Annie Wright, LMFT

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United States
Berkeley, CA
Annie Wright, LMFT

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

11/04/2025

Healing isn't linear—it's a spiral. You'll revisit the same wounds, but from a higher vantage point each time. You're not going backwards; you're going deeper.

11/03/2025

You can spot manipulation, emotional unavailability, unhealthy patterns from miles away. You give brilliant advice about toxic relationships, immediately identifying when someone's being treated poorly. Your radar for other people's dysfunction? Incredibly accurate.

But when it comes to your own behavior—your tendency to control, your emotional unavailability, your patterns of pushing people away or overwhelming them with intensity—you have massive blind spots. You see everyone else's issues clearly while being completely unconscious of your own.

Here's what I've noticed: This happens because trauma creates both hypervigilance and dissociation. You became exceptionally good at scanning for external threats while disconnecting from your own internal experience. You can analyze other people's behavior objectively because you're outside it, but you're inside your own emotional experience, dealing with your own triggers and defensive responses.

That ability to spot red flags in others? It's actually a trauma response—your nervous system learned to be hypervigilant about potential threats. But that same hypervigilance that protects you from others' dysfunction can make it difficult to see your own patterns clearly.

The goal isn't to become less aware of others' red flags or to judge yourself harshly. It's to extend the same quality of honest, compassionate observation to your own behavior that you naturally apply to everyone else's.

11/02/2025

Comment POWER ESSAY and I'll send it your way.

You're in the room. You've earned your place there. Your facts are airtight, your work is solid, your expertise is real.

And yet—your throat closes. Your body braces.
That ancient dread floods your system the moment you prepare to speak up, correct someone, or claim your authority.

You handle the actual work with competence. It's taking up space that makes your body scream danger.
Not because you're weak or broken.

But because your nervous system—and possibly your grandmother's, and hers before that—learned that visibility can cost everything.

In this new essay, When Fear Lives in Your Bones: The Real Price of Taking Up Space, I explore why brilliant, accomplished women still experience body-level terror when stepping into power—and what centuries of history, biology, and workplace reality reveal about this pattern.

This piece isn't about "confidence tips" or "leaning in." It's about understanding why your body braces when you claim space, and what it actually takes to move forward with your knees shaking.

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 POWER ESSAY and I'll send it your way.

11/01/2025

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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You got the promotion they said you'd never get. Built the life they said was impossible. Proved every doubter wrong. So why does it feel so empty? Because when your ambition is fueled by proving others wrong, you're still letting them control your life. Every achievement becomes about them, not you. The real victory? When you stop playing their game entirely and start building a life based on what YOU want—not what will finally make them see your worth.

10/31/2025

You're brilliant at tasks you can control—data analysis, strategic planning, research, writing reports. You volunteer for the technical presentations but never the team-building exercises. You'll lead a budget meeting but find ways to skip the company retreat.

You're incredibly competent when emotions aren't involved, but the moment feelings enter the workplace, you become unavailable. You can handle the work but not the emotional labor that comes with collaborative relationships.

This pattern often develops when early relationships taught you that emotional connection was unpredictable, overwhelming, or came with strings attached. You learned that you could trust your own competence but not other people's emotional responses.

Professional success feels safe because it's measurable and controllable in ways that emotional connection isn't. You can excel at the job without having to navigate the messy, unpredictable world of feelings and interpersonal dynamics.

10/30/2025

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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Stop waiting for "the one" to heal you. You're not looking for a partner—you're looking for a parent. No one can rescue you from yourself except you.

10/29/2025

At work, you're decisive, strategic, and confident about choices. You can analyze options quickly and move forward without second-guessing yourself. But when it comes to personal decisions—what to order at dinner, which movie to watch, whether to end a relationship—you're paralyzed by indecision.

You research every option obsessively, ask for multiple opinions, and still feel terrified of making the wrong choice. Personal decisions feel loaded with consequences that professional ones don't carry.

This happens because work decisions feel safer—they have clear criteria for success and failure, and mistakes can usually be corrected. Personal decisions activate attachment fears and the terror of making choices that could lead to rejection, disappointment, or loss.

This pattern often develops when early environments involved criticism for making "wrong" choices or when your preferences were consistently dismissed or overruled. Your nervous system learned that personal choices are dangerous territory where you could lose love or safety.

10/28/2025

If you're always braced for the next crisis—comment QUIZ below. My quiz reveals how vigilance became your comfort zone and how to begin softening that grip.

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Your triggers start in your body, not your mind. That tightness in your chest? That's your nervous system detecting danger before your brain even knows what's happening.

10/27/2025

Their Amazon purchase sends you spiraling.

An unplanned expense triggers panic that feels disproportionate.

You need to control every financial decision because money chaos activates memories of utilities being shut off, eviction notices, or parents fighting about bills.

Your nervous system learned that financial unpredictability meant danger.

Now you're financially stable but still operating like poverty is one purchase away.

10/26/2025

Comment 'OCTOBER Q&A' and I'll send it your way.

Ever catch yourself trying to heal "correctly"—like recovery is another performance review you need to ace?

Or you finally have free time but feel paralyzed choosing between rest, workbooks, or calling a friend—because what if you pick the wrong form of self-care?

That's not failure. It's your manager parts doing exactly what they were designed to do: keeping you safe through performance and control.

This month's Q&A unpacks the real mechanics behind this—what's actually happening when your protective parts weaponize the healing work itself.

We explore:

- Why your controller part turns IFS into another project to perfect (and what she really needs instead)
- How "sophisticated firefighters" use productivity to avoid uncomfortable feelings
- Why you're completely competent at work but fall apart at home over small things
- The exact shifts that help you stop performing recovery and actually experience it

This content is part of my Strong and Stable Substack community, where over 20,000 driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds gather to navigate healing without making it another thing to get an A on.

Comment 'OCTOBER Q&A' and I'll send it your way.

10/25/2025

If your inner peace depends on everything going exactly according to plan—comment QUIZ below. My quiz helps you see how hypervigilance became your baseline and how to start finding calm within imperfection.

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Your need for control isn't a personality trait. It's a trauma response. The opposite of control isn't chaos—it's trust. And trust can be learned in micro-doses, one delegated task at a time.

10/24/2025

Your bank account is healthy, investments growing, financial security real.

But your nervous system still operates like poverty is imminent.

You check your balance obsessively, panic over normal expenses, feel guilty about purchases you can afford.

Financial trauma isn't fixed by financial success—the scarcity mindset runs deeper than your actual resources.

Address

2140 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA
94704

Telephone

+15103732723

Website

http://taplink.cc/anniewrighttherapist, http://anniewright.com/, http://anniewrightlmft.substack.com/

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A little more about me...

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.

I look forward to being of support to you.