50 Quotes About Healing from Trauma to Remind You You’re Not Alone
Fifty lines from trauma clinicians, researchers, memoirists, and poets for the stretches of healing when your own words won’t come, grouped into five themes you can go to directly.

When Language Becomes a Lifeline
She’s in her car in the parking garage of her office building, engine off, hands still on the steering wheel. Suzanne has nine minutes before her next meeting. It’s a Tuesday morning in November, rain streaking down the concrete walls, the fluorescent light overhead flickering. Her slide deck is flawless. When she walks into that conference room, her voice will be measured and calm.
Nobody will know she spent forty minutes on her bathroom floor this morning, trying to breathe through something she can’t quite name.
She’s forty-eight, a chief operating officer, the woman her board describes as unflappable. She knows, in theory, that healing isn’t linear. But in the parking garage, theory doesn’t reach her. What reaches her is a note on her phone, a running list of lines she’s gathered over the past year. She reads three of them, and something in her chest loosens enough to let her go inside. Suzanne is an illustrative example, not a real client, but that pause in the car is a common one.
In my work with driven women, I see this pattern often: in the thick of trauma recovery, your own words can go offline. The nervous system is flooded and the thinking mind steps back. What gets 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 tells you that your reactions are uniquely shameful and that nobody could understand what your body is bracing against. One of the quieter turning points in healing is the moment that isolation cracks, when you find language that reflects your experience back with precision and care. What follows are 50 lines from clinicians, researchers, memoirists, and poets, grouped into five themes: the body, permission to feel, non-linear healing, boundaries, and who you’re becoming. Go to the section that names where you are.
What Trauma Is, and What Healing Can Mean
Trauma is a word that gets used loosely, and driven women often talk themselves out of it because nothing in their past looks dramatic enough to count. It helps to start with what the word describes, and with what healing can look like on the other side.
The American Psychological Association’s APA Dictionary of Psychology defines trauma as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning.”
In plain terms: Trauma isn’t measured by how bad something looks from the outside. It’s measured by what it left behind in you: the bracing, the numbness, the sense of being unsafe even when your life looks fine.
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines posttraumatic growth as “the positive psychological, and sometimes physiological, improvements that can accompany or result from direct engagement with profoundly challenging situations and life crises.”
In plain terms: Growth after trauma doesn’t mean the trauma was worth it, and it isn’t silver-lining thinking. It means that in the hard work of rebuilding, some people find capacities they didn’t know they had. If you want more on this, the guide to post-traumatic growth in driven women goes deeper.
What the Research Says About Healing
Several of the people quoted below have spent their careers on what trauma does and how people recover. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes recovery in three stages: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection with ordinary life. Her model is one reason trauma-informed clinicians start with safety before asking anyone to revisit what happened.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, and Peter A. Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, both write about trauma as something the body holds, not only a memory the mind stores. That’s why so many of the lines below talk about the body, and why somatic healing has become part of trauma treatment.
None of this means healing follows a formula. It means there’s a map, and that the map includes rest, grief, and relationships alongside insight. If you want a practical starting point, the guide to your window of tolerance is a good next read.
What Does It Mean That Trauma Lives in the Body?
This is one of the hardest ideas to take in if you’ve built your life on thinking your way through problems. Trauma doesn’t live only in your thoughts about what happened. It shapes how your nervous system reads safety and what your body braces for before your mind has a chance to weigh in.
A pattern I see often is a woman who can describe her history with real precision while her body still organizes every interaction around a threat that’s long gone. These lines name the body’s experience from the inside, which clinical language sometimes can’t.
“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
“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, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 2
“The roots of trauma lie in our instinctual physiologies. As a result, it is through our bodies, as well as our minds, that we discover the key to its healing.”
Peter A. Levine, Biophysicist and Stress/Trauma Expert, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)
“Decades after the mind knows that we are safe, the body still responds as if it were under life threat.”
Deirdre Fay, MSW, Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World (2021)
“The body senses danger, and it sets off a firestorm of chemical reactions aimed to protect itself. But most important, the body remembers.”
