50 Quotes About Healing from Trauma to Remind You You’re Not Alone
Healing from trauma is non-linear, and it’s rarely a solo endeavor. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can encounter mid-process is language that names exactly what you’ve been carrying. This collection of 50 quotes about healing from trauma is organized by theme, with clinical context throughout. It’s for driven women doing the hard internal work alongside impressive external lives. These words won’t fix everything. But they’ll remind you that you’re not alone.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- When Language Becomes a Lifeline
- What Does It Mean That Trauma Lives in the Body?
- Why Is Giving Yourself Permission to Feel So Hard?
- What Does Non-Linear Healing Actually Look Like?
- How Do Boundaries Fit Into Trauma Recovery?
- What Does Healing Ask You to Become?
- Both/And: You Are Wounded and You Are Healing
- The Systemic Lens: Why We Need Collective Healing Language
- Moving Forward with These Words
- Frequently Asked Questions
When Language Becomes a Lifeline
She’s in her car in the parking garage of her office building, engine off, hands still wrapped around the steering wheel. Kira has nine minutes before her next meeting. It’s a Tuesday morning in November, rain streaking down the concrete walls of the structure, the fluorescent light overhead flickering. Her slide deck is flawless. Her voice, when she walks into that conference room, will be measured and authoritative.
Nobody will know she spent forty minutes on her bathroom floor this morning, trying to breathe through something she can’t quite name.
Kira has been in trauma therapy for eight months. She knows, intellectually, that what she’s carrying has a name. Complex PTSD, rooted in a childhood that looked fine from the outside and felt anything but on the inside. She understands, in theory, that healing is non-linear. But in the parking garage, theory doesn’t reach her. What reaches her is the note she keeps on her phone. A running list of quotes she’s gathered over the past year. She opens it now, reads three of them, and something in her chest loosens just enough. She gathers herself. She walks into the building.
What Kira discovered is something I’ve watched happen repeatedly across 15+ years of clinical work with driven women: language can be a lifeline. When we’re in the thick of trauma recovery, we often can’t access our own words. The nervous system is flooded. The thinking mind goes offline. What breaks through sometimes isn’t an insight or a technique. It’s a sentence that says, I’ve been there. This is real. You’re not losing your mind.
Trauma isolates. It convinces us that our reactions are uniquely shameful, that nobody could possibly understand the terror we carry in our bodies, that we are fundamentally broken in ways others are not. One of the most significant moments in the healing process is when that isolation cracks. When we encounter language that reflects our experience back to us with precision and tenderness. That recognition is itself therapeutic. It begins to dismantle the shame that trauma deposits so efficiently.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades studying how trauma lives in the body and how healing requires both nervous system work and meaning-making. Part of that meaning-making is finding words that fit. Words that validate without minimizing. These 50 quotes are offered in that spirit.
TRAUMA
As defined by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is a fundamental disruption in how the mind and brain manage perceptions. A reorganization of the nervous system in response to overwhelming experience that leaves the body stuck in a state of threat even when danger has passed.
In plain terms:
Trauma isn’t just a bad memory. It’s a full-body experience that can leave you feeling perpetually unsafe, perpetually on guard, perpetually behind. Even when your external life looks completely fine. If you’re a driven woman who can’t understand why success hasn’t made you feel better, this is often part of why.
These aren’t inspirational quotes pulled from a social media algorithm. This is a curated collection from trauma researchers, clinicians, survivors, poets, and thinkers who have looked directly at this experience and found language for it. Some of these quotes will land immediately. Others might not make sense for six more months, when your healing has shifted and a phrase you passed over suddenly stops you cold. Keep the ones that resonate. Return to them when you need a tether.
I’ve organized these 50 quotes into themed groups, each reflecting a different dimension of the trauma recovery process. Throughout, I’ve added brief clinical commentary, not to over-explain the quotes, but to offer context for why these particular words tend to reach people in the ways they do.
A note before you begin: This content is psychoeducational in nature and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis or struggling with active suicidal ideation, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
What Does It Mean That Trauma Lives in the Body?
Somatic truth is one of the hardest concepts to convey to driven women who have built their lives on cognitive mastery. Trauma doesn’t reside only in your thoughts about what happened. It reorganizes how your nervous system perceives safety, what your body braces for before your mind has a chance to weigh in.
In my work with clients over more than 15 years, I’ve seen this pattern consistently: women who can articulate their trauma history with remarkable precision but whose bodies are still organizing every interaction around a threat that no longer exists. These quotes do something clinical language sometimes can’t: they name the body’s experience from inside it.
