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

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LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

The Top Ten Things I’ve Learned As A Therapist.

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • October 2, 2016

SUMMARY

And yet, it’s the most fulfilling, rewarding, creative career I could possibly imagine doing and it’s a sincere honor for me to be able to make it my life’s work and to help my clients in any way I can.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Top Ten Things I’ve Learned As A Therapist.
2. References
3. Frequently Asked Questions

SUMMARY

After years in the therapy room, certain truths emerge again and again across every background and presenting problem. These are 10 of the most important things a therapist has learned about being human. Direct, honest, and grounded in real clinical work rather than motivational abstraction.

Related Reading

• What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?
• Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections
• Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

So in honor of achieving this personal and professional milestone, I wanted to write a post about the top ten things I’ve learned as a therapist about this wild thing called being human.

If you're ready for the full healing arc, not a single piece of it, my signature program Fixing the Foundations is the structured path your relational trauma recovery has been missing.

The Top Ten Things I’ve Learned As A Therapist.

DEFINITION THERAPY

Psychotherapy is a collaborative process between a trained clinician and a client aimed at understanding and transforming the patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that cause suffering. Effective therapy provides not just insight but a corrective relational experience, a new template for what it feels like to be truly seen, heard, and held.

Definition

The Therapeutic Relationship: The therapeutic relationship. The bond between therapist and client. Is consistently identified by research as the single most powerful predictor of therapeutic outcome, more so than any specific technique or modality. A safe, attuned therapeutic relationship is itself a healing experience.

1. Relationships wound. And they can also heal.

“We are most alive when we find the courage to be vulnerable and to connect.”, Brené Brown, PhD, LCSW, The Gifts of Imperfection

BRENÉ BROWN

Most of our wounds, patterns, and behaviors are usually put down early in relationship and it’s through relationship that these wounds get mirrored back to us and, and it’s also through a certain kind of caring, attuned, and responsible relationship that the wounds may finally have a chance to heal.

The magic and the mystery of therapy is that whatever your wounds and patterns are in the outside world, they will ultimately show up in the therapy room and that’s actually great! It gives us a chance to safely and compassionately heal and work with these patterns in a way that you may have never experienced before.

THAT’S where the healing power of therapy lies; it’s not in the increased self-awareness (though that’s great!), it’s in the actual experience of a healing relationship with your therapist.

2. No matter where you’re starting from, transformation is possible.

This has become the unofficial tagline of my business because I bone-deeply believe that it’s true: No matter where you’re starting from, transformation IS possible.

A thing I’ve learned in my time as a therapist is that most of us, when given the right conditions, will thrive and flourish. What are these conditions? Most likely they include positive regard, acceptance, support, attunement, safety, and constancy of relationship. And it may also look like removing yourself from dysfunctional or abusive people, or moving across the country to get away from your family of origin, or coming out, or rejecting the path you thought you were “supposed” to take. Etc., etc..

So no matter where you are starting out from, no matter what your childhood was like, no matter how many disappointing relationships, bad jobs, or unfulfilling life choices you’ve experienced, it’s still possible for you to experience something different, for transformation to happen within your life.

And you can set yourself up for success by getting clear on what the conditions you need for your growth and healing might be, and then giving them to yourself. (and hint: therapy is a great place to find those conditions!)

3. Most of us believe everyone else has their stuff more figured out. The reality is that they probably don’t.

So many times people in and out of my office have told me that they truly believe that they are the only ones who could possibly have a relationship that feels so empty, or a family that’s so uniquely messed up, or such a strong sense of anxiety and desperation when they wake up in the middle of the night, etc., etc..

So many times people have told me that they imagine others they pass walking down the street must surely have their stuff more figured out than them.

The reality is that those other people we imagine are having easier experiences with life, who have their stuff more figured out, probably don’t.

Look, I say this not to diminish anyone’s experience, but as a therapist, I’ve been privileged to know and witness the inner lives of a lot of people and what I believe is that we’re all often having really tough times doing this whole humaning thing no matter what it may look like from the outside.

