Sarah did three years of weekly therapy. She’d read the books, listened to the podcasts, could name every pattern in her family of origin. And still, every time her mother’s name showed up on her phone, Sarah felt her stomach drop and her chest get hot. She knew she was an independent 44-year-old woman and not a fourteen-year-old girl. Her body didn’t seem to understand that. She’d started to think therapy just didn’t work on her.
Fixing the Foundations™ is what changes that.
If any of these read like your journaling, you’re in the right place. This is what Fixing the Foundations™ is for.
Fixing the Foundations™ is a new course and it has no course testimonials yet. These are words readers have sent about Annie’s free writing, the blog and the newsletter. They are about the writing, not about this course, and not about therapy. The course is built in the same voice.
“Annie, with your writing, you are making an important contribution to a wider audience than could ever meet with you one on one. You’re a gifted writer, you offer empathy and clear headed explanations for complicated issues. You address real life issues in a user friendly/supportive way. It’s beautiful and a gift. AND, you back up what you say with solid research.” L.R., reader
“Thank you for another incredibly beautiful post, Annie. It resonated so deeply with me that I looked back in a folder where I keep ‘doodles,’ things I have drawn or written at times that I feel something rising up that needs to be acknowledged.” Mary, reader
“Whenever I think the blog isn’t going to apply to me, it always hits the nail on the head. Thank you, Annie!” Robin, reader
More words from readers are on the full testimonials page.
These are the patterns I see across my practice, week after week. Tap any card below to see how we work with it inside the course.
You don’t need to have done years of therapy to belong here. You just need to be someone who’s ready to look at the patterns underneath.
Click either column to read the honest version of who Fixing the Foundations™ is built for.
48 lessons. 50 written exercises. A 200-page workbook. Seven phases in the clinical order that works.
Fixing the Foundations™ works at the level of the proverbial foundation, the early wiring underneath the polished adult life. In my work with clients, I’ve watched people try to begin with the grief, the relationship, the thing that hurts most, then conclude they’ve failed when their body gets overwhelmed. The order is the intervention. Phase 1 gives you the tools. Phase 2 teaches you how to use them. Then we go deeper.
Grounded in the work of Judith Herman, MD; Dan Siegel, MD; Peter Levine, PhD; Stephen Porges, PhD; Carl Rogers, PhD; James Pennebaker, PhD; Diana Fosha, PhD; and Bessel van der Kolk, MD. I built this opening around the clinical sequence I keep coming back to: safety and stabilization before deeper processing.
This matters because you don’t use a brand-new regulation tool for the first time in the middle of a fight, a board meeting, or a 9pm phone call that has already sent your body into overdrive. You practice it while things are calm. That is how it becomes available later.
Grounded in the work of Stephen Porges, PhD; Peter Levine, PhD; Dan Siegel, MD; Pat Ogden, PhD; John Bowlby, MD; and Ed Tronick, PhD. I kept returning to these clinicians and researchers because they gave language to what I’d watched for years: your body can be doing something very intelligent long before your thinking mind catches up.
Think of this phase like learning your own kitchen before you try to cook a complicated meal. You learn where the fire extinguisher is, what the smoke alarm sounds like, and which burner runs too hot. Then, when your boss sends the email or your partner gets quiet, you have a plan that belongs to your actual body.
Grounded in the work of Richard Schwartz, PhD; Diana Fosha, PhD; Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Kristin Neff, PhD; Dan Siegel, MD; and John Bowlby, MD. Richard Schwartz, PhD’s parts framework changed the way I understand the person who knows exactly what they’re doing and still finds themselves doing it at 11pm. There isn’t one broken self to fix. There are protective parts with old jobs.
A manager part is a little like the person in your house who took over every bill, every birthday, every possible emergency because nobody else was doing it. That part is exhausted. It is exhausting everyone around it. But it got that job for a reason. We start there.
Grounded in the work of Judith Herman, MD; Kenneth Doka, PhD; Pauline Boss, PhD; Peter Levine, PhD; Richard Schwartz, PhD; Diana Fosha, PhD; Kristin Neff, PhD; and Donald Winnicott, MD. I found Kenneth Doka, PhD’s language for disenfranchised grief and Pauline Boss, PhD’s work on ambiguous loss after sitting with too many people who had a real ache and no socially acceptable name for it.
