The Hopeful Brain: A Common-Sense Look at Modern Neuroscience

In this episode of OK State of Mind, a Family & Children’s Services podcast, Dr. Paul Baker, neuropsychologist and author of The Hopeful Brain, shares how breakthroughs in neuroscience have fundamentally shifted the way we view mental health, especially in children. Exploring core needs, rooted in neuroscience, offer a lens to understand behavior not as a problem to fix, but as a message to decode for hope.

Joined by Adam Andreassen, CEO of Family & Children’s Services, and Chris Masopust, Director of Training, the conversation explores how this hopeful science is being integrated across the organization—from therapists to peer support workers. By using simple, accessible brain-based strategies, Family & Children’s Services is creating more effective and compassionate mental health support for those who need it most.

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Transcript

Adam Andreassen: [00:00:00] What is the thought process about someone? How we help someone and get away from that notion that once the damage is done, well now you're stuck. 

Dr. Paul Baker: I say, this is the good news, and this is why I say everyone needs to know about neuroscience. If, if you're in a helping field, you need this information.

Dr. Paul Baker: Because ever since the nineties, which by the way, bill Clinton declared that the decade of the brain, because more information came out in the 1990s, in that decade about the brain and its functioning at any other time in history combined, 

Adam Andreassen: that means that probably most of the cliches that we grew up with.

Adam Andreassen: Precede most of what we know about the brain 

Dr. Paul Baker: a hundred percent. And what that means is that the brain is a lot more malleable and it's a lot more adaptable than we used to think it was. 

Chris: Dr. Paul Baker, a developmental neuropsychologist, former special education administrator, international lecturer, and foster and adoptive parent notes in his book, the Hopeful Brain that historically mental health practitioners [00:01:00] believed that by adolescents, our brains and personalities were formed and unchangeable.

Chris: If you are disordered or dysfunctional by that age, you would forever be that way. Dr. Baker goes on to describe how neuroscience and psychology have since evolved, and we realize now that people possess incredible potential for change and this potential provides hope. In today's episode, we are honored to have Dr.

Chris: Paul Baker as our guest to share with us from his more than 30 years exp. Working with children and young people. Dr. Baker speaks about these things and more today on okay. State of mind. So today we're with the author of the Hopeful Brain, Dr. Paul Baker, and we actually have a studio full today. Why don't we start out just by introducing ourselves, providing a little context to our conversation.

Chris: Dr. Baker, we'll start with you. 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah, for sure. My name is Dr. Paul Baker and I am by training a neuropsychologist and also an [00:02:00] applied behavior analyst as well. And I'm here to discuss a little bit about the Hope Hopeful Brain. All 

Chris: right, 

Adam Andreassen: so good to see you again, you, Dr. Baker. I knew you from a different life and a different job.

Adam Andreassen: And when I got to Family and Children's as CEO about a year ago, Adam Andreen here, I knew I wanted to bring you in. So really, really glad you're here partnering with us. 

Dr. Paul Baker: Thanks for bringing me in. I'm excited. 

Chris Masopust: Yeah. Chris Masopust, director of clinical training here at the agency. Just really excited to be a part of this project and helping kind of implement it.

Chris Masopust: At the agency. Yeah. Fantastic. 

Chris: Alright, well Dr. Baker, can you just start out by giving us a little bit of groundwork about person brain theory? Can you just lay that out in, in common terms for us? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I began my career, it started off in education in more specifically special education.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. And we were working with individuals with severe emotion and behavior disorders. And most of these kids were coming from schools that they were just not successful and they needed a place to be. So originally a lot of my [00:03:00] orientation was pure behavioral. And what I found out was that wasn't working really well with these kids.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm. That we, you, you had the ability to get behavior under control. But what we were really missing was the ability to make those really important life changing components actually come to fruition. And what we found out was that we really weren't spending enough time. Learning the story behind behavior and a, a phrase that, that I brought forth from one of my mentors, Dr.

Dr. Paul Baker: Nicholas Long from the Lifespace Crisis Intervention Institute, is he used to talk about nothing coming from nothing. And at that point, we really felt like things were missing. And I was able to start realizing that neuroscience was something that was absolutely critical that people knew about. And if you were working in the field of, of mental health in any aspect, whether you're in education, whether you're a psychologist, psychiatrist, social worker, whatever the role might be, you needed to know about neuroscience because [00:04:00] neuroscience helps to explain the why behind what's going on in the brain.

Dr. Paul Baker: So some of the psychological theories, the practices that we had, they worked and they made, they made sense, but they made even better sense when you understood. The neuroscience behind it. Mm-hmm. And it also allowed us to pinpoint interventions more specifically, so that when we understood that certain behaviors are coming from certain parts of the brain, we were able to identify strategies and interventions that were more effective and it made it more efficient.

Dr. Paul Baker: And I think that's what started this whole process of wondering out how can we make this more effective? How can we make it effective for any practitioner, whether they're a clinician or they're a A non-clinician. Mm-hmm. 

Adam Andreassen: When was this? How long ago were you talking? 

Dr. Paul Baker: So we probably started to look at this more formally around 2002.

Dr. Paul Baker: And so as I started to pull things together, I started presenting at conferences and it really started the conferences that I would normally have attended, and people were coming up to me saying, you should really make this a training. I never really thought about it being a training. So [00:05:00] 2004, that's exactly what we did.

Dr. Paul Baker: And it was a five day training at that time. 

Adam Andreassen: So one of the things I think at the beginning of this discussion, I know it's tough to describe, tell us in a nutshell what your whole book and everything you're doing is, but. What is the, if, if someone just listening for the first time and trying to get their minds around what this is that we're even talking about?

Adam Andreassen: What is person brain, hopeful? Brain? What, what is this and what's the elevator speech on this, on this whole thing? 

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, the, if, if people ask me what's this about? What I say is this is about looking at applying hope. Mm-hmm. To really distressing and challenging situations that otherwise we might have started to lose hope around.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and what this means is that people struggle. Clinicians struggle sometimes with clients. Things become, you know, they reach a dead end. Sometimes people are not sure exactly how to proceed, so they're looking for different roadmaps. And what we found is that hope was that essential ingredient that people were missing and they were forgetting to include that in all of their therapeutic interactions.

Dr. Paul Baker: And what we know about hope, and the reason [00:06:00] that the design of the book is around hope, is that you have to have hope, first and foremost to produce something called dopamine. And dopamine actually opens up the motivational circuitry inside of the brain. So whenever you're learning anything, whether you're learning mathematics, whether you're learning English, or how to write, or actually a coping skill or a social skill, you're gonna need those motivational circuits open in order to begin the transformational process.

Dr. Paul Baker: And so without them being open, we're really not moving in a positive direction. And that's when people start seeing the wheels are spinning and you, you see people getting frustrated. Everything I'm doing, it's not working. And one of the major ingredients that I ask about is, what are you doing to instill hope?

