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
03/11/2026
"Too intense." "Too ambitious." "Too much."
How many times have you heard this? And how small have you made yourself in response?
Here's what they didn't tell you: the people who said you were too much were really saying they couldn't hold your fullness. Their limitations became your prison.
But you were never too much—you were just surrounded by people who preferred you small. It's time to take up the space you were always meant to occupy.
03/10/2026
The Sprinter: “If I stop, something terrible will happen.”
The Perfectionist: “If it’s perfect, nobody can criticize me.”
The Caretaker: “If I’m needed, I can’t be left.”
The Ghost: “If I disappear, at least I can’t be hurt.”
Which hidden belief is running your workaholism?
Swipe through to find out. The one that makes your chest tighten is probably yours.
March 27th: Full assessment + experiential practices + companion workbook.
Comment WORKAHOLISM—or tap the link in my bio if you’d rather keep it private.
03/09/2026
Someone bumps into you, and you say, "I'm sorry." Your partner is in a bad mood, and you say, "I'm sorry."
You are constantly apologizing for your existence, for taking up space, for having needs.
This is the strategy of a child who learned that they were responsible for the emotional climate of their home. You learned to take the blame to appease an angry parent, to de-escalate a tense situation. "I'm sorry" became a tool for survival.
Now, it is a reflex. You are so used to taking responsibility for things that are not yours that you do it without thinking. But every time you apologize for something that is not your fault, you are reinforcing the belief that you are inherently in the wrong.
What if you replaced "I'm sorry" with "Thank you" today?
03/08/2026
Comment ARMOR WORKBOOK and I'll send it your way.
You checked your email four times between dinner and bedtime. Not because anything was urgent. Because sitting with the quiet felt worse than the inbox.
Or maybe your version is the canceled meeting you immediately filled. The Sunday where you can't read a novel without calculating what you should be doing instead. The promotion that felt incredible for a week and then… flat.
If that's landing, this workbook is for you.
Seeing the Armor is a companion workbook to this month's essay on workaholism — five exercises designed for driven women who've been praised for the very pattern that's costing them their sleep, their presence, and their ability to actually enjoy the life they've built.
Inside, you'll map:
- Your achievement half-life — how long satisfaction actually lasts before the hunger starts again
- Your stillness signature — what your nervous system does the moment the tasks stop
- The origin echo — whose voice you hear when the armor says "not enough"
- This isn't about slowing down or building a better morning routine. If willpower worked, you'd have fixed this already. This is about seeing the pattern before you try to shift it.
📍 And here's what else:
I'm teaching a live masterclass on March 27th called Transforming Workaholism: Achievement as Armor for the Unloved Child. 90 minutes on the neuroscience, the nervous system work, and the internal dialogue that actually shifts this pattern from the inside — not with discipline, but by understanding what the work is protecting you from feeling.
This workbook builds the evidence file. The masterclass is where we work with it.
Comment ARMOR WORKBOOK and I'll send it to your DMs.
03/06/2026
You inherited the trauma, yes. But you also inherited the grit, the fight, the refusal to give up. You come from a long line of survivors. That strength is yours too.
03/04/2026
When someone says "no" to you, it doesn't just feel like a practical inconvenience. It feels like a personal rejection.
A confirmation of your deepest fear: that you are too much, that your needs are not welcome, that you are fundamentally unwanted.
This is because you grew up in an environment where love was conditional and boundaries were either non-existent or punitive. You never learned that a boundary is a healthy expression of self-love, not a rejection of you.
Now, as an adult, your nervous system interprets someone else's "no" as a threat to your connection, to your very survival. You are not overreacting; you are having a deeply ingrained response.
Can you see someone's boundary today not as a wall, but as a healthy fence?
03/02/2026
You're working so hard NOT to be your parents that you've become a different kind of wound.
The hypervigilance that kept you safe from them is now directed at yourself. Every parenting moment feels like a test you're failing.
But here's the truth: your kids don't need a perfect parent who never makes your parents' mistakes. They need a real parent who knows how to repair. Every time you say "I'm sorry," you're teaching them what you never learned: that love survives mistakes.
03/01/2026
Comment ARMOR ESSAY and I'll send it your way.
You checked your email four times between dinner and bedtime. Not because anything was urgent. Because the alternative — letting yourself feel whatever was underneath the busyness — doesn't feel safe.
Maybe your version looks different. Maybe it's the Sunday afternoon where you can't sit on the couch without mentally calculating what you should be doing instead. Or the promotion that felt incredible for a week and then… flat. Like the hunger just reset itself.
Not because you're ungrateful. Not because something is wrong with you. But because your nervous system has been running on its own supply of adrenaline and cortisol for so long that stopping actually feels like withdrawal. Because that's exactly what it is.
In this month's essay, The Best Dressed Addiction, I unpack what workaholism actually is — not a personality flaw, not a discipline problem — and where the wiring comes from. Whether it was a home that looked perfect from the outside or one where there wasn't enough.
📍 And one more thing worth knowing:
I'm teaching a 90-minute live masterclass at the end of this month — Transforming Workaholism: Achievement as Armor for the Unloved Child — where we go deeper into the neuroscience, the nervous system patterns, and the internal dialogue that actually starts to shift this from the inside. Not with willpower. Not with a better morning routine. By understanding what the work has been protecting you from feeling.
Details coming soon. The essay is yours now. The masterclass is where we work with it together.
Comment ARMOR ESSAY and I'll send it your way.
02/27/2026
That panic after sharing something real? The urge to text "sorry for oversharing"? That's not regret—it's a vulnerability hangover.
Your nervous system is having a meltdown because you just did something it believes is dangerous: you let yourself be seen. For those of us with relational trauma, vulnerability feels like handing someone a weapon.
The hangover is your brain screaming "RETREAT!" Don't listen. Don't apologize. Breathe through it. You're teaching your system that being seen won't kill you.
02/26/2026
You’re tired of being the one who tries harder.
Tired of adjusting, accommodating, managing. Tired of loving people who can’t love you back the same way.
The exhaustion isn’t because you’re doing something wrong. It’s because you’re working too hard for something that should be mutual.
February 27th: Learn to rest in love instead of perform for it.
Comment NARCISSISM—or tap the link in my bio if you’d rather keep it private.
02/26/2026
The beautiful home, the successful career, the happy family. Your life is a curated collection of perfect moments.
But behind the screen, you feel a sense of emptiness, of disconnection, of quiet desperation.
You have built a life that is designed to be looked at, not lived in. You have followed the script, you have checked all the boxes. You have achieved the dream. But it was never your dream.
The hollowness you feel is not a sign that you are ungrateful. It is a sign that your authentic self is suffocating. It is a wake-up call, a loving invitation to start building a life that feels as good as it looks.
What is one thing you do for an audience of one: yourself?
02/24/2026
Here’s what you’re actually getting February 27th:
→ Three Mirrors Assessment (15 questions)
→ Four Archetypes Assessment (20 questions)
→ The neuroscience of repetition compulsion
→ 3 practices: Mirror Reversal, Boundary Whisper, Self-Knowledge Inventory
→ 75-page working workbook
→ 30-day integration plan
→ Lifetime recording access
90 minutes with a trauma therapist who has 15,000+ clinical hours. $47. This is the workshop I wish I’d had in my thirties.
Comment NARCISSISM—or tap the link in my bio if you’d rather keep it private.
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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.