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity (2018)
“Each symptom represents a way your brain and body adapted to a chronic condition of threat.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
The shift these lines point toward is a reframe: the hypervigilance, the overreaction to small stressors, the constant bracing isn’t weakness. It’s an old protection strategy that made sense once. Seeing it that way doesn’t change everything, but it changes something.
Why Is Giving Yourself Permission to Feel So Hard?
Permission to feel isn’t a small thing for driven women. The same traits that make someone good at leading teams and managing complexity often depend on setting feelings aside. Feeling gets scheduled for later, and later becomes never.
Healing asks for something that runs against years of successful conditioning: stop moving, and feel. These lines honor that ask without pretending it’s easy. It isn’t easy. It is necessary.
“Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)
“Tears can also help us realize that our loneliness is now causing us much unnecessary pain. This in turn can motivate us to open to the possibility of finding safe connections.”
Pete Walker, LMFT, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma (2013)
“Anger delivers important information about where one of our boundaries has been crossed.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“Our injuries do not occur in a vacuum, so our healing cannot occur in one either. Our hurts and losses need to be repaired interpersonally. We cannot heal alone.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“Givers are not allowed to impose anything so inconvenient as their own needs, including their difficult emotions, including their stress, on anyone else.”
Emily Nagoski, PhD, health behavior researcher, speaking with Amelia Nagoski, Episode 03: Human Giver Syndrome, The Feminist Survival Project 2020
“I am a human being not a human doing. I will not choose to be perpetually productive.”
Pete Walker, Psychotherapist and author, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013), ch. 12
For many women this is where the friction is. They can accept that something happened and that it affected them. Accepting that they’re allowed to still hurt, years later, and that the hurt isn’t a failure of discipline, is often the harder step.
What Does Non-Linear Healing Actually Look Like?
Non-linear healing is one of the most important ideas in trauma recovery and one of the most disorienting to live through. Nobody tells you how tired healing makes you, or that you may feel worse before you feel better, or that the setbacks don’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
Driven women are used to the logic of effort and outcome: put in the work, get the result. Trauma recovery doesn’t run on that logic. These lines name the spiral without treating it as a problem.
“Healing cycles can only be opened up to, watched, and validated; they cannot be evaluated, manipulated, hurried, or changed. When they get the time and attention they need, they are able to complete their healing mission.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997)
“The key to transforming trauma is to move slowly in the direction of flexibility and spontaneity.”
Peter A. Levine, PhD, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (1997), p. 216
“Every time the beast returns, I have to fight it slightly differently. The wars are shorter now, and often, the old tools work well.”
Stephanie Foo, Memoirist and Journalist, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022), ch. 43
“A life after trauma has to include some sense of pride, respect, or just awe that we have survived. We might have to thank those parts of us that contributed to our survival, even if how they (or we) survived is not pretty.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“I accept the lifelong battle and its limitations now.”
Stephanie Foo, Memoirist and Journalist, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022), ch. 43
“Trauma is all about speed and reflexivity. This is why people need to work through trauma slowly, over time, and why they need to understand their own bodies’ processes of connecting and settling.”
Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, My Grandmother’s Hands (2017)
“There are times when you simply must trust that you have worked hard enough. It is okay to give yourself permission to take time to rest. Too much focus on growth can lead you to deplete your resources.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020), p. 162
“We naturally travel between states, routinely moving out of ventral regulation into sympathetic or dorsal dysregulation and back again.”
Deb Dana, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Polyvagal Consultant, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (2021)
“We are works in progress, and our autonomic nervous systems are listening and learning in each moment.”
Deb Dana, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Polyvagal Consultant, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (2021)
Picture Suzanne a few months after that morning in the garage. She felt like she was getting better last fall, and now she feels like she’s back at the beginning, and she wonders what all those months were for. That question applies a performance frame to healing. The spiral isn’t regression. You don’t revisit the same wound at the same depth. You come back to it with more capacity than you had the last time.
How Do Boundaries Fit Into Trauma Recovery?