4. Because, being a human is really, really hard.

As a therapist I want to go on record by saying that the daily stuff of our own individual lives. The adulting and humaning we’re all called upon to do each and every waking day. Is often hard. Really hard.

Every day in my work, I see people shame and blame themselves for struggling with the daily, inevitable stuff of life, and this blaming can cause so much additional and unnecessary pain and suffering. The reality is, this whole adulting and humaning thing can be really hard sometimes. For most of us.

Not only do most of us have to figure out how to make a living, find a life partner, pay the mortgage and establish our careers, deal with commutes and clogged toilets, we also have to deal with the big existential givens of being human:

• Death: Death is inevitable for we are all mortal and this inherently causes some anxiety for all of us.

• Choice: We have freedom in our lives and are responsible for our choices and actions. And coming up against this can cause anxiety.

• Isolation: We long to be connected and yet are ultimately fundamentally separate and isolated from one another. And this can cause anxiety.

• Meaning: It is ultimately our responsibility to construct the meaning of our lives given life is inherently meaningless. And facing this can cause anxiety.

Now tell me, does this sound easy? Of course not! So can we all please have some compassion for how hard it can be to be a human and to be doing this whole life thing?

5. We all mess up in our relationships. So it’s not the rupture that counts. It’s the willingness to repair.

Whenever you get two or more people together, conflict is inevitable at some point.

And if those two people are in a relationship where they were raised together as siblings, or are parent and child, or where they are partnered and sharing the same bed, sleepless nights, and juggling work, commutes, kids, in-laws, sex, money and all the other triggering stuff of life, it’s sometimes going to get hard and challenging and you’re going to fight and have conflict and be your worst self with the people you love the most. And that’s okay, that’s actually normal.

The reality is that we all mess up in our relationships. None of us are perfect. (And we therapists are definitely not perfect either!) So it’s not the rupture. The breakdown or fight or conflict or misattunement in the relationship that counts. It’s the repair.

It’s the attempt at apologizing, fixing what happened, listening to the other person, being willing to take responsibility and re-engage in the relationship. The repair. That really counts and that’s frankly a much more realistic goal to aim for then never getting mad or acting out in your relationships.

6. The healing power of simply sharing our story in front of a supportive, safe other cannot be underestimated.

Most of us, at some level, carry around shame about parts of who we are or about where we come from or what we’ve done in our lives.

But when we share our stories with others including the deepest, most real, most unedited, raw, vulnerable parts of who we are with another human who can see you, accept you, and keep on loving you, the healing power of this. The sharing of our story, of ourselves. Is profound.

I think that’s part of what I love most about being a therapist: It’s the opportunity to be that safe, witnessing person for my clients who may have never felt like they could safely share all parts of themselves with another person before and still be accepted.

It’s a sincere honor and a privilege to witness my client’s stories and to see the relief that can come for them in simply speaking their truth.

7. Self-love isn’t the goal; self-acceptance is.

I have to admit: I got pretty burned out and crabby with the last five years of the personal growth movement’s message of Self-Love. I think that, sometimes, this may be a pretty unrealistic goal for many of us.

Sometimes you just may not be able to LOVE the fact that you come from an abusive family, or LOVE that your thighs will never be cellulite-free and your arms have stretch marks, or LOVE that, because of your choices you ended up in a career you hate with $100,000K of student loan debt.

So I don’t think that challenging my clients to LOVE all the parts of themselves and their stories is that realistic or helpful.

I think what’s perhaps more realistic is to aim for ACCEPTING these parts of you or your story. You don’t have to love it all, but can you at least accept it? If we’re able to start from accepting our reality, change becomes possible.

8. Sometimes on the healing path, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

Sometimes when we’re first beginning the work of therapy or healing, it’s akin to opening up and facing a closet in your house that’s been crammed full of stuff for the last seven years and never once touched or organized.

So you start cleaning that closet out, pulling the crap out bit by bit till soon the whole floor of that room is covered with junk and you’re standing in a pile feeling exhausted, frustrated, and more than a little hopeless that things won’t get better.

This is what it can feel like at a certain point in therapy: you’ve just made a bigger mess of things now that you started bringing your awareness to it all and you’re not sure how it’s going to get better and probably you’re even questioning and doubting why you started this all in the first place!

