By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026

May we enter the new year with resilience.

Mental Health & Wellness • December 25, 2022

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

You carry the invisible weight of relational trauma, early relational wounds that quietly disrupt your sense of safety and connection, making resilience feel both essential and elusive as you face the unknown of a new year. Resilience is not about avoiding pain or being unshakable; it is your nervous system’s capacity to recover and return to balance after stress, allowing you to move through challenges without becoming permanently destabilized or overwhelmed.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. What does it mean to be in a liminal period at the end of the year?
2. How do you build the internal fortitude and resilience to handle whatever the new year brings?
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
4. Frequently Asked Questions

Relational trauma is the emotional or psychological injury caused by harmful or neglectful relationships, usually with people who were supposed to keep you safe, parents, partners, close family, or friends. It is not a vague term for just any difficult relationship or a sign that you’re weak or broken. Instead, it names specific wounds that shape how safe you feel in connection and how your nervous system responds to stress or intimacy. This matters to you because if you carry relational trauma, your nervous system is more easily overwhelmed, which makes resilience both more necessary and more complicated. Understanding this helps you recognize why bouncing back feels harder and why resilience is about patience and care, not quick fixes or self-judgment.

• You carry the invisible weight of relational trauma, early relational wounds that quietly disrupt your sense of safety and connection, making resilience feel both essential and elusive as you face the unknown of a new year.
• Resilience is not about avoiding pain or being unshakable; it is your nervous system’s capacity to recover and return to balance after stress, allowing you to move through challenges without becoming permanently destabilized or overwhelmed.
• Your healing begins when you recognize that resilience is less about willpower and more about honoring your nervous system’s innate ability to regulate, giving you the internal fortitude to navigate uncertainty with both strength and compassion.

If you celebrate, today is Christmas so I want to wish you a very Merry Christmas. 

SUMMARY

Resilience. Not resolution. Is the most valuable thing you can carry into a new year. This post offers curated quotes to strengthen your internal fortitude when life doesn’t go according to plan. For driven women with relational trauma backgrounds, building resilience is less about willpower and more about knowing your nervous system has what it takes. Read on for a collection of reminders that you are more capable than you know.

If you don’t, or if you celebrate any other winter holiday , Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa , I hope the weeks and days have been what you have wanted them to be. 

1. For the next week, the last week of this year, it always feels like we’re entering a liminal period of time.
2. Internal fortitude and resilience to address, manage, overcome, and pivot no matter what life may bring.
3. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma

QUICK ANSWER · UPDATED JUNE 2026

Resilience is not the absence of pain or the ability to stay unshaken; it is the nervous system’s capacity to recover, return to regulation, and continue moving forward after disruption. For people carrying relational trauma, resilience at the new year can feel elusive because their baseline state is one of vigilance rather than safety. Building genuine resilience requires addressing the underlying wound, not simply developing better coping strategies layered on top of an activated nervous system. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually letting go of the version of strength that means never struggling.

In short: Resilience is the nervous system’s capacity to recover and return to balance after difficulty, and for those with relational trauma, building it requires healing the wound beneath the coping, not just adding more strategies.

HOW I KNOW THIS

Annie Wright, LMFT, has supported clients in building trauma-informed resilience across more than 15,000 clinical hours, particularly during transition periods like the new year. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Harvard Medical School, established that genuine recovery from trauma requires safety, mourning, and reconnection rather than pure willpower or reframing (Herman 1992).

What does it mean to be in a liminal period at the end of the year?

DEFINITION RESILIENCE

Resilience is the capacity to withstand, adapt to, and recover from adversity, not by avoiding pain but by developing the internal and relational resources to metabolize it. True resilience is not toughness or stoicism; it is the ability to feel fully, grieve honestly, seek support, and continue growing in the aftermath of difficulty.

A collective pause and slowing down. A time where our inboxes are lighter and maybe our souls and emotional bodies feel a bit more cozy.

Resilience

In the context of relational trauma recovery, resilience is the nervous system’s capacity to return to a regulated, functional state after stress, disruption, or loss. Not the absence of being affected by hard things, but the ability to move through them without becoming permanently destabilized.

