99 Quotes About Healing and Starting Over for Women Who Are Rebuilding Everything
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
A curated collection of 99 quotes, drawn from clinical textbooks, trauma research, and the poets and thinkers who name what the driven woman feels but can’t always articulate. Every quote is sourced, verified, and chosen with clinical intentionality for the woman reading this at an hour she should be sleeping.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Why These Words Matter for the Driven Woman
- The 99 Quotes
- Your Nervous System Is Also Starting Over: The Window of Tolerance
- How Starting Over Actually Shows Up: Two Women Rebuilding
- Both/And: These Quotes Can Be Medicine and They Can Be Avoidance
- The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Need Different Words
- Before You Read Further: A Note on Scope
- How to Begin Healing and Starting Over
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why These Words Matter for the Driven Woman
In my work with driven women, across more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve seen how the right words at the right moment can crack open something years of intellectualizing couldn’t reach. The nervous system responds to resonance before it responds to reason. When a woman reads a line that names her experience with precision she’s never encountered, something shifts in her body as much as in her mind.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University and developer of Polyvagal Theory, describes how the nervous system detects safety and danger through cues below conscious awareness. A single sentence can reach a part of the nervous system that self-talk alone often can’t.
Every quote below is pulled directly from clinical textbooks, peer-reviewed research, and the published works of the therapists, researchers, poets, and thinkers who have shaped the field of trauma recovery. Nothing is paraphrased. Each citation includes the author, the book, and the year.
The use of literature, including poetry, prose, and curated text, as a therapeutic intervention. Recognized by the American Library Association and used in clinical settings to facilitate emotional processing, self-reflection, and healing.
In plain terms: Reading the right words at the right time can be a form of medicine. Not a replacement for therapy, but a bridge to it. See also our uplifting quotes for hard times.
“When our bodies get weighed down by toxic stress, when they experience strain over and over, they can start to wear down. We all have a neurological wear-and-tear meter that neuroscientists call the allostatic load. When stress piles up without enough nervous system rest and repair, it overwhelms our allostatic load. Emotional trauma can cause physical bodily damage. Inflamed minds yield inflamed bodies.”
Mariel Buqué, Break the Cycle: A Guide to Healing Intergenerational Trauma, 2024
The 99 Quotes
1. “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
2. “When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
3. “The testimony of trauma survivors is at the heart of the book. Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
4. “The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
5. “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
6. “Without imagination there’s no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
7. “The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
8. “Elvin Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life, with all its pleasures and heartbreak.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
9. “Semrad often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
10. “Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
11. “Healing and reconnection become tangible possibilities once we understand trauma is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, in the sense of wounding or disconnection, rather than being just an external event.”
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal, 2022
12. “Healing from trauma involves gradually loosening the shackles of disconnected parts of ourselves, allowing a joyful reunion with body and spirit and reclaiming presence in the here and now.”
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal, 2022
13. “When we understand that we come by our symptoms honestly, they’re not innately dysfunctional traits, and that healing from trauma requires holistic, body-based solutions, a wonderful thing can happen. We can finally get off the hamster wheel: trying harder, gaining insight, endeavoring to prove our worth, and getting nowhere. We can shift out of survival mode and finally begin healing.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, 2024
14. “Although we have great capacity to heal on our own, there’s a saying in trauma therapy: wounding happens in relationship, and healing happens in relationship.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, 2024
15. “The goal in our healing is to come back to the body’s natural inclination of flexibility and repair. One grounded in regulation, a whole and true self. We can’t eliminate all threat, but we can move out of binary responses to it: healed or broken, safe or unsafe. I believe there’s more room for us to learn how to tolerate discomfort and to enlarge our capacity to be ourselves.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, 2024
16. “Healing happens when we honor the ways we learned to protect ourselves. When we stop focusing on the imperfections of our coping mechanisms and can validate their valiant and necessary efforts. Then, and only then, will those old protectors step aside, allowing space for another way.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, 2024
17. “The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat.”
Antonieta Ketty Machado, In the Dream House, 2019
18. “Most of all it was a story about reclaiming myself, transforming from the fragmented girl on the floor into a woman who could say, I’m more than this pain.”