Dr. Paul Baker: We know it's a powerful motivator. We know it's an O, it provides opportunity for us. This is what we tried to start doing in 2004 when the first official training came out and we celebrate our 20th anniversary. In 2024. That came very, very quickly. But this book that we have now is our [00:07:00] fourth edition, so we've grown quite a bit and we look at a fourth of the book now is references.

Adam Andreassen: So, but really, you, you're using brain science and you're translating it to help clinicians, everyday. People. Who, who are you helping and what is the connection of the, the way the brain's functioning and what you're teaching people? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yes. Our target audience to take this training would be anyone that's working with disconnected children, youth, or adults, meaning that our neuro transactional model basically says that we believe that there is a very succinct relationship between the brain.

Dr. Paul Baker: People and the environment and the training itself is called the person brain, which really we think encapsulates what we're the message we're sending. It's about people and their brains and the interaction with environments and everything around it, and how critical it is that we know that for transformation.

Dr. Paul Baker: This is that we use this for foster parents who have no clinical training all the way to people who have PhDs or [00:08:00] medical degrees who are implementing and integrating this into their practice. Our goal is to make neuroscience simple and useful for anyone that wants to apply it, 

Chris Masopust: which that is exactly why I'm so excited to be a part of this project is because a lot of times when you get into mental health, especially as a licensed therapist, you realize that a lot of the stuff we have access to is only for us, and you work with so many more people that are also providing those direct services.

Chris Masopust: And so having something like this available to our peer supports, in our case managers and all of the other people who are providing those excellent services and making something complicated like a. Chemistry experiment in our head, accessible and easy to understand is fantastic. 

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and another big population that we have is educators and schools.

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, we, we find at first our target audience was special educators that were dealing with children having emotion and behavior disorders. But what we found is the people that were really walking away with information that was useful for them were some of the regular educators that aren't exposed to this.

Dr. Paul Baker: And [00:09:00] realizing this isn't as daunting as we thought it was. Working with disconnected kids and the kids that might have otherwise have been on the outlying forces of, of the environment. You know, the, the aggressive kids, the, the verbally abusive kids. These are the kids that some people would shy away from.

Dr. Paul Baker: We want them to feel comfortable and confident that they can gain the skills to actually intervene and make a big difference in these kids' lives. Hmm. And that's really the goal. 

Adam Andreassen: Mm-hmm. So it feels like such a mixed bag in society. I'm so happy that words like trauma informed. And NN neuro anything are starting to be in lingo, but it also just adds all of these words that start to either mean a lot of things or nothing, and they're just kind of vague words.

Adam Andreassen: The thing to me that brought it home, and I'm hoping you can I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you to describe these things, but I remember in one of the speeches you were giving, you were talking about like the four or five things that the brain needs. It needs to be connected, it needs to be, and like the, I started to understand what's different or unique or distinctive about [00:10:00] this model in some of the simple ways.

Adam Andreassen: It describes human experience so that others can understand it too. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Those four or five things. I wonder if you could just, 

Dr. Paul Baker: and, and I think what you're referencing is one of our, our major paradigms, and that's called the four elements of flourishing. Mm-hmm. And, and where that came from.

Dr. Paul Baker: That's it. Is that when we started to look at resilience, you know, and resilience, there's so many definitions of resilience, but when we look at it, it's the ability to take a skill or a set of skills, applying 'em across a variety of environments successfully. And when you're able to do that, and then we say you have become resilient.

Dr. Paul Baker: And when I started to look along with others about what are the key ingredients across multiple disciplines, so whether you're in social work or in education, psychology, psychiatry. Anthropology even what did the literature say about resilient people from those disciplines? And we started to realize there were very clear commonalities in these [00:11:00] outcomes.

Dr. Paul Baker: Now, they might have had a different word, but what we decided to do is we chose words that we felt like represented all of those disciplines, and made the connection that they were really meaning to connect. So, for example, the first thing that we start with in, in the training in the four elements of flourishing is the topic of safety.

Dr. Paul Baker: And safety is such an absolutely critical thing because there's such a biological connection to feeling safe, feeling unsafe, and we concentrate on this idea of perceived safety based on your own experiences. And we know your experiences shape who you become. So if you've had good experiences, bad experiences, any and all of those, shape who you are and how you perceive the world.

Dr. Paul Baker: So unfortunately there are some people who've had some really unfortunate situations happen to them, some stressful, even traumatic events that have, have, have colored their lives. So sometimes very simple things like being touched on the shoulder or hearing a sound can cause an [00:12:00] overreaction. But these overreactions are based on real reactions that might have necessitated them, making safety moves in order to keep themselves safe in the past.

Dr. Paul Baker: So it might seem like an overreaction to us, but it was actually a survival strength for them at some point. So these start to craft, and it's important for people to understand that safety. If our brains are experiencing or perceiving that there is a lack of safety then it will actually put us into a survival mode where our survival systems are going to react to the world around us.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. Which is not exactly what we want happening under most cases. Like if you touch fire. You wanna touch that fire and move your hands away as soon as possible. These don't wanna put your hand in the fire. So your survival system is strong That way, you know, you pull your hand back in order to prevent any future damage.

Dr. Paul Baker: Is it 

Adam Andreassen: automatic? Like, is it It is 

Dr. Paul Baker: automatic. It's, it's, it's something that we even feel like has probably been passed down by our ancestors. You know, things that, fire's been around a long time. We probably touched it a [00:13:00] lot and we've learned it's hot, remove it. But the thing is, is that if we were to say that we were gonna trust that action to the logical systems in the brain, the logical systems may allow too much time for us to think and then we end up burning ourselves.

Dr. Paul Baker: We hold our hand in that fire. So there are times when the brain and the body need to react to the environment for safety. But in most occasions, we want the logical systems in the brain to be the systems that are taking over because logical systems have options and, and it allows us to, and we call these the responses that occur from the logical systems in that moment.

Dr. Paul Baker: So, so safety becomes our primary thing to look at. And then that was permeating through all the literature that some form of safety was one of the resilient outcomes. The second thing that we saw that was quite consistent across the literature was a feeling of significance. And you, you take a look at the synonyms associated with significance, you know, feeling valued, feeling [00:14:00] important, feeling worthwhile.

Dr. Paul Baker: When people don't feel they have value to add to the people or the environment around us, they will really suffer and, and they can be in quite a bit of pain. And in fact, we, and from some of our early research that we've got going on right now, we're finding out that people in the mental health field tend to leave this field when they don't feel that they are significant and that they have anything valuable to offer.

Dr. Paul Baker: And a lot of times they don't feel like they have something valuable to offer because they're spinning their wheels. And we hope that by giving them more information. They're gonna feel more empowered, be able to take some more appropriate clinical risks and start feeling, feeling valued again. 

