75 Staying Positive in Tough Times Quotes (That Don’t Ask You to Pretend)
This collection of 75 staying positive in tough times quotes is organized by what you actually need to hear. Not empty cheerfulness, but honest words about grief, hope, agency, and rest. Each section addresses a specific emotional terrain, grounded in what researchers like Susan David and Viktor Frankl understood: that real hope doesn’t ask you to pretend things are fine.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- 3:02am on Your Sister’s Couch
- What Genuine Positivity Actually Is
- Why Forced Positivity Backfires. The Research
- Quotes: Positivity That Doesn’t Erase Grief
- Quotes: On Finding Light in the Specific Dark
- Both/And: Feeling It Fully and Still Choosing to Look Forward
- The Systemic Lens: Who Gets to Grieve, and Who Is Required to Stay Positive Anyway
- Quotes: On Rest, Agency, and What’s Worth Protecting
- Frequently Asked Questions
3:02am on Your Sister’s Couch
The blanket is scratchy wool, and Dani has pulled it up to her chin despite the fact that it’s June. She’s been on her sister’s couch in Astoria for almost two hours now, and most of the apartment is asleep. One lamp on. A garbage truck somewhere very far away, its grinding sound filtering through the window like something from another world.
On the end of the couch sits a stuffed bear. Her sister has had it since they were children. Dani has been looking at it for twenty minutes.
Her client got a sentence today that she didn’t deserve. Dani argued everything she had. She knows the system, and she knows how to use it, and she did all of it. And it wasn’t enough. She’s been a public defender for six years. She knows how often this happens. That knowledge has never stopped it from feeling like a fist to the chest.
She found herself searching “staying positive in tough times quotes” around 2:45am, which she recognizes is a strange thing to do. Most of what came up felt thin. The kind of bright-side cheerfulness that lands like a pat on the shoulder from someone who doesn’t know you. She closed three tabs before she found anything she could actually sit with.
“Staying positive feels like a betrayal tonight,” she thought, staring at the bear. “Like it would mean what happened was okay.”
That thought is worth examining. Not dismissing. Not overriding with a motivational poster. Examining. Because it contains something real about the difference between genuine hope and the cultural demand to appear fine. That difference is what this page is for. The 75 quotes collected here aren’t asking you to pretend. They’re asking you to look a little more carefully at what’s actually true, even at 3am.
What Genuine Positivity Actually Is
Before the quotes, a working definition. Because “positivity” has been so badly misused that it often functions as its opposite. What most people mean when they say “stay positive” is: perform okayness, suppress the difficult feelings, keep moving. That’s not positivity. That’s suppression with better branding.
A concept examined by Susan David, PhD, psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility: toxic positivity is the expectation that one should maintain a positive mindset regardless of circumstances. It suppresses the emotional information that would otherwise guide adaptive behavior. Essentially asking a person to override their own nervous system’s most accurate reporting. David’s research distinguishes this from genuine optimism, which is grounded in honest emotional processing rather than avoidance of difficult feeling.
In plain terms: Being told to “stay positive” when things are genuinely hard is a request to lie to yourself. Your distress is data. It’s telling you something real happened. The quotes on this page don’t ask you to ignore that data. They ask you to hold it while also holding the possibility that something is still worth protecting.
Genuine positivity, the kind that actually survives contact with reality, is built differently. It doesn’t deny that the night is dark. It doesn’t insist you’re grateful before you’re ready. It says: this is real, and something still matters, and these two things can be true at once. That’s the distinction Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, spent his entire life articulating. The will to find meaning isn’t the same as insisting things are good. It’s the capacity to hold “this is devastating” alongside “there is still something worth going on for.” That’s a much harder, and much more honest, thing to ask of someone.
In my work with clients at trauma-informed therapy, I see this confusion constantly. A driven woman will come in having done everything “right”: she journaled, said affirmations, went to yoga. And she still feels terrible. Often, what she’s been doing is bypassing. She’s been staying positive on the surface while her nervous system quietly carries what she couldn’t let herself feel. The positivity that doesn’t ask you to pretend is actually the harder version. It requires you to feel the thing first.
