BROKEN ARROW, Okla. – July 4, 2026 (The Oklahoma Post)
As Oklahoma celebrates America’s 250th anniversary this weekend, a Broken Arrow counselor and Army veteran is marking the milestone with something other than fireworks. Dr. Steve Hudgins is releasing his new book, The Family Mask, on July 7, and he says proceeds from the first 24 hours of Kindle sales will go to four veterans organizations he has selected.
“I want to be able to say, look, here’s a way another veteran is giving to another veteran,” Hudgins said. “We’ve got to support our veterans, because our veterans are not being supported.”
Hudgins served in the Army from 1992 to 2000, working communications during his active duty years before moving to the Reserve, where he served in investigations, then transitioned into telecommunications management in Tulsa. He describes himself as a disabled veteran writing partly for his own brothers and sisters in arms who are losing limbs, losing families to drinking and substance use, or losing their lives to suicide. He was candid about his frustration with existing veteran support systems, saying handshakes, discounts, and public recognition are not enough, and that he is personally engaged in ongoing disputes with the VA over the level of support veterans receive.
He described America’s 250th as more than a birthday. “It’s a sacred opportunity to remember that freedom was never carried by symbols,” he said, but by human beings who often came home carrying invisible wounds beneath visible strength.
The Regal Endorsement
The Family Mask carries a foreword from Andrew Regal, a former Global Head of Video at The Wall Street Journal whose television resume includes stints at Court TV, MSNBC, and CNBC, along with Emmy nominations for work including NBC’s Consumer 101. Regal is an author himself, with his own writing focused on bullying and institutional dysfunction, so a name like his behind a book about the roles families adopt to survive trauma tracks with his stated interests. Hudgins said Regal told him he saw himself in the book.
Standing Guard After the Uniform Comes Off
Hudgins has spent years counseling veterans and describes what he sees in that work as something deeper than the symptoms usually associated with military trauma. “The deeper mental health struggle for veterans is identity injury,” he said. “People think the struggle is trauma, flashbacks, anger. Those are just symptoms. The symptoms are real, but they often sit on top of something deeper, the loss of the self that existed inside the mission.” He said the military provides structure, rank, brotherhood, purpose, discipline, and a reason to endure, and that when veterans come home, the uniform comes off but the nervous system does not stand down with it. “The uniform can come off,” he said. “But the nervous system, the grief, the identity disruption, it does not simply stand down. It stands guard.”
He argues that veterans often get boxed into one of two roles once they return home, neither of which allows them to simply be human. “The hero mask says I’m fine, I’m tough, others had it worse,” he said. “The damaged mask says I’m no longer useful, I’m not who I was. Neither mask gives that veteran room to be fully human.” He said many veterans are not really asking what happened to me. They are asking who am I now, since the mission that organized their identity is gone and the person they were before does not seem to exist in the same form. He described reintegration from military to civilian life as difficult precisely because it requires veterans to reinterpret their own experiences in painful new ways, often without anyone around them equipped to help.
Asked what families get wrong when a veteran comes home, Hudgins used a comparison. “You lend me your car and you don’t see it for a month,” he said. “What are you expecting that car to be returned to you as? The condition you left it in. That’s where families go wrong. They assume the veteran who comes home is the same person who left.” He said the assumption creates pain on both sides. The family is waiting for the husband, wife, father, mother, or son they remember, while the veteran is trying to become someone they may no longer fully recognize. The mismatch shows up as families mistaking distance for rejection, anger for disrespect, isolation for selfishness, or emotional shutdown for a loss of love, when the underlying cause is usually a nervous system still operating under rules shaped by danger, discipline, and survival. “Often the veteran is not trying to hurt the family,” he said. “The veteran is trying not to fall apart in front of them. Families misunderstand veterans because they expect homecoming to mean return.”
With fireworks filling Oklahoma skies this weekend, Hudgins offered specific, practical guidance for people supporting a veteran through the holiday. He pointed first to the noise itself. “Be aware of the timing of fireworks in your neighborhood,” he said. “These fireworks remind them of the gunfire they were under.” Beyond fireworks awareness, he encouraged people to make room for veterans without making them explain themselves, to sit with them, to check in after the fireworks end, to invite them into gatherings without forcing participation, to ask how they are doing and be prepared to hear more than fine, and to learn the difference between a veteran choosing solitude and a veteran sliding into isolation. He specifically flagged watching for the veteran who serves everyone else at a gathering but never allows anyone to serve them in return. “Families, churches, and communities honor veterans best when they stop treating toughness as proof that pain is absent,” he said. “Courage does not erase the grief. Service does not remove trauma.”
