Olive is a passion project, focused on helping parents, spouses and the adult children who love someone addicted. In 2015 I found myself sitting in the ICU, having just been told that my husband of 8 years had been hiding his addiction to heroin for the past year. I have never felt more alone than I did in that moment. I didn’t know what to do or who to go to for help. What followed was years of a vicious cycle that is all too familiar in addiction. The codependency, chaos, and trauma. I fell into the trap of trying to fix, manage and control a life that was already falling apart. Already a therapist, I knew that there had to be a different way of dealing with my husband’s addiction. No one talks about the loved ones. All efforts are focused on the addict. But the entire family is falling apart, not just the addict. and I was never going to be able to fix my husband’s problems for him. So I set out on a mission to find peace within my own life, to make sure that no matter where my husband was in his own recovery, that my children and I would find stability and peace.

In my work, I utilize my clinical expertise in treating addiction with my intimate understanding of the dynamics within the family unit, to help individuals find a way to heal, find their way forward, make sense of their struggle and move forward in a way that doesn’t abandon their love for their family member, but doesn’t abandon themself either.

This work is different. This work is focused on understanding how addiction impacts their loved ones, utilizing practical tools, and finding real world solutions that are rooted in evidenced based practices to help you get your peace back.