Find your way back home.
EXPERIENTIAL TRAUMA AND ADDICTION THERAPY IN ILLINOIS AND TEXAS
emotion-focused, body-based, relational psychotherapy that heals from the inside, out.
You know there is more to life than worrying, criticizing yourself, feeling exhausted, and trudging through depression — you’re just not sure how to get there.
You’ve done the work to understand yourself. You’ve had insights and know your triggers. But that knowing hasn’t done anything to keep the patterns from repeating. You’re still overthinking, shutting down, blowing up, and berating yourself at every turn. Your body is tense, anxious, and on edge. Your emotions either feel a thousand miles away or threaten to overwhelm you at any moment.
Welcome — you are in good company. People find their way here carrying lingering effects from experiences that overwhelmed them at some point. For some, this began in childhood, growing up in environments marked by instability, unpredictability, emotional pain, a difficult parent, or unmet emotional needs. For others, this happened later, through chronic stress, trauma, loss, or the end of important relationships. For many of my clients, it’s some combination of the two.
When our experiences overwhelm our capacity, our nervous system adaptively generates strategies to survive. These strategies can look like over-functioning, people pleasing, staying on alert, perfectionism, self-sufficiency, emotional shutdown, addiction, or holding ourselves at a distance in relationships. At some point, these strategies kept us safe. After time, though, they come with a tremendous cost: our aliveness, spontaneity, and authenticity.
Every person has the potential to live with more freedom, joy, ease, and love. My sincerest hope for you is to experience the relief of finally setting down the private weight of shame, aloneness, hopelessness, and chronic worry.
This is possible when we gain the tools to identify, feel into, and change old patterns, connect the dots between our past experiences and current struggles, and safely venture into our inner terrain in order to undo the aloneness and suffering that stems from past trauma.
As an experiential therapist, my approach empowers you to move through inner and outer difficulties — overthinking, self-criticism, doubt, guilt, shame, addiction, emotional shutdown, reactivity — to rediscover what’s already been there the whole time: the goodness and wholeness of yourself.
→ pervasive feelings of self-doubt, criticism, or fear of failure
→ persistent sense of hyper vigilance, constriction, tension, or unsettledness in the body
→ internal experiences of disconnection, overwhelm, anxiety, flatness, or emptiness
→ grief and loss of significant and meaningful relationships, communities, support systems, or passions
→ early attachment or relationship injuries that still ache
→ traumatic or life-shifting events that are still felt regardless of time having passed
→ chronic states or periods of stress that have gone unacknowledged or resolved
→ experiences of feeling misunderstood, abandoned, rejected, abused, or mistreated because of who you are
People find their way here carrying different things —These experiences can show up as symptoms such as depression, anxiety, feeling disconnected from yourself or others, stuckness, repeated patterns, addiction, or experiencing big emotions without understanding why. How we react tells us how we survived.Hi, I’m Olivia.
I help reflective, curious adults regain their authentic connection to themselves and others.
I believe healing happens in relationship, even when our attachment history tells us otherwise. When we are able to move through our feelings of disconnection, anxiety, guilt, and shame in the presence of a trusted other, we undo our traumatic aloneness. And with that, greater clarity, flexibility, and confidence in our inner capacities can arise.
My approach is authentic, warm, and compassionate. I’m not a blank slate and I won’t spend a session just nodding along. I bring my presence, deep listening, and a sincere desire to be with you fully into session.
The focus of my work is on supporting your nervous system to regain a sense of safety, stability, and settledness in order to deeply and safely process trauma. Along the way, we can uncover what makes sense about your symptoms and what’s adaptively brilliant about your thoughts, behaviors, and patterns — even when you feel like they’re “wrong” or “bad.”
My work is experiential, attachment-focused, and depth-oriented. I draw on trauma-informed approaches, including Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), parts work, and somatics to attend thoughtfully to what you may need in the moment so transformation can unfold without overwhelm or disconnection.
My goal is to support you to access your innate healing capacities, regain a felt sense of safety in your body, relationships, and life, expand your capacity for self-compassion and acceptance, and show up in the world with greater authenticity, intimacy, and aliveness.