
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
Recovering from a narcissistic relationship is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through, and leaving doesn’t mean the healing has started. This post is an honest look at what a structured recovery course can and can’t do, how it’s different from therapy, and what actually changes for driven women who do this work. It doesn’t promise outcomes it can’t back up, and it isn’t a sales page dressed up as an article.
Last updated: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT · See our Editorial Policy
- The Quiet After the Storm
- What Is “Normalcy” After a Narcissistic Relationship, Really?
- What Does the Research Say About Recovering From Narcissistic Abuse?
- Why Does This Hit Driven Women So Hard?
- What Does a Recovery Course Actually Contain, and How Is That Different From Therapy?
- Both/And: Can You Be Out of the Relationship AND Still Healing From It?
- Why Is Narcissistic Abuse So Hard to Name?
- Who I Am and Why I Know This
- What Does the Path Forward Actually Look Like?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Recovering a sense of normalcy after a narcissistic relationship isn’t linear. It means rebuilding trust in your own perception, grieving both the relationship and the version of yourself who existed inside it, and slowly reconstructing an identity that isn’t organized around someone else’s needs. The confusion, self-doubt, and hypervigilance that persist after leaving aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re the predictable aftermath of sustained psychological manipulation. In my work with driven women after these relationships, the most consistent obstacle isn’t external. It’s the inner voice they inherited from the narcissist, and no single course, book, or blog post untangles that voice by itself.
In short: Recovery after a narcissistic relationship is a nonlinear process. It involves rebuilding trust in your own perception, grieving the relationship, and reconstructing an identity after sustained manipulation. A structured course can scaffold that process. It can’t replace it, and it can’t replace therapy when therapy is what’s needed.
If you've been managing a narcissistic parent's reality your whole life, my self-paced course Normalcy After the Narcissist is where yours begins.
The Quiet After the Storm
She’s sitting in the gray armchair by the window at 4:50 on a Tuesday, and the late-afternoon light is doing that thing where it turns everything gold and slightly unreal. Her coffee went cold an hour ago. She hasn’t moved to reheat it. Outside, someone’s leaf blower drones on and off, and she notices she’s counting the intervals instead of thinking about anything at all.
It’s been three weeks since she left. The fights are gone. The 11pm text interrogations are gone. The feeling of walking into her own kitchen and scanning his face for the day’s weather report is gone. She expected relief. What she got instead was a strange, hollowed-out quiet that feels less like peace and more like static.
She doesn’t recognize the woman in the mirror some mornings, not because her face has changed but because she can’t remember, standing there, what she actually wants for breakfast. She used to have opinions about everything. Now she finds herself waiting, out of habit, for someone to tell her what’s reasonable to want.
This isn’t weakness. This isn’t her failing to “just move on.” This is the disorienting architecture of what comes after narcissistic abuse, and if you’re the one sitting in that armchair right now, I want you to know the quiet isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s the sound of a nervous system that finally has room to ask what it actually feels, now that no one is managing the answer for you.
What Is “Normalcy” After a Narcissistic Relationship, Really?
The process of re-establishing a stable, authentic sense of self and daily rhythm after the end of a relationship marked by narcissistic abuse. Judith Herman, MD, the psychiatrist and trauma researcher whose 1992 book Trauma and Recovery reshaped how the clinical field understands survivorship, frames this kind of recovery as the gradual restoration of identity, emotional regulation, and trust in one’s own perceptions, developed free from manipulation and control.
In plain terms: Normalcy isn’t a return to who you were before. It’s the slow rebuilding of a life that feels like yours again. It’s waking up without dreading what mood he’s in. It’s trusting your own memory of what actually happened. That’s what you’re building toward, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
Here’s what I keep having to say out loud to clients, because they keep arriving at my office expecting the wrong thing. Normalcy after a narcissistic relationship isn’t a return trip. It’s new construction. Narcissistic abuse distorts reality, erodes self-worth, and fractures identity slowly enough that most women don’t clock it happening in real time. When the relationship ends, there’s no version of “normal” to go back to. There’s only the work of building one.
