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
12/08/2025
The promotion didn't fix it. The degree didn't fix it. The relationship didn't fix it.
You keep achieving the next thing that's supposed to make you feel valuable, but the fundamental belief that you're not enough remains untouched.
That's because worthiness isn't earned through achievement—it's inherent.
But when early relationships made love conditional on performance, your nervous system never learned that truth.
12/07/2025
Comment RECKONING ESSAY and I'll send it your way.
You've built something impressive. You hit every target. People rely on you.
And yet—late at night when everyone's asleep, you find yourself wondering what would happen if you finally left.
You draft the resignation letter. Your hands shake. Your heart races. You close the laptop without sending it.
Not because you're being dramatic.
But because your nervous system learned early that leaving means losing everything. That being the reliable one, the fixer, the one who holds it together—that's what keeps you safe.
In this new essay, The December Reckoning: Why One in Three Professionals Will Leave Their Job This Season, I explore why December and January trigger this particular kind of career crisis—and what's really happening in your body when you consider letting go of roles that once guaranteed your worth.
This piece isn't about "finding your passion" or "work-life balance." It's about understanding why endings activate ancient alarm bells, why identity loss hurts more than we admit, and what it actually takes to leave without recreating the same patterns somewhere new.
This essay is part of my Strong and Stable Substack community, where over 20,000 driven women from relational trauma backgrounds gather to understand the real psychology behind their patterns while building lives that feel as good as they look.
Comment RECKONING ESSAY and I'll send it your way.
12/06/2025
If you've realized that being needed has become your only route to feeling loved—comment QUIZ below. My quiz reveals how caretaking became your survival strategy and includes a workbook to start releasing it.
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That compulsion to jump in and fix everything? It's not generosity—it's anxiety. When you learned early that your value = your usefulness, helping became survival. Now you literally cannot watch someone struggle without intervening. But here's what's really happening: you're robbing others of their agency and abandoning yourself. The practice? Sit on your hands. Let them figure it out. It will feel cruel. It's not. You're learning that your worth isn't tied to being everyone's solution.
12/05/2025
When your toddler says "I hate you" or your teenager rolls their eyes, it doesn't just sting—it devastates.
Their normal individuation feels like abandonment because it activates the child in you who was actually rejected, dismissed, or emotionally abandoned.
You know intellectually they're just being kids, but your nervous system responds like you're experiencing that original wound all over again.
12/04/2025
If saying "no" makes you feel selfish or unsafe—comment QUIZ below. My quiz helps you understand how your nervous system learned that love depends on compliance, and how to start redefining safety.
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"You're so easy-going!" "You never complain!" "You're such a team player!" These compliments feel good until you realize they're rewards for self-abandonment. The "good girl" strategy kept you safe in childhood—compliance meant love, saying no meant danger. But now? It's costing you everything. That resentment you feel isn't because you're ungrateful. It's because you're exhausted from betraying yourself. Start small. Say no to one thing today. Your nervous system needs to learn that boundaries won't cost you love.
12/03/2025
Things are going well. They're treating you with genuine care, showing up consistently, making you feel safe and valued. And then? You start pulling away. Picking fights. Creating distance. You sabotage the very thing you actually want because getting close feels terrifying.
This isn't about not knowing what's good for you. Truth be told, it's about a nervous system that learned intimacy equals vulnerability, and vulnerability equals danger. When early close relationships involved betrayal, abandonment, or emotional harm, your brain developed protective responses to manage the risk of being hurt again.
The closer someone gets, the more power they have to hurt you. Your nervous system learned that people who really know you will eventually use that knowledge against you, leave you, or hurt you in devastating ways. Sabotaging the relationship? It gives you control over the timing and terms of what feels like inevitable pain.
But here's what that old programming couldn't account for: Not all intimacy leads to harm. Some people are actually capable of knowing you deeply and still treating you with care and respect. Some relationships can be both close AND safe.
The path forward isn't about forcing yourself to trust or stopping those protective responses. It's about slowly building your capacity to tolerate the unfamiliar feeling of being genuinely cared for without having to earn it or fear losing it.