Thank you. Check your inbox.

Your guide is on its way.

But you have to remember this: Sometimes on the healing path, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

So keep plugging along, sorting out piles, hauling stuff off to the Goodwill, putting items back one by one, tossing what you don’t want. In therapy, keep showing up to your sessions, keep tolerating the discomfort of the not-knowing, trust the process and realize that often, things will get worse before they get better.

But eventually, things will change. Change is the only constant after all. You just have to keep going.

9. No one else is the expert of your experience. Only you are!

I tell my clients this all the time: I am not the expert of you. Your friends, your family, the gurus on TV, no one is the expert of you except for you. My job as a therapist is to be the expert in helping you access you and what you know to be best and true and most right for you.

Part of the beauty of therapy is that we get to clear away this unnecessary psychic debris and help you access what’s been there all along: Your core self, your own deep knowing, your internal sense of wisdom and your locus of control.

So remember: No one else is the expert of your experience. Only you are! But other people can definitely help you access your own expertise.

10. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

Credit goes to one of my favorite psychotherapy pen-and-paper mentors, Carl Gustav Jung for this beauty of the above quote. And ever since I first heard it nearly ten years ago, it resonated with me in every cell of my body.

It’s such a gift for me to help facilitate this for my clients.

Wrapping this up.

This post could have tripled or quadrupled in length because, quite honestly, there is so much more I could say about what I’ve learned in my work as a therapist. But I’ll leave that for future articles.

For now, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:

Leave a message in the comments below and I’ll be sure to respond.

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

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

This is part of our complete guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: How Therapy Actually Works: A Complete Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work. Routledge.
• Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self. Norton & Company.
• Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology.
• Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.
• Frankl, V. E. (1963). Man’s Search for Meaning. Guide Press.
• Kierkegaard, S. (1849 (translated 1980)). The Sickness Unto Death. Princeton University Press.
• Camus, A. (1942 (translated 1991)). The Myth of Sisyphus. Vintage International.
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
• Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. Guilford Press.
• Neff, K. D. (2003). The development and validation of a scale to measure self-compassion. Self and Identity.
• Stiles, W. B., Barkham, M., Twigg, E., Mellor-Clark, J., & Cooper, M. (2003). Impact of early sudden gains in cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

The Science Beneath the Clinical Lessons

Many of the things I’ve learned as a therapist aren’t intuitions. They’re borne out by decades of research on the neuroscience of trauma, attachment, and healing. Understanding the science can help you make sense of experiences that might otherwise feel mysterious, shameful, or like personal failures.

Take the lesson that change is slow. This isn’t just observational wisdom. It’s rooted in neuroscience. The brain’s capacity to form new neural pathways, a process researchers call neuroplasticity, is real and significant. But it happens through repetition, through emotionally significant relational experiences, and through time. Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, describes the therapeutic process as one of “integration”. Helping different systems of the brain (emotional, cognitive, somatic, relational) become more connected and communicative with each other. That kind of integration doesn’t happen in a week.

Or take the lesson that the body holds the story. Peter Levine, PhD, founder of Somatic Experiencing and researcher in the neurophysiology of trauma, demonstrated through his clinical work and research that traumatic experience is stored not primarily in the narrative mind but in the body. In muscle tension, nervous system arousal patterns, visceral sensations, and procedural memory. This is why talk therapy alone has limits for some people, and why somatic, body-based approaches are so valuable as complements.

Understanding the science doesn’t change the path of healing. But it often changes how people relate to their own struggle. Knowing that your persistent anxiety isn’t weakness but an adaptive nervous system response, or that your difficulty trusting isn’t character flaw but an attachment pattern learned in your first years of life, can be profoundly liberating. You’re not broken. You’re a person whose brain and body learned what they needed to learn to survive. And who is now, with support, learning something new.

How These Lessons Show Up for Driven Women Specifically

The ten lessons I’ve learned as a therapist apply to everyone. But they land with particular weight for driven women, because the dynamics of achievement and identity in this population create specific clinical textures that are worth naming.

