He Named His Memoir After What He Assumed That Therapist Thought of Him.

The Chris Olsen Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"You could be having the best year of your life, and that is a wonderful time to start therapy."

- Chris Olsen

Thirteen Folding Chairs in a Room Too Small for Them. Strips of Paper on the Walls Reading "Relapse" and "Dad Died."

Chris Olsen has more than fourteen million followers on TikTok and got there filming his friends, his coffee order, what he did last Tuesday. In 2017 he was nineteen, drinking himself to sleep every night, and being flown to Boca Raton by an interventionist named Don - who, at the airport, offered him his two free drink tickets for the flight. Chris's roommate had gone around him to his family after Chris admitted he thought he was an addict.

The strips of paper on the walls turned out to be other patients' life stories, written out - an assignment waiting for him. At the head of the room was a woman in a crisp white shirt, black pants, and heeled boots he suspected were made for walking all over people like him. That was Lizzie. She is the person he chose for this episode. She asked not to be named in full or photographed.

The first assignment everyone gets is to write down their ten most shameful secrets. He did. The next day he read them aloud. There was a silence, and then Lizzie looked around the room and asked whether anyone thought he had been honest. Heads shook. He would be reading that list again, he learned, and again, until he cried.

It escalated from there. One morning he walked into group to find screenshots of a friend's text messages pinned to the wall - messages she'd sent from her mother's phone about getting herself out early. Lizzie made small talk, smiled, then asked the friend whether she wanted to explain the wall or whether Lizzie should. The next hour was the group going in on her while Lizzie sat back. That was considered community building. Six months inpatient with three groups a day, then nine months working a job while still inpatient - he bussed tables at an organic restaurant next to the mall - then a year of outpatient.

David read him something Lizzie has since said about those months: that she can usually tell from the start what a patient's chances are, and she didn't see it for him - that she didn't want him to become a repeat offender, and was harder on him than on others precisely because she believed he could start his life over. Chris was blunt about the ledger. It worked on his sobriety and on his fear of drinking. It did not work on his self-esteem. The governing question at that facility was what do you deserve, after everything you've done to people, and the answer he absorbed was that he deserved to make other people happier and that the line stopped about there.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The room in Boca Raton, and the first assignment

He Was Fourteen, Watching His Mother Cry. A Therapist Told Him to Make Her Feel Better. He Sat Back and Said Two Words in His Head.

Before any of Boca, there was his mother, Maria. Chris describes a childhood outside Washington that was close to idyllic - a super mom who was at everything he and his sister did. The confusion came on a drive to school, when she told him, crying, that she was an alcoholic. The mom he had grown up with, in his opinion, didn't have issues. She would later describe herself as self-medicating, and her use shifted when her father died.

The scene he takes David to is a family weekend at one of her rehabs in Nashville. He was the youngest person in the room. Chairs were pulled into the center - his mother, him, a therapist between them. His mother wept and told him she had been a bad mom for his whole childhood. He started to well up. The therapist turned to him and told him this was where he needed to make his mother feel better.

He barely spoke for the rest of that session except to reassure her. He walked out confused, and also aware that he had just found a tool he was going to use a great deal. When David asked whether he thinks she was a good mom, the answer came without hedging: yes. "She wasn't the drunk to me growing up. She was my mom."

Then he said the thing that reframes the whole hour. Some of their hardest moments together came after she got sober. She had been five years ahead of him, and when he stopped needing fixing, the role went with it - she had gotten sober, and there had been a project, a kid drinking too much, someone to help. He puts it plainly: there was a sort of enmeshment in their unhealthiness, and both of them had a hard time with the other one getting well. He is also unambiguous about the debt. Without her going first, he doesn't think his parents would have recognised what was happening to him, or known to stage an intervention as early as they did.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Nashville, and what happened when they both got sober

A Thousand Kind Comments Don't Land. He Scrolls Until He Finds the Cruel One, Because That's the Story He Was Told About Himself.

When the following arrived, the validation felt extraordinary, and that was the problem. Post-rehab, he was not used to feeling that good, and he recognised the feeling as dangerous. He raised it with Lizzie before she raised it with him - asking, he suspects, whether he should delete all of it, because this was dangerous and he didn't deserve it and something bad must be coming.

David quoted his own line back to him: that a thousand comments don't land because they don't match the story he was told about himself, so he scrolls for the nasty ones. Tell me I'm annoying as hell, then tuck me in and kiss my forehead - otherwise I can't sleep. Chris called that him at his most self-aware. He isn't scrolling expecting to find something bad, but once he does, that's what fills him for the rest of the day, because that's the part he believes.

He and Lizzie agreed on a social media break last summer - two or three months entirely offline. His nervous system, he says, was calm for the first time in a long while, though he allows that the experiment was compromised because he always knew he was going back. What they landed on instead is that it is a job, in the good sense and the bad one: he is allowed to clock out, and then clock back in. Most people use the feed as the treat at the end of the day. He cannot, because by then he has been at work in it since morning, and the video that surfaces may be about how annoying he is.

David pressed on whether the attention fills the quiet that sobriety leaves behind. Chris said yes, at times - and was specific that it got worse right after he finished writing the book, having just spent months casting himself as the villain of his own story. He also noticed, out loud, that he was speaking more slowly and carefully than he does online, and diagnosed it himself: he matches the energy in the room, he is trying to make everyone comfortable, and part of his brain is calculating how to sound like the smartest version of himself. Asked how a viewer is meant to tell what's real, he turned the question over rather than answering it, and wondered aloud who he is putting on.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Is social media the new drug?

Nine Years Later They Are Still Working Together. What They Work On Now Is Undoing What They Did Together Then.

He knew she believed in him in their last conversation before he left the program, because her tone changed. It was the first time he had heard it turn warm, and it landed all at once - how completely he had trusted her with his life for the previous year. His read on it now: people don't fight with you if they don't care about you. Lizzie fought because she knew he could take it.

She has since left that facility and opened a private practice, and in some of their first sessions afterward she told him she no longer resonated with that level of shame. The center has changed its philosophy too. Chris finds her trajectory genuinely fascinating - what it takes for a therapist to undo her own work. Their sessions still begin, often, with him volunteering what he did wrong that week, and she stops him and rewinds, and they look instead at why he needed to lead with the charge sheet.

Asked to finish the sentence "the real me is," he had the words ready, which he noted was new: kind, loving, perhaps too soft occasionally, motivated, mostly happy. He is twenty-eight, still sober, still her patient. His mother is doing great and closing in on a sobriety milestone of her own. The pride he used to reserve entirely for her he now, carefully, extends to himself.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Where he and Lizzie are today

"I'm Chris Olsen, and the person who believed in me is my therapist."