Chanel Miller, Know My Name, 2019
19. “Resolution of the trauma is never final; recovery is never complete.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
20. “It can’t be reiterated too often: no one can face trauma alone.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
21. “The body keeps the score, and it always wins. It keeps the score through illness, through pain, through nightmares, through flashbacks, through sleep disturbances.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
22. “The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
23. “Even years later, traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014
24. “The Self is just beneath the surface of our protective parts, such that when they open space for it, it comes forward spontaneously, often quite suddenly, and universally.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
25. “The Self can’t be damaged, the Self doesn’t have to develop, and the Self possesses its own wisdom about how to heal internal as well as external relationships.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
26. “The Self’s view is unfiltered by distortions. When we’re in Self, we see the pain that drives our enemies rather than only seeing their protective parts.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
27. “When my clients were in that place, the dialogue would go well. The critic would drop its guard and tell its secret history and the client would’ve compassion for it and we’d learn about what it protected.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
28. “Love is the answer in the inner world, just as it’s in the outer world. Listening to, embracing, and loving parts allows them to heal and transform as much as it does for people.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
29. “Parts aren’t cognitive adaptations or sinful impulses. Instead, parts are sacred, spiritual beings and they deserve to be treated as such.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
30. “Even the most destructive parts have protective intentions. When they trust it’s safe to step out of their roles, they’re highly valuable to the system.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
31. “The newly unburdened part almost universally says it feels much lighter and wants to play or rest, after which it finds a new role, transforming into its original valuable state.”
Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts, 2021
32. “The greater the wounding, the more numerous and powerful our protectors need to be.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
33. “When our nervous systems protectively turn our minds and hearts away from the truth of the moment, there’s an element of isolation from ourselves and others that may increase our sense of despair; however, when we come into contact with suffering in the presence of another, meaning and hope may emerge.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
34. “Our nervous systems continually ask this question: ‘Are you with me?’ The answer is yes when we’re present and available to one another, without judgments or agenda, offering true safety, presence, and listening.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
35. “Healing trauma might be an embodied and relational experience between patient and therapist, with the patient’s inner wisdom leading the way while the therapist holds a safe, warm, stable, responsive space to support shifting the felt sense and behavioral patterns of implicit memories.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
36. “Memory reconsolidation research shows that for implicit patterns to change, one must simultaneously be in touch with the embedded trauma and have a reparative experience, what was needed at the time but wasn’t available, offered in the present moment through relationship.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
37. “We’re fundamentally interdependent beings whose brains develop and organize optimally through co-regulation and relational connection, beginning from prebirth and continuing throughout life.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
38. “We’re adaptive rather than disordered.” This is the premise in therapy that reframes symptoms as intelligent responses rather than defects.
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
39. “Talk therapy can help with this process, but the body is the central focus for healing trauma. Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity. This is why people need to work through trauma slowly, over time, and why they need to understand their own bodies’ processes of connecting and settling.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 2017
40. “Many Black bodies have proven very resilient, in part because, over generations, African Americans have developed a variety of body-centered responses to help settle their bodies and blunt the effects of racialized trauma. These include individual and collective humming, rocking, rhythmic clapping, drumming, singing, grounding touch, wailing circles, and call and response, to name just a few.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 2017
41. “Trauma isn’t a flaw or a weakness. It’s a highly effective tool of safety and survival.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 2017
42. “Clean pain is pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It’s the pain you experience when you know exactly what you need to say or do; when you really don’t want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. Experiencing clean pain enables us to engage our integrity and tap into our body’s inherent resilience and coherence in ways that dirty pain doesn’t.”
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 2017
43. “When offered the lens of Polyvagal Theory, clients become curious about the cues of safety and danger their nervous systems are sensing and begin to understand their responses as courageous survival responses that can be held with compassion.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
44. “A working principle of the autonomic nervous system is ‘every response is an action in service of survival.’ No matter how incongruous an action may look from the outside, from an autonomic perspective it’s always an adaptive survival response.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
45. “Trauma survivors without the necessary co-regulating experiences generally find small moments of distress to be too great of a challenge to their vagal braking capacities, making them quick to dysregulate and be pulled into survival responses.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
46. “Polyvagal Theory helps therapists understand that the behaviors of their clients are autonomic actions in service of survival, adaptive responses ingrained in a survival story that’s entered into automatically, not choices made by the brain.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
47. “Repeatedly violating neural expectations in a therapeutic relationship creates disconfirming experiences that influence a client’s autonomic assumptions; as the nervous system anticipates differently, the old story no longer fits and a new story can be explored.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
48. “Clients with trauma histories often experience more intense, extreme autonomic responses, affecting their ability to regulate and feel safe in relationships; trauma replaces patterns of connection with patterns of protection that may become habitual autonomic patterns.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
49. “The goal of therapy is to engage the resources of the ventral vagus to recruit the circuits that support the prosocial behaviors of the Social Engagement System, creating a physiological state that supports connection, curiosity, and change.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
50. “Without sufficient safety resources, a pattern of immobilization, mobilization, immobilization is replayed in a painful autonomic loop in which the intense longing to reach ventral vagal safety is unmet and accompanied by feelings of hopelessness.”