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”
Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma researcher, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
“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, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of Trauma and Recovery
“Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on. Unchanged and immutable. As every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, psychologist and somatic trauma researcher, founder of Somatic Experiencing
“The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, psychologist and somatic trauma researcher
“Childhood trauma is not just about what happened to you; it’s also about what didn’t happen for you.”
Nicole LePera, PsyD, psychologist and author of How to Do the Work
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou, poet and author
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
Khalil Gibran, poet and author of The Prophet
In my clinical practice, the van der Kolk quote above produces a particular moment of recognition again and again. The sudden understanding that the hypervigilance, the overreaction to small stressors, the perpetual bracing isn’t weakness or pathology. It’s an outdated protection strategy that made perfect sense once. That reframe shifts something. Not everything. But something.
Why Is Giving Yourself Permission to Feel So Hard?
Permission to feel is not a small thing for driven women. The same traits that make someone exceptional at leading teams, building companies, and managing complexity often require a significant suppression of emotional experience. Feeling gets scheduled for later. Later becomes never.
Healing from trauma asks something that goes against years of successful conditioning: stop moving, and feel. These quotes honor that ask without making it sound easy. It isn’t easy. What it is, is necessary.
“You don’t have to be positive all the time. It’s perfectly okay to feel sad, angry, annoyed, frustrated, scared, or anxious. Having feelings doesn’t make you a negative person. It makes you human.”
Lori Deschene, founder of Tiny Buddha
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet and mystic
“To heal is to touch with love that which we previously touched with fear.”
Stephen Levine, poet and author of A Year to Live
“Your trauma is not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility.”
Author unknown
“We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.”
S. Kelley Harrell, author and shamanic practitioner
“Healing takes time, and asking for help is a courageous step.”
Mariska Hargitay, actor and founder of the Joyful Heart Foundation
“You survive the abuse. You’re gonna survive the recovery.”
Mariska Hargitay, actor and founder of the Joyful Heart Foundation
This is the section where many of the women I work with experience the most friction. They can accept that trauma happened. They can accept that it affected their nervous system. Accepting that they’re allowed to still be in pain, years later, that their grief doesn’t have an expiration date, that’s harder. Of course it’s hard. The world doesn’t reward visible struggle, and they’ve spent years learning to look fine. You’re allowed to feel what you feel, for as long as you feel it. That’s not weakness. That’s honesty.
What Does Non-Linear Healing Actually Look Like?
Non-linear healing is one of the most important concepts in trauma recovery, and one of the most disorienting to experience in real time. Nobody tells you how tired healing makes you, or that you’ll feel worse before you feel better, or that the regression you’re in at month six isn’t failure. It’s processing at a deeper layer.
driven women struggle with this more than most. They’re accustomed to the logic of effort and outcome: put in the work, get the result. Trauma recovery doesn’t run on that logic. These quotes name the spiral without pathologizing it. That distinction matters clinically. If you find yourself drawn to the Direction Through the Dark mini-course, it’s worth knowing that one full module is dedicated specifically to navigating the non-linear nature of this process and finding your bearings when the path doubles back on itself.
“Healing is not linear. It is a spiral. You will revisit the same wounds again and again, but each time from a higher perspective.”
Author unknown
“Recovery is an unfolding process, not a destination.”
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of Trauma and Recovery
“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you. All of the expectations, all of the beliefs. And becoming who you are.”
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, clinical professor of family and community medicine
“Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.”
Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author of Daring Greatly
“It takes a lot of courage to heal the parts of yourself that you didn’t break.”
Author unknown
“There is no timestamp on trauma. There isn’t a formula that you can insert yourself into to get from horror to healed. Be patient. Take up space. Let your journey be the balm.”
Dawn Serra, sex and relationship therapist
“Some days, doing the best we can may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front. And doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”
Fred Rogers, educator and television host
“You are not broken. You are breaking through.”
Alex Myles, author and mindfulness writer
“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.”
Michelle Rosenthal, trauma recovery coach and author
POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH
A concept developed by Richard Tedeschi, PhD, psychologist and researcher at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, describing positive psychological change, including enhanced personal strength, deeper relationships, and greater appreciation for life, that can emerge as a result of struggling with highly challenging life circumstances.
In plain terms:
Post-traumatic growth isn’t toxic positivity or silver-lining thinking. It’s the genuine, hard-won expansion that can happen when you’ve had to rebuild yourself from the ground up. It doesn’t mean the trauma was worth it. It means you found something in yourself that the trauma couldn’t take. That distinction matters.