Learning to set boundaries is, for many women, one of the most radical parts of healing. If your early environment taught you that your needs were too much, that love depended on compliance, or that saying no meant losing connection, you learned to set your limits aside so you could stay close.
Healing asks you to unlearn that equation. These lines treat boundaries not as walls but as the structure that makes real closeness possible.
“Having a boundary is an aspect of self-respect that allows you to assert your “no” and your “yes.” Without a boundary, you will be more likely to give in to others because you long for approval.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach to Regaining Emotional Control and Becoming Whole (2016)
“Boundaries are the limits that help you to define yourself, and without them, it becomes harder to feel where you begin and end.”
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook: Evidence-Based Strategies to Recover from Trauma and Build Resilience (2020)
“Boundaries are a fundamental form of self-protection, and we all have the right to safeguard our physical and mental well-being.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“When we set a boundary, we let go of being invested in the outcome. This distinguishes boundaries from attempts to control.”
Suzette Boon; Kathy Steele; Onno van der Hart, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists (2011), p. 393
“Your self-protective boundaries are not the problem. Your parents’ mistreatment is the reason your family cannot joyfully celebrate special occasions together.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024), p. 140
“When we restore the boundary that was violated, we honor ourselves.”
Glennon Doyle, Memoirist and Activist, Untamed (2020)
“She has also regained the ability to feel autonomous while remaining connected to others; she can maintain her own point of view and her own boundaries while respecting those of others.”
Judith Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
“Boundaries are not about controlling other people in any way.”
Rachel Rodgers, Business Coach, Attorney, and Author, We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Taking Control of Her Destiny (2021)
“When the soulful life is being threatened, it is not only acceptable to draw the line and mean it, it is required.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian Psychoanalyst and Cantadora, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
“A Yes is nothing without the No that gives it boundaries and form.”
Michael Bungay Stanier, Founder of Box of Crayons and executive coach, The Coaching Habit (2016), p. 139
Driven women often describe setting a boundary as feeling cruel, as if they’re doing something unkind to someone they love. That feeling is real. It’s also a leftover from old relational conditioning, not evidence that the boundary is wrong. If this section hits hard, the complete guide to betrayal trauma covers how broken trust shapes the limits you learned to set, or not set.
What Does Healing Ask You to Become?
Trauma takes things from the self. Part of healing is the slow work of finding who you are underneath the survival strategies, who you might have been, and who you can still become. These lines speak to that reclaiming.
“The survivor no longer feels possessed by her traumatic past; she is in possession of herself.”
Judith Lewis Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
“I will love myself enough to be honest when I fail at loving.”
Kiese Laymon, Author, Professor of Creative Writing, Heavy: An American Memoir (2018)
“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”
Madeline Miller, Novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
“The belief that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious container that holds our lives in a state of constant anxiety.”
Tara Brach, Meditation Teacher and Clinical Psychologist, Radical Acceptance: Awakening the Love that Heals Fear and Shame Within Us (2003)
“I stepped into those woods and my life began.”
Madeline Miller, novelist and classicist, Circe (2018)
“The PTSD had always told me I am alone. That I am unlovable. That I am toxic. But now, it is clear to me: That was a lie.”
Stephanie Foo, Memoirist and Journalist, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (2022), ch. 42
“Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no. Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“Trauma survivors need to feel safe in order to heal; they need to feel some sense of control over their lives now; and they do not need to feel small or less than others or ashamed.”
Janina Fisher, PhD, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021)
“Rebuilding self-trust involves tuning in to your experiences and courageously choosing to believe yourself, even when no one else does.”
Sharon Martin, DSW, LCSW, Cutting Ties with Your Parents: A Workbook to Help Adult Children Make Peace with Their Decision, Heal Emotional Wounds, and Move Forward with Their Lives (2024)
“When you break up with shame, you’re cutting ties with the main emotion that has kept you in cycles. You’re leaving behind your comfort zone.”