At its center, this means feeling steady in your own body again: waking up without the low hum of anticipating criticism, trusting your own thoughts rather than immediately running them through a filter of “but is that really what happened, or am I overreacting.” That last one, in my experience, is the slowest to heal.
Clinically, this is about regaining emotional regulation after a long stretch of living in hypervigilance. During the relationship, the nervous system learns to stay on edge because the abuser’s unpredictable moods make edge-staying adaptive. Once the relationship ends, that wiring doesn’t just switch off. The body has to be taught, slowly and repeatedly, that it’s safe to stand down. Normalcy also means re-establishing relationships that don’t run through a filter of fear, reconnecting with people pushed to the margins, and setting boundaries that protect whatever safety has been recovered so far.
And normalcy isn’t the absence of struggle. There will be weeks that feel like real progress and then a Tuesday, out of nowhere, when an old wound reopens. That’s not regression. That’s the texture of this kind of healing, and treating it as a straight line is one of the fastest ways to make a woman feel like she’s failing at something that was never designed to be linear.
What Does the Research Say About Recovering From Narcissistic Abuse?
Understanding what’s happening neurobiologically explains why this process feels so nonlinear and exhausting. This isn’t only an emotional injury. It’s a set of learned survival mechanisms and rewired neural pathways, built in response to a chronic, unpredictable stressor. I want to walk through what the research says here, because I’ve watched clients get real relief just from understanding that their brain did exactly what brains are built to do under those conditions.
A term coined by Jennifer Freyd, PhD, professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon whose research I’ve returned to again and again over the years, betrayal trauma describes what happens when a person or institution someone depends on for survival or support violates that trust. In narcissistic relationships, it’s the mechanism behind why survivors often minimize the abuse or lose access to clear memories of it. The brain will protect the attachment bond even at the cost of accurate perception, because losing the attachment can feel, to a nervous system, more dangerous than staying confused.
In plain terms: If you stayed longer than you knew was good for you, betrayal trauma explains why. Your brain was protecting you from a truth that felt unsurvivable: that the person you loved and needed was also the one hurting you. That’s not weakness. That’s neurobiology doing exactly what it evolved to do.
I recently went back through Craig Malkin, PhD’s work on the narcissism spectrum, and what stayed with me was his explanation of how unpredictability itself becomes the injury. Malkin, a clinical psychologist who has spent his career studying narcissism, describes how victims internalize blame precisely because the abuser’s behavior is volatile rather than consistently cruel. It’s the unpredictability that keeps the threat-response system switched on continuously, elevating cortisol and impairing the prefrontal cortex’s capacity for rational, regulated thought.
Ramani Durvasula, PhD, a clinical psychologist who specializes in narcissistic personality disorder, has documented something similar from a different angle: the limbic system becomes hyperactive in response to ongoing invalidation. That hypervigilance is a survival adaptation, not a character flaw, but it creates chronic anxiety that persists long after the relationship has ended, which is exactly why so many women tell me they feel “crazy” for still flinching at things that no longer threaten them.
Herman’s landmark framework describes three stages of trauma recovery: safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection. The first stage matters because trauma dysregulates the autonomic nervous system in ways that don’t resolve just because the external danger is gone. Many survivors of narcissistic abuse describe symptoms that overlap heavily with PTSD: flashbacks, emotional numbing, a hair-trigger startle response. Freyd’s research on betrayal trauma explains why so many survivors also lose access to clear memories of the abuse, because the brain sometimes fragments the memory to protect against the full weight of the pain when the person causing harm is also the person a survivor depends on.
Here’s the hopeful part. Neuroplasticity means the brain that adapted to survive a narcissistic relationship can also adapt its way back out, rebuilding healthier attachment patterns and slowly assembling a coherent account of what happened. That process is gradual, includes setbacks, and isn’t a referendum on how strong you are.
Why Does This Hit Driven Women So Hard?
