I help ambitious women heal relational trauma and build thriving lives on solid foundations.
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Psychotherapist & Executive Coach | Trauma Recovery Specialist | Author | Founder, CEO Evergreen Counseling | 15,000+ Hours with Silicon Valley's High Performers
01/25/2026
Comment 'JANUARY Q&A' and I'll send it your way.
Have you ever found yourself doing mental gymnastics at 2 AM trying to figure out if your partner's behavior is actually a problem—or if you're just overreacting because of your childhood?
Maybe you grew up with a parent with borderline personality disorder, and now you can't tell what's "normal relationship conflict" versus what's actually emotional abuse.
Or you left a job two years ago and you still don't know if it was the right decision—still grieving the colleague who somehow met needs your childhood never did.
Here's what I know: if you grew up where emotional volatility was dangerous, your nervous system learned to scan for threat 24/7. That means even low-level conflict can feel like being back in a war zone.
But trauma-informed work doesn't say "it's just your nervous system, ignore what's happening." It says: "Let's regulate your body enough so you can accurately read what's happening."
This month's Q&A gets into the real mechanics of this.
We talk about:
- The two data streams framework: how to distinguish your nervous system's history from what's actually happening now
- The traffic light check for reality-testing whether you're in green, yellow, or red territory in relationships
- Why "the right decision" might not be a feeling—it might be a direction (and why complicated bereavements don't mean you chose wrong)
- How to recognize narcissistic dynamics when you're 65 and wondering if it's too late to leave
- The truth about switching from fear-fueled to desire-fueled goals without losing your ambition
This is part of what we work through in Strong and Stable—where over 20,000 driven and ambitious women gather to learn to trust themselves when their bodies still remember their trauma—and what actually helps.
Comment 'JANUARY Q&A' and I'll send it your way.
01/24/2026
A 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis this morning.
Over 100 people detained in Maine this week.
If your body reacted to that news. If rage moved through you. If you couldn't stay still.
That wasn't anxiety. That wasn't a disorder. That was your nervous system recognizing what's actually happening.
And what's actually happening is this: You're living in systems built on total control. At work. In relationships. Politically. The powerful have one message: obey, or face collective punishment.
Systems don't accidentally work this way. They're designed this way. Intentionally. To keep you compliant, confused, burned out.
But here's what they're betting on: that understanding this will paralyze you. That awareness will equal despair.
It doesn't have to.
When you see HOW these systems operate—what they demand, how they condition compliance, what false choices they create—you stop being a victim of them. You become literate in them.
And literacy is power.
You can set boundaries where you were taught to be boundless.
You can choose relationships built on shared power instead of surrender.
You can engage politically without burning out because you understand what you're actually fighting.
You can hold grief for Alex Pretti AND stay clear enough to direct your rage strategically.
Your capacity to stay conscious, to function with eyes open, to refuse burnout—that's not self-care. That's resistance. That's how sustained struggle happens. That's how we survive what comes next.
This carousel teaches you the architecture of the systems designed to control you. Not so you feel helpless. So you can see clearly. And when you see clearly, you can fight differently.
01/23/2026
Good girls don't get angry, so they get anxious instead. Your anxiety might be decades of swallowed rage. Anger isn't the problem—suppressing it is.
01/21/2026
This is what I wish someone had taught me years ago.
How to tell the difference between goals that are mine and goals I inherited from a childhood spent caretaking. How to do meaningful work without burning myself out doing it. How to set boundaries with a mission that would happily take everything I have.
January 23rd. 90 minutes. $47.
Camera optional. Recording included if you can't make it live.
Comment 2026 RESET below or visit the link in my bio.
01/20/2026
You can work a room like nobody's business. Your network is enviable.
But at 2 AM, when the anxiety hits, who do you call? For high achievers with relational trauma, relationships become performances.
We're the entertaining one, the successful one, never the vulnerable one. But here's the truth: the loneliness you feel isn't from lack of people—it's from lack of depth.
You've been keeping yourself safe by keeping yourself hidden. One real connection beats 500 surface-level ones every time.
01/19/2026
This one question changed how I help clients set goals.
"Whose goal is this, actually?"
Most mission-driven women have never asked themselves this. They just assume if they're the one writing it down, it must be theirs.