Dr. Mariel Buqué, Psychologist, Break the Cycle (2024)
“She is the keeper of the soul. Without her, we lose our shape.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Jungian Psychoanalyst and Cantadora, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)
“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
Mary Oliver, poet, Devotions (2017)
“When we heal our own trauma, individually and collectively, we don’t just heal our bodies. By refusing to pass on the trauma we inherited, we help heal the world.”
Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, My Grandmother’s Hands (2017)
“The first task of recovery is the establishment of safety. This task must take precedence over all others.”
Judith Herman, MD, Psychiatrist, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
“The voice of doubt, shame, and guilt blaring in our heads is not our voice. It is a voice we have been given by a society steeped in shame.”
Sonya Renee Taylor, Founder of The Body Is Not an Apology, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (2018)
“The way home we were all seeking would be not in spite of our bodies but through them.”
Hillary L. McBride, PhD, researcher, clinical psychologist, and counsellor, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living (2021), ch. 9
Many driven women have built impressive lives that are, in a real sense, copies of what they thought they were supposed to want. The work of healing often includes finding out what they want underneath the performance. That’s not a side project. It’s the whole project.
Picture Suzanne again, almost a year on, at her desk before her first meeting. She’s printed three lines and taped them inside a drawer. One of them is Madeline Miller’s: “But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.” She isn’t really asking whether it’s strange to keep a quote in a drawer. She’s asking whether she’s allowed to want a different life. She needed to read it in someone else’s words before she could believe it might apply to her.
Both/And: You Are Wounded and You Are Healing
Holding contradictions is one of the most tiring and least discussed parts of trauma recovery. You can be wounded and healing at the same time. You can grieve what was taken from you and build something new. You can honor the past without living inside it. The Both/And isn’t a compromise. It’s a more accurate description of what’s happening in you.
Driven women often struggle with this most, because they’re used to phases: finish this, move on to that. Healing doesn’t organize itself that way. Your suffering was real, and your capacity for growth is also real. Those two truths don’t cancel each other out. When you stop trying to decide whether you’re broken or whole and let yourself be both, something tends to ease. Not fixed. Eased.
The Systemic Lens: Why We Need Collective Healing Language
There’s a reason lines like these get passed around so widely. It isn’t only that pain is common. It’s that the culture around many driven women discourages admitting it. Success is supposed to be evidence of wellbeing. If you’re functioning, you’re fine. Strength means not needing help.
That messaging is part of what keeps someone like Suzanne in a parking garage for years before she reaches for support. It’s also why a quote about trauma can feel like permission. The words aren’t new. They’re a counter-signal to everything else she’s been told. The three stages Herman describes, safety, mourning, and reconnection, are slow, private, and hard to measure, and very little in a performance culture makes room for them.
So if healing feels lonely, that isn’t a personal failing. You’re doing something structurally hard in a setting that offers you almost no language for it, except the language you find and bring with you. Your struggle is legitimate. Several of the lines above, including Resmaa Menakem’s and Sonya Renee Taylor’s, name that wider context directly.
Moving Forward with These Words
Reading quotes is one thing. Using them as tools is another. A few simple practices tend to help a line stay with you past the moment it lands.
The first is recognition. When a quote lands, pause instead of scrolling past it. Ask yourself what it touched. What truth did it name that you’ve been afraid to say out loud? A few minutes of journaling can surface a lot.
The second is return. Keep a running list of the lines that move you and go back to it during hard stretches. Healing includes long periods of forward movement punctuated by setbacks, and a short list gives you something to hold when your own resources feel thin.
The third is sharing. If you’re in therapy, bring a quote to session. “I read this and it stopped me” is a rich place to start, and a good therapist can help you explore what it’s touching.
Picture Suzanne a year and a half on. On hard mornings she still sits in the car for a minute, engine off, and reads two or three lines. What’s changed isn’t that the hard mornings stopped. It’s that she no longer reads the words as proof she’s failing. She reads them as company. Most days that’s enough to get her out of the car. Not every day. Most days.
The healing road is long. It’s also real, and it’s yours. These words, from people who looked directly at trauma and found language for it, are offered as company on that road. If you want more, the collection of uplifting quotes for hard times is another place to look.