Chris Masopust: And I, I might be jumping around a little bit, but I think the part of what we talked about today is the four elements of flourishing.

Chris Masopust: And you said nothing comes from nothing. And I think the other thing is every behavior has a story. Right? We talked a lot, a lot about that in the training. And earlier you'd mentioned that sometimes a reaction may seem like an overreaction. Well, when we can understand the sense of safety [00:15:00] and the sense of significance, I think those stories start to make a lot more sense.

Chris Masopust: Yeah. And so I think that's an important part of those, those four elements of flourishing. I, I want 

Adam Andreassen: to get back to the four elements of flourishing, but I also we're, we're talking about these trainings we're doing at Family and Children's. What I know we're bringing you in, and I know you're coming every quarter and good stuff is happening, but what are we doing right now for our system with Dr.

Adam Andreassen: Baker? 

Chris Masopust: So this today or last two days we've had the pleasure of having Dr. Baker back for, this is the third time now, and we've trained. Just a little over 200 of our staff in this person brain model. And our plan so far this year, and I've really got some ambitious goals with this one, is to make sure we train close to about a thousand staff this year in this person brain model.

Chris Masopust: And that's not just a specific population, that's all staff, so, right. 

Chris: That's operations too, not just the clinicians. Right. 

Chris Masopust: Everybody. Everybody. Yeah. I mean, I, I knew this from the get go, but even being in the trainings today and reading the Hopeful Brain, it, this is something that everybody working in mental health Yeah.

Chris Masopust: Could benefit from, whether you're in administration or in HR or in it. Mm-hmm. Like there's, there's meaningful bits of this [00:16:00] that are beautiful takeaways just for everyday work and especially for working in this field. And it gives 

Adam Andreassen: us shared language. Yes. I feel like you talk about significance, it's, it's not just frontline staff.

Adam Andreassen: It, it's if you are an accountant or keeping facilities open, absolutely. It's important to feel connected to everything we're doing and there's a reason we're doing everything we do. And I feel like that's one of the things that, this model encapsulates so well is all those things that if we have that shared language and shared understanding, we're gonna be better in interacting with each other.

Adam Andreassen: Mm-hmm. What are your thoughts though? 'cause you started bringing this to organizations before ours. How does it benefit a system when person brain comes in, becomes this common language and this model that we're all endorsing? What have you seen the impact be for systems and the communities and so on as a result of that?

Dr. Paul Baker: So the first thing that I hear from organizations that have gone through the training, and by the way, when you're, you're looking at the volume that you guys are, are, are talking about training, this will result in you becoming a person, brain certified [00:17:00] organization. Hmm. And I think that what happens when you become that level of, of you receive that level of training is that you would start expecting that that common language starts to shape the culture.

Dr. Paul Baker: In a way that is strength-based and it's positive in nature, but it's also taking into account the individual experience of everyone. And that's every employee that you're working with. So if we even now go back to the four elements of flourishing, tying that into the third element, which is about what were the first two again, because we talked about other things.

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. So the first one we talked about was safety. Mm-hmm. The second one was significance. And then third, this is a great segue right now. This takes us into respect. And respect is something that's extremely important to understand because respect is 100% tied to a person's cultural experience. And we're not talking necessarily race or religion or ethnic background.

Dr. Paul Baker: We could talk just about anybody. Each one of us at [00:18:00] this table has a different cultural experience. We, we've, we've been raised maybe have some similar foods, some similar language, but we have, we have different cultural experiences and we need to be able to be understood based on those cultural experiences.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and I, I define culture by the way is anything, any sight, sound, smell, taste or touch that has been important to you in your past that you want to continue in the present and in the future. Mm-hmm. And, and those things become extremely important now, when people feel disrespected. There's an interesting correlation in the research as disrespect actually serves as a red flag to safety, to being unsafe.

Dr. Paul Baker: Because if you can disrespect me. The brain starts worrying about, well, what else could you do to me potentially? If you could speak to this me this way and know that it makes me uncomfortable, then what else could you potentially do? And so I think one of the organizational benefits is, is really helping to create [00:19:00] safe environments.

Dr. Paul Baker: And we're not talking about like physical safeties, you know, necessarily, but emotionally safe, organizationally safe, approachable, safe. And I think I like that word sometimes better than safety. When you're talking about organizations, it's approachability. I can come to you and say, Hey, I've messed up and I'm not exactly sure what to do.

Dr. Paul Baker: Rather than sitting in the background and letting something snowball, we really want people to feel really comfortable so that that sense of safety, that sense of value that, that people know that what they do is contributing positively to this environment and that we have ways of recognizing that.

Dr. Paul Baker: And so then finally, the fourth one, after we've had safe significant respect, it's this focus on relatedness. We know that from the moment that we are born. We are designed to connect with other people, we'll reach our hands out and hope that people will grab and we can grab onto 'em and squeeze their fingers.

Dr. Paul Baker: We wanna see that finger being squeezed. You know, when, when little babies, but even babies have things by looking at us and, and, and holding [00:20:00] their big eyes open that are, we are drawn to then protect them. They're emitting hormones, they're, and they're causing rises and a reward and a bonding hormone known as oxytocin.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and from the first breath of life to the last breath of life, we will be making connections with people because that is natural. Explain something, how important it is that we are connected well in inside of our brains. We have locations where, you know, if you are hungry, you are gonna go looking for food.

Dr. Paul Baker: It's just gonna drive. You're gonna be naturally driven to do that. If you're thirsty, you're gonna go look for something to drink. But here's something, what people don't always realize is that in this same section is that when you need attention, you're gonna go looking for people. Mm-hmm. And it's that primitive.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. And we need to know about that because so many times we hear that children or adolescents, or adults have attention seeking [00:21:00] behavior. And we, we take that as being a, a intentionally negative thing. They're, they're just attention seeking. Well, my statement that I would say is, well then we need to figure out what it is they need us to attend to more.

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, most of these individuals that are attention seeking are trying to tell us that they're, they're thirsty and they're hungry for more of us. And that's hard for some people because in some of the locations where I work, there might be staff that are two to one or a foster child that's got they're the only foster child in the house.

Dr. Paul Baker: And the foster parents will say, how much more attention can I provide them? And part of the, the neuro transactional approach is to say, alright, look, I could see you're physically present for these people, but here's the question. What's the quality of that attention? Mm-hmm. And what does it look 

Chris Masopust: like?

Chris Masopust: And if you 

Dr. Paul Baker: examine 

Chris Masopust: that, you know, you hear all the time when you talk about. Parents and families and households, and the couple words that always come up are, how are the children nurtured in the household? And I think this directly ties back to parents may be present [00:22:00] physically, but they may not be engaged.