You won’t be asked to rip open every cabinet in the proverbial house of your life and sit in the debris. You’ll work with grief in a container, with a beginning and an end, because grief needs witness and a place to land, not another demand to get over it.
Grounded in the work of John Bowlby, MD; Mary Ainsworth, PhD; Mary Main, PhD; John Gottman, PhD; Ed Tronick, PhD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Stephen Porges, PhD; Peter Levine, PhD; and Dan Siegel, MD. Mary Main, PhD’s work on earned secure attachment is one I come back to often, because it gives us a hopeful truth that is not sentimental: the old template can be understood and revised.
Attachment is not a personality quiz result you get sentenced to live with. It is a set of early instructions about closeness. This phase helps you notice the instructions before they quietly write another text, pick another fight, or make someone kind feel strangely uninteresting.
Grounded in the work of Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Peter Levine, PhD; Stephen Porges, PhD; Emily Nagoski, PhD; Donald Winnicott, MD; Stuart Brown, MD; Rick Hanson, PhD; Carl Jung, PhD; and Judith Herman, MD. Emily Nagoski, PhD’s work helped me name something I see all the time: wanting has an accelerator and a brake, and many people have spent years assuming the brake is their whole personality.
Reclamation is not about becoming a shinier version of yourself. It’s more like opening the windows in a room you’ve kept closed for years, then noticing the air was there all along.
Grounded in the work of Norman Doidge, MD; Judith Herman, MD; Richard Schwartz, PhD; Stephen Porges, PhD; James Pennebaker, PhD; Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD; and Dan Siegel, MD. I included this phase because I’ve watched insight disappear under the pressure of a bad season when there was no maintenance plan waiting in the kitchen drawer. The plan needs to fit a bad month, not an ideal one.
The goal is not that you never get activated again. The goal is that an old pattern no longer gets to drive the whole car home.
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Not more theory. Not another book. A complete written map, in the order that actually works.
The internet is full of self-study courses on trauma. Very few are built by licensed clinicians. Here’s the honest difference.
This is still a psychoeducational course, not therapy. The credentials are here so you know who built the map you’d be following.
I built Fixing the Foundations™ because I couldn’t send my clients anywhere.
After fifteen thousand clinical hours, I kept meeting the same woman in my office. She was 42 or 47 or 51. She was a physician, an executive, an operator, a founder, a therapist herself. She’d done years of therapy. She’d read every book. She could name every pattern. And she was still flinching when her mother’s name showed up on her phone, still shutting down when her husband put a hand on her shoulder from behind, still exhausted in a way that sleep didn’t fix.
She didn’t need another book. She needed a sequenced program that treated relational trauma the way I treat it in the room. Nervous-system first. Anchors before excavation. Grief permitted. And the whole thing paced so a driven woman with a full life could actually get through it.
Nothing like that existed. So I built it.
Annie
This is everything included in Fixing the Foundations™. The course, the workbook, the audio, lifetime access, and the four bonuses.
One payment, or three monthly payments of $699. Both include lifetime access, the full seven-phase course, the 200-page workbook, the audio library, and all four bonuses.
You have fourteen days from the date of purchase to request a full refund, for any reason. After fourteen days, sales are final, because you receive complete permanent access to every lesson, the workbook, and all four bonuses the moment you enroll. If you choose the payment plan, every scheduled payment is required and the plan can’t be cancelled partway through. Please read the full course terms before you purchase.
When you enroll in Fixing the Foundations™, you also get four bonuses that were built specifically for the person doing this work at their own pace, on their own kitchen table, without a live cohort holding the container. Each one exists because I know what tends to come up between lessons, and I wanted you to have something in your hand for it. They come with the course at no additional cost.
A private podcast feed you can add to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you already use. Inside it, a library of audios in my voice for the moments the workbook can’t reach. Inner-child audios you can pull up when a hard memory surfaces. Pep talks for the day you want to quit. Sleep audios for the nights your body doesn’t feel safe in the dark. Regulation audios for when you’re activated and need to come back into your body in the next ten minutes. Grief companions for when you’re sitting with the parent you didn’t have and you need someone in the room with you. New audios added as I record them.
