50 Quotes About Toxic Mothers to Validate the Wound You Were Never Supposed to Name
Fifty quotes from psychotherapists, researchers, poets, and memoirists about the mother wound: naming what happened, what the body remembers, what was missing, and how you can begin to give yourself the care you didn’t get.
The Wound You Were Never Supposed to Name
It’s a Wednesday in October, late afternoon, the kind of thin gray light that makes everything look provisional. Carlotta is forty-four, a surgeon, and she’s been sitting in her car in the hospital parking structure for twenty minutes with a coffee she hasn’t touched and her coat still on. Carlotta is an illustrative example, not a real client. Her phone is on the passenger seat. It’s her mother’s usual day to call.
She’s been telling herself for years that she turned out fine. The career, the house, the marriage, the good reviews from residents. Then, sitting there with the engine off, a quieter sentence shows up: I’m not fine. I haven’t been fine for a long time. And I think it started with her.
In my work with driven women, this is one of the hardest things to say out loud. Not a breakup, not a professional failure. The mother. Many women extend a particular kind of protection to the woman who raised them, even when that woman was a source of real harm, and the protection often holds long after the woman has built a life that looks, from the outside, like proof that nothing went wrong.
There’s a strong cultural rule against naming your mother as toxic. Against saying: the person who was supposed to be my first safe place wasn’t safe. Even women who are thoughtful and psychologically fluent about everything else can find that the words won’t come without something that feels like betrayal, as if they’re the ones doing something wrong.
These 50 quotes are offered as an act of naming. They come from psychotherapists, researchers, poets, and memoirists who looked directly at this experience and found language for it. They’re grouped into seven themes, each one a different layer of the mother wound. Some will land right away. Others might not make sense until later. Keep the ones that fit, and come back to them when you need something to hold onto.
What People Mean by the Mother Wound
The mother wound isn’t a formal diagnosis. It’s a plain-language name for the hurt that can come from a mother who, for whatever reasons of her own, couldn’t give you the steady warmth, attention, and protection a child needs. For some women, that looked like overt cruelty. For others, it was quieter: a mother who was preoccupied, critical, unpredictable, or who needed her daughter to take care of her.
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines emotional abuse as “a pattern of behavior in which one person deliberately and repeatedly subjects another to nonphysical acts that are detrimental to behavioral and affective functioning and overall mental well-being.” The entry notes that researchers “have yet to formulate a universally agreed upon definition of the concept.”
In plain terms: Not every hard mother was emotionally abusive, and you don’t need the word to take your experience seriously. But if you grew up with repeated humiliation, rejection, withholding of affection, or control, it can help to know that there’s a name for that pattern, and that it’s about her behavior, not about something wrong with you.
Naming the pattern doesn’t require deciding whether your mother was a bad person. It only asks you to be honest about what it was like to be her child.
On the Truth You Couldn’t Say
The first step in healing the mother wound is often simply naming it. Not explaining it, not justifying it, not defending yourself in advance against the person you know will push back. Just saying what was true. These quotes do that work directly.
“To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them.”
Judith Lewis Herman, Psychiatrist and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992)
“Children will develop a fantasy that they are bad kids relying upon good parents to avoid confronting the terrifying reality that they are good kids relying upon bad parents.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook (2016), p. 130
“Our relationship with our mothers has a big impact on how we experience our self as a child. A child with a critical parent often internalizes the judgment and is riddled with self-doubt, inadequacy, and shame.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“Adults who were abused or neglected as children will often blame themselves. This can lead to persistent feelings of guilt and shame.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016), p. 130
“Self-absorbed, immature, and insecure adults shame and criticize others to make themselves appear superior. This is abusive behavior, especially when an adult does it to a child.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“my mother was / a hurricane / & i was / the only house / in her path.”
Amanda Lovelace, Poet, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2016)
“Emotionally immature parents fear genuine emotion and pull back from emotional closeness. They use coping mechanisms that resist reality rather than dealing with it.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“In the effort to placate her abusers, the child victim often becomes a superb performer. She attempts to do whatever is required of her.”
Judith Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
Many driven women describe a particular exhaustion by the time they get here: the exhaustion of having tried every other way to make peace with what happened. Every reframe, every compassionate reading of their mother’s limits, every attempt to be understanding. Relief often doesn’t come from understanding more. It comes from letting yourself say what was true.
On What the Body Remembers
For women who’ve built their lives on thinking clearly, this can be one of the harder ideas to accept. The mother wound doesn’t live only in memories. It can show up as bracing before a phone call, a tight chest when she says something dismissive, or nausea when you book the flight home for the holidays.
Carlotta, still in the parking structure, notices it in the language she uses. She describes her reaction to her mother’s calls the way she’d chart a patient: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, gripping the steering wheel. For years she assumed that was just how she was. Only recently has she started to wonder whether it’s fear.
