Ethical Living by Olivia Bilocca

Name: Ethical Living by Olivia Bilocca
Address: Is-Siggiewi, MT
Telephone: +35699632674

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➡️ Systemic Family Therapist
➡️ HR Consultant
➡️ Speaker
➡️ Workshop Facilitator

28/10/2026

Every relationship starts with two “normals” before it has one.

Family therapist John Byng-Hall called these family scripts. They’re the unwritten rules you grew up with about how things are done. How people argue. How care is shown. What happens on a Sunday. Nobody teaches them to you directly. You absorb them, and they end up feeling less like one way of doing things and more like THE ONLY way.

Then you get close to someone, a partner or a friend, whose script is different. And both of you think yours is the normal one.

Take conflict. In one family, people raised their voices, said their piece, and ten minutes later were making coffee together. In another, nobody shouted. When someone was upset, they went quiet until it passed. Put those two people together and the first interprets silence as punishment, while the second hears a raised voice as danger. Neither is wrong. They’re filtering the same moment through different scripts.

Or family time. In some families, Sunday lunch at your parents’ is non-negotiable, every week, no questions asked. In others, you see extended family a few times a year and that’s considered close. So one partner can’t understand why skipping a Sunday is such a big deal, while the other feels their partner doesn’t value family.

Byng-Hall noticed that we tend to either repeat our script or deliberately do the opposite. “I’ll never do what my parents did.” But doing the opposite still means the old script is in charge.

The third option is what he called improvising. Not your normal, not theirs, but a new one you build together. It starts with saying your script out loud: “In my family, Sunday lunch meant...” Most couples have never had that conversation, and it explains a lot of the arguments they keep having.

The goal isn’t to decide who's normal is right. It’s to notice there are two, and agree on what yours will be as you co-create it together.

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist
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19/10/2026

You might have seen the word enmeshment going around lately. It’s being used a lot, and not always accurately, so let’s start with what it actually means.

The term comes from Salvador Minuchin, a family therapist who in the 1970s looked at how families manage the space between their members. At one end are families where people are very disconnected from each other. At the other end are families where the lines between people get so blurred that it’s hard to tell where one person ends and another begins. He called that enmeshment.

In an enmeshed family, closeness isn’t the problem. The problem is that there’s no room to be separate. Your feelings are expected to match everyone else’s. Decisions that should be yours get made by the group. Privacy feels like secrecy. Disagreeing feels like disloyalty. If one person is upset, everyone has to be upset, or has to fix it.

Some ways it can show up:

👉A parent who treats their child as their best friend or confidant, and leans on them for emotional support.

👉Feeling guilty for wanting a different life, career or set of values from your family.

👉Being expected to share everything, and getting hurt reactions when you keep something to yourself.

👉Struggling as an adult to know what you want, because you’ve always checked first what everyone else needs.

One or two of these on their own doesn’t make a family enmeshed. Most families have moments like this. It’s enmeshment when it’s the pattern, and stepping outside it isn’t really allowed.

The simplest way to tell the difference: closeness means you can be different from each other and still stay connected. Enmeshment means being different feels like a threat to the connection.

And it rarely comes from bad intentions. It often grows in families that have been through a lot, where holding on tight felt like the safest option. Understanding where it came from doesn’t mean you have to keep living by it.

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist
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14/10/2026

No relationship is free of conflict. Not the good ones, not the long ones, not the ones that look perfect online. People get tired, snappy, distracted and defensive. They misread & misunderstand each other. They say the wrong thing at the wrong time.

That doesn’t mean something is wrong. It’s what happens when two people with their own histories, moods and limits share a life.

What tells you how healthy a relationship is isn’t how often you clash. It’s what happens AFTERWARDS.

In therapy we call this rupture and repair. The rupture is the moment things go wrong: the sharp comment, the cold silence, feeling dismissed. The repair is coming back to it. Acknowledging what happened, owning your part, hearing theirs, and reconnecting.

The relationships that last aren’t the ones that avoid rupture (conflict). They’re the ones that get good at repair. And repair doesn’t have to be perfect either. “I was snappy with you earlier, that wasn’t fair” does a lot of work.

Where it goes wrong is when there’s no repair at all. The argument gets dropped, nobody mentions it, everyone is back to 'normal' and it piles up with the next one. Or one person always does the repairing and the other never does.

So if you’re measuring your relationships against perfect, they’ll always fall short. A more useful question is this: when things go wrong between us, (how) do we find our way back?

This is about everyday conflict. If someone is regularly cruel to you or you don’t feel safe, that’s a different conversation, and it deserves proper support.

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist
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10/10/2026

Today is World Mental Health Day, and most of what you’ll see today is about what you can do for yourself. That matters, and it’s part of this too.

But it’s only part of it. How safe you feel in your country, how you’re treated at work, whether you’re heard at home, who you can call when things get hard. All of that shapes your mental health long before you do anything about it.

So if you’re struggling, it’s worth asking what’s going on around you as well as what’s going on in you.

Which of these is strongest in your life right now? And which one could do with more?