Defined by Susan David, PhD as the capacity to experience thoughts and feelings (including difficult and painful ones) with curiosity, compassion, and openness, rather than suppression or overidentification. Emotional agility is the psychological infrastructure that makes genuine resilience possible. It’s not the absence of struggle but the ability to be present to struggle without being destroyed by it.
In plain terms: Emotional agility means you don’t have to choose between feeling your grief and finding your way through it. You can do both. But only if you let yourself actually feel the grief instead of performing your way around it.
Why Forced Positivity Backfires. The Research
Susan David, PhD, psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, has spent decades documenting what happens when people attempt to override negative emotions with forced optimism. Her research shows that emotional suppression doesn’t eliminate the feeling. It amplifies it. The suppressed emotion gains charge. It comes out sideways: as irritability, as physical symptoms, as a vague sense of hollowness that none of the affirmations quite reach.
Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, approached the same problem from the far edge of human suffering. Frankl developed logotherapy, a form of existential psychotherapy built on the premise that the human drive to find meaning is more fundamental than the drive toward pleasure or power. He didn’t counsel prisoners to “stay positive.” He helped them ask: what is this experience asking of me? What do I still have the freedom to choose, even here? That reframe from forced positivity to meaning-making is what allowed some people to survive psychologically in conditions designed to strip everything away.
What both researchers understood is that the instruction to “stay positive” often arrives at exactly the wrong moment. When someone has just encountered something real, painful, and worth grieving. The instruction doesn’t help. It isolates. It tells the person that their accurate perception of a bad thing is the problem, rather than the bad thing itself. In my work doing executive coaching with ambitious women, I watch this dynamic play out constantly: a client’s grief gets coded as negativity, and her very legitimate sadness becomes another item on the list of things she’s failing at.
The quotes in this collection are organized around that distinction. They’re not asking you to perform recovery before you’ve started it. They’re asking something harder and more specific: what can you actually hold onto tonight?
Quotes: Positivity That Doesn’t Erase Grief
This first grouping of staying positive in tough times quotes does something specific: it holds hope and pain in the same sentence. These aren’t inspirational at the expense of honest. They’re from writers, thinkers, and survivors who understood that the night is real and the morning comes anyway. But the morning doesn’t retroactively make the night not happen.
These are worth reading slowly. Let the ones that land actually land. If some of them don’t land tonight, that’s fine too. Come back to them. Check our broader collection of uplifting quotes for hard times when you need a wider range.
1. “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
2. “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.”. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
3. “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”. Martin Luther King Jr.
4. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace
5. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”. Leonard Cohen, Anthem
6. “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”. Richard Bach, Illusions
7. “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”. Wendell Berry
8. “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”. Kahlil Gibran
9. “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”. Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
10. “It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.”. C.S. Lewis (widely attributed)
11. “Fall seven times, stand up eight.”. Japanese proverb
12. “Even when everything is falling apart, something remains. That something is you.”. Paraphrase of themes in Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
13. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”. Helen Keller
14. “Grief is the price we pay for love.”. Queen Elizabeth II, letter to families after September 11, 2001
15. “The darker the night, the brighter the stars.”. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Quotes: On Finding Light in the Specific Dark
There’s a difference between generic optimism and particularized hope. Generic optimism says “things will get better.” Particularized hope says: “given the specific texture of this specific darkness, here is something worth noticing.” The second kind is harder to manufacture but far more durable. It requires looking carefully at what’s actually here, rather than projecting onto some abstracted future version of yourself who has healed and moved on.
This is where I often direct clients who are in what I’d call the middle distance of hard times. Not in acute crisis, but not through it either. Something like what Dani was sitting with on that couch: the verdict has happened, it can’t be changed, and now she has to figure out what she’s going to carry forward. If you’re in that particular terrain right now, you might also find these quotes about hope in hard times useful, which go deeper on this specific emotional zone.