Ten composite clients, ages 40-something to 50-something, walked through all seven phases of the course. Camille at the kitchen table on a Tuesday, still in the blazer, not answering the text from a parent. Elena in the car outside the grocery store, crying after saying no to a sibling for the first time. Nadia lying awake at 2am, finally putting words to something she’s been outrunning for twenty years. Ten complete arcs, one per client, so that by the time you finish this bonus you’ve watched the entire seven-phase journey happen ten different ways, in ten different family systems, in ten different bodies. Roughly 130 pages, illustrated, printable.
Fixing the Foundations is a course. It is not therapy, and there will be moments in this work when what you need is a great therapist. This guide is for those moments. Part one is how to actually find one: what clinical training to look for, how to read a therapist directory listing and know what’s real, the five questions to ask on a consult call, the red flags that mean you should walk. Part two is how to do this course alongside therapy, including exactly what to bring into session from each phase, and scripts for asking your therapist for what you need. Part three is what to do if you’re not in therapy yet, and what this course can and can’t do without one. Roughly 50 pages.
A searchable library of the questions I’ve been asked about this work over the last fifteen years, answered in writing, in one place, for the first time. Tagged by phase, tagged by topic, searchable by keyword. You’ll find the question you’re actually asking at 11pm on a Tuesday, and you’ll find my answer to it. Seeded at launch with over 100 questions and answers drawn from my Substack, my newsletter, and the questions readers write in to ask me. New entries added over time, drawn from the patterns I see in what readers ask.
Four bonuses. $2,000 in additional value. Included at no additional cost.
Self-paced work, in an order that holds. Specific shifts, not vague promises.
This is a psychoeducational course, not clinical treatment. Results vary. The course provides a framework; your own commitment and pacing determine what shifts.
Join the Fixing the Foundations™ Waitlist
If you’ve read this far and you’re still not sure you belong here, I want to say something directly.
The uncertainty you’re feeling right now is the pattern. The part that asks whether you’re struggling enough to deserve this, whether you’ve done enough first, whether the timing is right, that part has been asking those questions your whole life. It’s not evidence that you should wait. It’s the first thing the course addresses.
The version of you who feels ready is on the other side of the seven phases, not somewhere before them.
Warmly, Annie Wright, LMFT
Join the Fixing the Foundations™ WaitlistNothing dramatic. That’s the point. Nothing dramatic happens if you don’t do this work.
You keep reading the books. You keep listening to the podcasts. You keep learning the vocabulary. You explain your childhood in complete sentences at dinner parties and to your closest friends. You get more articulate about your patterns every year.And the patterns keep going.
Your mother’s name still shows up on your phone and your stomach still drops. Your partner still puts a hand on your shoulder from behind and you still flinch, and you still can’t reason your way out of it, and you still apologize afterward and explain it and go to bed feeling like a woman who understands herself perfectly and cannot stop being the same person in her own body. The tone your mother used at the kitchen table comes out of your own mouth at bedtime with your own child. You hear yourself. You hate it. You promise yourself tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow is the same. The relationship pattern repeats. Different person, same shape. You get more insight after every ending. You use the insight to explain, not to change. Another decade goes by. You are still in this same body, still holding this same phone, still watching this same name light up the screen, still explaining yourself to your friends in the same complete sentences. Older. More articulate. No less flinching. This work isn’t about fixing you. It’s about closing the gap between what you understand and what your body can actually do differently in the room, on the phone, at the kitchen table, at bedtime.That gap is what this course is for.
It’s a Tuesday, six months from now. Your mother calls. You feel the familiar pull in your chest. And instead of spending the next three hours in your head, you take a breath, notice what’s happening in your body, and decide, not from the old fear but from something steadier, whether to pick up.
That’s not a breakthrough. That’s a Tuesday. That’s what this course is for.
The patterns don’t have to run forever. That’s all this is saying.
Join the Fixing the Foundations™ WaitlistIf you are in crisis: Call or text 988 Text HOME to 741741 988lifeline.org