Ethical Living by Olivia Bilocca

Ethical Living by Olivia Bilocca ➡️ Systemic Family Therapist
➡️ HR Consultant
➡️ Speaker
➡️ Workshop Facilitator

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...
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

We get handed one story about getting older and it's pretty much all loss.Tornstam's research points at something else g...
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

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

Your heart rate increases for a completely ordinary reason. A coffee. A flight of stairs. Stepping into a warm room. And...
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 |

The fourth time in ten minutes you check if they've replied, and some part of you has already written three different me...
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 |

The familiar always feels safer than the unknown, even when the familiar is the thing hurting us.It's how the nervous sy...
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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Yesterday I delivered The Humans in HR: Beneath the Role, a 4-hour small group workshop for HR professionals in Malta.HR...
10/06/2026

Yesterday I delivered The Humans in HR: Beneath the Role, a 4-hour small group workshop for HR professionals in Malta.

HR has changed beyond recognition in thirty years. The emotional load, the organisational complexity, the expectation to hold everyone else together while the business moves at pace, this is not the personnel department of the 1990s.

But in some organisations, it is still treated as though it is.

Yesterday was about looking clearly at the gap between what the role actually demands and how it is still perceived, resourced, and supported.

What stayed with me was this. The HR professionals in a room, willing to look honestly at a gap that doesn't get named often enough: between what the role has actually become and how it is still perceived, resourced, and supported in many organisations. People who carry significant emotional and strategic weight, often without structures that recognise it or colleagues who fully understand it. That conversation is overdue in most organisations.

If you work in HR: how well does your organisation actually understand what your role has become?

Olivia Bilocca | Licensed Therapist

When there is no way out, the way in often begins.Jung believed that real inner growth rarely happens when life is comfo...
25/05/2026

When there is no way out, the way in often begins.

Jung believed that real inner growth rarely happens when life is comfortable. It happens when we're completely stuck , when no choice feels right, when our usual ways of coping stop working, and when the ego finally runs out of answers.

That moment of feeling utterly lost isn't a sign that something has gone wrong. From a Jungian perspective, it's often a prerequisite for something deeper to emerge.
When the conscious mind doesn't have the solution, and we resist the urge to force one, something else becomes possible. Jung called it the Self. Not the self we perform for the world, but the deeper, wiser centre that quietly directs our growth. The part of us that knows, even when we don't.

Like a seed that already knows how to become a tree.
So if you're in a season of feeling stuck ]not collapsing, but not pretending either] you may not be falling apart. You may be making space.

"When no choice feels right, it means the conscious mind doesn't have the answer yet." — Marie-Louise von Franz, drawing on the work of C.G. Jung

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