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

The Course Pathway for Mothers Breaking Intergenerational Trauma

Parenting • May 10, 2026

SUMMARY

This post maps a path for mothers who want to break intergenerational trauma. From understanding how trauma travels biologically and relationally, to regulating the nervous system, rebuilding attachment patterns, and doing the work within the real constraints of a demanding life. It’s a practical roadmap, not a perfection manual.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The 6 PM Storm
2. What Is Intergenerational Trauma?
3. The Nervous System Frame: Why 6 PM Feels So Hard
4. How Intergenerational Trauma Shows Up in Mothers
5. Complex Trauma and the Parenting Body
6. Both/And: Breaking the Cycle Without Breaking Yourself
7. The Systemic Lens: Why Mothers Carry This Alone
8. How to Heal: A Course Pathway for Mothers
9. Frequently Asked Questions

In short: Breaking intergenerational trauma as a mother means developing enough nervous system regulation and attachment awareness to respond to your children from the present rather than react from your own unhealed wounds.

The 6 PM Storm

The kitchen window has gone gold, then grey. Sarah sets her laptop bag by the door at 5:52 PM, still half in a client call that ended nine minutes ago, and already she can feel it arriving before it arrives. Her daughter’s backpack is dumped in the hallway. Her son is asking for a snack in the specific whine that means he’s overtired. The rice on the stove needs stirring. Her chest tightens first, then her jaw, then a thought she doesn’t choose: You’re not enough. You’ll never get this right.

She doesn’t know where the thought comes from, not exactly, but her body does. It is 6 PM. It has always been 6 PM somewhere in her, since long before she had children of her own.

Across town, Divya is standing at her own counter with a dish towel in her hand, not moving. Her toddler’s dinner plate has just hit the floor, and instead of the surge Sarah feels, Divya feels the opposite: a slow, familiar going quiet. Her son is crying. She can hear him. She is not sure she can feel him. This is not indifference. It is a nervous system doing something it learned to do a long time ago, in a house where feelings were rarely met and rarely named.

Neither woman is failing. Both are living inside a pattern that started before they were born into their own families, patterns that traveled down through the people who raised them and into bodies that never got a say in the matter. This is the work of breaking intergenerational trauma: not becoming a different person by force of will, but understanding what the 6 PM storm is actually made of, and building a path through it that a mother can actually walk, one evening at a time.

What makes this hour so unforgiving is that it asks the most of a mother precisely when she has the least left to give. The workday is done, the reserves are low, and the people who need her most are also the ones with the least patience for waiting. That collision, low reserves meeting high need, is where old wiring tends to surface fastest. It’s not a coincidence that so many mothers name this exact hour when they talk about the moments they feel furthest from the parent they want to be.

What Is Intergenerational Trauma?

Intergenerational trauma is the transmission of trauma’s effects from one generation to the next. Not only through the stories a family tells, but through patterns of relating, through nervous system responses, and through emotional legacies that get passed down without anyone deciding to pass them. These patterns shape how we parent, how we respond to stress, and how we understand ourselves in relation to the people we love most.

Clinically, intergenerational trauma covers the many ways early adverse experiences affect brain development, attachment style, and the capacity to regulate emotion, all of which then shape caregiving behavior and relational patterns later in life. The cycle continues unless it’s consciously recognized and interrupted somewhere along the line.

I recently read Mary Main, PhD, a pioneer in attachment research and professor emerita at UC Berkeley, whose work shows how unresolved trauma in a caregiver can lead to fearful-avoidant attachment patterns in children, patterns that quietly perpetuate relational and emotional instability across a generation (Madigan et al., 2006). None of this means a mother is doomed to repeat what was done to her. It means the pattern has a mechanism, and a mechanism can be worked with.

It’s worth naming what intergenerational trauma is not, because the term gets used loosely. It isn’t a diagnosis, and it isn’t a life sentence. It’s a description of how certain patterns travel, biologically through gene expression, relationally through the way a parent responds under stress, and narratively through the stories a family tells or doesn’t tell about its own history. A mother doesn’t inherit a fixed fate. She inherits a set of defaults, the settings her nervous system learned to run on before she had any say in the matter. Defaults can be changed. That’s the entire premise of the work ahead.

The Nervous System Frame: Why 6 PM Feels So Hard

At the center of intergenerational trauma sits the nervous system, the body’s constant, quiet sentinel that scans for safety or danger and shapes emotional and behavioral responses long before conscious thought catches up. For mothers working to break a trauma pattern, certain hours of the day or certain relational moments can trigger a survival response even when nothing around them is actually dangerous.