Chris Masopust: Right. And then I think that's when we start talking about those, those attention seeking, or I prefer the connection seeking, right? Mm-hmm. Because that's really what it is, is just trying to find that deeper connection. And it's, yeah, absolutely. I don't, I don't know where I was going with that one, but that's definitely kind of what, well, we 

Dr. Paul Baker: know that when that doesn't happen, whether it's it's it's connection or you know, attachment, what, whatever it is, if we don't provide these very needy individuals with the attention that they need, they will go find other forms of attention.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and we in our field call that the artificial. Attachment. And in those cases, that's when you make people more vulnerable to gangs, to hanging out with inappropriate risk takers and opens up the possibility of substance and and, and addiction issues that can, can come through. And it really can be, it leaves people vulnerable, so not intervening and fulfilling that need at an early stage.

Dr. Paul Baker: It, it's really risky and it's quite dangerous. 

Adam Andreassen: I know you have [00:23:00] so many stories, and I don't know which ones you could access for something like this, but whether from experience as a provider or helping organizations, what are the stories or examples of things that kind of drive home some of these points and the benefits that that can come from them?

Adam Andreassen: Because I just know that that the picture or the analogy of what this does when people start to engage with this and understand this material. What, what, what would be some stories or examples you could offer? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Well, you know, the other thing that's, it is played a major role in my life is that I had the privilege of serving as a foster parent to over 29 different kids.

Dr. Paul Baker: And I ended up adopting four of those out of foster care. And, and all four of those young boys that were adopted were, were really struggling. And it had numerous placements placements that were about to break down significantly to the point they would've been put in group care or in potentially residential care.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, you know, now they're, they're thriving individuals that thriving [00:24:00] adults making good choices and, and raising families in some cases and, and really making some changes. But I, I'll tell you that the biggest thing that, that I have seen is that when people apply the thinking that we have about safety, significance, respect, and relatedness, they are able to conceptualize and actually give themselves hope.

Dr. Paul Baker: That they can come in and help these, these individual kids. We have a process in the person brain model known as reimbursements and the re I was hoping you're gonna get to, so it's a massive aspect of what we do. And reimbursements are basically an opportunity to take a look at six areas of potential need.

Dr. Paul Baker: And we scan each one of the individual that are, that might be receiving our services that we scan their lives. And we look for relational aspects that have been troubling to them. So many of our kids have had trouble with men, they've had [00:25:00] trouble with women, they've had bad experiences with a person called police officer or psychologist, or psychiatrist.

Dr. Paul Baker: And for whatever reason, they are refusing to work with them or they have apprehensions or anxiety about it. And what we look at is when we see something like that, we know that they need reimbursing experiences. And what we mean by that is we're not taking them back to do past life regression or anything like that, that you know, that people might think.

Dr. Paul Baker: But what we're asking is, is what is it that they missed in the developmental sequence, a across their lifespan so far, whether they're four years old, whether they're 11 years old or 45 years old, doesn't matter throughout their life, what is it that they missed that they should have experienced in order to give them skills that people that are successfully living in the community, are able to exhibit?

Dr. Paul Baker: So, example I give is most of the foster children [00:26:00] that came into my care had never really experienced having their own birthday before. Now I found that to be absolutely hard to believe I really did that these kids had never had a birthday. But when I started to think about that, think about the skills that are associated with going to a birthday party.

Dr. Paul Baker: You start going, my grandson right now, he, he's a year old, he's gone to a lot of birthday parties. And so he is already learning skills like self-control how to participate with a group to some degree starting to see one child receive all of these amazing presence, probably ones that he wants, and he's got to delay his gratification.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. So we, we forget about how important those early stages in life might be, and just life opportunities are not only life opportunities, they're skills, training opportunities. You think about an 11-year-old who's never spent the night over at another child's house or never had a spend the night guest or the 15-year-old, the 16-year-old, the 11-year-old that has a [00:27:00] bike but has never been taught how to ride a bike.

Dr. Paul Baker: Because maybe the people that they've been living with don't know how to ride a bike, and then they were never taught that. But these are the types of skills that from a, a realistic relational standpoint when you miss them, you don't, you don't get a chance to practice them. You know, even having the opportunity of going to the grocery store, I can't tell you how many times I received a foster child and they would say things and the, the response would be well, we're getting all of his information together.

Dr. Paul Baker: But what I can tell you is the last thing you want to do is to take him to a grocery store. Of course, the first thing I wanted to know is why. Mm-hmm. Why can't, oh, the behavior is horrendous in the grocery store. So do not take him to a grocery. He hadn't been to a grocery store since he's four years old, and the child's nine now.

Dr. Paul Baker: And I would say, well, the last thing we need to be doing is keeping 'em from the grocery store. That's where we're going tomorrow. Right. And if we're not going to the grocery store tomorrow, we're gonna go to a service station because they only have two aisles. [00:28:00] And then we'll go to the grocery store where they have 13 or 14 aisles.

Dr. Paul Baker: But we need to be able to provide those experiences because are we gonna expect that a 14 year old's gonna have grocery store behavior if we don't teach 'em that? 

Adam Andreassen: When you talk about, so I think society, I mean, as a parent myself, there's this notion that if I mess up as a parent, now the damage is done.

Adam Andreassen: Mm-hmm. And then you also think, you know, if you're working with kiddos in school or then you working with adults, I think it's so easy to just think, okay, it's done or it's still happening to this person. And so if I'm a teacher or if I'm a clinician, what can I do? The damage is done. Is, is this number one saying, okay, wait you that, that's faulty thinking.

Adam Andreassen: And number two, is it as simple as you reimburse them a counteract, what is the thought process about someone. How we help someone and get away from that notion that once the damage is done, well now you're stuck. 

Dr. Paul Baker: I say this is the good news, and this is why I say everyone needs to know about neuroscience.

Dr. Paul Baker: If, if you're in a helping field, you need this [00:29:00] information. Because ever since the nineties, which by the way, bill Clinton declared that the decade of the brain, because more information came out in the 1990s, in that decade about the brain and its functioning at any other time in history combined. So this is a massive amount of information based on neuroimaging, which is advanced forms of looking at the brain and actually being able to look at it overextended and period of time and real fast.

Dr. Paul Baker: That 

Adam Andreassen: means that probably most of cliches that we grew up with precede most of what we know about the brain. A 

Dr. Paul Baker: hundred percent. You know, when I was in graduate school, I remember very clearly hearing from one of my professors at the time that by a child, by a child's 13th birthday, their personalities were formed.

Dr. Paul Baker: And there wasn't a lot you could do about it. And it really perplexed me because I had friends of mine who were becoming adolescent counselors and I didn't want to tell them, oh yeah, it looks like you have no hope. But naturally then I went to another class. I was taking it in the same semester, and I have a neuroscience professor who's telling me about this amazing stuff called neuroplasticity.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. This ability [00:30:00] that the brain has in most areas of the brain, not all areas are of the brain are neuroplastic, but in the type of areas that we're talking about in transforming right now are neuroplastic. And what that means is that the brain is a lot more malleable and it's a lot more adaptable than we used to think it was.