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist

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10/08/2026

We've had a few years now of being told to protect our peace and never shrink for anyone. And plenty of people needed to hear that. But it's left a lot of us treating every bit of friction in a relationship as a red flag.

Here's the distinction that helps: preferences versus values.

Preferences (negotiable aspects) are how tidy the flat is. How much notice you need before plans. Whether they run late. How they load the dishwasher. Real friction, genuinely irritating, BUT not a moral issue. You'll be experiencing this stuff forever, with everyone, and that isn't losing yourself. That's just two people sharing a life or a group of friends going through life together decade after decade.

Values (non negotiable) are honesty. How your kids get spoken to. Whether your work gets taken seriously. Whether you're safe. Those don't change, and when one gets crossed it feels completely different to being annoyed about the dishwasher. Most people can tell, if they slow down long enough to ask.

There's a second one too. Giving something to someone or a relationship versus disappearing.

If you decide to let something go because this person matters more than being right, it usually sits fine. You don't keep score. Disappearing is different. You agree, you go quiet, and you're still irritated about it three weeks later on a deeper level than the frustration mentioned earlier. That resentment is telling you something; usually that you gave away something that wasn't a preference after all.

These dynamics only work if everyone's doing it. If you're the only one bending, that's not a healthy relationship.

Nobody fits your criteria in full, ticking each and every box. Not your partner, not your best friend, not you. The work is knowing which parts you'd be wrong to give up, and being generous about everything else.

Olivia Bilocca | Warranted Systemic Psychotherapist

28/07/2026

We get handed one story about getting older and it's pretty much all loss.

Tornstam's research points at something else going on at the same time. People slowly reshuffle what they actually care about. Fewer people, but the right ones. Less interest in being impressive. More room for the stuff that was always underneath the noise.

His theory has its critics, and fair enough. It can read as too tidy, too simplistic: like you just adjust your outlook and aging gets easier. It doesn't. There's real loss in it, physical and otherwise, and no reframe makes that disappear. So take this as a way of looking at life in general, not an instruction manual. Something to keep in mind alongside the hard parts, not instead of them.

Save this for a day you need reminding that quieter doesn't mean smaller.

Olivia Bilocca | Warranted Psychotherapist

20/07/2026

Their face changes for half a second, and you're already going back through everything you said in the last five minutes.

Nothing happened. They shifted in their chair.

Here's the thing though. You're not paranoid. Somewhere along the way you learned to read a room before it turned, and you got properly good at it. So good that you now pick up on things that were never actually there.

Someone's tired. Someone's distracted. Someone's thinking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with you.

Nobody's annoyed with you.

You picked this up years ago, around people who made it necessary. You don't need it now.

Olivia Bilocca | Warranted Systemic Psychotherapis

16/07/2026

Your heart rate increases for a completely ordinary reason. A coffee. A flight of stairs. Stepping into a warm room. And within seconds, some part of you has decided something is wrong.

There's a name for that. Researchers Steven Reiss and Richard McNally called it anxiety sensitivity, back in the 1980s. It isn't a fear of the situation you're in. It's a fear of the physical sensations anxiety produces on its own, a racing heart, a tight chest, the feeling of not getting quite enough air.

This is where it turns circular. The sensation is perceived as dangerous. That perception produces more of the same physical response. Which then gets interpreted as further proof that something is wrong.

This is also why anxiety can end up feeling worse than the thing you were originally anxious about. The original worry kicks off the engine. Anxiety sensitivity is what keeps it running long after the worry itself has become irrelevant.

This doesn't mean that the sensations aren't real. Your heart is actually racing. Your chest is actually tight. It means the sensation is information for you, not a diagnosis. A racing heart can mean danger. It can also just mean a racing heart.

Olivia Bilocca |

13/07/2026

The fourth time in ten minutes you check if they've replied, and some part of you has already written three different meanings to explain the silence.

That's not love working the way it's supposed to.

There's actually a name for that state. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov called it limerence back in the 1970s, after noticing that "being in love" and love itself don't always match up the way we assume.

Limerence is the obsessive, intrusive, can't-eat-can't-think version. Your mood rises and falls entirely on whether they reciprocate. You replay a five-minute conversation for three hours. The fear of losing them takes up more room than the relationship itself.

Love, the steadier kind, doesn't run on that engine. It can sit through an ordinary day. It doesn't need constant proof. It tolerates boredom.

Some food for thought: limerence usually burns out within months, unless something keeps the uncertainty alive. Which is exactly why the most unavailable people can hold your attention the longest. Not because the connection is deeper. Because the not-knowing keeps the limerence topped up.

That doesn't make what you felt fake. It makes it explainable. And once you can name what's actually happening in your body, you get to choose whether you keep feeding it.

Olivia Bilocca |

15/06/2026

The familiar always feels safer than the unknown, even when the familiar is the thing hurting us.

It's how the nervous system works. It chooses recognisable over good, every time, until we teach it otherwise.

✨Noticing the pattern is where it starts.

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist

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Address

Is-Siggiewi

Telephone

+35699632674

Website

http://www.ethicalliving.eu/

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