olivia shine

masters intern

genuine. caring. spirited. intentional. playful

she/they

Hello! My name is Olivia, my pronouns are she/they. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania beside the hickory forests belonging to the Susquehannock’s before living my adult life in Pittsburgh. I am ethnically Slavic and racially white, pansexual, and neurodivergent. Before recently completing a master’s degree in counseling at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, I worked in an acute clinical mental health setting for 10 years, where I fiercely allied with thousands of individuals to construct meaning and healing when hope felt lost. I see individuals, couples, and facilitate groups as an Associate Professional Counselor. I can take some insurances or sliding scale self-pay.

My beloved clients have described my style as welcoming, relaxed, warm, genuine, and comforting. I’m adaptive and receptive to different healing and learning styles so we will come up with a plan together that empowers your strengths and resources. My role is to walk alongside you and in support of you while mapping experiences with curiosity, connection, and compassion instead of shame and distance. Therapy with me is conversational, feeling-centered, and consciousness raising. I love laughing, a potent medicine, so humor is sometimes an intervention. We may also infuse movement to embody the changes we try on, learn about coping skills from Dialectical Behavior Therapy to work with current challenges, and reverently incorporate culturally significant and spiritual practices unique to you.

I continuously grow and strengthen my own integrative and decolonized approach, which is feminist and liberation-centered, trauma-informed, emotion-focused, considers attachment styles, challenges individualism by being relational and systemic, integrates the nervous system by bringing awareness and presence back into the body, and is influenced by Eastern and Indigenous philosophy. When appropriate, I like to offer occasional and intentional self-disclosure to share ideas and wisdoms I’ve encountered in my own healing journey and the many I’ve been witness to. My love for literature and study of critical race, systems/ecological, gender, and queer theory also informs my practice.

Some things we could work on together-

  • Reconnecting to inherent safety, belonging, and dignity within us, our bodies, and in relationships amidst trauma and colonial oppression.

  • Understanding our inherited generational cycles and finding how to break free.

  • Elevating how we engage with the world and our community through boundaries, accountability, action, and radical authenticity.

  • Building a foundation of self-compassion and acceptance.

  • Harm reduction and non-pathologizing care for grief, depression, addiction, self-harm, trauma, and anxiety.

  • Recovering from activism burnout and finding sustainable care strategies.

  • Rewiring limiting beliefs and behaviors.

  • And many more!

Beyond being a therapist, I’m a nurturing cat mom to Lenny and Finch, a houseplant enthusiast, and a gardener of medicinal herbs. An intuitive Cancerian, I’m guided by the Earth and Moon to travel through the changing seasons and phases of transformation. I love dancing, drinking tea, being in nature (especially by water), dreaming, performing moonlit rituals, making art, decorating, and listening to music at an ungodly volume.