The Story He Could Not Write From a Distance
The Family Mask is the vehicle Hudgins built for that message, and its central idea reaches beyond veterans into every family carrying something unspoken. Hudgins is a licensed professional counselor supervisor with a doctorate in Community Care Counseling and a specialization in Marriage and Family Therapy, and a body of work built around what he calls Mosaic Family theory.
The framework grew out of his doctoral research into remarriage and blended family dynamics, driven in part by a statistic he cites often, that nearly 65 percent of second marriages end in divorce. He argues the word blended fails to capture what these families actually carry, fractured histories, loyalty conflicts, and the slow work of rebuilding trust. A mosaic, he says, does not hide its broken pieces. It reassembles them on purpose.
The Family Mask extends that thinking into a broader claim about how families function under pressure. “The greatest danger in a family is not always what happens openly,” Hudgins said. “It’s what everyone quietly agrees not to name.”
His argument is that families under stress assign roles the way a workplace assigns duties. Someone becomes the peacemaker. Someone becomes the strong one. Someone becomes the faithful one, or the counselor of the group, the one who helps everyone else process their fear while quietly carrying their own. Hudgins traces his own version of this back to his childhood, watching his parents argue and stepping into the peacemaker role by necessity rather than choice. He remembers a specific family gathering where his father and his father’s siblings began arguing over his grandmother’s land while she was still alive to hear it. Hudgins said something to her about the timing. She responded by clearing the room of spouses and grandchildren, talking to her five adult children alone at the kitchen table, and later thanking him for bringing peace to the family. He said the moment stuck with him for the rest of his life, and the role stuck with him too.
The book’s central claim is that this kind of role does not stay contained to one person or one generation. Hudgins describes children as essentially blank slates, conditioned by what their parents model rather than choosing their patterns freely. “A father learns to control because he was never allowed to feel afraid,” he said. “A child watches all of this and slowly learns this is how we survive. The mask becomes an emotional inheritance.” One generation wears the mask to survive something specific, shame, grief, abuse, addiction, divorce, rejection, or war. The next generation wears it because they were raised inside a system where naming the pain honestly felt dangerous. They did not choose the mask at first. They inherited it.
He argues that when a person is never given language, permission, or a safe witness to help them understand what happened to them, the pain does not disappear. It goes underground, and it resurfaces through personality, as anxiety, anger, perfectionism, emotional distance, or silence. The people carrying it often describe themselves in terms that sound like character flaws rather than history. Instead of saying I was neglected, he said, people learn to say I’m too needy. Instead of saying I was controlled, they say I have to keep everyone happy. Instead of saying I was unseen, they say they don’t matter. “That’s how unnamed wounds become adopted as identity,” he said. “Transgenerational trauma is the mask one generation wore to survive, but the next generation mistakes it for identity.”
At its core, the book rests on a single conviction. “People rarely suffer because they are broken,” Hudgins said. “They suffer because they have confused the roles they learned to survive with the identity they were created to live.”
Hudgins is also pointed about what he thinks pop psychology gets wrong about healing. He said he dislikes the phrase let it go, calling it dishonest, and prefers instead a slower process, naming the wound, separating guilt from responsibility, and grieving the unsupported child a person once was. He said the goal of the book is not to strip families of the coping mechanisms that got them through hard periods. “A mask is not always deception, it’s protection,” he said. “Healing is not about shaming that mask. Healing is about honoring why it formed, naming what it protected, and discovering who the person was before survival became the assignment. The family mask is not the enemy. The tragedy is when a mask that once protected the child becomes an identity that imprisons the adult.”
The Anatomy of a Family Mask
Hudgins said the book grew directly out of his own life rather than clinical theory alone, starting with his father’s death He said writing in first person, rather than from clinical distance, was a deliberate choice, and one he considers uncomfortable by design. “It can’t be explained honestly from a distance,” he said. “How many self-help books are so dry and boring like that? I did not want to write another book that stood at a clinical distance,” he said. “Readers deserve honesty before instruction.
He described the writing process itself as a kind of exposure, allowing readers to see the exact place where survival becomes persona, where his wounds shaped his reactions, where shame made silence feel safer, and where restraint became its own kind of mask. “Disclosure is hard because it asks me to stop standing above the material and become part of the evidence,” he said. “When you take ownership, it breaks the agreement with shame.”