You don’t have to earn the right to feel what you feel. Reaching for language, and refusing to leave your experience unnamed, is itself a step toward healing. It counts.
If what’s underneath this search is bigger than a list of quotes can hold, you don’t have to carry it alone. Fixing the Foundations is my self-paced course for relational trauma recovery, the article archive has more on trauma and recovery, and you can reach out about working together.
Warmly,
Annie
Next steps in your recovery
The Master Course
Fixing the Foundations™
The core self-paced course for the whole architecture of relational trauma recovery. Seven phases, 48 lessons, and a 200-page workbook on family-of-origin patterns, nervous-system repair, and rebuilding the proverbial House of Life™ from the foundation up.
Focused Mini-Course
Picking Better Partners
A self-paced mini-course for women whose pattern shows up in partner selection, the same shape of person, over and over, wearing different faces.
Uplifting Quotes for Hard Times
Lines from writers and clinicians for the stretches when getting through the day is the goal.
99 Quotes to Rekindle Your Inner Resilience
Lines for rebuilding after burnout, betrayal, or loss, grouped by what you need right now.
Frequently asked questions.
How long does it take to heal from trauma?
There’s no single timeline. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery, describes recovery in three stages: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection with ordinary life. How long each takes depends on the kind of trauma, the support you have, and your circumstances. Healing tends to depend more on the depth of the work than on the passage of time.
Why do I keep feeling like I’m back at square one, even after months of therapy?
Healing tends to spiral rather than move in a straight line. Revisiting a wound doesn’t mean you haven’t healed. It often means you now have the capacity to work with something you couldn’t reach before. For driven women this can feel especially painful, because progress is usually their strongest skill. If you feel genuinely stuck, it’s worth talking with your therapist about whether the approach needs adjusting.
Is it possible to heal from trauma without therapy?
Some people find meaningful healing through supportive relationships, body-based practices, community, and self-directed work. Complex or relational trauma often benefits from a therapeutic relationship, because the nervous system learns safety in relationship. If therapy isn’t accessible right now, structured self-paced work can be a useful bridge.
How do I know if what I experienced counts as trauma?
The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines trauma by its effects: an experience that brings on fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting effect on how you think, feel, and function. It doesn’t depend on how bad the event looks to anyone else. Only an assessment with a qualified clinician can tell you what you’re dealing with, but your experience doesn’t need anyone else’s permission to matter.
How do I start healing from trauma if I don’t know where to begin?
Start with safety. In Herman’s model, establishing safety comes before any deeper processing. In practice that can mean finding a therapist with real trauma training, building awareness of your body through gentle practices, and spending time in relationships where you don’t have to perform.
Why do quotes and poetry sometimes reach me in ways therapy sessions don’t?
Language that arrives sideways, through image, rhythm, or unexpected precision, can reach you when direct explanation doesn’t, especially when you’re used to living in analytical mode. If a line lands for you, bring it to session. That resonance tells you something about what’s alive in you right now.
Are there therapy options for women healing from trauma?
Yes. Trauma-informed therapy works with the patterns trauma leaves in the nervous system and in relationships. Annie Wright, LMFT, offers individual therapy for driven women healing from relational trauma. She’s licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida under Fla. Stat. 456.47. You can reach out through the connect page.
What if healing brings up thoughts of not wanting to be here?
Please don’t carry that alone. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line. If you’re in immediate danger, call 911. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists local crisis services. Quotes can keep you company, but they aren’t a substitute for crisis support.
References.
- American Psychological Association. “Posttraumatic Growth.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/posttraumatic-growth.
- American Psychological Association. “Trauma.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/trauma.
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- Levine, Peter A., with Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
Individual Therapy
Trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational trauma. Licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida.
Learn MoreExecutive Coaching
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership and burnout.
Learn MoreFixing the Foundations
Annie's signature course for relational trauma recovery. Work at your own pace.
Learn MoreStrong & Stable
The Sunday conversation you wished you'd had years earlier. 28,000+ readers.
Join Free
Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
Work With Annie