It’s a time where, consciously and unconsciously, many of us reflect on the last year, taking stock, inventorying our gains and losses, lessons learned and mistakes made. 

It’s a time, too, where, for many of us, we dream and hope and set intentions for what the next year , 2023 , might hold. 

None of us have crystal balls. None of us know what 2023 will hold (remember New Year’s Eve 2019 into 2020?). So I no longer wish for myself or anyone else anything other than resilience to face what may come to pass. 

How do you build the internal fortitude and resilience to handle whatever the new year brings?

A 3-minute assessment to identify the core wound beneath your relationship struggles.

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As a small gift to you, to strengthen your own resilience as we move forward into the next year, I want to leave you with this emotional nourishment: 99 of my all-time favorite quotes on resilience.

May even just one line speak to you and make you feel a tiny bit stronger and more capable after reading the post. 

I’m wishing you a wonderful 2023. And above all else, I’m wishing you resilience for whatever life brings despite our plans, intentions, and goal setting.

Building Resilience Through Year-End Therapy Work

The liminal week between Christmas and New Year offers a unique therapeutic opportunity, when the world slows down, your psyche naturally opens to deeper reflection that busy daily life typically prevents. In therapy during this period, you’re not just reviewing the year’s events but examining how your nervous system navigated each challenge, noticing which old patterns activated under stress and which new capacities emerged.

For trauma survivors, this annual inventory can feel particularly complex: celebrating growth while grieving lost time, acknowledging resilience while feeling exhausted from constant vigilance, hoping for change while fearing disappointment. Your therapist helps you hold these paradoxes, understanding that resilience tools in our self-care tool chest aren’t just coping mechanisms but fundamental rebuilding of your capacity to withstand life’s uncertainties.

Rather than setting rigid resolutions that your trauma brain might weaponize into another source of shame, trauma-informed therapy during this transition focuses on building flexible resilience, the kind that bends without breaking when life inevitably surprises you.

Together, you explore what genuine resilience means for someone with your specific history: perhaps it’s learning to ask for help before drowning, recognizing triggers before they consume you, learning how to manage stress, or simply believing you deserve the good things that might come. Your therapist helps you distinguish between the brittle strength of hypervigilance (which exhausts you) and authentic resilience (which sustains you), teaching your nervous system the difference between productive reflection and rumination.

Most importantly, therapy during this threshold time helps you metabolize the year’s accumulated experiences, both triumphs and losses, so you enter the new year with genuine integration rather than just exhaustion. Through processing what 2022 brought, you’re not just creating space for 2023; you’re literally rewiring your capacity to meet uncertainty with grounded presence rather than familiar panic.

Because true resilience isn’t about becoming invulnerable to life’s challenges but developing an unshakeable trust in your ability to meet whatever comes, drawing on both your hard-won survival skills and the new neural pathways of healing you’re courageously building, one session at a time.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

How Resilience Actually Shows Up in Driven Women

When driven women talk about resilience, they often describe what I’d call “performed invulnerability”. The ability to keep functioning, keep delivering, keep showing up for everyone else, regardless of internal conditions. This performance gets labeled resilience by the world around them. But what I see clinically is often something different: a capacity for containment that costs far more than it appears to.

True resilience, in the clinical sense, includes the capacity to acknowledge difficulty. It requires the ability to feel distress. Not just manage it. And to tolerate the discomfort of not having everything together. For women who’ve survived childhood environments that required constant competence, this is genuinely difficult. The thing that looks like weakness. Needing help, acknowledging uncertainty, letting someone see you struggle. Is actually the thing that builds the nervous system’s long-term capacity to recover.

Tessa, a city planner in her early forties, described entering the new year with what she called “a very detailed plan for not falling apart.” She had her quarterly goals set, her therapist booked through June, her gym schedule color-coded. What she didn’t have was any plan for what to do if the plan didn’t work. In session, we explored what resilience would actually look like for her. Not the execution of a perfect strategy, but the capacity to continue when the strategy failed. That’s a different skill entirely, and it required her to practice the thing she’d spent her whole life avoiding: sitting with uncertainty without immediately solving it.