Dr. Paul Baker: And so this has really opened up this idea. And even we used to think that if we hadn't intervened and provided the best, most appropriate environment for a child by the age of three, and this is probably the biggest myth that has been out there, that there really wasn't any more hope for these kids.

Dr. Paul Baker: This is absolutely not true. What we know is it just gets a little bit harder. It's harder to teach those skills that were should have been provided from ages one, from birth to three. Maybe give it, just give that pretend age range, and you're trying to do that to a, with a 12-year-old, it might be a little bit harder, but it's still possible and we need people to understand.

Dr. Paul Baker: That's why this book has the name Hopeful Brain, because the science of just [00:31:00] neuroplasticity tells us that we can change throughout our lifespan. But there's something even more exciting I think right now, and it's the science of epigenetics and epigenetics basically tells us that our DNA, it, it there, the DNA sequencing is not our destiny, and we need to be embracing that, that actually our DNA is changing along with us.

Dr. Paul Baker: And so when the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, and the touches of our lives change from, from being very violent, aggression filled, unpredictable. And we then become in, in embraced by environments that are compassionate, that are consistent. They, they are predictable, they're full of empathy and love.

Dr. Paul Baker: These actually impact the way that our brain starts to redesign itself. Redesigning itself, this was not what we thought was possible. We have that power [00:32:00] by influencing all of those factors and changing them to tell the brain, start building new and different pathways. You're not living in the same environment.

Dr. Paul Baker: You're not experiencing the same experiences anymore, and there can be a way to change that. So those are two major things in science right now that we need to know about. And it needs to be driving hope, because that tells us that every single human has hope. Mm-hmm. No matter how significant what they've done, what's happened to them.

Dr. Paul Baker: You gotta have that hopeful spirit. Hmm. 

Chris Masopust: And I think one thing I like to talk about this is that I, I spent about three years of my career working with severely mentally ill. Those with like schizoaffective schizophrenia, those who have not done well in like traditional outpatient. And even from like, going back to Adam, what you're saying is those old like sayings that we all know you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Chris Masopust: Yeah. Well, even as a kid, I was like, I don't, I don't think that really sounds right. I feel like you could probably teach any age dog any trick you want if you work hard enough at it. And I think this is so much [00:33:00] fun to talk about because it's the science behind that, that not only is that like saying wrong, but it's also for obviously people as well that you can teach these people who have been deemed by society, like those troubled youth, that they can't be helped, they're stuck.

Chris Masopust: Or those adults who have had a diagnosis of a serious mental illness, they can't be helped, they're done. Right. That's not true at all. Right. With those reimbursements and these just simple actions and instilling that hope they, they can change. 

Adam Andreassen: And even words we use as providers words like chronic.

Chris Masopust: Yeah. 

Adam Andreassen: It the, I feel like it sort of locks us into some assumptions that you're saying. Probably aren't even really fair to be assumption. 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah, it's tough. I think chronic, you can use a sense that if we don't do anything and we don't start intervening uniquely, then there could be a chronic aspect of this.

Dr. Paul Baker: But our goal would to say, well, let's make it so that it's not chronic and that we need to remove that, that particular or word from there. So, you know, one of the things I think we have to keep in mind is we overcomplicate the process of [00:34:00] helping. We, we think it's confusing, it's, it's gonna be too complex.

Dr. Paul Baker: And that's why people, I think stay away from it. But one of the things we try to, to help with in the training and in the support that we provide is to explain, it's actually very simple. And I'll give you an example of this and, and this is with my, one of my adopted sons, and. One of the things that was happening, he was having significant behavioral problems in school when he first came to me in foster care.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, you know, the behaviors were outta control. He had been in a number of foster cares foster care situations before he had come into mind. And his behavior was considered to be extremely complex. In fact, he was given a complex care designation. And so this, this, you know, people would say, oh, he's complex care.

Dr. Paul Baker: And I would say, oh, well, you know, what does that mean exactly? But when it really came down to it, there was one part of his life that was really struggling, and that was the area of significance on our four elements. [00:35:00] Once he was able to find something that gave him a sense of value and significance, there was an immediate change, and he was no longer that complex care kid anymore.

Chris: Mm-hmm. 

Dr. Paul Baker: He was a kid that was making a big change in his life. This is a kid now that works in a corporate environment, right, for with a major insurance company as a manager. So this is a kid that transformed it and he will tell you to this day, it was about a particular moment in time that transformed him because it gave him hope.

Adam Andreassen: Mm. 

Dr. Paul Baker: And that's all he needed. 

Adam Andreassen: How often is the transformation tied to a point in time versus a consistent, when you talk about reimbursements. How predictable is it when someone's gonna start feeling or showing the effects of some of those reimbursements? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah, I think it, it has a lot to do with the, the intensity of the support and, and the consistency of it.

Dr. Paul Baker: [00:36:00] So when we look at the need for reimbursement, so we introduce very quickly relational reimbursement, there's five different areas and goes even to experiential reimbursements where we talk about what are the experiences that were missed that are, that are needed, and then how can we do that so that it's developmentally appropriate right now?

Dr. Paul Baker: And also the second thing we want to factor in, is it culturally appropriate? So every time we look at a reimbursement, we, we really scan people's lives to find out are they feeling unsafe, insignificant, disrespected, or unrelated. And then we go to look at the reimbursements and develop a profile for them.

Dr. Paul Baker: And again, I, I have to emphasize this. Our goal is to make whatever we're gonna do. Practical and fit into the normal routine. So we might say, you know, if you're providing relational reimbursement, maybe this young person that you're dealing with or the adult that you're dealing with really won't even go see therapy because they legitimately have had a bad experience with mental health clinicians before for whatever reason.

Dr. Paul Baker: I [00:37:00] remember being introduced one time as a psychologist and this kid basically looking at me and giving me the finger and and saying, I hate psychologists. And I said, why? Because all psychologists get you locked up in the loony bin. Mm-hmm. And I thought, you know what? You need a reimbursement with psychologists.

Dr. Paul Baker: This individual needs to experience a psychologist differently. But then when I took that same person down the hall to introduce 'em to the social worker, they had a negative experience about a social worker. So then I said, we need social worker reimbursement as well, because if we don't do it, it puts that person at risk for years to come that this is unresolved.

Dr. Paul Baker: They may avoid therapy at at all costs because they think that their history. Is their future not, 

Adam Andreassen: I kind of wanna ask something off topic from the book, and that is about the mental health field in general. You know, mental health field has been around for decades and thankfully over the last five years, especially since Covid, maybe over the last 10 years.

Adam Andreassen: But then Covid, it really made it okay to [00:38:00] seek care and to all that. But how do you see the mental health field changing and is it progressing and where would you critique? Our ability as a field to connect with what you know about the brain. 

