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
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.
10/23/2025
That exhausting feeling of being a fraud at work? It's not imposter syndrome—it's your nervous system still running old software. When your early experiences taught you that worth = performance, your achievements never feel quite real or secure enough.
The solution isn't more success. It's building an internal foundation of worth that exists independent of your LinkedIn profile. What would change if you knew you belonged here, just as you are?
10/21/2025
You respond instantly to every request, always available, always on.
It's not about efficiency—it's about the dopamine hit of being essential.
Your nervous system learned that your value came from your usefulness, so you've optimized your entire life around being indispensable.
But being needed isn't the same as being valued, and availability isn't love.
10/19/2025
Comment PARTS LETTER and I'll send it your way.
Your 3 AM wake-ups have become 2 AM.
Then 1 AM.
Full of anxiety about work, worries about keeping everything afloat, the endless mental list of what needs doing.
You've built something remarkable—but you can't remember the last time you truly rested.
When someone asks "Who are you without your work?" you literally can't answer.
Not because you're broken.
But because somewhere between ages 7 and 12, a part of you took over as CEO. And that part has been running the show ever since, never taking a day off, never trusting anyone else to handle things.
In this month's personal letter, The Day I Discovered My CEO Part Was Running My Life (And Why She Wouldn't Take a Break), I share my own journey of discovering I was completely blended with my workaholic manager part—and what happened when I finally started to unblend.
This isn't about productivity hacks or work-life balance tips. It's about understanding the parts that drive you, appreciating what they've protected you from, and offering them the possibility of rest.
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 PARTS LETTER and I'll send it your way.
10/17/2025
12-hour days feel normal. But dinner with family? Anxiety. Date night? Dread.
This isn't dedication - it's workaholism as emotional avoidance. Research shows ambitious women with relational trauma often use work as refuge from vulnerability.
Work has clear metrics, predictable rewards. Relationships? Messy, unpredictable, vulnerable.
Your nervous system learned achievement was reliable in ways relationships weren't. Every late night at the office is choosing the safety of spreadsheets over the uncertainty of intimacy.
Work doesn't judge or abandon. But it also doesn't heal what relationships wounded.
10/16/2025
You can read micro-expressions, predict emotional reactions, navigate complex interpersonal dynamics.
But when someone asks how YOU feel? Blank.
Your hypervigilance made you an expert in others' emotions for survival, but your own feelings got buried so deep you don't even know how to find them anymore.
10/15/2025
You were the practice child, the one they made mistakes on.
Your younger siblings got parents who'd learned, mellowed, or gotten help.
They have easier relationships, fewer wounds, lighter loads.
The unfairness burns.
You did the heavy lifting of being first, absorbing their unhealed trauma, and now you watch your siblings have the parents you desperately needed.
10/13/2025
Not where you thought you'd be by now? You're exactly where you need to be.
Research proves it: 72% of adults with complex trauma show significant improvement after intervention. Your brain creates 700 new neurons daily. Neuroplasticity means change is always possible.
Your curriculum included advanced courses in resilience and survival. Every delay was preparation. Every detour was necessary.
You're not behind. You're on YOUR track, moving at the pace that ensures you won't collapse when you arrive.
The healing is real. The change is possible.
10/12/2025
Comment 'PARTS WORKBOOK' and I'll send it your way.
It's 3:30 AM and you're wide awake with seventeen voices debating slide formatting.
Or you're rewriting an email for the fourth time because one voice says it's too direct, another says it's too soft, and a third is calculating whether your word choice will cost you the relationship.
If this sounds familiar, this new workbook is for you.
The Meeting Your Parts Workbook offers practical IFS tools for driven women with multiple internal voices competing for airtime.
Inside, you'll discover:
- Why you have seventeen opinions about everything (and why you’re not broken)
- How to identify your Manager Parts, Firefighters, and Exiles
- Six practical exercises to access Self-leadership
This isn't about silencing your inner critic. These are tools for understanding that your "inner critic" is actually several distinct parts with different strategies for keeping you safe.
These parts kept you alive. The work is helping them understand the emergency's over.
This workbook is part of my premium 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 'PARTS WORKBOOK' and I'll send it your way.
10/10/2025
Your packed schedule isn't about productivity—it's about protection.
Every moment filled is a moment you don't have to feel the grief, anger, sadness, or fear you've been carrying.
Stillness terrifies you because that's when the feelings catch up.
So you stay busy, exhausted, running from emotions that are patiently waiting for you to slow down.
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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.