In my work with clients, I’ve found that resilience for driven women often grows not through adding more to the calendar but through deliberately practicing its opposite. Pausing, not knowing, allowing things to be incomplete. The nervous system learns flexibility through contrast. You can’t build real resilience in a life that never allows you to be uncertain, uncomfortable, or unproductive.

Resilience and Grief Are Not Opposites

One of the most counterintuitive clinical truths about resilience is that it coexists with. And is often deepened by. Grief. In a culture that conflates resilience with relentlessness, this is a difficult reframe. But in the consulting room, what I see consistently is that the women who are most genuinely resilient are those who’ve learned to grieve well: who can acknowledge loss, feel it fully, and still orient themselves toward the future.

For women entering a new year after a particularly hard one, grief is often the unfinished business sitting beneath the resolution-making. The year that passed may have held losses that weren’t fully mourned. A relationship that ended, a health scare that still sits in the body, a version of your life you quietly surrendered. Moving forward without tending to those losses doesn’t make you resilient. It makes you efficient at avoiding the thing that, if processed, would actually free you.

What does this look like in practice? Sometimes it means deliberately scheduling time to acknowledge what was hard. Not in a self-indulgent way, but as a genuine accounting. Sometimes it means naming the grief to someone who can witness it. Sometimes it means noticing, in your body, where the year still lives. In the tightness across your shoulders, the low-grade dread on Sunday evenings. And making space for that to be spoken rather than managed.

Resilience isn’t the absence of the wound. It’s what grows around it when the wound has been genuinely tended.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

You can be grateful for what you have and grieve what you didn’t get. You can love someone and acknowledge the harm they caused. You can be strong and still need help. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven women I work with often struggle with this because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives.

The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual. “What’s wrong with me?”. We miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt. These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me. And what systems made it possible?”

When Resilience Feels Like the Only Option You Have

In my work with driven women, I’ve noticed something important about the word “resilience.” It’s often used as a compliment. You’re so resilient, you bounced back so well, look at how strong you are. And for women who came from relational trauma backgrounds, that compliment can land with a particular sting. Because resilience, for us, wasn’t a choice. It was a survival strategy.

Shalini, a physician in her early forties, put it plainly in a session once: “People tell me I’m resilient like it’s a gift. What they mean is that I’ve survived things that should have broken me. And I have. But I didn’t choose that. I just kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.”

That’s a different kind of resilience than the positive-psychology version. It’s not the resilience of someone who fell down and got up because they believed they could. It’s the resilience of someone who got up because there was no one coming to help them up, and lying there was worse. Both are real. Both deserve acknowledgment. But they are not the same thing. And treating them as interchangeable does a disservice to the second kind.

What I want to offer as we enter a new year is a reframe: resilience isn’t just endurance. At its best, it’s the capacity to feel what’s hard, to be changed by it rather than flattened by it, and to return to yourself. Not to who you were before, because that person may not exist anymore, but to who you are becoming.

What Resilience Actually Looks Like in the Body

The clinical literature on resilience has shifted significantly in recent years. Early models emphasized traits. The resilient person as someone with particular characteristics. More recent work, including the contributions of Ann Masten, PhD, psychologist and researcher at the University of Minnesota, emphasizes that resilience is less about individual traits and more about access to systems of support: stable relationships, basic safety, community.

This matters for driven women from relational trauma backgrounds because it reframes the question. It’s not “what do I lack that resilient people have?” It’s “what systems of support am I building now, even if they weren’t there before?” The absence of a secure attachment figure in childhood doesn’t doom you to fragility. This experience means that healing involves building those supports now. A therapist, a community, a partner who is consistently present, a relationship with yourself that’s based on accurate self-knowledge rather than fear.

In the body, genuine resilience doesn’t feel like hardness. It doesn’t feel like invulnerability or a refusal to be affected. It feels more like flexibility. The capacity to bend without breaking, to feel moved without being swept away. This response is what nervous system regulation looks like in practice: not the absence of activation, but the capacity to return to baseline after activation. Not the absence of grief, but the ability to grieve and still get out of bed. Not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in the presence of fear.

This kind of resilience is built. It’s not innate. And for those of us who had to develop our version of it under duress, it’s worth pausing at the start of a new year to acknowledge what we’ve constructed. Quietly, often alone, without ceremony. And to recognize it as exactly what it is: extraordinary.