But our goals get inherited. From family patterns that taught us caretaking = worth. From cultural expectations about what "good women" give. From the mission's demands that slowly ate our whole lives.
The Source Check helps you tell the difference.
I'm teaching it January 23rd in a live workshop.
Comment 2026 RESET below or visit the link in my bio.
01/18/2026
2016. One of my favorite years—and one of the hardest.
2016 was the year I got engaged to the love of my life. We got engaged naturally, on Beltane, in the Northern California Redwoods. And right before he took me to the forested amphitheater where he’d planned to propose, we stumbled upon a witch in the middle of her Beltane ritual. Magical and totally apropos.
2016 was the year I *finally* completed my grueling four-year licensure journey and became a licensed therapist in California!
2016 was the year I set up my very first solo therapy office—thanks to that same aforementioned handsome fiancé, who assembled the furniture, did the painting, and hung all the art.
And then came November 8th.
The next morning, while I was still in shock, Jeffrey Wright posted: “May the election of Trump bring forth the fiercest, smartest, toughest generation of ass-kicking women this country could possibly imagine.”
That became my forever mood.
Love. Purpose. And a fire that hasn’t gone out. 🔥
01/18/2026
Comment GOALS LETTER and I'll send it your way.
Five years ago, I stopped setting goals from fear. From "what will keep me safe" and started asking "what does my soul actually want."
That shift changed everything—my relationship with my body, my finances, my work, how I move through my days.
The tool that helped? Vision boards. Not the casual kind you throw together on a Sunday afternoon. The kind I spend a month creating—treating them like an art form, keeping them in front of my face every day, using them as both creative expression and nervous system regulation.
In this month's letter, A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now, I share what happened five years ago when deeper layers of trauma recovery work finally rewired the fear channels that had been running my life. And how I use vision boards now—grounded in the actual science of what makes them work—to set goals from faith instead of terror.
📍 Here's what else:
I'm teaching my first live workshop in five years on January 23rd. It's called The 2026 Reset—90 minutes to figure out which of your goals are driven by fear versus genuine desire, and rebuild two of them from scratch using trauma recovery skills.
The letter is yours now—including the research on why vision boards work when paired with action. The workshop is where we apply it to your life.
Comment GOALS LETTER and I'll send both.
01/17/2026
You grew up holding things together. Then you chose work that needed you to keep holding things together.
That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern.
And when you sit down to set goals, that pattern is running the show. The mission's demands become your goals. The community's needs become your priorities. Self-care becomes something you'll get to "when things calm down."
No wonder you're tired.
On January 23rd, I'm teaching a workshop to help you separate your goals from the ones you inherited.
Comment 2026 RESET below or visit the link in my bio.
01/16/2026
You know the feeling.
The relentless pressure of a deadline feels like home—focused, activated, purposeful. A vacation, on the other hand, can feel like a low-grade panic attack. The unstructured time, the lack of a clear objective... it's terrifying.
This isn't a personality quirk. It's a nervous system that learned that productivity equals safety.
For high-achieving women with relational trauma, "doing" becomes a brilliant strategy to manage anxiety and to feel worthy. Rest, stillness, and unstructured time feel dangerous because they leave you alone with the feelings you've been outrunning your whole life.
Your system doesn't know how to be safe without a task list. The exhaustion you feel isn't just from your work; it's from the invisible labor of never, ever being able to truly stand down.
What's one small way you could practice "being" instead of "doing" this week?
01/15/2026
This is the difference between burning out by March and actually sustaining yourself through meaningful work.
Obligation-based goals require constant guilt to stay motivated. Values-based goals sustain you because the desire is real AND the pace is human.
Same important work. Different operating system.
On January 23rd, I'm teaching a workshop where we take your 2026 goals and run them through an obligation-versus-values test. Then we rewrite them from alignment.
Comment 2026 RESET below or visit the link in my bio.
01/14/2026
You keep ending up with partners who need fixing, friends who drain your energy, relationships that require constant emotional management. People tell you to "choose better," but somehow you're magnetically drawn to people who are struggling, unavailable, emotionally complicated.
This isn't about having poor judgment. Here's what I've noticed: It's about a nervous system that learned to associate love with chaos, drama, and emotional intensity. When your early relationships involved unpredictability or having to earn love through caretaking, your brain developed a specific template for what "love" feels like.
