The team

Meet the Partners

Identity Partners is built from practice, not performance. Our background spans community wellbeing work, VCSE environments, crisis line listening, social research, and identity-focused relational practice. The work is grounded in lived experience, systems thinking, and a commitment to structural honesty.

We draw from a wide theoretical lineage: attachment theory, trauma and embodiment, harm reduction, sociological analysis, digital hyperconnectivity, and relational ethics. Not as a set of models to impose on people, but as a deep well of understanding that informs how we meet you.

Olivia 'Livv' Bland

Founding Partner

Livv is a millennial based in Brisbane, Queensland, whose life has been shaped by a rare combination of high cognitive ability, late-identified neurodivergence, and complex developmental experiences. Recognised early for outstanding analytical intelligence, she later received formal diagnoses of ADHD and Level 2 Autism – conditions she had already learned to navigate through years of highly effective, intuitive masking and adaptive strategies.

Her early environment required rapid emotional development and constant attunement to others. As a child, she learned to read people and rooms with extraordinary speed and accuracy – a skill that matured into a powerful relational capacity. Livv picks up on key interpersonal dynamics intuitively, anticipating needs, and stabilising complex situations with a level of emotional intelligence that goes far beyond that of most clinical practitioners.

Alongside neurodivergence, Livv carries a history of trauma across multiple life domains. Rather than diminishing her, these experiences have shaped a deep commitment to dignity, safety, and structural honesty in her work. She brings lived experience, analytical clarity, and a rare ability to hold complexity without collapsing into sentimentality or detachment.

Livv is a lifelong learner with active studies across psychological, medical, and coaching domains. She is currently collaborating with policymakers on initiatives aimed at improving access to trauma-responsive services for survivors of dissociative and trauma-related disorders.

Outside of practice, Livv is a voracious reader, poet, songwriter, and vocalist – someone with intellectual altitude, emotional depth, and clarity of perspective. She brings her whole self to the work of identity development.

Simon 'Si' Johnson ACCPH ISSUP

Founding Partner

Identity Partners was born from Si's desire to bring his whole self into a professional setting – combining emotional warmth with systems-level thinking, relational depth with analytical clarity, and lived experience with structured practice. As a neurodivergent practitioner, Si's orientation is shaped by both cognitive pattern-recognition and relational attunement, giving his work a distinctive blend of logic, humanity, and coherence.

His background spans:

• VCSE wellbeing work with a drug and alcohol community treatment provider
• Suicide and crisis line listening with Samaritans
• Identity development work with the practice
• A recently commenced Master's in Social Research

These environments shaped a professional stance grounded in containment, clarity, and structural honesty. Si's work is relational in nature and logical in content: human, attuned, and warm – but also rigorous, conceptual, and systemically informed.

He draws from a wide theoretical lineage including attachment theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth), relational rupture and repair (Gestalt, Schema, ACT, Existential Analysis), person-centred therapy in the Rogersian mode, and the shadow work of Jung in his later works. He is trauma-informed, non-directive, health-first, harm reduction orientated, and psychosociologically literate. He explicitly rejects parent-child, teacher-student, or expert-novice relational imbalance when working with clients, and understands the psychologically destabilising nature of relational rupture, transition, grief, identity fragmentation, or misalignment.

Si works with people who want depth without clinical framing, direction without hierarchy, expertise without impersonality, and warmth without boundary collapse. His practice is shaped by lived experience, professional grounding, and a commitment to helping people understand themselves and the lives they are constructing.

Identity Partners is the expression of that commitment – a place where identity can be explored, built, and sustained through structured relational partnership.