The lesson that you can’t think your way out of a feeling, for instance, hits differently for women who’ve organized their entire identities around being the thinking, competent, analytical one. The idea that the body is keeping score. That your persistent gut tension or your inability to sleep or your inexplicable panic attacks are data rather than malfunction. Can feel destabilizing at first for someone who’s learned to override her physical experience in service of her goals.

Isabel is a management consultant who came to work with me after what she described as “a breakdown that looked like a breakthrough.” She’d been promoted to the highest level of her firm, had given a TED talk, was regularly quoted in industry publications. And was waking up at 3am every night unable to breathe. “I kept trying to fix it cognitively,” she told me. “Make a list. Problem-solve. Optimize my sleep hygiene.” What she hadn’t learned, in any of her considerable education, was how to feel something without immediately trying to manage it.

In my work with women like Isabel, the entry point into deeper healing is often through the body. Through learning to notice and name somatic experience without immediately categorizing it as a problem to solve. The stomach that drops in a certain meeting. The chest tightening when asked to take on more. The jaw that unclenches for the first time in months during a weekend by the ocean. These are the signals that have been waiting to be heard. Not fixed, just acknowledged.

The lesson that relationships are the medicine connects to this too. For many driven women, professional excellence has provided a sense of worth that interpersonal vulnerability cannot. But the specific wound of relational trauma. The wound that says you can’t trust people, that needing them is dangerous, that you’re essentially alone. Can only be healed relationally. In the therapy room. In honest friendships. In learning, slowly, that it’s safe to let people in.

The Lesson Most Clients Resist: Healing Happens in Relationship

Of all the lessons I’ve accumulated over years of clinical practice, this is the one that surprises clients most. And that they resist most vigorously: you cannot fully heal alone.

In a culture that prizes self-reliance and individual willpower, and in a population of women who’ve often survived by learning not to need anyone, this lesson can feel like a defeat. The idea that healing requires an other. A therapist, a community, a trusted relationship. Can feel threatening to someone whose deepest adaptation was learning to be her own sufficient resource.

But the research is unambiguous. John Bowlby, MD, British psychiatrist and father of attachment theory, proposed that humans are fundamentally relational creatures. That the capacity to form secure attachments is as essential to survival as food and shelter. Judith Herman, MD, who wrote the definitive clinical text on trauma recovery, is equally clear: “Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.”

This doesn’t mean you need to share everything with everyone. It means that the specific kind of healing that relational trauma requires. The healing of the implicit expectation that others will fail, hurt, or abandon you. Can only happen in the context of relationships that don’t do those things. Over and over, in small reparative doses, until the nervous system finally gets the message that something has changed.

That’s what therapy can provide. Not just insight. Not just tools. A lived, felt, relational experience of something different. Something the nervous system can use as new evidence about what relationships can be.

Both/And: Strength and Suffering Can Coexist

In clinical work with driven women, one of the most healing shifts happens when they stop framing their experience as either/or. Either I’m strong or I’m struggling. Either I’m grateful for what I have or I’m allowed to hurt. Either my life is objectively good or my pain is valid. The truth, almost always, is both.

Lucia is a physician in her early forties. Board-certified, respected by colleagues, raising two children she adores. On paper, she’s thriving. In my office, she described a sensation she called “smiling underwater.” Everything looks fine from the outside. Inside, she hasn’t taken a full breath in months. She doesn’t want to complain because she knows how privileged her life looks. But the weight is real, and the isolation of carrying it silently is making it heavier.

This is the paradox I see again and again in my practice: the women who have built the most impressive external lives are often the ones carrying the heaviest internal loads. Not because success caused their suffering, but because the same relational trauma that drove them to achieve also taught them to perform wellness rather than feel it. Both things are true: they are genuinely accomplished, and they are genuinely struggling. Healing begins when they stop forcing themselves to choose between those two realities.

The Systemic Lens: What Your Struggle Reveals About the System, Not About You

When a driven woman is struggling. With her mental health, her relationships, her sense of self. The cultural prescription is almost always individual: meditate, journal, set boundaries, practice self-care. These interventions aren’t wrong, but they’re radically incomplete. They place the burden of repair on the woman who was harmed, without ever naming the systems that created the conditions for harm.