Deb Dana, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, 2018
51. “Changing the system starts with us being the change we want to see in our own lives. The first step is to own our discomfort with the status quo, to acknowledge that constantly striving for success but never feeling safe enough to fully relax or feel content isn’t living; this is existing.”
Tamu Thomas, Women Who Work Too Much, 2024
52. “We must see that it doesn’t help anyone if we’re living on the edge of our nerves, ready to snap at any moment. We must understand that shutting down our feelings because we’re terrified of what will surface is what will make us fall apart and that feeling our feelings is what will help us free ourselves and each other from the trap of toxic productivity.”
Tamu Thomas, Women Who Work Too Much, 2024
53. “If girls are constantly shielded from any sharp edges, how can they be expected to build any resilience to avoid falling apart later in life when they run up against real criticism or setbacks?”
Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect, 2019
54. “We can reverse and relearn these habits, and help our daughters do the same, with just a little awareness and practice.”
Reshma Saujani, Brave, Not Perfect, 2019
55. “Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.”
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 2021
56. “The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 2021
57. “If we wait long enough, our brains (usually) readapt to the absence of the drug and we reestablish our baseline homeostasis: a level balance. Once our balance is level, we’re again able to take pleasure in everyday, simple rewards. Going for a walk. Watching the sun rise. Enjoying a meal with friends.”
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation, 2021
58. “Like a poison, toxic shame needs to be neutralized by another substance. An antidote. If the patient is to be saved. Compassion is the only thing that can counteract the isolating, stigmatizing, debilitating poison of shame.”
Beverly Engel, It Wasn’t Your Fault, 2015
59. “Clients come to therapy not to change what happened, which is impossible, but to change the effects of the past as they impinge on the present. Rather than deal with the actual events, clients need to deal with the internal residues of the past.”
Pat Ogden and Janina Fisher, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, 2015
60. “The midlife crisis, which I prefer to call the Middle Passage, presents us with an opportunity to reexamine our lives and to ask the sometimes frightening, always liberating, question: “Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?””
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
61. “Those who travel the passage consciously render their lives more meaningful. Those who don’t, remain prisoners of childhood, however successful they may appear in outer life.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
62. “The Middle Passage represents a summons from within to move from the provisional life to true adulthood, from the false self to authenticity.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
63. “Symptoms of midlife distress are in fact to be welcomed, for they represent not only an instinctually grounded self underneath the acquired personality but a powerful imperative for renewal.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
64. “The transit of the Middle Passage occurs in the fearsome clash between the acquired personality and the demands of the Self. A person going through such an experience will often panic and say, “I don’t know who I’m anymore.” In effect, the person one has been is to be replaced by the person to be. The first must die.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
65. “The Middle Passage begins when the person is obliged to ask anew the question of meaning which once circumambulated the child’s imagination but was effaced over the years. The Middle Passage begins when one is required to face issues which heretofore had been patched over.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
66. “The question of identity returns and one can no longer evade responsibility for it. Again, the Middle Passage starts when we ask, “Who am I, apart from my history and the roles I have played?””
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
67. “The Middle Passage is less a chronological event than a psychological experience. The longer one remains unconscious, which is quite easy to do in our culture, the more likely one is to see life only as a succession of moments leading toward some vague end, the purpose of which will become clear in due time.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage, 1993
68. “Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard, it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.”
Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams, 2014
69. “Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.”
Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams, 2014
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
70. “Loss of control is at the core of PTSD. No one develops the disorder who was in control of the circumstances: able to stop the car or the tsunami, not be in the wrong place at the wrong time, avoid the perpetrator, and so on.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
71. “PTSD is, really, all about losing control. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to prioritize reclaiming and increasing a client’s sense of control over his or her body, mind, therapy situation, and life.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
72. “Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it can’t occur in isolation.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
73. “Phase 1 is concerned with establishing safety and stabilization, whether that takes hours, weeks, or even years. Phase 2 involves the processing and resolution of trauma memories. Phase 3 focuses on integration, that is, applying what was gained from phases 1 and 2 into the mainstream of daily life.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
74. “According to Janet, it’s not advisable to move to Phase 2, working with the memories of past trauma, until the goals of Phase 1 are achieved, that is, until the traumatized individual is safe, stable, and able to function well on a daily basis.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
75. “There’s no getting around it, recalling traumatic experiences is destabilizing. Opening up to memories of terror and helplessness will (less and more) unglue anyone. As a result, people who live in the aftermath of traumatic experience develop coping mechanisms, what we call defenses, that enable them to live with the fact of whatever it’s that they have endured.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
76. “Loosening defenses such as repression, avoidance, and so on, as is necessary to process trauma memories, increases instability, that’s logical: When you disrupt a coping mechanism, coping becomes more difficult. Decompensation is the professional term for such a disruption in coping.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
77. “If someone is relatively, reliably stable, it’s usually safe to open the Pandora’s box of trauma memory to process and make sense of what happened. That person can usually tolerate the increase in unsteadiness that results from trauma memory processing.”
Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers, Volume 2, 2017
78. “Mindfulness can also support well-established trauma-treatment methods, helping people find stability when faced with traumatic symptoms by strengthening body awareness, boosting attention, and increasing our ability to regulate emotions.”
David Treleaven, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, 2018
79. “Helping someone be mindful of shame often isn’t enough. Trauma survivors need relationship: under the right conditions, connection can help rebuild safety and trust and work skillfully with shame and forgiveness.”
David Treleaven, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, 2018
80. “Look, we’re not unspectacular things. We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”
Ada Limón, The Carrying, 2018
81. “If we became more like a body of air, branches, and make room for this red charging thing that barrels through us, how afterward our leaves shake and stand straighter.”
Ada Limón, The Carrying, 2018
82. “I had a plan. I wanted to sleep for a year because when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I’d be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I’d have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018
83. “The suppression of women health workers and the rise to dominance of male professionals wasn’t a “natural” process, resulting automatically from changes in medical science, nor was it the result of women’s failure to take on healing work. It was an active takeover by male professionals.”
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 1973
84. “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
85. “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
86. “To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins victim and witness in a common alliance.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
87. “In the absence of strong political movements for human rights, the active process of bearing witness inevitably gives way to the active process of forgetting. Repression, dissociation, and denial are phenomena of social as well as individual consciousness.”
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1992
88. “Every decision or opinion is an opportunity to upset someone by not doing things their way.”
Ingrid Clayton, Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves, 2024
89. “I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them… When we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That’s to say, queers, real-life ones, don’t deserve representation, protection, and rights because they’re morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they’re human beings, and that’s enough.”
Antonieta Ketty Machado, In the Dream House, 2019
90. “I was on fire, told Tiffany I was figuring it out, I just needed a minute. I told her I talked to the DA, she’s really nice, her name is, I looked at my paper, scrawled in green waxy letters, AYLEELEE.”
Chanel Miller, Know My Name, 2019
91. “I had wanted to say, Who are you? Where are you calling me from? What’s an advocate? Was she my therapist? Where’s the YWCA? Apply to the Victim Assistance what? Do they pay for therapy? What kind of name is Brock? He lives in Ohio? When did he leave jail? Will I get to stay anonymous?”
Chanel Miller, Know My Name, 2019
92. “Being threatened engages our deepest resources and allows us to experience our fullest potential as human beings.”
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger, 1997
93. “We humans join our inner worlds with one another through many pathways that are largely below conscious awareness. When we’re truly present with one another, the silent resources of attention, responsiveness, and love flow in a way that nourishes healing.”
Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma, 2018
94. “The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety isn’t in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we’re living in it.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
95. “Antidepressants do cause an improvement in the Hamilton score, they do make depressed people feel better. It’s an improvement of 1.8 points. That’s a third less than getting better sleep.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
96. “The number showed that 25 percent of the effects of antidepressants were due to natural recovery, 50 percent were due to the story you had been told about them, and only 25 percent to the actual chemicals.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
97. “You have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are. Neither the old story of it being imaginary nor the chemical imbalance story is true.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
98. “The forces that are making some of us depressed and severely anxious are, at the same time, making even more people unhappy. Depression and anxiety are only the sharpest edges of a spear that has been thrust into almost everyone in our culture.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
99. “The idea you feel terrible because of a ‘chemical imbalance’ was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.”
Johann Hari, Lost Connections, 2018
Your Nervous System Is Also Starting Over: The Window of Tolerance
When we talk about healing and starting over, there’s a conversation happening at the level of decisions and identity. But there’s a parallel process most people don’t name: the nervous system is starting over too. In my work with clients rebuilding their lives, one of the first things I assess is where they’re living in their nervous system. Are they in hyperarousal, scanning for threats? Or have they dropped into hypoarousal, flattened and disconnected?
A concept developed by Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, describing the optimal zone of arousal in which a person can function effectively, process emotions, and integrate experiences.
In plain terms: Your window of tolerance is the zone where you can think and feel at the same time. Rebuilding after a loss means gradually widening that window.
The window of tolerance was developed by Daniel Siegel, MD, of the UCLA School of Medicine. Outside this window in one direction, you’re in hyperarousal: reactive, hypervigilant. Outside it the other way, you’re in hypoarousal: dissociated, flat. Women rebuilding have often lived outside this window so long they’ve stopped noticing, calling the hypervigilance drive and the flatness “being fine.” Widening that window, when it happens, tends to happen gradually rather than all at once.
A body signal like hypervigilance or flatness is information, not proof of a single cause. The same sensations can show up with trauma still active in the nervous system, with ordinary grief, with clinical anxiety or depression, with burnout, or with some combination of those. Bessel van der Kolk’s work is one lens on why words alone sometimes don’t move you toward the future you can picture: for some people, the body is still responding to something the mind has already tried to set down. That’s a plausible contributor, not a confirmed explanation for any individual reader. A licensed clinician who knows your history and current symptoms is better positioned to sort out what’s driving a given signal, and what kind of support fits it. Gathering words that resonate is one legitimate part of healing. The next section shows what came after that, for two women I’ve worked with.
How Starting Over Actually Shows Up: Two Women Rebuilding
Quotes land differently depending on what a woman is actually rebuilding. Two composites from my practice show how differently starting over can look.
Octavia is 49, a hospital administrator, and it’s a Sunday evening in late October when she finally opens the box that’s sat taped shut in her new apartment since the move, eleven months after her divorce was finalized. It’s labeled in her ex-husband’s handwriting: KITCHEN, MISC. She’s holding a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST COOK, and she doesn’t know why this is the object that undoes her.
“I know how to run a 300-bed facility during a staffing crisis,” she tells me that Tuesday. “I don’t know how to sort through a box of kitchen things from a marriage that’s over. I stood there for forty minutes holding a mug.” She laughs, but it isn’t really a laugh. “I keep waiting to feel like myself again, and I don’t know which self that’s supposed to be.”
Sitting with Octavia, I felt the particular quiet that shows up when a driven woman has run out of systems. The competence that carried her through real crises had nothing to grip onto in a cardboard box of mismatched kitchenware.
What I’ve come to think of as the inventory problem is something I see often in women rebuilding after a long marriage ends, though not every woman experiences it the same way or on the same timeline. She can inventory a hospital. She’s still working out how to inventory herself, because the self she’s taking stock of was built, in part, around a marriage that no longer exists.
Lourdes is 52, standing in the parking lot of a community college, engine off, a folder of financial aid paperwork on the passenger seat. It’s 6:40 on a Wednesday morning in September, and she hasn’t been a student since 1994. Her son left for his sophomore year two weeks ago. Her marriage ended two years before that, not with betrayal, just a long, slow drift. She’s been a paralegal for eighteen years, good at it, and she’s terrified to walk in and admit she doesn’t know what she wants to be.
“I raised a person,” she says in our third session, still in her work clothes. “I did that well. And now I’m sitting in a parking lot having a crisis about a certificate program in medical coding. Nobody ever asked me what I wanted, including me.”