COMPOSITE VIGNETTE
Dani, 39
She came in on a Thursday evening in March, still in her work blazer, a half-empty Yeti tumbler sweating a ring onto the side table. Dani was a regional vice president at a logistics company. Precise, fast-thinking, articulate. She’d been in therapy for four months and had arrived that day with what felt, to her, like evidence of failure.
“Last fall I thought I was doing so well,” she said. “Like I could feel myself getting better. I could feel it. And now it’s like I’m back at the beginning. What was even the point of all those months?”
I felt the familiar weight of that question. The performance frame applied to healing. Progress, then apparent regression, interpreted as proof that the whole enterprise was worthless. I’d heard some version of it dozens of times, and it still caught something in me. The exhaustion of watching someone hold herself to an impossible standard in the one space meant to be free from it.
What I told her was something I’ve come to believe after years of this work: the spiral isn’t regression. The spiral is the mechanism. You don’t revisit the same wound at the same depth. You revisit it from a different altitude, with more capacity to metabolize what you couldn’t last time. “Going back to the beginning” is often a sign that the work has gotten deep enough to reach something that needed reaching. Dani sat with that for a long time. She didn’t seem entirely convinced. She picked up her Yeti and took a long drink. She’d be back the following Thursday.
How Do Boundaries Fit Into Trauma Recovery?
Learning to set boundaries is, for many women I work with, one of the most radical acts in the entire healing process. If your early environment taught you that your needs were too much, that love was conditional on your compliance, or that saying no meant abandonment, then boundaries don’t feel like self-protection. They feel dangerous. Selfish. Mean.
Healing requires unlearning that equation. These quotes reframe boundaries not as walls but as the architecture of genuine connection, the distance at which mutual care becomes possible.
“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”
Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author of Daring Greatly
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
Prentis Hemphill, therapist and embodiment facilitator
“Givers need to set limits because takers rarely do.”
Irma Kurtz, advice columnist and author
“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated.”
Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author
“No is a complete sentence.”
Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird
“You teach people how to treat you by what you allow, what you stop, and what you reinforce.”
Tony Gaskins, motivational speaker and author
“The only people who get upset about you setting boundaries are the ones who were benefiting from you having none.”
Author unknown
“Setting boundaries is a way of caring for myself. It doesn’t make me mean, selfish, or uncaring because I don’t do things your way. I care about me, too.”
Christine Morgan, author and wellness writer
“If someone throws a fit because you set a boundary, it’s just more evidence the boundary is needed.”
Author unknown
“You have the right to say no without having to explain yourself.”
Author unknown
What I see consistently in my practice is that driven women often describe setting boundaries as feeling like cruelty. Like they’re doing something mean to someone they love. That feeling is real. It’s also a legacy of relational conditioning, not a moral truth. The discomfort of setting a boundary is information. Not a stop sign, but a signal that you’re operating outside old patterns. That’s exactly where healing happens.
What Does Healing Ask You to Become?
Trauma steals the self. Part of healing is the slow, often painful process of reclaiming who you are beneath the survival strategies. Discovering who you might have been, and who you can still become. These quotes speak to that process of reclamation and emergence, the identity work that happens alongside, and because of, everything you’ve already carried.
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.”
Brené Brown, PhD, research professor and author of The Gifts of Imperfection
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
C.G. Jung, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
C.S. Lewis, author and literary scholar
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
C.G. Jung, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anaïs Nin, diarist and author
“We do not heal the past by dwelling there; we heal the past by living fully in the present.”
Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, poet and Pulitzer Prize winner
“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”
Maya Angelou, poet and author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“You cannot use someone else’s fire; you can only use your own.”
Audre Lorde, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist
“Healing is reclaiming the self that was put on hold to survive.”
Author unknown
“Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life and accepts a copy or an imitation of it.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
C.G. Jung, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology
“We repeat what we don’t repair.”
Christine Langley-Obaugh, therapist and author
“One of the most courageous decisions you’ll ever make is to finally let go of what is hurting your heart and soul.”
Brigitte Nicole, author and wellness writer
“You don’t have to be fearless. Just don’t let the fear stop you.”
Author unknown
“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.”