12/02/2025
If you've built an impressive life that still doesn't feel secure inside—comment QUIZ below. I'll send you my quiz that helps you understand what's actually happening in your body when success never feels like enough.
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You can't think your way out of a nervous system pattern. Your PhD in your own dysfunction is actually keeping you stuck. Healing happens in the body, not the mind.
12/01/2025
You can hold two truths simultaneously: You love your children more than life itself AND you sometimes feel like you've disappeared into motherhood in ways that feel suffocating.
This isn't selfish, ungrateful, or a sign that you're not cut out for parenting. It's profoundly human.
Motherhood can trigger a complex mix of feelings, especially if your own early experiences involved suppressing your needs for others or taking care of people before you were developmentally ready. Maybe you never got to fully explore your own identity before becoming responsible for shaping theirs. Maybe motherhood activates old patterns of self-sacrifice that feel both familiar and overwhelming.
That feeling of being "trapped" often isn't about your children at all—it's grief for parts of yourself that feel buried under the constant demands of caregiving. It's longing for the freedom to explore who you are outside of your role as a mother.
Loving your children deeply and mourning aspects of your pre-motherhood life aren't contradictory. Both can be true. Both deserve compassion and attention.
What would it look like to honor your love for your children AND your need for individual identity and fulfillment? Not as competing priorities, but as interconnected parts of a sustainable, authentic life?
11/30/2025
If you can't remember the last time something felt "good enough"—comment QUIZ below. My quiz shows you how perfection once protected you, and how to build safety without the relentless pressure.
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Making it look effortless is the most exhausting performance of all. Your struggle doesn't diminish your success—it makes you human. Let people see you sweat.
11/29/2025
Your calendar has "yoga" and "meditation" blocked off like meetings.
You approach self-care with the same intensity you bring to work—optimizing, achieving, perfecting.
But actual rest, the kind where you do nothing productive? That feels wrong, lazy, selfish.
Your nervous system learned that your worth was tied to productivity, so even your rest has to be productive.
11/28/2025
If your worth still feels tied to your next achievement—comment QUIZ below. I'll send you my therapist-created quiz that reveals why your nervous system learned to equate productivity with safety, and how to begin changing that.
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Your inner workaholic isn't ambitious—it's a terrified child who thinks productivity equals safety. Time to give that exhausted inner manager a new job description.
11/27/2025
How we’re holding Truthsgiving (from abroad)
If your body feels a little off about Thanksgiving today—you love the idea of gratitude and gathering, and you also know the story we were taught was wildly incomplete—you’re not alone.
My family travels internationally every year at this time. We’re not at a traditional Thanksgiving table, and we practice gratitude year‑round, not just on one Thursday. But even from afar, it matters to us *how* we relate to this day.
As a relational trauma therapist, the more I learn, the more clearly I see how a country can behave like a dysfunctional family system: denial, minimization, rewriting history to protect the powerful. Seen from that angle, the textbook Thanksgiving myth isn’t neutral; it’s a form of collective gaslighting.
So we’re experimenting with something I call Truthsgiving: Holding gratitude for the people we love and the life we get to live *and* telling the truth about the land we come from, the violence that made this holiday possible, and the Indigenous communities who are still here and still fighting for sovereignty and justice.
For us this looks like (imperfectly, in real life):
- Naming the history out loud, even when we’re not physically in the U.S.
- Donating to Native‑led organizations and following Indigenous educators.
- Letting our daughter know that being “a kind person” includes learning real history, not just repeating comforting stories.
This is not about shame for having loved childhood rituals or for gathering with your people. It’s about widening the frame so gratitude doesn’t require amnesia.
If you’re curious about your own version of Truthsgiving, you might ask:
- What’s one piece of the real history I’m willing to learn or share today?
- What’s one Native‑led org I can materially support?
- How can I hold both: love for my people *and* honesty about how we got here?
You don’t have to do it perfectly. You just have to be willing to tell a slightly truer story than the one you were given.
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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.
