you actually can improve
Strategize around obstacles instead of smashing your head into them repeatedly
Avoid wasting energy on quests that don’t exist (looking at you, impossible expectations)

This is how winning happens. Not by magically teleporting to endgame, but by grinding the right XP, collecting the right loot, and leveling up steadily, even if the starting map looks like it was designed by someone who just discovered chaos mode.

Acceptance is step one in effective mechanics management. It stops you from wasting energy, letting you focus on what you can control. That’s how small moves stack into big wins.

So yes, life may hand you an adventure you didn’t choose. That’s fine. You can still play it like a pro. You can still conquer the bosses, collect the loot, and unlock achievements - one clever, grounded, fully accepted move at a time.

12/30/2025

Your brain isn’t broken. It’s just doing what human brains do. Humans evolved to scan for danger, compare ourselves to others, remember painful lessons very vividly, and try to predict outcomes so we can avoid getting hurt again. That’s a survival feature that becomes a significant flaw as it is glitchy as hell in unhealthy environments. And you must be honest, large groups of domesticated apes tend to get pretty unhealthy.

If you’re surrounded by constant stress, criticism, chaos, scarcity, or emotional unpredictability, your brain does exactly what it was designed to do:
It stays on high alert
It assumes the worst
It overthinks every interaction
It replays mistakes like a highlight reel nobody asked for
It turns normal emotions into chronic distress

The good news is - that makes you human. The bad news is - you’re human in a setting your nervous system was never meant to live in long-term. You cannot think your way into peace while your environment keeps triggering all your alert systems. Think trying to ignore the weak auras warning yelling “run away little girl” at every game mechanic.

Positive thinking doesn’t override a toxic system and self-awareness doesn’t cancel ongoing stress. Telling yourself to “just be grateful” doesn’t magically calm a brain that’s constantly bracing for impact. This is why healing is about more than “fixing your mindset.”
It’s about:
Reducing exposure to harmful dynamics
Creating pockets of safety and predictability
Learning which thoughts are protective and which are inherited from survival mode
Giving your nervous system evidence that you’re no longer in a constant boss fight

You don’t need to be tougher. You need conditions that allow your very normal human brain to stand down. And yes, changing environments (external or internal) is hard. But staying in one that keeps your stress maxed out? That’s a grind no character should be expected to endure forever.

Some more good news is that you can gain some control over yourself and your feelings regardless of the circumstance. You can chart a future with fewer buggy addons and more of the good stuff. Check out my website for useful tools.