I felt something quietly fierce sitting with Lourdes. Here was a woman who had done everything asked of her, competently, for three decades, and had arrived on the far side of that competence to discover no one had left room for a want.
I’ve come to call this the second question. The first question a rebuilding woman answers is what she has to do. The second, the one I’ve watched shape how rebuilding feels for a lot of women, is what she wants. Lourdes hadn’t answered it by the time our work together paused. The parking lot, the unopened folder, the radio turned off so she could hear herself think: that’s the second question showing up, not resolved.
Both/And: These Quotes Can Be Medicine and They Can Be Avoidance
Reading quotes can be genuine self-care, and it can also be a way of feeling like you’re doing something without doing the deeper work. Both are true. The difference isn’t in the reading. It’s in what happens next. If these words move something in you, that’s worth paying attention to, though what it means varies by person and isn’t something a quote can diagnose. The question is whether you’ll let that response lead you somewhere, or close the browser and go back to performing. Octavia read quotes for months before she called my office. Lourdes had a folder of them saved on her phone before she filled out a single form. Neither woman’s reading was wasted; it was preparation, and for Lourdes, when our work paused, it was still an open question what would come after that.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this framework. Each is one contributor among several, not a decisive explanation on its own:
- Self-affirmation effects on behavior d+ = 0.32 (PMID: 25133846)
- Positive psychology interventions and well-being, SMD 0.34 (PMID: 23390882)
- Positive psychology in clinical samples, Hedges’ g = 0.24 (PMID: 29945603)
The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Need Different Words
Our culture offers driven women two genres of comfort: productivity advice and toxic positivity. Neither touches what she actually needs to hear, which is that her pain is real and the gap between how her life looks and how it feels isn’t a personal failing. It’s a common pattern in women who built an identity on a foundation that asked them to perform competence long before anyone asked what they wanted, though how it plays out differs from woman to woman. Octavia’s hospital career and Lourdes’s eighteen years as a paralegal are, on paper, success stories. Neither woman’s world had a script for what happens when the role that organized decades of decisions ends and the woman underneath has to answer for herself.
Before You Read Further: A Note on Scope
Starting over gets used for a wide range of experiences, and they don’t all need the same help. Grief after a loss and clinical depression can look similar from the outside, and they can fluctuate and overlap in the same person over the same months. Grief tends to come in waves tied to reminders of the loss, with real relief in between; depression tends to be flatter and more constant, though that’s a generalization, not a self-test. Telling the two apart, or recognizing both are present, depends on context: duration, what else is going on in the person’s life, specific symptoms, and how much daily functioning is affected. That’s an individualized clinical assessment, not a blog-post checklist. Trauma responses involve a body still reacting to a danger that has passed, and sorting that out from grief, depression, or anxiety also takes an individual evaluation. Burnout is a response to chronic overextension with its own recovery arc, and can coexist with any of the above. None of this is meant to diagnose; this post is educational content from Annie Wright LLC, not a substitute for individualized clinical care.
If your rebuilding involves a medical diagnosis, sleep disorder, or substance use concern, please bring that to a physician or licensed provider. If it involves disability, caregiving, or financial hardship, those are structural realities, not failures of mindset. And if you’re currently in danger or in crisis, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 if you’re in immediate danger. A quote isn’t enough in that moment.
A quick scope note, since both are mentioned here: therapy is where trauma, grief, and mental-health treatment happen, with a licensed clinician assessing and building a plan around it. Executive coaching and personal coaching aren’t trauma or grief treatment; they focus on current work, leadership, decision-making, and developmental goals, and work best alongside, not instead of, therapy when trauma or grief is part of the picture.
If what you’ve read here resonates, individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also join the waitlist for Fixing the Foundations, my signature course for relational trauma recovery, with cart opening September 8.
How to Begin Healing and Starting Over: Beyond Quotes and Into Real Ground
In my work with women rebuilding their lives, I see something consistent: they collect words. That’s not small. But there’s a moment when quotes stop landing the way they used to. That moment isn’t a sign healing isn’t working. It’s a sign you’ve done what words can do, and now you need experience.