Nido Qubein, educator and author
The Clarissa Pinkola Estés quote above does something I find useful in session. It names a particular kind of loss that trauma creates, the loss of a life that belongs to you rather than to someone else’s expectations. Many driven women have built impressive lives that are, in a meaningful sense, copies of what they thought they were supposed to want. The work of healing often involves figuring out what they actually want underneath the performance. That’s not a small project. It’s the whole project.
COMPOSITE VIGNETTE
Lynn, 44
It was a Wednesday in late October, the kind of gray afternoon that felt like an early curtain call. Lynn arrived wearing a pearl-gray cashmere sweater and carrying a leather folio she set on the floor before sitting. She was a senior partner at a law firm. She’d been in therapy for six months and told me, when she arrived that day, that she’d printed out three quotes and taped them to the inside of her desk drawer at work.
“I know that sounds strange,” she said. “I’m not really a quotes person. But this one.” She pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. Read it quietly. “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. I read it every morning before my first meeting.”
I sat with that for a moment. I thought about everything Lynn had told me over the previous six months. The mother who’d needed her to be perfect. The partnership track she’d pursued not because she loved litigation but because she didn’t know what else to want. The marriage that was comfortable but had the quality of two people managing logistics more than choosing each other.
She wasn’t asking me whether it was strange to keep a quote in her desk drawer. She was asking whether she was allowed to want a different life. She already knew the answer. But she’d needed to read it in someone else’s words before she could believe it might apply to her. She folded the paper back along its crease and slipped it into her pocket.
Both/And: You Are Wounded and You Are Healing
Carrying contradictions is one of the most exhausting and least-acknowledged aspects of trauma recovery. You can be wounded and you can be healing simultaneously. You can grieve what was taken from you and build something new. You can honor the past without being imprisoned by it. The Both/And isn’t a compromise. It’s a more accurate description of what’s actually happening inside you.
driven women often struggle with this most. They’re accustomed to phases: complete this, move on to that. Healing doesn’t organize itself that way. It asks you to hold contradictions rather than resolve them. Your suffering was real, and your capacity for growth is also real. Those two truths don’t cancel each other out. They coexist. That’s what these quotes are naming when they work best.
What I’ve seen consistently across years of clinical work is that the moment a woman stops trying to decide whether she’s broken or whole, and starts allowing herself to be both, something genuinely shifts. Not fixed. Not resolved. Shifted. That’s worth something.
The Systemic Lens: Why We Need Collective Healing Language
There’s a reason these quotes circulate so widely. It’s not only that individual trauma is universal. It’s that we live in a culture that actively discourages acknowledging trauma. driven women carry a particularly specific version of that pressure: success is supposed to be evidence of wellbeing. If you’re functioning, you’re fine. Strength means not needing help.
That messaging is harmful. It’s what keeps a woman sitting in a parking garage for years before she finally reaches for support. It’s what makes a quote about trauma feel like permission. Not because the words are new, but because they’re a counter-signal to everything else she’s been told. The structural reality is that there’s no cultural infrastructure for grief, for healing, for slowness. The infrastructure runs on productivity, performance, and forward momentum. Healing requires you to move against that current. That’s not personal failing. That’s a systems-level problem.
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of Trauma and Recovery, wrote that healing from trauma requires safety, mourning, and reconnection, in that order. None of those three stages are culturally valued. They’re invisible, interior, slow. Quotes that name these stages are a small act of counter-cultural resistance. They say: this inner work matters, even when it’s invisible.
For women whose external lives are structured around visibility and achievement, the hidden labor of healing can feel particularly lonely. You’re not doing something shameful. You’re doing something structurally difficult, in a culture that offers you almost no language for it except the language you find yourself and bring into the room. Your struggle is legitimate. The system was never designed with your flourishing in mind. The Strong & Stable newsletter exists for exactly this reason: ongoing language and community for women doing this inner work alongside their outer lives.
Moving Forward with These Words
Reading quotes is one thing. Using them as genuine tools in your healing process is another. In my work with clients who find quotes helpful, I’ve identified a few practices that tend to deepen the impact beyond the moment of resonance.
The first is what I call the recognition practice. When a quote lands for you, pause. Don’t scroll past it. Ask yourself what specifically resonated. What truth did it touch that you’ve been afraid to speak out loud? Journaling that response, even for five minutes, can surface something significant. The quote is a key. Your response to it is the door.
The second is the return practice: keep a running list of the quotes that move you, and return to the list when you’re in the middle of a hard stretch. Healing involves long periods of forward movement punctuated by unexpected regressions. A curated anchor list gives you a resource when your own internal resources feel depleted.