“The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
“Decades after the mind knows that we are safe, the body still responds as if it were under life threat.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“Too young to process the trauma, we experience feelings, beliefs, and body sensations that live inside us without the story that connects them to the past.”
Mark Wolynn, Director of the Family Constellation Institute, It Didn’t Start With You (2016)
“Long after the back of her mother’s hand had stopped smacking her, she continued to smack herself mentally, punishing herself for the “sins” of her body.”
Hillary L. McBride, PhD, researcher, clinical psychologist, and counsellor, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (2021), ch. 4
“For many families, it seemed that toxic stress was more consistently transmitted from parent to child than any genetic disease I had seen.”
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (2018)
“The body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored.”
Babette Rothschild, Psychotherapist and Trauma Specialist, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment (2000)
“To make a parent-child relationship secure, the parent must be able to recognize the child’s independent feelings and thoughts.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
If your body reacts before you’ve decided how you feel, that isn’t irrational. It may be remembering something your mind learned to set aside. The guide to complex PTSD goes further into how early relational stress can stay with you.
On What Was Missing
The grief of the mother wound is often grief for an absence rather than a loss: mourning what was never there instead of what was taken away. There’s no ritual for it. No funeral, no casserole on the doorstep, no acknowledged death. Just a quiet ache about not having been seen.
Elaine is in her fifties, a venture capitalist with two adult daughters. Elaine is an illustrative example, not a real client. Her mother calls every morning, and Elaine lets most of those calls go to voicemail. Over dinner, she tells a close friend that it feels like grieving someone who’s still alive. “I don’t know how to grieve a person who’s still there,” she says. “Still calling. Still not seeing me.”
“To feel that you aren’t important to your mother leaves a hole. Most often it is felt as a hole in the heart. It’s the hole where Mother was supposed to be.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“If we don’t feel welcomed by our mother, we often don’t feel welcomed by the world.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“When we don’t get a sense that Mother wants to meet our needs, we can believe, ‘My needs are shameful or a burden. I shouldn’t have needs.’ We feel alone in our experience.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent’s warmth and interest.”
Pete Walker, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013)
“When parents are emotionally immature, their children’s emotional needs will almost always lose out to the parents’ own survival instincts.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
“Emotional loneliness is a vague and aching feeling that a person can have about being alone in the world. It can start in childhood from a feeling of being unseen by emotionally preoccupied parents.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“For a young child to not feel wanted is to have no solid ground.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines internalization as “the nonconscious mental process by which the characteristics, beliefs, feelings, or attitudes of other individuals or groups are assimilated into the self and adopted as one’s own.”
In plain terms: If the inner voice that calls you not enough sounds a lot like your mother, this is one way to understand why. Children absorb the voices around them before they can question them. What was taken in without choosing can, with time and support, be looked at, questioned, and gradually replaced.
On Estrangement and Limits
Estrangement from a parent is one of the most misunderstood decisions a woman can make. The cultural story treats it as a failure to forgive. For many women, it’s a decision made after years of trying every other option, as a way to stop being hurt.
There’s no universal right answer about contact. Some women keep a close relationship with firm limits. Some keep a thin, careful one. Some step away completely. What tends to help most is making the decision deliberately rather than in the middle of a crisis, and having support while you do.
“Your self-protective boundaries are not the problem. Your parents’ mistreatment is the reason your family cannot joyfully celebrate special occasions together.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 140
“Grieving an estrangement is quite different from grieving the death of a loved one. Estrangement is a unique form of loss for which the losses are not always tangible or easy to describe.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 41
“Crucial to the breaking of incestuous bonds to the parents is the recognition that we do not belong to them and they do not belong to us. Individuation begins with the painful recognition that we are all orphans.”
Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (1992)
“Cycle breakers often have to walk away from family members without an apology, without their love, and without their acknowledgment of how they passed down pain.”
Dr. Mariel Buqué, PhD, Psychologist, Break the Cycle (2024)
“She couldn’t figure out how to interact with her parents and siblings in such a way that she could have a relationship with them and still be herself.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
“Boundaries are a fundamental form of self-protection, and we all have the right to safeguard our physical and mental well-being.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“A child’s individuality is seen as a threat to emotionally insecure and immature parents because it stirs up fears about possible rejection or abandonment.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Clinical Psychologist, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (2015)
Reducing contact isn’t the same as punishing someone. It can simply be a way of protecting a self that wasn’t protected when it needed to be. The companion collection of quotes about boundaries goes deeper into that part of the work.
On Grief and Mothering Yourself
At some point, the mother wound tends to ask for something different. Not repairing the original relationship, and not turning your mother into someone else, but learning to give yourself some of what you needed and didn’t receive. People sometimes call this reparenting. It’s the heart of the work, and it’s also unfamiliar territory for most women.
