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About Grava
We are Caroline and Dane Stevens, a married couple and the co-founders of Grava Health. Grava Health is a holistic practice for adults in Colorado where therapy and life coaching work side by side, and this is the story of how it came to be.
Before Grava, our co-founders each put more than a decade into careers that looked strong on paper. Caroline led public relations campaigns for household-name technology and financial companies, and Dane worked at multiple Silicon Valley tech startups, where he helped one company, in particular, grow from a two-bedroom apartment into a two billion dollar company.
We were good at those tech jobs. San Francisco is where we fell in love, and for a while we flourished there. The pace that made our twenties in the city so exciting also made it easy to measure ourselves by output, and as the pressure grew, so did the ways we coped with it. Unrelenting standards and harsh self-judgment turned into habits that cost far more than they gave.
Only a few months into our marriage, we hit the lowest place either of us had ever been, and both of us spiraled into active addiction. Our self-worth had been built on what we thought others wanted for us and what society expected of us. This left us with shallow friendships, strained family relationships, and a marriage that was barely holding together. The parts of our lives we’d been proudest of had been hiding how lost we were on the inside.
The years that followed asked a lot of us, with a pandemic, grief and loss, health problems, financial scarcity, and career instability, all while starting over from square one in a new state. What carried us through was a commitment to ourselves and to each other to find out who we truly were.
Along the way we met mentors and providers who inspired us and believed in us before we did, and that’s one reason we wanted to do the same for other people. Going through it on our own and as a couple is also why Grava works for more than the individual. Humans are pack animals, and we believe the relationships, families, and communities around a person are part of what drives and fulfills them.
Colorado is where our new life took hold. We each built a recovery that was our own, found meaning and purpose in what we do, and formed friendships centered around mutual respect and shared interests. While working full-time during the day, Caroline went back to graduate school at night for her master’s degree in counseling. Dane noticed she came home from class with more energy than she’d left with, after years of watching her walk in the door completely drained from work. Inspired by that, he also brought his leadership and sales skills into behavioral health and went on to support many organizations in this field with operations and business development. Helping those programs grow, and then doing the same for clients as a peer coach, turned out to be the work he’d been seeking all along.
Years inside behavioral health organizations showed us a lot of good care and a few patterns we couldn’t unsee. Clients were treated like charts more than people, and discharge days arrived without a plan or any real picture of what life looked like in their next chapter. Mental health was addressed in one setting and physical health in another, and the parts of life in between, like relationships, routines, and one’s purpose, were left for the client to sort out alone.
A friend who had built his own business told us about an old concept called “burning the boats,” where you cut off your own retreat so that moving forward becomes your only choice. He shared how an unexpected change in his career had left him facing a lot of uncertainty, but ultimately gave him the courage to make a decision he now considers one of the best of his life. We’d been talking about what we would do differently for years, on walks with our dogs and over dinner, and that conversation suddenly stopped being just talk. Grava is the practice we have long envisioned.
The Grava name started with Dane asking whether we could build the practice around helping people with heavy things, the physical kind he works with and the emotional work Caroline unpacks with clients. We both knew first-hand what it takes to carry something heavy, and the relief that comes when you finally allow someone to help you carry it. We wanted to combine what experts had taught us with what we’d lived through ourselves.
Through exploration, we discovered the term “gravis,” which is Latin for “heavy, serious, or weighty” and the root behind words like “gravity” and “gravitas.” Gravity holds things in orbit. Gravitas is the weight a person carries after they have been through something challenging and emerge with real substance. The meaning of “gravis” fit our vision immediately, because it captures both the load people live under and the strength that comes from learning to carry it.
The word lives on in Spanish and Portuguese as “grava,” the base layer laid down first when a road is built. It’s the layer beneath the surface anyone sees or drives on, packed and leveled until it will hold weight. This grava is laid one stretch at a time toward a place you cannot yet see from where you are standing. The base layer might not be admired, but everything built above it depends on it shouldering the weight.
You lay the foundation first, and then you pave your own road.
We don’t believe anyone is broken, and perfection isn’t the goal. Health is something you keep moving toward, and on any given week that can look like fewer symptoms, a boundary that holds, or a hard work stretch or holiday season carried through without losing yourself in it.
We also know that addiction is much broader than substances. Sometimes the thing a person can’t stop reaching for is alcohol or another drug. Sometimes your outlet might be work, food, a relationship, a screen, or achievement. Under chronic stress or pain, the brain’s reward system naturally looks for relief, and any behavior that eases this discomfort gets reinforced until it becomes a habit. Once you see how common the pattern is, the shame attached to it loses its weight. That’s why we built Grava to push back on the stigma around substance use and mental health, and to treat every person with dignity and respect.
That same regard for the person runs through how the Grava practice works. We keep intake as painless as we can so your time goes to you instead of paperwork, and we tell you what we notice, kindly and directly, including when it’s hard to hear. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so during the free initial consultation and help you find other resources.
We hold ourselves to a high standard and we ask you to honor yourself in the same way. If you’re ready to make the first call, we’re here to help.
Co-Founder and Lead Therapist
MA, LPCC, LAC
Many of the clients I work with can explain exactly why they do what they do and still find themselves repeating maladaptive patterns. Insight got them part of the way, and they’re here at Grava for the rest.
Co-Founder and Lead Coach
Believe me, I was the first person to dismiss therapy. I come from a family that never talked about problems, and I mistook that avoidance for strength until it stopped working.
