I help ambitious women heal relational trauma and build thriving lives on solid foundations.
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Psychotherapist | Executive Coach | Speaker | Founder of a trauma-informed therapy center with 15,000+ hours guiding Silicon Valley's leaders.
07/20/2025
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What if that impossibly long to-do list isn't a productivity problem—but actually your nervous system's brilliant way of staying one step ahead of feelings you're not quite ready to face?
This month's letter unpacks a pattern I see constantly in driven women: the packed calendar that looks like impressive ambition on the outside—but quietly functions as emotional armor against fear, shame, stillness, grief, inadequacy, or that nagging sense of "not enough."
Here's what I've learned from my own embarrassingly detailed confession: When every minute is scheduled, there's no room for those harder emotions to catch up with you, right? Your system figured out early that constant motion equals safety. Achievement equals worthiness. Productivity equals protection.
But eventually, that shield starts to weigh more than it protects.
In this deeply personal letter, I explore why so many of us load our schedules like we're preparing for siege warfare, why sitting still can feel genuinely dangerous to a nervous system wired for survival, and how to tell the difference between authentic drive and compulsive protection against feelings.
The recognition hook? If you've ever felt relief when your calendar gets completely packed—or genuine anxiety at the thought of an open weekend with nothing planned—this letter will make a lot of sense.
This letter is part of my Strong and Stable Substack community, where 21,000+ driven women gather to understand the "why" behind these patterns and build psychological empowerment.
Comment TODO LIST and I'll send you the link to the whole thing.
07/18/2025
At work, you're decisive and confident.
At home, you're hypervigilant about rejection.
Personal relationships activate attachment patterns formed in childhood when emotional safety wasn't guaranteed.
Your brain learned to scan for signs of withdrawal, criticism, or abandonment.
This hypervigilance once protected you from unpredictable caregiving. Now it shows up as analyzing texts and reading between lines that aren't there.
07/16/2025
Work emergencies feel manageable because they have clear protocols.
Family dynamics trigger responses that feel disproportionate because the people closest to you have access to your most vulnerable parts.
This happens when early family relationships involved emotional unpredictability. Your nervous system learned that family emotions could be threatening to your safety.
You're not weak - you're responding to old programming.
07/14/2025
The gap between how your life looks and how it feels is exhausting. This disconnect happens when external success doesn't match internal experience - like building a beautiful house on an unstable foundation.
The anxiety isn't about your actual circumstances, it's about unresolved patterns from when safety felt conditional on performance.
Your nervous system is still scanning for threats even in your successful life.
07/13/2025
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When your schedule clears—even for a moment—does your chest tighten?
Maybe you fill that space without thinking. Another task, another email, another way to stay in motion. Anything but stillness.
If that feels familiar, this new workbook is for you.
Finding Safety Beyond Your To-Do List offers gentle, practical tools to help you explore why stillness can feel so hard—and how busyness may have quietly become emotional armor.
Inside, you’ll find research-backed exercises to help you:
• Map your personal busyness patterns
• Gently name the feelings you’ve been avoiding
• Build small, sustainable moments of safety—without giving up your ambition
This workbook is part of my Strong and Stable Substack membership, where 20,000+ driven women gather to heal from relational trauma.
Comment ‘PAUSE WORKBOOK’ and I’ll send it your way.
07/12/2025
You can speak up for others when they're being treated unfairly, but asking for what you need feels impossible.
This pattern develops when advocating for yourself felt dangerous early on.
Maybe your needs were seen as burdensome or selfish. Maybe speaking up led to conflict or emotional withdrawal. So you learned to channel advocacy energy outward instead of inward.
Your needs matter just as much as the people you stand up for.
07/10/2025
Friends call you for guidance because you see their situations clearly.
But when it comes to your own life, you're too close to see the patterns.
This happens because your own relationship dynamics often recreate familiar patterns from childhood - even painful ones feel normal because they're known.
You're not lacking wisdom, you're lacking objectivity about patterns that feel like home.
07/08/2025
Your professional competence doesn't translate to personal confidence because work and family activate different parts of your nervous system.
Work feels safer with clear rules and measurable outcomes. Family relationships trigger old patterns from when love felt unpredictable or conditional.
These responses often stem from early relational experiences that taught you to scan for threats in intimate connections.
You're not broken - you're responding to programming that once kept you safe.
07/06/2025
The Safety of a Packed Calendar: When Busyness Shields You From Feelings
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What if that relentless drive to stay busy isn't a character flaw—but actually a brilliant protective strategy your nervous system learned early on?