What did a good-enough mother do? She noticed when you were upset and asked about it. She celebrated your achievements without making them about her. She let you be different from her without treating the difference as an attack. Learning to do some of that for yourself is slow, and it usually comes with grief for the years you went without it.
“You see, there are no two ways about it: a mother must be mothered in mothering her own offspring.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian Psychoanalyst and Cantadora, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
“Grieving is necessary to help us release and work through our pain about the terrible losses of our childhoods.”
Pete Walker, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013)
“Survivors of chronic childhood trauma face the task of grieving not only for what was lost but also for what was never theirs to lose. The childhood that was stolen from them is irreplaceable.”
Judith L. Herman, MD, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (2015)
“Trauma isn’t just the sadness that comes from being beaten, or neglected, or insulted. That’s just one layer of it. Trauma also is mourning the childhood you could have had.”
Stephanie Foo, Journalist and Memoirist, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022)
“The process of growth is not a straight line but a spiral. You’ll cycle through similar issues many times.”
Jasmin Lee Cori, MS, LPC, The Emotionally Absent Mother (2010)
“Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no. Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“if i could go back in time & give myself her childhood back, / i would.”
Amanda Lovelace, Poet, The Princess Saves Herself in This One (2016)
“Grieving involves letting go. However, releasing traumatic memories can sometimes feel at first like you are letting go of any last remnants of hope for redemption.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016)
For driven women who’ve spent their lives proving their worth through achievement, the idea of treating yourself gently in the middle of an unresolved story can feel almost backward. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s a learned system, and learned systems can change.
On Inheriting and Choosing
A deeper layer of this work is the question of inheritance: what you were handed, what your mother was handed before you, and what you choose to pass forward. For women who are also mothers, this can be the sharpest edge of all. The fear of repeating patterns you never chose.
Elaine knows she didn’t do what her mother did to her. Lately, though, she’s been sitting with something harder: the ways her drive made her absent from her daughters at times they needed her. “I didn’t repeat the wound,” she writes in her journal one February night. “I passed forward a different version of it.” She isn’t sure yet whether different is enough.
“Of course, emotionally immature parents were once children themselves, and as children they may have had to shut down many of their deepest feelings in order to be acceptable to their own parents.”
Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
“The mother who functions as a shadow sister is often the one who, when she married, gave up her hopes for her own creative life, and in her disappointment projected her unlived life onto her child.”
Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation (1985)
“My mother had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision.”
Ariel Levy, Staff Writer at The New Yorker, Author, The Rules Do Not Apply (2017)
“When we don’t find a way to heal our own suffering, it’s not unusual for our children to carry the feelings for us.”
Mark Wolynn, Director of the Family Constellation Institute, It Didn’t Start With You (2016)
“Intergenerational trauma is a force that flows from one generation of a family to the next. The emotions that don’t get resolved or attended to in one generation risk being passed down, again and again.”
Dr. Mariel Buqué, PhD, Psychologist, Break the Cycle (2024)
“When you make a deliberate choice not to pass on your trauma to others, that choice begins to mend some of the trauma.”
Resmaa Menakem, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and Somatic Therapist, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017)
“Your healing quest is not just about you. It has collective motivation. You send ripples of healing backward and forward by becoming a cycle breaker.”
Mariel Buqué, Licensed Psychologist and Intergenerational Trauma Expert, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma (2024)
“By attempting to share or carry our parent’s burden, we continue the family suffering and block the flow of life force that is available to us.”
Mark Wolynn, Director of the Family Constellation Institute, It Didn’t Start With You (2016)
“By finding a way to honor our parents’ fate, we can begin to step out of their pain and live our own lives.”
Mark Wolynn, Director of the Family Constellation Institute, It Didn’t Start With You (2016)
The point of this section isn’t guilt. Guilt says you’re bad. What’s more useful here is grief and responsibility: grief for what was handed to you and what you may have passed on without meaning to, and responsibility for the choices you can still make now. Seeing the pattern clearly is what makes it possible to interrupt it.
Both/And: You Can Grieve and Still Protect Yourself
The Both/And of the mother wound is this: you can love your mother and hold her accountable for real harm. You can grieve the relationship you needed and protect yourself from the relationship she offers now. You can feel tenderness for the woman she was and stop pretending her version of events is the whole truth. None of these cancel each other out.
Elaine has gradually built a relationship with her mother that has edges. She picks up twice a week. She stays on for thirty minutes. She listens without pouring herself into the phone. “I can love her from here,” she tells her friend. “I can’t love her from inside her.”
That’s the Both/And. The love is real. The limit is also real. Healing the mother wound rarely produces a story where everything resolves. More often, it produces a story where you have choices you didn’t have before.