Third is the share practice. If you’re in therapy, bring a quote to session. “I read this and it stopped me” is one of the richest opening lines for clinical work. Your therapist can help you excavate what it’s touching, what resistance it’s activating, what hope it might be offering.
The healing road is long. It’s also real, and it’s yours. These words, from researchers, survivors, poets, and practitioners who have looked directly at trauma and found language for it, are offered as company on that road. You’re not alone in this. You never were.
Whether you’re considering individual therapy, executive coaching, or simply beginning to name your own patterns, know that reaching for language, refusing to leave your experience unnamed, is itself a step toward healing. It counts.
Q: How long does it actually take to heal from trauma?
A: Healing from trauma doesn’t follow a single timeline. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, describes a staged process: establishing safety, mourning and grieving, and reconnecting with ordinary life. Duration depends on trauma type and severity, quality of therapeutic support, and nervous system factors. What I tell clients: healing is less about time and more about the depth of processing. A year of genuine therapeutic work can create more lasting change than a decade of avoidance.
Q: Why do I keep feeling like I’m back at square one, even after months of therapy?
A: Healing spirals rather than progresses in a straight line. Revisiting a wound doesn’t mean you haven’t healed. It means you’ve developed more capacity to process what you couldn’t last time. For driven women especially, “feeling like I’m not making progress” is acutely painful because progress is typically their strongest skill. What looks like regression is often integration at a deeper level. If you’re genuinely stuck, discuss with your therapist whether the current approach needs adjustment.
Q: Is it possible to heal from trauma without therapy?
A: Some people experience meaningful healing through supportive relationships, somatic practices, spiritual community, and self-directed inner work. That said, complex or relational trauma typically requires a therapeutic relationship to fully process, because the nervous system learns safety in relationship. Healing relational wounds usually requires experiencing a safe, attuned relationship as part of the process. If formal therapy isn’t accessible right now, self-paced structured work can be a useful bridge.
Q: How do I know if what I experienced qualifies as trauma?
A: Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma researcher, draws a key distinction: trauma isn’t what happened to you, it’s what happened inside you as a result. Trauma isn’t defined by the severity of the event by external standards. Persistent hypervigilance, difficulty trusting, emotional dysregulation, disconnection from your body, or a sense of being fundamentally unsafe, regardless of how “bad” the circumstances were, all indicate your nervous system experienced something overwhelming. Your experience doesn’t need anyone else’s permission to count.
Q: Can driven women really prioritize healing alongside demanding careers?
A: Yes. And they often need to. Patterns shaped by trauma don’t stay neatly in the personal domain. They show up in how you lead, negotiate, relate to authority, handle conflict, and respond to failure. Unaddressed relational trauma can limit leadership capacity and relationship quality in ways external achievement won’t fix. The women I work with through therapy and coaching consistently report that investing in inner life creates compounding returns in outer life. Healing isn’t a detour from ambition. It’s the ground ambition grows from.
Q: How do I actually start healing from trauma if I don’t know where to begin?
A: Start with safety. Judith Herman’s model of trauma recovery (1992) identifies safety as the necessary first phase before any deeper processing can take place. Practically, this means finding a therapist with genuine experience in trauma, not just general counseling. It means building somatic awareness through body-based practices. It means creating relational contexts where you don’t have to perform. If formal therapy isn’t your first step, taking a structured self-assessment quiz can help you identify which patterns need the most attention.
Q: Why do quotes and poetry sometimes reach me in ways that therapy sessions don’t?
A: Poetry and evocative language bypass the analytical mind and speak to the felt sense. When you’re in a highly analytical, driven mode, language that arrives sideways, through metaphor, rhythm, or unexpected precision, can reach what direct conversation can’t. Narrative therapy, bibliotherapy, and expressive arts all have clinical validity as therapeutic adjuncts for exactly this reason. If a quote is landing for you, bring it to session. That resonance is data about what’s alive in you, and a skilled therapist will know how to work with it.
References
Books & Primary Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, 1997.
- Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery, 2022.
- Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves. Vintage, 1992.
- LePera, Nicole. How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self. HarperWave, 2021.
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Tedeschi RG, Calhoun LG. Posttraumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychol Inq. 2004;15(1):1-18. doi:10.1207/s15327965pli1501_01.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, 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. PMID: 19795402.
If this resonated, you may also find these guides useful: understanding complex PTSD, the complete guide to betrayal trauma, and somatic healing for driven and driven women.
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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 and trauma-informed executive coach with over 25,000 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. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.
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