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
12/29/2025
Friends come to you when they need help moving, career advice, or someone to research solutions to their problems. You're incredibly helpful with logistics, planning, and practical support. But when they need someone to just listen to their feelings or hold space for their pain, you suddenly become unavailable.
You'll help them find a therapist but won't be their emotional support. You'll research their medical condition but won't sit with them while they cry about the diagnosis. You're generous with your time and skills but stingy with emotional availability.
This pattern often develops when early relationships taught you that emotional needs were overwhelming, burdensome, or led to being trapped in other people's chaos. You learned that practical help was safer to give because it has clear boundaries and endpoints.
Emotional support feels like quicksand that could pull you under, while practical help feels manageable and contained.
12/28/2025
Comment 'DECEMBER Q&A' and I'll send it your way.
Ever lie awake at 3 AM knowing you need to leave your job—but simultaneously terrifying yourself with every possible worst-case scenario?
Maybe you've tried to set boundaries and asked for changes, but your body keeps registering dread before meetings with certain people.
Or you're paralyzed by guilt about leaving your team behind, worried about damaging your reputation, or completely blank when people ask "so what's next?"
That's not weakness. It's your nervous system unable to distinguish between the existential risk of leaving and the emotional death of staying somewhere you don't belong.
This month's Q&A unpacks the real mechanics behind this—what's actually happening when you know it's time to leave but fear you're making a catastrophic mistake.
We explore:
- How to distinguish burnout from self-sabotage when considering leaving
- Managing reputation concerns around high-profile exits (especially when women's departures are scrutinized differently)
- The crushing guilt of leaving your team and why this echoes childhood parentification
- What to do when you feel completely blank about what's next (hint: recovery comes before reimagining)
- Handling pushback from people who think you're making a mistake
This Q&A is part of my Strong and Stable Substack community, where over 20,000 driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds gather to understand why professional endings feel like identity crises—and what actually helps.
Comment 'DECEMBER Q&A' and I'll send it your way.
12/27/2025
That secret fantasy about getting sick enough to be forced to rest? You're not alone. For those of us who can't stop without "legitimate" reason, illness becomes the only acceptable excuse to surrender.
Your nervous system is so exhausted it's literally fantasizing about being taken down because you won't do it voluntarily. You don't need a fever for permission to rest. Book a "sick day" while healthy. Call it a sovereignty day. Your only job: nothing. The guilt will come. Let it. Rest anyway.
12/26/2025
That nightly glass (or three) isn't about the alcohol—it's about the only way you know to downshift from hypervigilance.
You never learned how to feel feelings safely, so you learned to manage them through numbing.
Whether it's wine, work, shopping, or scrolling, the substance isn't the issue.
The issue is that feeling your feelings still feels dangerous.
12/25/2025
Your life looks perfect from the street. Beautiful house, manicured lawn, success on every level. But you feel the cracks in the foundation—the anxiety that won't quit, the relationships that feel hollow, the success that never feels like enough.
Here's the truth: you can't build a stable life on an unstable foundation. Those childhood wounds you've been ignoring? They're the cracks threatening everything you've built. Foundation work isn't glamorous, but it's the only way to build something that lasts.
12/24/2025
When someone genuinely compliments you, your brain immediately discounts it.
They're being nice, they don't really know you, they're wrong.
Shame feels like truth because it's familiar—it matches the early programming about who you are.
Acceptance feels foreign, suspicious, unsafe.
Your nervous system literally doesn't know how to integrate positive feedback because it conflicts with core beliefs installed before you could evaluate their truth.
12/23/2025
"Others had it worse." "They did their best." "It wasn't that bad."
These are the phrases keeping you stuck. You can't heal what you won't let yourself grieve. And you can't grieve what you keep minimizing.
Your sadness for the childhood you didn't get isn't betrayal—it's loyalty to the little girl who deserved better. She needs you to stop defending the people who hurt her and start defending her. Look at a photo of yourself as a child. Tell her you're sorry. Tell her it wasn't fair. She's been waiting decades to hear it.
12/22/2025
They seem to know how to do relationships, handle emotions, set boundaries naturally.
Meanwhile, you're googling "how to respond when someone says they love you" at 35.
This isn't because you're broken—it's because early relational trauma meant you missed crucial developmental lessons about connection, safety, and love.
You're not behind; you're self-teaching what others learned through secure attachment.
12/21/2025
Comment RECKONING LETTER and I'll send it your way.
You know it's time to leave. The situation isn't healthy. Maybe it hasn't been for a while.
And yet—you stay. You tolerate. You tell yourself it'll get better, or that you're overreacting, or that leaving would be irresponsible.
You draft the exit plan but don't execute it. You wait until you're forced out instead of choosing to go.
Not because you lack courage.
But because your nervous system learned early that challenging authority means losing everything. That staying—even in toxicity—is safer than the unknown of leaving on your own terms.
In this month's personal letter, I Have a Lifelong Pattern of Staying Too Long, I share what I didn't say in this month's essay—my own history of overstaying bad situations from childhood through my professional life, and why I still feel bone-deep fear about leaving before I'm pushed.
This isn't about "setting boundaries" or "knowing your worth." It's about understanding why some of us wait until we're forced out instead of choosing our own exits, and what actually helps when leaving feels more dangerous than staying.
This essay is part of my Strong and Stable Substack community, where over 20,000 driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds gather to navigate relational patterns while fully owning their success.
Comment RECKONING LETTER and I'll send it your way.
12/20/2025
Everyone thinks you have it all together. "I don't know how she does it!" they say. You know how: by never letting anyone see you need help. Your hyper-competence is a force field that repels the very support you're desperate for. People don't offer because you look invincible.
But that capability that kept you safe as a child is now keeping you isolated as an adult. Practice strategic incompetence. Let something drop. Say "I don't know." Watch who shows up when you stop being everyone's rock.
12/19/2025
You simultaneously believe that you're overwhelming, dramatic, and exhausting to be around AND that you're boring, inadequate, and not worth anyone's time or attention. These contradictory beliefs about yourself can exist in the same moment, leaving you feeling confused and unstable.
You worry that you're too needy while also feeling invisible. You think you talk too much while also feeling like no one really hears you. You feel like you're taking up too much space while also feeling like you don't matter at all.
This internal contradiction often develops when early relationships sent mixed messages about your worth and value. Maybe you were criticized for being "too much" in some ways while being ignored or neglected in others. Maybe the same people who told you that you were special also made you feel like a burden.
Your sense of self got fractured by inconsistent messages about who you were allowed to be. You're not actually too much or not enough—you're responding to programming that never made sense in the first place.
12/18/2025
You did everything right. The degree, the career, the marriage, the house. Your life is Pinterest-perfect. So why do you feel dead inside? Because you built a life to impress others, not to nourish yourself. Every milestone was about proving worth, not finding joy. That emptiness isn't ingratitude—it's your soul saying "this isn't mine." You don't have to blow it all up. Start small. What's one thing you do purely for external validation? What's one thing that brings you secret joy? The revolution starts there.
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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.