The Systemic Lens: The Myth of Maternal Perfection
Part of why it’s so hard to name a mother as harmful is a cultural story about motherhood itself: the idea that a mother’s love is automatic, unconditional, and always good. When motherhood is idealized that completely, saying your mother hurt you can feel like challenging something much bigger than your own family.
That idealization also puts enormous weight on individual mothers, often with very little support. Many of the women who struggled to mother well were carrying their own untreated hurt, isolation, poverty, or unequal expectations at home. Naming that context doesn’t excuse harm. It helps explain how it gets passed along, and why the shame of speaking about it runs so deep.
“Since Greek myth glorified the role of mother, it also tended to condemn to infamy those who in some way rebelled against it.”
Mary R. Lefkowitz, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College, classicist, and author, Women in Greek Myth (1986), p. 34
“We expect women to work as if they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work.”
Brigid Schulte, Journalist and author, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (2014), p. 112
“Children should be cared for by a community of adults, releasing mothers from the exhausting isolation of the nuclear family.”
bell hooks, Feminist theorist and cultural critic, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), p. 133
“The job of the working mother, like that of the secretary, is usually to ‘take the calls.’”
Arlie Hochschild, Professor of Sociology, The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (1989), p. 9
Every woman who tells the truth about her early experience, who stops using “she did her best” as a cover when the best was genuinely harmful, contributes to a more honest conversation about what children need. Your story matters beyond your own healing. It matters to the women who come after you and need to know that this is nameable, and survivable.
Of course this is hard. You were taught, directly or indirectly, that naming it was disloyal, and that loving her meant staying quiet. You’re not doing anything wrong by looking clearly at what happened. You’re doing something many women before you weren’t allowed to do.
Carlotta still hasn’t decided what she’ll say the next time her mother calls. But she took her coat off before she went inside that day. Small things count. They’re often where the work begins.
Warmly,
Annie
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Frequently asked questions.
Is it possible to have a relationship with my mother while also healing from her harm?
For some women, yes, with clear limits, emotional distance, and realistic expectations. The key question isn’t whether contact is possible, but whether contact causes ongoing harm that outweighs what it gives you. That assessment is individual. Some women find carefully limited contact workable. Others find that any contact reopens the wound. A therapist who understands relational trauma can help you think through what makes sense for you.
Why does my mother’s criticism affect me so much more than anyone else’s?
Your mother’s voice was often the first template for how you talk to yourself. The inner critic that says you’re not enough can sound a lot like the earliest critical voices you absorbed as a child. When she criticizes you now, it can land on that old place, not just on the present moment. That isn’t oversensitivity. It’s an understandable response to a very early relationship.
How do I stop seeking my mother’s approval when I know it’s not coming?
Approval-seeking usually started as a way to stay safe and connected, not as a character flaw. It went back to a time when her approval really did matter for your wellbeing. Stopping usually isn’t a matter of deciding to stop. It tends to involve grieving what you didn’t get, practicing giving yourself some of it, and often having support while the old pattern loosens.
Can I heal the mother wound without my mother’s participation?
Yes. For many women, that’s the only option available, because a mother who caused harm may not be able or willing to take part in repair. Much of the healing happens inside you rather than in the original relationship. What changes may not be the dynamic with her, but your relationship to that dynamic and to yourself.
I feel like I should be over this by now. How long does healing take?
There’s no timeline, and the “should be over it” message can itself be an echo of old voices. This kind of wound isn’t a single loss with a predictable arc. It can shape how you relate to yourself and to others. Meaningful change is possible at many points in life. You haven’t missed a window.
Is it possible to love my mother and still acknowledge that she hurt me?
Yes. Love and harm aren’t mutually exclusive. Many women love their mothers and also carry real hurt from how they were parented. Holding both at once isn’t confusion. It’s honesty, and it’s often a steadier foundation for healing than denial or anger alone.
Which quotes in this collection help most when I feel guilty for naming it?
The ones that explain why the guilt is there. Judith Lewis Herman’s line that a child, “to preserve her faith in her parents,” must reject the conclusion “that something is terribly wrong with them” describes how children protect a parent in their own minds. Sharon Martin’s reminder that “your self-protective boundaries are not the problem” speaks to the guilt that can come with limits. Lindsay C. Gibson’s observation that emotionally immature parents “were once children themselves” makes room for context without erasing harm.
Can I work with Annie Wright directly?
Yes. Annie Wright, LMFT, offers individual therapy for driven women healing from relational trauma. She’s licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida under Fla. Stat. 456.47. You can reach out through the connect page.
What if I’m not safe right now, or these quotes bring up thoughts of not wanting to be here?
Please don’t carry that alone. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists local crisis services. Quotes can keep you company, but they aren’t a substitute for support.
References.
- American Psychological Association. “Emotional Abuse.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/emotional-abuse.
- American Psychological Association. “Internalization.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/internalization.
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LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
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Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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