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
VÁCLAV HAVEL, playwright, dissident, and former President of the Czech Republic, Disturbing the Peace
16. “Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.”. Hafiz (trans. Daniel Ladinsky; note: Ladinsky’s translations are interpretive rather than literal, but the spirit attributed to Hafiz is widely cited)
17. “Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.”. Christopher Reeve
18. “You don’t have to be positive all the time. It’s perfectly okay to feel sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, scared, or anxious. Having feelings doesn’t make you a negative person. It makes you human.”. Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha
19. “Turn your wounds into wisdom.”. Oprah Winfrey
20. “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
21. “There’s always going to be bad stuff out there. But here’s the amazing thing. Light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can’t stick the dark into the light.”. Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart
22. “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”. Albert Einstein (widely attributed)
23. “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”. Attributed to John F. Kennedy (note: the translation is disputed by linguists, but the framing persists as cultural touchstone)
24. “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.”. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
25. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love
26. “Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”. A.A. Milne (via Winnie-the-Pooh / Christopher Robin dialogue)
27. “The human capacity for burden is like bamboo. Far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.”. Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
28. “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”. Helen Keller
29. “I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
30. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”. Eleanor Roosevelt
Maya’s experience with these quotes was instructive. She’s a hospitalist physician who started reading them late one night after a patient died in a way that felt preventable. Not by her, but by a system that kept him from getting care until the damage was done. “I needed something that didn’t tell me it was all going to be fine,” she said in our work together. “I needed something that acknowledged that this specific night was terrible, and still found a reason to come back tomorrow.” That’s the particularized hope these quotes are aimed at.
Both/And: Feeling It Fully and Still Choosing to Look Forward
Here’s the Both/And that applies to every quote on this page: choosing to look for what’s worth protecting is an act of agency. And it requires first letting yourself feel what’s actually here. These two things are not in opposition. They’re sequential. You don’t skip from the grief to the hope. You move through the grief, and the hope on the other side of it is built on solid ground rather than denial.
This is where Dani eventually landed, somewhere around 4am. Not cheerful. Not recovered. But she’d let herself feel the full weight of what had happened to her client: the injustice of it, the specific woman’s face, the years ahead of her. In sitting with that, something clarified. She was still a public defender. She was going to go back. Not because it was fine, but because the work mattered too much to walk away from, and her rage was actually evidence of that mattering.
“Staying positive” wasn’t the right frame. The right frame was: what do I still care enough about to protect? That question pointed somewhere real. If you’re working through something similar, the Fixing the Foundations™ course has specific work on grief and agency that goes deeper on this Both/And terrain.
The quotes in this section are organized around that particular framing. The ones that hold grief and agency simultaneously, without collapsing one into the other.
31. “I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life. Specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown. And I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.”. Erica Jong
32. “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”. Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
33. “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
34. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”. Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
35. “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’”. Mary Anne Radmacher
36. “The most beautiful people I’ve known are those who have known trials, have known struggles, have known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.”. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
37. “Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent.”. Calvin Coolidge
38. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”. Ralph Waldo Emerson (widely attributed)
39. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”. Attributed to Winston Churchill
40. “The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.”. Juliette Lewis
41. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”. Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
42. “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”. William Barclay
43. “It’s okay to look back at the past. Just don’t stare.”. Benjamin Dover (widely attributed in self-help literature)
44. “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair.”. 2 Corinthians 4:8, New Living Translation
45. “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”. Carl Jung (paraphrase widely attributed; the spirit aligns with Jungian individuation theory)
The Systemic Lens: Who Gets to Grieve, and Who Is Required to Stay Positive Anyway
The instruction to “stay positive” is not distributed equally. It lands hardest on people who have the most legitimate reasons to be something other than positive. This isn’t abstract. It’s a documented pattern that follows the contours of race, class, gender, and professional role.
Dani knows this. She’s a Black woman doing public defense work, and she has watched white colleagues cry in the hallway after hard verdicts while she regulated herself into a professional composure that was expected of her before anyone asked. The expectation that she continue presenting as capable and forward-facing is a burden her clients’ families don’t have and her white colleagues can more easily set down. Her grief is real, and the demand to contain it is also real. These two things don’t cancel each other out.