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, I think that the field, and I'm gonna agree with you a hundred percent, that one of the good things that came outta Covid was that people were more likely to say, I'm vulnerable and you know, I might seek help now that I'm vulnerable.

Dr. Paul Baker: It made it a little bit safer to go and, and get help. And even things like technology, being able to have telemedicine to attend a therapy session from the safety of your home. And maybe you only need to do that initially, or maybe that's how you do it forever. It's opened up more opportunity. Seven years ago, would you think that it would be okay to be doing telehealth?

Dr. Paul Baker: We would be, oh, no way. This is a personal, you know, thing. You need to be one-to-one. Well, you know, is this better than nothing? And you know, I prefer face-to-face. It's a lot better. We're relational beings as humans, but we do the next best thing. I think that the [00:39:00] field overall across mental health is.

Dr. Paul Baker: Doing a better job than we ever have. I think we're so much more open. To science being involved and not just the psychological sciences we're actually open to, well, maybe, maybe medicine has something to add to what we're doing and, and it seems to me that the fields are interacting better than they ever have.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and, and they're open to like social work being more open to psych practices, psych practices being more open to social work practices, and even psychiatrists coming and being very, very forthright and saying, you know, we need this practical information too to be able to give our patients, you know, it's, it's great to be able to walk away.

Dr. Paul Baker: We, you know, Adam and I historically, we, we've actually run this training for psychiatrists and psychiatric nurse practitioners, and they've come up and said, you know, we've had all this formal training and we recognize the technical terms, but what really helped us was the practical [00:40:00] language that you, you gave to us, because that's what I gave my patients when they left the office.

Dr. Paul Baker: Hmm. And they knew what to do and it was language that had meaning to it and it's language that actually had life. And I felt like when they left that they actually might try this. Yeah. Might put these things into place. 

Chris Masopust: I think going back to hope and kinda what we're talking about too is I think the exciting part about bringing this to agency is I've got a lot of connections here.

Chris Masopust: I've gotten to know a lot of people being in training and one of the therapists I had known for quite a few years while I'm here came up to me after the person brain session he was in and said, you know, I've heard the word trauma-informed care for the past, I don't know, 10, 20 years. And he goes, it never really, it just sounded like a buzzword to me.

Chris Masopust: I didn't really know what it meant. He goes, I know what it means now. I know what to do about it now. And I think that's just such a cool way to approach that. 

Adam Andreassen: So what does trauma-informed care mean? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Well, I'm gonna say this and if you look at our website, you're gonna say that our, our mantra is trauma-informed care and beyond.

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. Because this content that we've had, it's been in there since 20 or so, 2004. I. So we were trauma informed and didn't know it, [00:41:00] and then we became very awa aware that we were, 

Adam Andreassen: and it's, I feel like it's another word that if you're a listener, you might, you might hear, you might have heard this term, you might not have, but how really, what, what is trauma informed care?

Adam Andreassen: So we can discuss it from a standpoint of like, well, what are we talking about? 

Dr. Paul Baker: So to keep it quite simple, and again, there's, there's so many different definitions, just like resilience, culture, et cetera. But trauma-informed care is basically saying that there is an, in there, it's an approach that considers that certain populations have experienced such overwhelming events in their lives that they are unable to cope.

Dr. Paul Baker: And that's really the definition of what trauma is. You know, what's the difference between stress, just having regular stress and you know, maybe even having ongoing conflict, et cetera, that, that caused you to be uncomfortable. Trauma is when you've had an event. Or a series of events that have occurred in your life that are still problematic for you right now, and that these [00:42:00] problems are so significant that you do not possess the capacity, which is probably skills to manage that.

Dr. Paul Baker: And as a result, you need someone who can take that into consideration and to the fact that trauma actually produces certain reactions socially in the environment that people who have been traumatized, you know, have certain. Behaviors, certain things that are, are going to be obvious and the trained clinician, when they see or hear the about them, will be better positioned to put the right intervention in.

Dr. Paul Baker: But I think what trauma-Informed Care has done as a general practice is an awareness that we need to be a lot more open than we've ever been before. And that trauma is much more rampant than we've ever thought. And it, and it has been a buzzword. You go to almost all conferences you go to now in the middle, there's trauma informed something everywhere and it starts to become [00:43:00] redundant.

Dr. Paul Baker: And that's my biggest fear. I don't ever want to be a part of that, that, that click that's just regurgitating the same information. What we wanna know is what are the elements. To human success, to human resilience that will endure for the next hundred years. 

Adam Andreassen: So when your colleague said wait. Say I, I thought I knew what it was, or, I've always heard this term.

Adam Andreassen: Now that I know what this is, what was his statement or what was he getting at? 

Chris Masopust: I think the biggest thing that he took away from it was the, obviously the four elements of flourishing, like the safety and respect, but also just the, the over complication that we've put on it. Again, I think a lot of people have heard trauma-informed care as a way of being, as a clinician, but really breaking it down into these simple reimbursements.

Chris Masopust: Just sometimes taking 'em to a grocery store, letting them experience it in a new way or having someone there to support them while they're doing it. And just really breaking it down to these very simple, not super complicated therapeutic techniques just like this. They just need some extra support.

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. And most mental health clinicians. Have been [00:44:00] trained to write very elaborate treatment goals and objectives that unfortunately they've been forced to write because for reimbursement reasons, financial reimbursement reasons, not psychological reimbursement. No, not psychological reimbursement.

Dr. Paul Baker: Literal. Exactly. But what the danger is, is these treatment goals and objectives sometimes really don't even apply to what's really going on, and they're not even functional. So if you try to share those treatment goals and objectives with some of your clients slash patients, they, they don't have a lot of meaning.

Dr. Paul Baker: But if you're telling someone that they have self-control problems or self-regulation issues of their emotions and behavior, and as a result, we've looked back and we've seen, you've missed a lot of opportunities in life that other people might have had. So we're gonna go back and we're gonna establish and, and establish opportunities.

Dr. Paul Baker: To put those experiences into action. So the, the going to the grocery store, that 15-year-old might go to the grocery store much differently than a 5-year-old or a 4-year-old. But if there are skills that need to be obtained that will help them later in life in that grocery store experience of walking on [00:45:00] aisle nine at Walmart, for example, that's what we need to be doing with them.

Dr. Paul Baker: Or going out to dinner skills. Like I had 16, a 16-year-old foster child that came to me on his birthday who had never been to a restaurant before where someone asked you, may I take your order, please? Mm Wow. And didn't know what to do with that. And my assumption was, even with my training, he'd been to a restaurant with the opportunity to order, meet and to tell them that they wanted it, he wanted it, you know, medium rare. He had no clue what to do. And so when the server was asking these questions, it caused unbelievable stress and he ran out of the restaurant. So I had to coach him through the moment and everything we got back in a successful and needless to say, I wanna let you know, he is one of my sons now and he is just fine ordering at a restaurant now.