Why Entering the New Year Feels Different When You Carry Relational Trauma

For many driven women with relational trauma backgrounds, the new year carries a particular emotional weight that goes beyond the cultural enthusiasm for fresh starts. New Year’s is a relational holiday in disguise. A time when families gather, when the mythology of belonging is most visible, when the gap between the life you’re building and the family foundation that should have supported it is most apparent.

Ana, a VP of engineering in her late thirties, described it plainly: “Every new year, I set all these intentions. And every new year, the first week back with my family reminds me why I need them. Not because my family is catastrophically dysfunctional. They’re just… consistently disappointing in the specific way that only your family can be. I come back every January feeling like I’m starting from behind.”

If that resonates, I want to offer a reframe: you’re not starting from behind. You’re starting from a different place than your peers who had more relational support in the year that just ended. The resilience required to continue building a meaningful life, healing relational wounds, and showing up for the people you love. Without the scaffolding others lean on without knowing they’re leaning. Is a form of capital. It doesn’t feel like it in the first week of January. But it’s real.

What Resilience Actually Asks of You

Resilience, in the popular imagination, is often presented as a destination. You either have it or you’re building toward it. I want to propose something different: resilience is a practice, not a state. And like any practice, it has rhythms. There are seasons of high capacity and seasons of depletion. There are periods when your window of tolerance is wide and periods when it’s narrow. Entering a new year with resilience doesn’t mean entering it fully resourced. This dynamic means having enough of a foundation to take the next step. Which is all any of us ever has, and all that’s ever required.

Ann Masten, PhD, psychologist and researcher at the University of Minnesota who has spent decades studying resilience in children and adults, coined the term “ordinary magic” to describe the finding that resilience is less about extraordinary strength and more about access to ordinary resources. A trusted person, a stable environment, a sense of meaning. For driven women building these resources in adulthood rather than receiving them in childhood, the work of cultivating ordinary magic is real and requires effort. But it is possible. I’ve watched it happen with hundreds of clients over fifteen years of clinical work.

What does entering this new year with resilience actually look like in practice? It looks like knowing your depletion signals and having at least one plan for responding to them. It looks like having at least one person in your life. A therapist, a partner, a close friend. Who can hold you when you’re struggling rather than requiring you to hold them. It looks like building habits that resource your nervous system in ways that cost less energy than they return: movement that you genuinely enjoy, rest that is actual rest, connection that nourishes rather than depletes.

It doesn’t look like a perfect meditation practice. It doesn’t look like having resolved your relational trauma. It doesn’t look like having it together. It looks like moving through the year with enough self-knowledge and enough support to recover from what’s hard rather than being flattened by it. That is enough. That is, in fact, a lot.

On Celebrating the Year Behind You

Before we fully turn toward the new year, I want to pause and ask: have you actually acknowledged what you survived and built in the year behind you? Not as a productivity accounting exercise, but as a genuine act of witness to yourself.

Driven women from relational trauma backgrounds are often extraordinarily good at forward motion and extraordinarily bad at pause. The internal critic is always scanning for what’s not done yet, not healed yet, not good enough yet. The year that just ended contains real evidence that contradicts that voice. And most of us never actually gather that evidence or let it land.

What did you carry this year that was genuinely hard? What did you do anyway? What did you build, repair, maintain, or begin? Who did you show up for? In what ways did you show up differently than the patterns you inherited. Parenting, relating, setting limits, asking for what you needed? These are not small things. For someone building from a relational trauma background, they are the actual substance of healing. Let yourself see them.

Entering the new year with resilience starts with honest acknowledgment of what it actually took to get here. Not the performed version. Not “I’m so grateful, look at everything I have.” The honest version: I have built something real, and it was genuinely hard to do, and I’m still here. That’s the foundation. That’s where the new year actually starts.

On Permission to Rest as a Form of Resilience

One of the most radical things a driven woman from a relational trauma background can do at the start of a new year is to give herself explicit permission to rest. Not as a reward for productivity. Not on the condition that everything is done. But as a genuine act of care for the nervous system that has been running hard for a long time.

