Full Circle Counseling-Valerie Olson

11/02/2025

"Sometimes the greatest gift a friend can give is not a solution, or advice, or even the promise of brighter days, but simply their quiet presence. Life is not always about fixing what is broken, but about walking beside someone in their brokenness so they don’t have to face it alone. A true friend is not one who only shows up when the sun is shining, but one who lays down beside you when the clouds are heavy and the rain seems endless. They are the kind of person who doesn’t hurry your healing or try to pull you to your feet before you are ready, but who reminds you that you are worthy of love, even in your lowest moments. Their listening becomes a safe place, their silence becomes a comfort, and their presence becomes a reminder that you are never truly alone. Sometimes friendship is not about doing, but about being—being there when it matters, being still when words fail, and being strong when you cannot. And in those gentle moments, when the world feels heavy, you discover that the truest kind of love isn’t about carrying each other’s burdens away, but about carrying each other through them."

10/31/2025

10/30/2025

10/24/2025

Quit rescuing those who aren’t ready to take responsibility for their own growth. It’s tempting to step in, to fix, guide, or carry someone through their struggles—but true transformation can only happen when they show up for themselves. Pouring your energy into someone else’s journey can leave you drained, frustrated, and disconnected from your own path. Your growth, your healing, and your peace are your responsibility. When others are ready, they will take their own steps!

10/21/2025

We can be better than ever.

10/19/2025

I'm proud of you.

The progress you can’t see is STILL progress.

The effort, the consistency, and showing up - it all stacks up behind the scenes.

Most people give up right before things start to turn. They mistake the invisible progress for no progress at all.

But not you. You know you’re inching forward with every small action you take, with every tiny promise you keep with yourself.

Keep going and keep showing up ❤️

You’ve got this.

10/17/2025

The mainstream mental illness industry describes trauma as an event or diagnosis, rather than what it truly is: a disruption of the nervous system’s ability to stay connected, safe, and coherent.

What I do is different. From an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, trauma is not defined by what happened to us but by what happened *inside* us when support and safety were absent. It’s not a disorder, but an injury of internal and relational disconnection. Healing isn’t about “treating symptoms” but about restoring integration: helping the brain, body, and relationships return to balance.

The trauma industry too often focuses on techniques and protocols while ignoring the deeper need for attuned human connection. It treats survivors as isolated patients instead of as nervous systems trying to find resonance and safety in an unsafe world. In doing so, it can inadvertently reinforce the fragmentation trauma creates.

Trauma healing doesn’t happen in isolation or through tools alone; it happens in spaces of compassion, attunement, and shared humanity where safety and connection can grow again.

10/15/2025

This might sound confusing but it's inspired by Carl Jung. I've loved analyzing fairy tales for years.

1. The Feminine Descent
Belle begins as every woman does in the first act of individuation: the call beyond the village. Her “provincial life” symbolizes the habitual persona: polite, intelligent, but contained. The village is consciousness, narrow, safe, and defined by repetition.

Yet the soul whispers for more. She sings of “adventure in the great wide somewhere,” not realizing that this longing is not for a man, but for the unknown within herself.

The Beast, dark, wild, and untamed, is the shadowed Animus, the masculine soul-image buried in the unconscious of the woman. He represents what society taught her to fear: passion, aggression, autonomy, will, and instinct.

To love him, she must confront the buried masculine that her conditioning has condemned.

2. Continued in comments...

10/15/2025

How we feel and the emotions we experience are a central part of our mental health. Conversely how we respond to emotions is critical for our health, mental and physical. While they can perplexing, stubborn, frustrating, annoying, frightening and downright depressing at times, emotions are a fundamental and necessary part of brain functioning. In fact, they are central to being human.

Unfortunately societal beliefs often tells us we shouldn’t have emotions or some emotions are bad. Telling your brain it shouldn’t have emotions is like telling your heart not to beat or your lungs not to breathe, and it doesn’t make your brain very happy.

Emotions don’t always feel nice and can make us want to run away from them. And like any avoidance, short term this seems to work, we feel relieved. But inside your brain is feeling pretty annoyed at trying to hold it all in.

How you respond to your emotions is important. Research shows suppressing, berating and shaming emotions doesn’t help us deal with them at all and just creates more stress and make emotions feel even more difficult.

Naming, validating, expressing and recognising emotions seems to help us process them and help us become friends with them, rather than them having power over us. It seems to soothe those emotions and instead of adding a layer of more stress and difficult feelings, helps us deal with the ones we have.

read more about the science of emotions and how we can help our emotions in my books
📕‘A Toolkit for your Emotions’.
📚 A toolkit for modern life
📖 A toolkit for happiness

10/14/2025