Dr. Paul Baker: So he, he's able to do that. But I, I guess what I I'm saying is we make a lot of assumptions even simply by looking at people and think, well, he's 16, I'm sure, but I'm telling you, I've had teenagers staring out the [00:46:00] windows of, of my home before looking at people riding their bikes and knowing that they can't go out there and join them because they don't know how to ride that bike.

Dr. Paul Baker: And you know, you think about if those are opportunities that are milestones and people think about how many other opportunities that we don't milestone in our heads that were missed for teaching a skill. 

Adam Andreassen: When you say neuro transactional, that, that term you're describing the totality of the ways that we.

Adam Andreassen: Give and engage in, I mean, what, what does neurot transactional mean? 

Dr. Paul Baker: So transaction, it, it, with some people, it has a negative connotation. Like, you know, transactions, they'll, they'll think, oh, that's, you know, it's, it's very rigid and concrete and, and cold. But what we really think is that, you know, at first we were calling what the work we were, the work we were doing is neuro relational.

Dr. Paul Baker: But that really was not fair because the work is beyond just the relational pieces. The relational pieces are foundational. We know that nothing's gonna happen between people unless there's trust [00:47:00] and respect between them. And we know that's a foundation and therapy. You can try any therapy, any design you do, CBTD, BT, any of those formal theories and practices, if there's another foundation of trust and respect.

Dr. Paul Baker: There's, there's nothing therapeutic that's gonna be happening in that, that interaction. So, you know, I, I think what we have learned basically is that these transactions that we have, they occur, occur across a number of domains. So when you just look at the reimbursements, and that's the primary framework, there are relational transactions, there are experiential transactions, there are regulatory transactions, there are cultural transactions, and that's really the exchanges that you have between you and the people and the environments that you exist in.

Dr. Paul Baker: That's really what it is. And it's the transactions. And that's usually what we're fine tuning. How do I come up to you and, and greet you? If I'm an individual with autism and I don't have very good social [00:48:00] skills, I need to be able to taught, be taught a social skill of entering a conversation. We take that for granted.

Dr. Paul Baker: I. You know that we know how to join a group of people and say, Hey, how you doing? Or even an adolescent walking up to another group of adolescents going, Hey, what's up man? Those are social approach skills. If you don't have them, you're in big trouble. And if you have them and they're not very functional and you walk up and you say something that's scary to someone else or something that's really offputting, these people can start to shun you and they get nervous being around you because your behavior is unusual.

Dr. Paul Baker: And that leads to a, a state that, and we in the person brain call alone, and when people are put into a state of alone, which is being involuntarily separated from groups of people that you wish to be a part of, we've got real big problems. Then. Do 

Adam Andreassen: you think loneliness, I've heard, I've heard it described as is it an epidemic?

Adam Andreassen: Is loneliness everywhere? Is social media destroyed [00:49:00] togetherness? Or where are we collectively? Society, western society, how, how. Widespread is alone. 

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, I, I don't know exactly the statistics on, on loneliness or alone, but I will tell you this, we're well aware and, and, and looking at the research right now and what that impact might be, and, and the correlation as to when did this start?

Dr. Paul Baker: Is it because, you know, in Covid, did it just bring it to our attention more? You know, people started to be able to recognize I'm lonely. Mm-hmm. You know, I, I, I haven't ever put that, that label on it. 

Adam Andreassen: I think a lot of people knew they were lonely before, but Covid made it so that now we're all lonely. So it's way easier to, and it could be more easy 

Dr. Paul Baker: to enter into.

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. Yeah. Or, and, and then I think too, a lot of, especially males would, being able to label, oh, hold on. You know what, I'm lonely. That's what's going on here. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's something that's happened. So there's a little bit more awareness. I think that we're also asking more about that too.

Dr. Paul Baker: Like how, how are you doing? How are you feeling? [00:50:00] You know, are you feeling connected? You know, people, what I'm very interested in finding out in research, in, in the organizational sector is what is the impact of people who are working from home? You know, do they suffer from a higher level of loneliness and depression?

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and who tends to want to work at home 

Chris Masopust: more? And I think the fascinating thing about this too is that. The hopeful brain and all the topics in there tie a lot into the new research that's coming out. That's talking about the quality of the connections. Yeah. Not just that we're connected, but the quality of it.

Chris Masopust: And I remember being in grad school about 10 years ago and reading a research paper that said oh yeah. If you're connected online virtually with somebody, it's still a connection. It's still beneficial. Well, now we've got research coming out now that's saying, well, no, not exactly. It's not the same.

Chris Masopust: Yeah, it's not quite the same. We don't get the same neurochemicals that we do whenever we're face-to-face and in person. And so there's a lot of that that's coming out and changing just based off the new information. 

Dr. Paul Baker: And it's why I refuse to have certain meetings unless they're face-to-face. Especially when you're, you're trying to grow new concepts, establish [00:51:00] something into a culture, trying to, it, they, you can grow into having that kind of consultative relationship or whatever it might be.

Dr. Paul Baker: But I, I, I don't like to have, especially as you're beginning relationships to do that virtually, because it's not the same, but. It can then serve its purpose later on. Once the relationships are established, the connections, the trust, the respect are there, then it can have a place in what you're doing.

Dr. Paul Baker: Obviously technology, it's gonna have to have a place. 

Adam Andreassen: I, I don't remember if it was your presentation or someone else. So I, I'm attributing this to whoever I heard it from, but I don't remember. It was some slide that showed, you know, loneliness, putting into context. And it was, I think America statistics, but historically people got their connections heavily through churches, clubs, and work.

Adam Andreassen: Was that your presentation or was it No, it wasn't me. 

Dr. Paul Baker: But I I, I'm familiar with what you're talking about and 

Adam Andreassen: those rings of church and clubs are just shrinking so dramatically. Yeah. That it is doing two things. One, it is robbing people historically of [00:52:00] where they've usually found their relationships.

Adam Andreassen: Yeah. But it also is putting ever more pressure or focus on the workplace. I think this is another reason it's so important to have these sort of shared languages. It's not just a matter of, Hey, are you in Survival Brain? You're being cranky today. It might be also understanding those need states that we bring with us to work that might not be fed in other places like they historically were.

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. And you know, that's an extremely important observation in the sense that these, these places that used to be serve as group meeting places, group where things could be solved as a community, they're dwindling and we're becoming more isolated. I think it's important in, in that loneliness factor is you know, why, why are we allowing this?

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, are we aware we're doing it? That becomes the question too, do we know what we're doing to ourselves or are we gonna learn a bad lesson? 