Healthy, stable people? They might feel boring, suspicious, even threatening to a nervous system that's wired for emotional intensity. Your body recognizes those familiar patterns of dysfunction as "home," even when your logical mind knows these relationships aren't good for you.
Truth be told, you're not broken for being attracted to broken people. You're responding to programming that taught you love comes with struggle, that relationships require constant work, that your value comes through what you can fix or provide.
The path forward isn't about judging your past choices or forcing attraction to people who feel foreign to your system. It's about slowly expanding your nervous system's definition of what love can look like—that it can be both deep AND peaceful, both passionate AND stable.
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My name is Annie Wright. I’m a licensed psychotherapist and consultant supporting individuals, couples, and families from the Bay Area and beyond.
I received multiple undergraduate degrees from Brown University, my graduate degree in psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and my coaches training from the Coaches Training Institute.
In between degrees and training, I’ve also served in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, spent several years as a Washington DC-based healthcare consultant, lived and studied for nearly four years at the world-famous Esalen Institute, served as a non-profit leader in the women and girl’s empowerment space, launched a mental health center here in Berkeley, California, and had my clinical thoughts, opinions, and writing published in outlets such as Forbes, NBC, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and more.
Because of my diverse professional background, I bring a robust variety of skills and a strong commitment to social justice in my work as a psychotherapist, coach, and consultant.
So that’s what you should know about me professionally.
What you should know about me personally is that I chose to become a psychotherapist because therapy has been (and continues to be) profoundly invaluable in my own journey from adversity to healing. I do this work because I care deeply about helping others who feel hopeless, stuck, and lonely – like I did at many points in my life coming from very challenging and adverse beginnings. I do this work because I strongly believe that everyone deserves a skilled, fierce ally and lots of resources to support them when life gets tough (as it inevitably does).
And I do this work because, at the end of the day, I can’t not do this work.
Not only is this work my passion, it’s also the story of my own life path. Honestly, from the time I was a little girl reading every book I could about the Holocaust, Salem witch trials, ancient mythology and fables in the local library of the Maine island village I grew up in, I’ve been fascinated and drawn to stories of human suffering, of people triumphing over adversity, and by what it takes to move forward to build a beautiful, healed life despite early disadvantages, abuse by those in power, and trauma of the mind, body, and soul. I’ve identified with the pain I saw in others and also resonated with the yearning for something better. I’ve been deeply inspired by models and examples of people who didn’t just survive but thrived despite circumstances, and cultivated a hunger for learning, for resources, for practices that would support me in doing the same.
Along the way, my personal passion to heal my own life grew to professional and formal academic pursuits.
Some of these pursuits included running an Ivy League student advising program (not to mention becoming the first in my family to go to college), interning at an international conflict resolution organization, leading girl- and women-serving non-profits, being an educator and public servant in Central Asia, doing a 180 with my life and career at age 25 by saying goodbye to a lucrative but unfulfilling corporate consulting job and moving from Capitol Hill to Big Sur, California to wash dishes and bake bread in the Esalen kitchens, study psychology and spirituality, and live in a yurt under a eucalyptus grove by the sea. Years later, I’m now a licensed psychotherapist, mental health clinic founder, and published writer.
I wholeheartedly believe that crafting a life of connection, meaning, and fulfillment is possible no matter where you start out in life and that everyone deserves to be skillfully supported in pursuit of this.
As a psychotherapist, coach, and consultant, I work with individuals, couples, and families from the Bay Area and beyond to help them transform their challenges and move forward in creating a life that feels empowered, connected, hopeful, and possible. It’s a privilege and an honor to support my clients – all brave and determined people who want to make sense of their past and to move forward in creating more fulfilling, meaningful lives for themselves.
I truly love the work that I do.
I’m so glad you’re here and that you’re exploring the possibility of working with me. I encourage you to read about the ways we can work together which includes therapy (which I offer through my group counseling practice), coaching, consulting, workshops or online products. As you consider working with me, I also invite you to explore the most frequently asked questions people have when considering my services, check out my many years of blog posts to learn more about how I think and work, and if you’re still not sure I’m the right fit for you as a helper, you can also contact me to set up a complimentary 20-minute initial consult call so that I can answer any additional questions you might have about working with me in any capacity.
