The Practice of Staying Present

When Olivia speaks to students now, they often return to a simple rule:

While you are still supported by faculty, supervision, and the scaffolding of learning, dare to take risks. Let the questions that tug at your heart lead you. Treat every assignment as an entryway into the work and the people who call to you. Curiosity, they believe, is a quiet act of bravery.

During her training in Applied Psychology, that mindset began to take shape through coursework and clinical placements that emphasized reflection, presence, and relational care. 

This was reinforced when a more experienced therapist at the Crime Victims Treatment Center offered them a single sentence: When the therapist is brave, the client is safe. It sounded simple, but, like most truths, it required practice.

At first, bravery surprised her. It was quiet. It meant staying present as stories of violence unfolded, holding her gaze when it would be easier to look away, and asking another question when silence seemed safer. She learned that care is not just a feeling, but a choice made over and over. 

Back as an undergraduate at NYU, they wove between Applied Psychology and Gender & Sexuality Studies, discovering how systems shape the stories people bring with them. Through their work with the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Research Consortium, they helped turn the lived experiences of queer youth into data that could speak for safer schools. They learned to read both the stories and the systems that hold them.

But knowledge alone was not enough.

Building a Practice of Care

In places like Children of Promise, where she worked with families marked by incarceration, and later at the Crime Victims Treatment Center with survivors of interpersonal violence, she learned that healing is rarely linear. It circles back, hesitates, resists, and sometimes begins again. Walking alongside someone in that process calls for patience and an openness to being changed yourself.

Along the way, Olivia met others traveling similar roads. As an adjunct at NYU, they encourage students to pursue their own questions, offering support without taking the journey out of their hands. That same approach now informs the private practice they are opening, rooted in relational, affirming care and shaped by a belief that healing begins with safety, curiosity, and presence. They have come to understand community as something woven into the work itself. 

In this story, love is not a general idea. It is a daily practice. It is the choice to stay present. It is honoring complexity, her own included, as a queer clinician shaping a life grounded in care and belonging.

And so the rule continues, passed from one guide to another: be willing to stay.

In that willingness, someone else may begin to feel safe.