The expectation that women. Particularly driven women. Should manage careers, households, relationships, caregiving, and their own mental health without structural support isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systemic design flaw. When corporations demand 60-hour weeks and then offer “wellness programs” instead of workload reduction, when healthcare is tied to employment, when childcare costs more than college tuition in many states. The “wellness gap” driven women experience isn’t a gap in their self-care routines. It’s a gap in the social contract.

In my work with clients, I find it essential to name these forces explicitly. Your exhaustion is not a character deficit. Your difficulty “balancing” work and life isn’t a skills gap. You are attempting to meet inhuman expectations with human resources, and the system that set those expectations has no interest in adjusting them. Understanding this doesn’t solve the problem. But it stops you from internalizing it.

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.

The Path Forward: Applying What Therapy Teaches to Your Own Healing

In my work as a therapist, the things I’ve learned don’t stay neatly behind the office door. They’ve shaped how I understand human suffering, what I believe people actually need to heal, and what I think gets in the way most reliably. If I’m honest, the single most consistent thing I’ve witnessed over years of clinical work is this: people heal in relationship. Not in isolation. Not by reading the right books or finding the right reframe. In connection. With a therapist, with a community, with themselves. Whatever path forward looks like for you, I’d encourage you to build it around that truth.

What I’ve also learned is that most people underestimate how much of their suffering is physiological. The anxiety that shows up as catastrophic thinking, the depression that manifests as flatness and disconnection, the reactivity that blows up important relationships. So much of it has roots in a nervous system that learned to brace, to protect, to survive. And nervous systems don’t update through good intentions alone. They update through experience. New, repeated, safe experiences that slowly teach your body something different than what it learned early on.

One of the modalities I’ve come to trust most deeply for this kind of system-level change is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). EMDR is one of the most empirically supported treatments we have for trauma, and what I’ve seen in clients who do this work is a qualitative shift. Not just intellectually understanding that the past is in the past, but actually feeling that in a way that changes behavior in the present. Old wounds lose their charge. The past stops running the show from behind the scenes.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another approach that I find myself drawing on constantly. Both in sessions and in how I think about the people I work with. The idea that we’re all made up of different parts that each have their own histories, needs, and strategies is both clinically sophisticated and genuinely humanizing. When a client stops attacking the part of themselves that’s avoidant or angry or shut down, and gets curious about it instead, something opens up. That curiosity is the beginning of self-compassion that actually sticks.

Here’s something else I’ve learned that doesn’t get said enough: healing isn’t linear, and it doesn’t end at a destination called “healed.” It’s more like an ongoing orientation. Toward honesty, toward connection, toward yourself. Some periods of your life will call for deeper work; others will be about integration and maintenance. Recognizing which season you’re in is itself a kind of wisdom that develops with practice. If you’re wondering whether you’re in a season that calls for deeper support, the asking of that question is usually the answer.

For driven women especially, I’ve learned that the biggest obstacle to healing is often the belief that they should be able to figure it out themselves. That needing help is weakness, or that therapy is for people who can’t cope. But the women I’ve watched do the most profound healing are often the sharpest, most capable people I know. They didn’t heal despite their intelligence; they healed partly because they were willing to apply it to something that mattered as much as their own lives. You can explore what that looks like through something like foundational healing work designed specifically for this.

Whatever brought you to this point of reflection. Whether it’s a life circumstance, a relationship, a quiet and persistent sense that something needs to change. I want you to take it seriously. That pull toward growth is worth listening to. You don’t have to know exactly what you need or what it will look like. You just have to take one step. Reaching out is that step. And in my experience, it’s the one that changes everything that comes after it. I’ve learned a lot as a therapist. The most important thing is this: people can change, and they don’t have to do it alone.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
2. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
3. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. fearful-avoidant attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby's unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
4. Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: retrospect and prospect. Am J Orthopsychiatry. 1982;52(4):664-678. doi:10.1111/j.1939-0025.1982.tb01456.x. PMID: 7148988.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.

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

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