Rest, for those of us who grew up in environments where rest wasn’t safe. Where stillness invited intrusion, or where productivity was the price of conditional love. Can feel counterintuitive to the point of anxiety. Stopping feels dangerous. Slowing down feels like falling behind. The nervous system that learned to manage chaos through constant output doesn’t know how to interpret the absence of urgency. It creates urgency where none exists, because urgency is familiar.

Angela, a startup founder who took two weeks off between Christmas and the new year for the first time in her career, described the first three days as torture: “My brain kept inventing emergencies. I couldn’t figure out how to be a person who wasn’t working. And by day four, something shifted. I remembered I was tired. Like, actually tired. Not just depleted-and-pushing-through tired but genuinely, deeply tired. And I cried for about an hour and then slept for eleven hours. And I felt more like myself than I had in years.”

That story isn’t unusual. For driven women whose nervous systems have been running on overdrive, genuine rest can feel like breakdown before it feels like restoration. The tears, the unexpected depth of fatigue, the loss of the identity that productivity provides. All of these are part of the process of actually stopping. And what comes after, for most people, is something closer to aliveness than the busy state that preceded it.

Entering the new year with resilience means building in genuine rest. Not as the thing you’ll do when everything else is done (which means never), but as a structural part of how you live. This is not advice. It’s a clinical observation: the driven women I’ve worked with who have the most sustainable capacity for meaningful work and meaningful relationship are the ones who treat their rest as non-negotiable, who protect it with the same seriousness they bring to their most important professional commitments. The rest is not the reward for the work. It is what makes the work possible.

The Small Daily Acts That Build Resilience Over Time

Resilience is not built in grand gestures. It’s built in small, consistent acts. The therapy appointment you keep even when you don’t feel like going, the five minutes of breath work before a difficult call, the limit you hold even when the guilt is loud, the conversation you have instead of the one you avoid, the rest you take without justification. These small acts, repeated over time, restructure your nervous system and your relational templates in ways that single breakthrough moments cannot.

As you enter this new year, I’d invite you to identify one small act of resilience you can commit to consistently. Not a resolution. Those are notorious for dying in February. A practice. Something specific, achievable, and genuinely nourishing. Something that, if you did it every day for the next year, would leave you meaningfully more resourced than you are now. One thing. Tended consistently. That is enough. That is, in fact, how lasting change happens.

Here’s to the new year. Here’s to everything you’ve survived that brought you here. And here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations. Slowly, honestly, and with more self-compassion than anyone in your family of origin ever modeled for you.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Steps Toward Healing: Building Genuine Resilience for the New Year

In my work with clients, I find that the word “resilience” gets used in a way that often misses what it actually means. It gets conflated with toughness, with not breaking down, with the ability to absorb difficulty and keep going without showing the seams. But the resilience that actually serves us. The kind that’s worth building, and the kind that’s sustainable over years rather than quarters. Isn’t about invulnerability. It’s about the capacity to be genuinely affected by hard things and to move through them without being permanently undone. That’s a very different orientation, and it requires a very different kind of preparation.

Entering a new year with genuine resilience means being honest about what the year ahead might ask of you, and then making deliberate investments in your capacity to meet those demands. Not by toughening up, but by deepening your roots. That pattern means attending to your nervous system, your relationships, your relationship with your own emotional experience, and the beliefs that will be tested when things get hard. It’s not pessimism. It’s preparation of a different kind. Preparation that actually builds something rather than just bracing.

One of the most important investments in resilience is therapeutic work that addresses the nervous system directly. Somatic Experiencing (SE) is particularly valuable here, because it increases your baseline capacity for regulation. The nervous system’s ability to move through activation and return to a settled state without getting stuck at either extreme of overwhelm or shutdown. When that capacity is higher, difficulty lands differently. It still lands. Resilience doesn’t mean insulation. But it doesn’t knock you over the way it might otherwise. That’s a genuine physiological change, and it’s one you can build with consistent, skilled support.