Susan David, PhD, psychologist at Harvard Medical School, has written and spoken extensively about what she calls “the tyranny of positivity”. The cultural demand that people maintain upbeat affect regardless of circumstances. Her research documents how this demand is enforced most aggressively on people who are already navigating the most difficult conditions. Women are consistently expected to manage their emotional expressions in ways men aren’t. Black women in professional environments face a compounded version of this. Public defenders, social workers, and physicians in under-resourced systems absorb systemic failure and are expected to remain motivationally intact while doing so.
What does this mean for a quote collection about staying positive? It means some of these quotes are more accessible to some readers than others, and that’s worth naming. The Audre Lorde quote that follows is here deliberately. So is the Toni Morrison. So is the explicit acknowledgment that hope-keeping in a broken system is political, not just personal. It’s an act of resistance, not compliance with someone else’s demand that you perform okay so they don’t have to look at what’s wrong. If you want to go deeper on the resilience research that connects this to women’s lived experience, our reasons to keep going page addresses this terrain more directly.
46. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
47. “Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo have every reason to insist the world is broken and cannot be fixed. By contrast, those who hope for a better world understand that without a sustained belief in possible alternatives, no alternatives can be achieved.”. Alex Steffen (this framing, often misattributed to Susan Sontag, appears in Steffen’s Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century)
48. “If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life.”. Marcus Garvey
49. “I know why the caged bird sings.”. Maya Angelou, title of her memoir (and the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem it references)
50. “You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”. Anonymous (widely circulated in trauma-informed communities)
51. “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”. Shirley Chisholm (widely attributed)
52. “When you can’t find the sunshine, be the sunshine.”. Anonymous (worth noting this one can function as toxic positivity depending on context. It’s included here for examination, not prescription)
53. “We were never meant to survive.”. Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival”
54. “For a long time I was afraid of my own anger. I thought it would destroy things. And then I realized my anger was one of the few things that had never let me down.”. Paraphrase of themes in Audre Lorde’s essays
55. “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”. James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro
Quotes: On Rest, Agency, and What’s Worth Protecting
This final section holds three specific types of quotes that often get crowded out of “stay positive” collections: the ones that give you permission to rest before you’re positive, the ones about agency as something you choose rather than something you’re obligated to perform, and the ones about identifying the specific thing (the person, the work, the value) that makes tomorrow worth it.
These are the quotes Dani most needed at 3am. Not the “it gets better” ones. She knows it gets better; she’s been doing this long enough. What she needed was something that let her not be okay tonight while also pointing toward a reason to come back tomorrow morning. You can also explore inspirational quotes to keep going when you’re ready for that longer view, or connect with our community through the Strong & Stable newsletter for weekly writing on exactly this kind of middle-of-the-night terrain.
If you’re in the place right now where therapy feels like the right next step, working one-on-one with a trauma-informed therapist can provide the kind of sustained support that a quote collection can point toward but not replace. And if you want to start exploring on your own, a free consultation is a low-stakes place to begin.