Driven women tend to get read as resilient and self-sufficient, which is exactly why narcissistic abuse disrupts them in such a paradoxical way. The neurobiology described above doesn’t land evenly. It lands hardest on the exact traits that made these women look, from the outside, like they had it together.
Julie is 53, a regional VP at a logistics company, the kind of woman who color-codes her calendar in four different shades and has never once missed a deadline in eleven years at the same firm. She keeps a stainless steel water bottle with a faded conference sticker on her desk, refilled exactly twice a day, and for years that small ritual was the only part of her schedule that belonged entirely to her.
She left her husband in February, after a twenty-two-year marriage that outside observers would have called stable. It wasn’t. “I’ve a spreadsheet,” she told me in our second session, half-laughing, half-not. “I made a list of every single time he told me I was remembering something wrong. I’ve forty-one entries. I stopped because I got tired of typing, not because I ran out of examples. I need someone to tell me I’m not the crazy one here, because I’ve genuinely started to wonder.”
Sitting across from her, I felt the particular weight I’ve come to associate with driven women in this phase of recovery. Not pity. Something closer to recognition. The spreadsheet wasn’t a quirk. It was Julie’s nervous system doing the only thing it knew how to do with forty-one instances of reality being rewritten: catalog the evidence, because the catalog was the one thing he couldn’t argue with.
Neurobiologically, this lines up with an amygdala still scanning for threat months after the actual threat left the building, paired with a prefrontal cortex that kept losing the argument to stress hormones the moment she tried to make a simple decision, like what to order for lunch. The competence that ran a nine-figure logistics division could not, on its own, override a nervous system trained for two decades to distrust its own read of reality.
What I’ve come to think of as the catalog-as-survival-tool shows up in driven women again and again. The instinct to document and research her way out of the confusion isn’t a character flaw. It’s the adaptation of a woman who learned that being provably right was the only form of safety available to her. We didn’t take the spreadsheet away in that second session. We started asking what she might need underneath it, and Julie left that day without an answer, which was, for her, its own kind of progress.
It’s worth naming directly: the exact traits that fuel ambition and strategic thinking can become liabilities during recovery. When a woman like Julie experiences chronic stress from sustained narcissistic abuse, executive function often falters under the surface long before it shows up anywhere visible. Perfectionism intensifies. Imposter syndrome creeps in where it never used to live. These get mistaken, often by the women experiencing them, as personal failings instead of trauma responses.
There’s a social layer here too. Driven women are frequently conditioned to “handle it,” which discourages asking for help and deepens isolation, its own trigger for a threat-response system already working overtime. Therapy that integrates somatic awareness, trauma-informed cognitive work, and attachment-focused intervention can help women like Julie recalibrate a nervous system that’s been on high alert for years. Paced breathing and mindfulness don’t fix the underlying injury, but they measurably reduce amygdala reactivity, often the first ground a client needs under her feet before anything else can happen.
What Does a Recovery Course Actually Contain, and How Is That Different From Therapy?
One question I hear constantly from women considering the Normalcy After the Narcissist course is some version of, “I’ve already read most of your blog. Is there actually anything new here for me?” It’s a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a marketing one.
“Survivors of abuse show us the strength of their personal spirit every time they smile. But the deeper work is not the smile. It’s the slow, unglamorous relearning of what safety feels like in the body, long after the danger has passed.”
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and author of Trauma and Recovery
The short answer is yes, but the honest long answer requires being specific about what a blog can and can’t do. My blog offers insight, validation, and practical framing, and I mean that as real value, not a hedge. But no set of standalone articles was ever going to carry the full architecture of a recovery process.
Blog posts function, at their best, as informational and validating snapshots. What they don’t provide is sequence. The course is built as a layered curriculum with a specific order, with guided journaling prompts targeting the cognitive distortions that show up reliably after narcissistic abuse, minimization, self-blame, internalized shame, plus experiential, body-based exercises a written article structurally can’t deliver. It also includes community touchpoints and live Q&A access, offering real-time connection that reading alone doesn’t provide, which matters because isolation is one of the most consistent aftereffects of narcissistic abuse.