This week's essay unpacks a pattern I see constantly in driven women with relational trauma: the impressively full calendar that looks like success on the outside—but quietly functions as emotional armor against the feelings we're not quite ready to face.
Here's what I've learned: When every hour is scheduled, there's no room for stillness. And without stillness, those harder emotions—grief, loneliness, fear, shame, inadequacy—can't catch up to you, right? Your system figured out that motion equals safety.
For so many of us, busyness becomes our shield. But eventually, that shield starts to weigh more than it protects.
In this piece, I explore how achievement can mask emotional pain, why unstructured time can feel genuinely threatening to a nervous system that learned to equate productivity with worthiness, and why having "time abundance"—those open, unscheduled hours—can actually trigger more anxiety than relief.
The recognition hook? If you've ever felt a strange sense of relief after filling your schedule completely—or genuine anxiety at the thought of an open Saturday with nothing planned—this essay will make a lot of sense.
This essay is part of my Strong and Stable Substack membership community, where 21,000+ driven women gather to understand their patterns and build psychological empowerment.
Comment PAUSE ESSAY and I'll send you the link to the whole thing.
06/26/2025
This question hits like cold water for so many women I know.
The line gets blurry, doesn't it? Being valued for what you do versus who you are. Especially when you learned early that love came with conditions—that you had to be useful, helpful, indispensable to earn your place.
I watch this pattern play out constantly. You get really good at reading rooms, anticipating needs, jumping in to fix things. Usually at your own expense.
One client, a physician, built her whole identity around being indispensable—at work, at home, with friends. The thought of not being needed sent her into a panic that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with some deep part of her that equated usefulness with safety.
What's heartbreaking is how this creates relationships full of connection that somehow still feel hollow. Where you're appreciated for what you provide but not really seen for who you are underneath all that giving.
Here's the thing: being needed and being loved aren't the same thing. And learning to tell the difference changes everything.
Comment "QUIZ" if you're wondering whether your caretaking might be masking something deeper.
06/25/2025
If you find yourself constantly responsible for others' emotions, if you're the one everyone turns to in crisis—your experience isn't just being "the strong one." It's a sophisticated neurobiological pattern where your nervous system has learned that hypervigilance to others' needs equals safety while focusing on your own needs equals threat.
Dr. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory research shows that when early environments make your safety dependent on managing others' states, the brain develops a persistent pattern where the nervous system remains in sympathetic activation when not actively monitoring others' needs.
This isn't just theory. I've seen it countless times in my clinical practice:
• A former coaching client, a healthcare leader who couldn't stop solving everyone's problems, discovered her chronic responsibility developed when childhood safety depended on managing her parent's emotional states.
• A former therapy client, an executive who managed everyone's crises, discovered her chronic responsibility wasn't about generosity—it was about preventing the overwhelming anxiety that emerged when focusing on her own needs.
The path forward isn't forcing boundaries before your nervous system feels safe—it's honoring the protection your responsibility provided while gradually developing your capacity to experience safety during self-focus.
I'm sharing this because having the right kind of psychoeducation can make all the difference. When we understand the neurobiological basis of chronic responsibility, it increases self-compassion, which paradoxically creates more capacity for genuine boundaries.
If you're tired of generic advice that doesn't account for your relational trauma background while you're simultaneously trying to build your proverbial house of life while healing your psychological basement, follow my work for more trauma-informed insights that will actually help you create real change.
06/22/2025
𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝗤&𝗔: 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝗲
Comment 'JUNE Q&A' to get a link to this month's Q&A.
This month’s Q&A centers around something I see every day in my practice—and in my own life: the gap between understanding trauma and actually healing it while you're still living in the conditions that created it.
We go deep into questions like:
– How do I reparent myself without isolating from others?
– Why do the nightmares persist, even after decades of therapy?
– How do I keep healing when my mom still calls and triggers everything?
– What’s underneath my inability to leave a relationship that isn’t working?
These aren’t surface-level questions. This is the real work—how healing unfolds while you’re managing family dynamics, while you’re still overfunctioning, while you’re trying to trust yourself again.
If you’ve ever felt like you should be further along—or wondered if you’re doing it “wrong” because it still feels so hard—I hope this Q&A helps you feel seen, resourced, and reminded: You’re not behind. You’re in it. And there is a way forward.
The full 45-minute video and transcript are now available for paid subscribers on Substack. Comment 'JUNE Q&A' and I’ll send it your way.
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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.
