Caitlin Olsen

My career as a therapist started when I walked into my first therapist's office in the spring of 2008. I was newlywed, isolated, and devastated. My parents' marriage had imploded and I was freaking out about my own marriage's future. I was bored and underemployed, living in a small town while my husband completed military pilot training. I was new to the Air Force and didn't fit in. When I realized Rebecca, my therapist, was a complex, imperfect human AND still immensely helpful to me, I started to see myself as someone who could pay it forward and have a rewarding career.

I applied to UNLV's master's program in marriage and family therapy when I was a few weeks pregnant with my first child. He was born a month after classes started, and his brother arrived six months before graduation. My husband was deployed for four months during that second pregnancy while I began my off-campus internship and raised our toddler. It was hell, but school and clients helped me stay balanced and moving forward. I left my graduate program with a sense of self-esteem and resilience I couldn't have imagined when I first walked through Rebecca's door.

While still a student therapist, I was asked to help build an addiction and trauma recovery program and leaped at the chance. I became trained in EMDR, EFT couples' therapy, parts psychology, and group dynamics while building my expertise in addiction, attachment, betrayal trauma, psychosomatics, and mindfulness.

I ran women's betrayal trauma recovery groups for eight years and for various programs. I created my own womens programs when I launched the coaching side of my business in 2020. Boundaires for Beginners teaches women how to establish and maintain healthy boundaries while Freak on a Leash: The Sisterhood helps Mormon women navigate their faith crises. Group work has remained a consistently important and rewarding part of my career.

The majority of my one-on-one clients have been women struggling with depression, anxiety, life changes, and faith crisis. I have also treated couples and individual men. I prioritize self-compassion as the foundation for all mental health work with every client I work with. Mindfulness and other true self-care practices are also integral to my approach to therapy.

The therapeutic bond is paramount to any successful treatment, so emotional safety, open communication, and professional follow-through are hallmarks of my work. I am extremely careful to gauge and regularly assess how safe and trusting the client is feeling with me in our work together.

I am extremely boundaried with clients which allowed me to be extremely generous. I have learned that resentment toward clients creates walls and leads to burnout so I am very self-attuned and careful regarding how I spend my energy and how much I give to my work. I am as open as possible with clients regarding my boundaries and capacity in the hopes that modeling this type of self-care helps give them permission to do the same in their own lives.

I love mental health work and find it extremely fulfilling.