None of this makes the course a replacement for therapy. I’ve seen women use a course as an avoidance strategy when what they actually needed was a therapist in the room with them. It can prepare someone for therapy, help someone stay grounded between sessions, or function as a standalone resource when therapy isn’t immediately accessible, but it isn’t a substitute for the relational container that trauma-informed therapy provides.
So the honest answer to “will this teach me something new” depends on what you’re looking for. The blog already offers validating content for free. The course provides sequence, structure, embodied practice, and a community of women doing this work alongside you, without promising to replace clinical care.
Both/And: Can You Be Out of the Relationship AND Still Healing From It?
One of the most misunderstood parts of this recovery is the timeline. Plenty of women arrive at my office assuming that once the relationship ends, the healing should move in a straight line from bad to better. It’s messier than that. Healing here is a both/and process: you have ended the relationship, and you’re still, simultaneously, doing the ongoing work of recovering from it.
Laura is 45, an operations director at a mid-size healthcare company, and she left her partner of nine years back in January, nearly six months before she sat down across from me on a rain-streaked Thursday in June. On paper, Laura had already “moved on.” She was living independently. She’d started running again, three miles most mornings before work, her old pair of trail shoes finally replaced with new ones she’d bought herself, a small thing that had taken her weeks to feel allowed to do.
“Some days I think I’m actually fine,” she said, turning her coffee cup a quarter turn on the table between us, “and then I’ll be standing in the cereal aisle at Hannaford and I’ll suddenly be positive that everyone around me can tell I let someone treat me like that for nine years. I know that doesn’t make sense. I know it. It still happens.”
I felt, listening to her, the ache of watching someone hold two true things at once without yet trusting that both could be true. She was out. She was also still inside it, in the way trauma keeps a foothold long after the external circumstances change. Neither fact canceled the other out.
Laura’s incongruence, thriving externally while still carrying an internalized “I can’t trust my own judgment,” is common, and it doesn’t signal failure. Clinically, this is trauma integration doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, slowly, on its own timeline. The external source of harm is gone. The internalized messages it left behind take considerably longer to unlearn than they took to install.
What I’ve come to call the both/and phase is where most of my clients actually live for the longest stretch of recovery. Laura is using mindfulness, cognitive restructuring, and somatic awareness to separate her own voice from the narrative her ex spent nine years constructing. In our sessions, she’s also begun looking at how the relationship shaped her attachment style and her capacity to hold a boundary without apologizing for it. None of that resolves in a single session. She left that Thursday still turning the coffee cup, still not entirely sure which day she was going to get.
Healing doesn’t mean erasing the memory of harm. It means developing the capacity to live alongside that memory without it running the show, through inner work and outside support: community, rest, and sometimes professional care that a course alone was never designed to provide. A woman like Laura might have a genuinely clear, confident week followed by three days where old wounds feel raw again. That’s not regression. That’s a sign the healing is active rather than stalled, and recognizing it invites a kinder relationship with your own timeline, one that trades the pressure to “be done” by some arbitrary date for permission to move at whatever pace your history actually requires.
The Systemic Lens: Why Narcissistic Abuse Is So Hard to Name
Understanding narcissistic abuse takes more than recognizing individual behaviors. It requires a Systemic Lens, because narcissistic abuse tends to thrive inside relational and cultural systems that actively obscure what’s happening. Many women find themselves caught in layers of denial and minimization, coming both from the people around them and from their own internalized narrative, a reflection of how deeply these dynamics get embedded in family systems, workplace culture, and broader social structures.
At its core, narcissistic abuse involves manipulative patterns that erode a person’s sense of self over time. But because these patterns usually unfold behind closed doors, tangled up with charm and intermittent reinforcement, they resist straightforward identification. The Systemic Lens matters here because the abuse was never just about one person’s individual pathology. It’s about how systems, family expectations, workplace hierarchies, and cultural stories about strength and self-sufficiency work together to keep survivors quiet.