56. “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”. John Lubbock, The Use of Life
57. “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.”. Anne Lamott
58. “Nourishing yourself in a way that helps you blossom in the direction you want to go is attainable, and you are worth the effort.”. Deborah Day
59. “You don’t have to be happy to be hopeful.”. Frequently stated by therapists in the context of motivational interviewing; origin attributed to various clinical sources
60. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”. Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
61. “Not all those who wander are lost.”. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
62. “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”. C.S. Lewis (widely attributed)
63. “Resilience is not about bouncing back to who you were. It’s about moving forward as who you’re becoming.”. Paraphrase of themes in Susan David, PhD, Emotional Agility
64. “Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”. Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi
65. “The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”. Chinese proverb
66. “Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.”. Jacques Prévert
67. “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive. To breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
68. “Tough times never last, but tough people do.”. Robert H. Schuller
69. “My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”. Mizuta Masahide, 17th-century Japanese poet
70. “Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”. Charlie Jones
71. “Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.”. Nicole Reed
72. “It’s not whether you get knocked down; it’s whether you get up.”. Vince Lombardi
73. “You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.”. Brian Tracy (widely cited in coaching contexts)
74. “If you’re reading this right now and struggling to find one reason to keep going. You don’t have to find a reason for forever. Find a reason for tonight.”. Paraphrase of a sentiment widely expressed in crisis support contexts
75. “There is some good in this world, and it’s worth fighting for.”. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Dani made it through the night. She fell asleep on the couch eventually, the wool blanket still scratchy against her chin, the bear still at the end of the cushion. She went back to work on Monday. She filed a brief two weeks later on a separate case that she did win. None of that retroactively made Friday’s verdict acceptable. But something in her had located what was worth protecting, and she moved from there.
That’s what these quotes are for. Not to make the hard thing unhappen. Not to rush you toward being okay before you’re ready. Just to point, in a small way, at the thing worth going on for. Even tonight, even now, even from a scratchy couch in Astoria at 3am. If you’re in the middle of something hard and want support that goes beyond a quote collection, trauma-informed therapy can be a place to bring the full weight of it.
Q: What’s the difference between genuine hope and toxic positivity?
A: Genuine hope acknowledges that things are difficult and still finds something worth orienting toward. Toxic positivity, a term examined by Susan David, PhD, at Harvard Medical School, asks you to deny or suppress the difficult feelings in service of maintaining an upbeat presentation. The key difference is whether the emotion is processed or bypassed. Genuine hope comes after the grief, not instead of it.
Q: Is it possible to be “too positive”. To use optimism as a way of avoiding reality?
A: Yes, and this is one of the most clinically important things to understand about resilience. When positivity functions as avoidance (reaching for a motivational quote before you’ve let yourself feel the actual feeling), you’re not building resilience, you’re layering denial. The emotion that wasn’t felt doesn’t disappear; it tends to emerge later in ways that feel disproportionate. What Susan David’s research calls “emotional agility” is the capacity to feel the hard thing first, then choose a forward-facing orientation from a grounded place.
Q: What do you do when you genuinely cannot find anything to be positive about?
A: Don’t try to manufacture positivity you don’t have. Viktor Frankl, MD, PhD, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote from inside one of the worst experiences imaginable, and what he discovered wasn’t that people forced themselves to be positive. They found one specific thing that mattered enough to go on for. It doesn’t have to be big. It can be a person, a project, a commitment, a question you haven’t answered yet. If you can’t find even that, it’s a signal to reach out for support, not a personal failure.
Q: Why do some positivity quotes feel hollow and others actually land?
A: The ones that feel hollow tend to skip the hard part. They move straight to the resolution without acknowledging the specific texture of the difficulty. The ones that land tend to do one of two things: acknowledge the darkness explicitly before gesturing toward the light, or speak with enough specificity that they seem to know what hard actually feels like. This is why Hemingway’s “strong at the broken places” resonates differently than “keep your chin up.” One contains the knowledge of breaking. The other doesn’t.
Q: Is “staying positive” actually therapeutic, or is it a cultural demand dressed up as wellness?
A: It depends entirely on what it means. Genuine positive reappraisal (the capacity to find meaning or find something worth protecting even in difficult circumstances) is well-supported by the research and is genuinely therapeutic. But the instruction to “stay positive” as it’s commonly used is often a cultural demand: it tells the person that their pain is socially inconvenient and they should manage it out of view. That version isn’t therapeutic; it’s suppression with better branding. The distinction matters, and it’s worth asking yourself which version you’re being asked for.
Related Reading
David, Susan. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. New York: Avery, 2016.
Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Translated by Ilse Lasch. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. (Original German publication: 1946.)
Havel, Václav. Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížd’ala. Translated by Paul Wilson. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, and David Kessler. On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss. New York: Scribner, 2005.
Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light and Other Essays. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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