Chris Masopust: Yeah. I think it's what's the Jurassic part quote? Just because we could, doesn't mean we should. Yeah. Right. And like, let's look at the science behind, let's look at the research and see what are the things that we should be doing based off of the neurochemicals that we get from 

Adam Andreassen: it.

Adam Andreassen: And, and if [00:53:00] we're, whether we're here or separated, how do we make sure that we are connected such. That if you are alone in the workplace, that I can pick up on that. And how do we even normalize? 'cause it's not always easy or even welcomed. But let's say it's welcomed to be more interconnected. Well, what do we do?

Adam Andreassen: Do we all go play a card game at work? What does that look like? Yeah. Yeah. 

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and I think that's what we have to explore. And then when we have this, this knowledge about what's important and, and what are, are critical aspects of, of healthy environments within an organization, the cultural part of the organization Yeah.

Dr. Paul Baker: I guess is what I'm talking about more specifically. But when we're looking at this stuff, I guess we need to make sure that we have some type of assessment model that that goes back in finding out are we measuring this? If we're concerned about it, we'll measure it. But if we're not concerned about it, we won't measure it.

Dr. Paul Baker: And I think that's important. 

Adam Andreassen: So if you run across this conversation and you know, maybe like one thing and the rest is, is either [00:54:00] confusing or doesn't connect. Is the hopeful Brain is that book who, who can read that and be like, okay, that is at my development understanding level, and is it for more clinicians and people with the basis?

Adam Andreassen: And if so, then where would you send somebody if they wanna know more? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Well, here's the whole purpose of what we've done with the Hopeful Brain and the other books that we have written as part of Neurot transactional practice is that we want to make this accessible to any reader. And, and we, we just say that we want someone with a nonclinical background.

Dr. Paul Baker: So if you have a foster parent that's just struggling and they wanna say, can you gimme a resource that I can look to, to help me understand what's going on with my foster child? We want them to be able to pick this book up, find value in it, and comfort in being able the readability. But we also want.

Dr. Paul Baker: Someone who has a graduate degree that maybe even be in a, a PhD in Psychology Neuropsychology, to be able to pick that book up and say, oh, I'm still getting information out of this. And maybe it's not so much the technical language, [00:55:00] but it's the practice that I'm walking away with. 

Adam Andreassen: Does your website have information that will be helpful to anybody, whether they are highly educated in the field or sort of a, a parent who's hearing this saying, I want to know more.

Adam Andreassen: So website gonna have resources for all of that? 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah, Adam, I hope that's what it does and that's certainly our, our, our goal for that. And you know, whether it's training or consultation or any of that stuff, what our goal, again is to make the practice of helping a lot simpler. And a lot more effective.

Dr. Paul Baker: And again, we feel like the essential ingredients is one, knowing about the brain and how it interacts with our lives so that we can make the best choices as far as strategies and interventions. 

Adam Andreassen: So I wanna give you just a second to figure out if there's something that we wanna make sure we talk about today.

Adam Andreassen: But is there anything, as you've sat through these trainings, these last few times, and you've really been organizing this for our system? Are there things that have either come up in the training or as we're having this conversation that you wanted to make sure we got to today? 

Chris Masopust: Honestly, no. I think we've had like a great conversation so far and a lot of the [00:56:00] highlights and the topics and even the light bulb moments that I've seen a lot of our staff have as they've been sitting in this training we've, we've talked about today.

Chris Masopust: And I think it's so great to be able to talk about it here in this space too. 

Adam Andreassen: And we want to, we want you to come back and visit with us again, but Absolutely. Is there anything summatively or that you wanted to circle back to, we make sure we covered today before? I, 

Dr. Paul Baker: I don't think so. I just think, you know, if, if, if people keep in in mind that it, it is a lot simpler than we make it sometimes and even the most complex cases and with some basic knowledge you can get a lot of empowerment in making the change that you're hoping to make and it, it's not as daunting as it is.

Dr. Paul Baker: And that's really our goal is to convince people of that. And a lot of times it's the people who've been in the field for many years and they say, I wish I would've thought this way so many years ago. It would've made it a lot more enjoyable. And that's, that's the best 

Adam Andreassen: compliment we can get. And, and Chris as someone who is not clinically trained but gets to spend all your time, probably too much time around clinicians.

Adam Andreassen: Yeah. The conversation today, what aspects are you most [00:57:00] sitting with right now? What's swirling the most and connecting the most? 

Chris: Well, I, I shared with Adam the other day after getting, going through your book, I was able to apply concepts just this past weekend in an exchange that I had with my son because I knew that the topic that we were on, that there was a story, you know, sometime back that impacted what was going on right then.

Chris: So I would say and, and this is kind of to your question about the book. This is not. Just for clinicians. This is for parents and educators and people who deal with other people. And, and I appreciate the, the accessibility of this and the broadness of the scope because it really is very practical.

Chris: I'm wondering, can you talk, and you talked a little bit about it in the hopeful brain toward the conclusion, hope and compassion. Can you just conclude. With some thoughts on how hope impacts [00:58:00] compassion and how we can take that with us. 

Dr. Paul Baker: Yeah. So, you know, one of the major things that we want people to do is, is to, one, is to gain some excitement about getting involved with individuals that might be a little bit challenging and they might not have wanted to get involved with before because they were apprehensive, they didn't have the skills or knowing what's going on.

Dr. Paul Baker: And, and that really will start with the development of empathy. Mm-hmm. And understanding. And we realize that it's important for people to understand what's going on with other people. And if you think of empathy as being able to put yourself in the emotional shoes of another person, we think of that as being extremely important in the process of hope.

Dr. Paul Baker: You know, if you, if you could become hopeful and you're gonna start looking at things from a different way, we know that healthy psychology means that you've experienced a wide range of emotions. And, and some people believe that, you know, a healthy life is being sheltered from anything negative. Quite the contrary.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. We, we really believe that you need to experience a full range of emotion and learn how [00:59:00] to navigate it successfully, because that helps you to become more empathic towards other people. Mm-hmm. If you've experienced a little anxiety, you've experienced a little depression, you know how it feels. So if you're recognizing that in another person, you're more likely to go and do the next thing, and that's to be compassionate.

Dr. Paul Baker: Mm-hmm. And compassion we define as acting on our empathy. So compassion is the action to the understanding, which is the empathy. Mm-hmm. Which should have been guided initially from. That spark of hope. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do to actually open that book up and say, let me give it a go and see if it'll work.

Chris: Yeah. Well that's great. That's a great piece for us to, to conclude with. And Dr. Baker, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate it. Absolutely. And Adam and Chris, thank you for joining today. Your, your brains in this. Context. It, it's perfect. This has just been a very enriching [01:00:00] conversation as Adam said, for even for me as a non-clinician.

Chris: I'm just standing on the outside looking in and it's been great. So thank you all so much for being here today. Thank 

Chris Masopust: you so much. Thank you. 

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