Consider a woman who grew up in a family where emotional expression got treated as weakness. If her partner shows narcissistic traits, she may struggle to name his behavior as abusive, because her baseline for emotional safety was already compromised. Naming narcissistic abuse, in that context, isn’t just labeling the partner. It’s challenging the framework that taught her not to trust her own read of things.
Workplaces function as systemic enablers too. Driven women often absorb a subtle, ongoing undermining, being left out of decisions, having their work quietly credited to someone else, and when those tactics resemble narcissistic dynamics, they get waved off as “just office politics.” There’s a stigma layer as well: the term “narcissistic abuse” itself sometimes gets met with skepticism in clinical and social settings, partly because narcissistic traits exist on a spectrum and can look, from the outside, like other personality styles.
In therapy, taking a Systemic Lens means looking at both the individual relationship dynamics and the larger context that shaped them. It means validating what the survivor experienced, naming the patterns that contributed to it, and identifying where those systems can actually be challenged. That’s the groundwork that makes durable healing possible instead of a series of insights that don’t hold under pressure.
Who I Am and Why I Know This
I want to be direct about where this comes from, because readers deserve to know why a therapist is qualified to write about any of this. I’ve spent more than 15,000 direct clinical hours working with driven women, much of it specifically on recovery after narcissistic and coercively controlling relationships. I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist across 14 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado (telehealth only), and I built and eventually exited a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy practice.
None of that makes me a substitute for your own therapist, and nothing here is meant to diagnose or treat you. What those years have given me is a fairly precise map of the patterns that show up again and again in this kind of recovery: the self-doubt, the hypervigilance, the strange grief for a version of yourself that got smaller to survive. I built the Normalcy After the Narcissist course because I kept seeing the same gap between “read another blog post” and “start expensive weekly therapy,” and wanted something honest in between.
You've been managing their reality long enough.
A focused self-paced course on the specific damage of being raised inside a narcissistic family system. The framework, the language, and the recovery sequence, without the gaslighting that named you the problem.
What Does the Path Forward Actually Look Like?
Healing from narcissistic abuse is a nonlinear process that asks for patience, courage, and a multi-layered approach. There’s no quick fix here. The path forward is about reclaiming autonomy, rebuilding identity, and building safety, both internally and in your relationships with other people.
One of the first steps is naming the abuse and its impact directly, sitting with painful truths about how the relationship shaped your self-esteem, your boundaries, your view of yourself. Journaling, therapy, or a support group can offer a safe container for that reckoning, a genuine act of self-validation that dismantles the denial and self-blame narcissistic relationships are specifically designed to produce.
Therapy with a clinician experienced in trauma and narcissistic abuse can be genuinely life-changing here. Trauma-informed cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and somatic experiencing all help survivors process difficult emotion and rebuild healthier relational patterns over time, including recognizing manipulation as it happens and developing self-compassion, which sounds soft but is, clinically, some of the hardest work in the entire process.
Rebuilding trust, in yourself first and in others eventually, is another core piece. Narcissistic abuse tends to leave survivors doubting their own instincts, which makes new relationships genuinely difficult to enter. Mindfulness and grounding practices help you tell the difference between an old trauma reaction firing and something actually happening right now, and over time that distinction gets easier to make.
Community support does real work here too. Connecting with other survivors, through peer groups or trusted friendships, breaks the isolation that narcissistic abuse depends on to keep going unnamed, offering validation that no solo reading process can fully replicate.
Reclaiming your identity often means returning to interests and values the relationship pushed aside. This part of the process is deeply individual, and it tends to mark a real turning point: the moment a woman starts building a life on her own terms.
Setting boundaries remains one of the hardest steps. Boundaries protect what’s left, and what’s being rebuilt, and holding one under pressure takes practice, not just intention, especially in the early months when it can still feel like defiance rather than basic self-respect.