A few modalities come up often in this kind of work. None is a universal answer; whether any fits a given person is a judgment a licensed clinician makes with that client, based on history, symptoms, and preference.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one option some clinicians use when a past traumatic experience appears to be part of what’s keeping the nervous system on alert. Its evidence base is strongest for post-traumatic stress specifically, and it isn’t the right fit for everyone. This was one option Octavia and I discussed while she was still, literally, sorting through boxes from the marriage.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a framework some clinicians use with clients rebuilding an identity fused with a role: wife, caregiver, the person someone else needed. IFS work is exploratory and client-paced, with no guaranteed timeline, and it’s one of several approaches to this kind of internal work, not the only one. It was one of the approaches Lourdes and I discussed, alongside others, for the part of her that organized two decades around being needed.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) is a body-based approach some clinicians use to address physical residue from a major transition: an unresolved bracing, a grief that shows up as tension in the chest or gut. Its research base is still developing relative to more established modalities, and, as with EMDR and IFS, fit depends on an individual clinical assessment.
One practical thing I encourage, separate from any specific modality: keep a short list, three things only, of what you’re building toward. What ends up on that list, and how long it takes to get there, looks different for every woman. Octavia was still working hers out the last time we spoke. Lourdes’s folder was still on the passenger seat, unfinished, the last I knew.
Rebuilding is one of the most demanding and creative things a person can do. You don’t have to do it alone. If you’re ready to work with a therapist who can support this kind of complexity, I’d encourage you to explore therapy with Annie. If your rebuilding is more about current decisions, leadership, or direction than trauma or grief, executive coaching may be the better starting point.
Warmly, Annie
Q: Are all of these quotes verified from actual published sources?
A: Yes. Every quote on this page was pulled directly from published clinical textbooks, peer-reviewed research, and the published works of the authors cited. Each attribution includes the author’s full name, the book title, and the publication year.
Q: Can reading quotes actually help with healing and starting over?
A: Bibliotherapy, the clinical use of reading as a therapeutic tool, is a recognized intervention. It can help regulate the nervous system and serve as a bridge to deeper therapeutic work. It’s not a replacement for therapy, but it can be a meaningful complement to it.
Q: Why do some quotes affect me so strongly that I cry?
A: When a quote makes you cry, it’s often reaching past your intellectual defenses toward feelings you’ve been managing rather than processing. That’s not weakness. Pay attention to the quotes that move you most. They’re showing you where the work is.
Q: I’ve been reading quotes for months but nothing has changed. Why?
A: Reading can open the door, but it can’t walk through it for you. If you’ve been collecting quotes without beginning the relational work of therapy, you may be using reading as a way to feel like you’re making progress without the vulnerability real change requires.
Q: What should I do if reading about starting over brings up thoughts of self-harm or feeling unsafe?
A: Please treat that as urgent. Call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 if you’re in immediate danger. This post is educational content, not crisis support, and your safety comes before anything written here.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Cloitre M, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. PMID: 19795402.
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. PMID: 25699005.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. PMID: 40735382.
- Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Fearful-avoidant attachment and defense. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. PMID: 28952412.
- Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79. PMID: 16530597.
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. PMID: 37924221.
- Boot WR, et al. The pervasive problem with placebos in psychology. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2013;8(4):445-54. PMID: 25133846.
- Bolier L, et al. Positive psychology interventions: a meta-analysis. BMC Public Health. 2013;13:119. PMID: 23390882.
- Chakhssi F, et al. Positive psychology interventions in clinical samples. BMC Psychiatry. 2018;18(1):211. PMID: 29945603.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
- Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal. Avery, 2022.
- Clayton, Ingrid. Fawning. Monument Editions, 2024.
- Machado, Antonieta Ketty. In the Dream House. Graywolf Press, 2019.
- Miller, Chanel. Know My Name. Viking, 2019.
- Levine, Peter. Waking the Tiger. North Atlantic Books, 1997.
- Schwartz, Richard. No Bad Parts. Sounds True, 2021.
- Badenoch, Bonnie. The Heart of Trauma. W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.
- Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
- Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.
- Ogden, Pat, and Janina Fisher. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Co., 2015.
- Hollis, James. The Middle Passage. Inner City Books, 1993.
- Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams. Graywolf Press, 2014.
- Rothschild, Babette. The Body Remembers, Volume 2. W. W. Norton & Co., 2017.
- Treleaven, David. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. W. W. Norton & Co., 2018.
- Hari, Johann. Lost Connections. Bloomsbury, 2018.
- Buqué, Mariel. Break the Cycle. Harmony Books, 2024.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven 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 USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