For women whose resilience is being tested by relational dynamics. Difficult family situations, a challenging political or social climate, professional environments that require them to absorb a great deal. Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a powerful complement. IFS helps you build what’s called “Self-leadership”. A quality of internal groundedness and clarity that remains available even when parts of you are scared, overwhelmed, or grieving. The goal isn’t to stop having those parts’ experiences. It’s to have them without losing access to the part of you that knows what matters and can keep moving toward it.

Practical resilience-building for driven women also means being intentional about community in the new year. We know from both clinical experience and research that social connection is one of the most powerful buffers against stress. Not just pleasant, but physiologically necessary. Investing in relationships that are genuinely nourishing, honest, and reciprocal is one of the most evidence-based things you can do for your resilience. That might mean deepening existing relationships, building new ones, finding or building community around shared experience, or considering group therapy as a context where relational resilience is both practiced and supported.

It’s also worth naming that genuine resilience includes knowing your limits and honoring them. The cultural story about resilience often leaves this part out. The idea that resilience means unlimited capacity, that asking for help is weakness, that needing to slow down is failure. None of that is true, and believing it is often one of the things that makes hard years harder than they need to be. If you’re entering a new year knowing that certain things are going to be difficult, make a plan that includes who you’ll lean on and what support will be in place. Not just what you’ll produce. You can explore what a structured support framework might look like through Fixing the Foundations.

Resilience is built in relationship, in the body, in the accumulated experience of moving through hard things with adequate support and coming out the other side having learned something. You don’t have to do the hard things alone, and you don’t have to do them while bracing against any sign of being affected. Let this year be one where you’re both ambitious and tended to. Where your capacity to engage is matched by your investment in your own replenishment. If you want a partner in building that, I’d invite you to learn more about working with me. The new year is always an opening. Let’s make the most of it.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Mary Oliver, poet, from “The Summer Day”

DEFINITION POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH

A phenomenon identified by Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, psychologists and professors at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, describing the positive psychological change that can emerge from the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. Post-traumatic growth is not the absence of pain or the erasure of what was lost. It is the development of new strength, perspective, or meaning that would not have arisen without the rupture.

In plain terms: Resilience isn’t about bouncing back to who you were before a hard year. It’s about discovering that you can be changed by difficulty and still move forward. Growth and grief can exist at the same time, and often the most honest New Year intention honors both.

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

References

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969.

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides 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, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

Work With Annie

Credentials & Licensure

License

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)

Clinical Experience

15,000+ direct clinical hours

Licensed in 15 U.S. Jurisdictions, including Colorado (telehealth only)

CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096

Signature Frameworks

Creator of House of Life^™ and Fixing the Foundations^™

Forthcoming Book

The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)

Past Leadership

Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling

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Featured Expert Commentary

Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.

Last clinically reviewed: August 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

Editorial Policy Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer

Frequently Asked Questions

Why focus on resilience rather than specific goals for the new year?

After 2020 showed us how quickly plans can unravel, resilience becomes more valuable than rigid goal-setting. True resilience means developing the internal resources to navigate whatever comes, pandemics, losses, unexpected changes, while maintaining your sense of self and capacity for growth, rather than tying your worth to achieving specific outcomes.

What makes the week between Christmas and New Year so psychologically significant?

This liminal period creates a natural pause in our usual routines, allowing our nervous systems to shift from constant doing to simply being. It's when many people unconsciously process the year's accumulated stress and grief while simultaneously opening to possibility, a unique psychological state that supports both integration and intention-setting.

How does relational trauma affect how we experience the holidays?

Holidays often intensify trauma responses because they're inherently about family, tradition, and belonging, precisely what was complicated in traumatic childhoods. You might feel simultaneously triggered by family dynamics and grieving the warm holiday experiences you never had, making this season particularly complex for healing.

What's the difference between toxic positivity resilience and genuine resilience?

Toxic resilience demands you "stay strong" while bypassing genuine emotions. True resilience means feeling your feelings fully while maintaining faith in your capacity to move through difficulty. It's not about being unaffected by hardship but developing the tools to metabolize pain without being consumed by it.

Why are quotes particularly helpful for building resilience?

Quotes work like emotional anchors, brief, memorable phrases that can pull us back to center during overwhelming moments. When your prefrontal cortex goes offline during stress, a memorized quote can serve as an external reminder of your values, strength, and the universality of human struggle and survival.