Finally, self-compassion is foundational, not optional. Survivors often carry shame or anger toward themselves for what they perceive as failures: staying too long, missing red flags, needing help at all. Compassionate self-talk and therapeutic work aimed at rebuilding self-worth soften those harsh judgments over time. This isn’t about achieving perfection. It’s about honoring what it actually took to leave, and giving yourself room to heal at the pace your history requires.
If you’re in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach out for immediate support. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7. This post is psychoeducational in nature and isn’t a substitute for individualized mental health treatment.
As you move toward whatever normalcy looks like for you, remember that healing is never something you do entirely alone. It’s a communal process, built through relationships with clinicians, supportive peers, and your own steadier relationship with yourself. Your recovery is possible, even on the days it doesn’t feel that way. With honesty and patience, you can build a life shaped by what you’ve learned rather than defined by what you survived.
Warmly,
Annie.
Warmly, Annie
Q: How long does it typically take to feel ‘normal’ again after leaving a narcissistic relationship?
A: There’s no set timeline. Recovery depends on the length and intensity of the relationship, the presence of trauma bonding, your support system, and your resilience. Some women notice significant shifts within several months; others take years to regain a sense of stability and trust in themselves. Honor your unique process without pressure or comparison. Therapy can accelerate healing by addressing underlying wounds and teaching coping strategies.
Q: Why do I still feel confused or question my reality even months after leaving?
A: Narcissistic abuse often involves gaslighting, a manipulation technique that distorts your perception of reality. Even after separation, your brain may struggle to reorient itself and rebuild trust in your own judgment. This confusion is a normal part of recovery, not a sign something is wrong with you. Grounding exercises, journaling, and cognitive-behavioral strategies can help reestablish clarity. A skilled therapist who understands narcissistic abuse is crucial for validating your experience and rebuilding your internal compass.
Q: How can I rebuild my self-esteem after being systematically undermined?
A: Rebuilding self-esteem after narcissistic abuse requires intentional, compassionate work. The abuser erodes confidence through constant criticism, blame, and emotional invalidation. Start by identifying and challenging the internalized negative beliefs you carry. Celebrate small victories and set realistic goals that reinforce your competence. Surround yourself with supportive people who see and affirm your worth. Cognitive restructuring and self-compassion exercises are among the most effective tools for restoring a positive self-image.
Q: Is it normal to feel anger toward myself for staying as long as I did?
A: Absolutely. Self-directed anger and guilt are common after leaving a narcissistic partner. You might replay moments of denial or rationalization, questioning why you tolerated the mistreatment. These feelings are part of processing the trauma, but they can become harmful if they harden into self-judgment. Remember: narcissistic abuse is designed to entrap and confuse. It’s not your fault. Compassionate self-reflection and therapy can help transform self-blame into insight and self-trust.
Q: How do I avoid falling into another narcissistic relationship?
A: Prevention involves increasing your awareness and strengthening your boundaries. Reflect on the patterns or vulnerabilities that made you susceptible: a strong desire to please, fear of abandonment, or low self-worth. Educate yourself about narcissistic traits and manipulation tactics. Practice assertiveness and trust your intuition when red flags appear. Therapy can support you in developing these skills and learning to recognize warning signs earlier than you could before.
Q: What’s the difference between a narcissist and someone who is just difficult or selfish?
A: Narcissistic personality disorder exists on a spectrum, but what distinguishes narcissistic abuse from ordinary conflict is the consistent pattern of manipulation, lack of empathy, gaslighting, and the abuser’s need to control and diminish your reality. Occasional selfishness is human. Systematic invalidation, reality-twisting, and a pattern of punishment when you don’t meet their needs is a different thing entirely. A trauma-informed therapist can help you name what you experienced with clarity.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
- 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.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Durvasula, Ramani. Should I Stay or Should I Go. Post Hill Press, 2017.
- Malkin, Craig. Rethinking Narcissism. HarperCollins Publishers and Blackstone Audio, 2015.
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Annie Wright
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist, 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 Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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