A 34 Percent Chance
Hudgins has survived cancer twice. He described the first diagnosis as a straightforward tumor removal. The second had metastasized, and he said doctors gave him a 34 percent chance of survival if the disease went unaddressed by 2021.
“The second time, I began to understand that survival without truth can still leave a person hidden,” he said. He described the disease as exposing every role he had built his identity around, the strong one, the faithful one, the counselor who helps others process fear while privately facing his own. “Cancer forced me to confront the parts of me I had hidden behind responsibility, faith, clinical language, perseverance,” he said. “It made me ask questions I could not answer with a degree, a title, a sermon. Who am I when I cannot perform? That was the moment I knew I had to write. Not because cancer is the whole story, but because cancer revealed the story beneath the story.”
Epitaph Worth Earning
Hudgins was direct that the motivation behind The Family Mask, and behind tying its release to America’s 250th anniversary, is not personal recognition. He expressed some frustration that more attention has not gone toward the idea of veterans supporting other veterans through work like this.
He said his goal, in his own words, is simple enough to fit on a headstone. “I just want my epitaph to say Dr. Steve came into the world and left it in a better place than he was born into,” he said. “That’s my philosophy.”
Amazon.com: Dr Steve Hudgins: books, biography, latest update
The Family Mask releases July 7. Readers can find it along with his existing titles, Piece by Piece and The Journey: Not the Destination, through his practice site, where his full catalog, podcast, and counseling work are listed, with Kindle editions of his available titles priced at $0.99 for the duration of the anniversary campaign.
Writing By: Gregory Moyer | Editing by Robbie Robertson
EDITOR’S NOTE: Original post date.
Sources
Interview with Dr. Steve Hudgins, conducted by Gregory Moyer, July 2026. Primary source for all direct quotes, the July 7 release date, the veteran proceeds pledge, the legislation discussion, and Hudgins’ personal accounts of his family history, cancer diagnoses, and military service.
Dr. Steve Hudgins practice profile, Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/steve-hudgins-broken-arrow-ok/459191 Verifies his licensure as a professional counselor supervisor in Broken Arrow, his credentials, and areas of practice.
About Dr. Steve Hudgins, drsteveh.com: https://drsteveh.com/about-dr-steve-hudgins/ Verifies his doctorate in behavioral health sciences, marriage and family therapy specialization, Mosaic Family framework, the 65 percent second marriage divorce statistic he cites, and his prior telecommunications career.
Dr. Steve Hudgins Books and Podcast, drsteveh.com: https://drsteveh.com/dr-steve-hudgins-books-and-podcast/ Verifies his published titles Piece by Piece and The Journey: Not the Destination, The Family Mask as a forthcoming July 2026 release, and his podcast.
Andrew Regal biography, CanvasRebel Magazine: https://canvasrebel.com/meet-andrew-regal/ Verifies Regal’s background as former Global Head of Video at The Wall Street Journal, his tenure at Court TV, MSNBC and CNBC, and his Emmy nominations.
Sen. Julie Daniels biography, Oklahoma Senate: https://oksenate.gov/senators/julie-daniels Verifies Daniels as sitting Senate Majority Floor Leader, R-Bartlesville, and former Judiciary Committee chair.
Sen. Christi Gillespie biography, Oklahoma Senate: https://oksenate.gov/senators/christi-gillespie Verifies Gillespie as sitting senator for District 33, R-Broken Arrow.
Support Independent Journalism
At The Oklahoma Post, we report on stories that others overlook; from local courtrooms to statewide accountability. We rely on reader support to stay independent. Your contribution helps keep the public informed. If you’d like to help us keep publishing local voices and independent reporting, consider making a one-time donation today. Every contribution makes a difference.
Got evidence, events, birthdays, obits or inside info?
Email The Oklahoma Post confidentially: editor@theokpost.com
And for the record: unlike the courthouse clique, The Oklahoma Post runs on facts, not dark money.
© 2026 The Oklahoma Post |
By The People’s Popular Paper | Oklahoma Special Report
2026 — The Oklahoma Post — TheOKPost.com is dedicated to delivering relevant news and information to Oklahomans and to sharing their stories, pictures, and experiences. Content on this website includes fact-checked, verified-source reporting created by The Oklahoma Post, as well as contributions from various individuals and links to external public and privately owned sources. The views and opinions expressed in user-generated content are solely those of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Oklahoma Post. The Oklahoma Post does not independently verify the accuracy of third-party contributions and relies upon contributors to fact-check their work. By sharing links and allowing open contributions, TheOKPost.com exercises its right to free speech and provides a platform for diverse perspectives.