I recently read Stephen Porges, PhD, whose Polyvagal Theory (2007) explains how the autonomic nervous system moves between states of safety and social engagement, fight or flight, and shutdown, sometimes called dorsal vagal collapse. When a mother’s nervous system detects relational threat, a child’s frustrated glance or a partner’s withdrawal, even a subtle one, it can activate old survival pathways she inherited from her own childhood, long before she understood what was happening to her.

Here’s the three-layer version, because the clinical language only helps if you can feel what it means. Clinically: your autonomic nervous system shifts between ventral vagal safety, sympathetic activation, and dorsal vagal shutdown, largely outside conscious control. In kitchen-table terms: your body has a smoke detector installed by your own childhood, and it doesn’t always know the difference between a burnt dinner and a real fire. On a Tuesday afternoon, this looks like snapping at your son over a spilled cup and feeling your whole body flood with heat before your mind has even registered a decision to be angry, or standing at the counter, dish towel in hand, feeling nothing at all while your daughter cries two feet away.

This activation can show up as overwhelm, irritability, or a kind of emotional shutdown right at the moments a mother most intends to be calm and present. The 6 PM “witching hour” often lines up with transitions, fatigue, and small relational ruptures that heighten this activation, which is exactly why cycle-breaking work has to start with the body and not with willpower alone.

Why does the body get there so fast, faster than a mother can think her way out of it? Because the nervous system isn’t reasoning through the situation in real time. It’s matching a felt pattern against old data. A raised voice at dinner doesn’t register first as a raised voice. It registers as a shape the body already recognizes, and the response is already underway before conscious thought arrives to explain it. This is why insight alone, understanding intellectually where the pattern came from, rarely changes the pattern by itself. The body needs new, repeated experience to build new data, not just a better story about the old data.

The table below is a rough map, not a diagnosis. Most mothers move through all three states multiple times in a single evening, and that’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign of a nervous system that is still, understandably, doing its old job.

I recently read Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score (2014), whose work makes the case that trauma lives not only in the mind but in the body and in relational patterns that repeat until they’re interrupted on purpose. For mothers breaking a cycle, this is the whole point: their nervous systems carry the imprint of what happened to them long before they held a child of their own, and that imprint can shift with the right kind of repeated, embodied practice.

How Intergenerational Trauma Shows Up in Mothers

In my work with driven and ambitious mothers, the pattern rarely looks like the textbook version of trauma. It looks like a woman who runs a department by day and cannot get through bedtime without her voice climbing. It looks like a mother who provides for her child in every material way and still feels, most evenings, like she is watching herself from across the room. Intergenerational trauma doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the small, repeated moments where an old pattern takes the wheel.

Sarah is a 42-year-old attorney and mother of two. Her days are full of client meetings, deadlines, and negotiations she handles without breaking a sweat. But every evening, as she moves from work mode into home life, something in her body shifts before she can name it: a tightness in her throat, a churning stomach, a dread she can’t quite locate. She keeps a mug on her kitchen counter, a chipped one from law school that she never replaced, and some nights she wraps both hands around it just to feel something solid.

Tonight, her 14-year-old daughter throws her a frustrated glance over unfinished homework, and her 9-year-old son is refusing to get into the bath. Sarah feels the old voice arrive on schedule. You’re not enough. You’ll never get this right. These are echoes of her own childhood, where emotional needs were minimized and any expression of distress was met with silence or with anger.

“I know exactly what’s happening in my body,” Sarah told me once, sitting with her hands still wrapped around that same chipped mug. “I can feel the science of it, the fight or flight, all of it. Knowing doesn’t stop it. It just means I hate myself less afterward.”

What I noticed, listening to her, was that Sarah had already done the hardest part: she could see the pattern while she was inside it. That’s not nothing. Most people can only see it in the rearview mirror, if at all.

Sarah’s nervous system responds with a mix of fight and freeze. She tightens her jaw, her voice rises, and then she catches herself and swings hard into withdrawal, going quiet and cool. This rupture-and-repair rhythm leaves her exhausted and ashamed, despite a deep and genuine desire to parent differently than she was parented. Her story is a clean illustration of what’s actually happening under the surface: an old attachment wound getting activated, a nervous system holding somatic memory of threat, and a complicated tangle of guilt sitting right next to fierce love.

Divya is a 38-year-old physician and mother of one. She describes her own childhood as quietly painful, a home where emotional neglect was the norm rather than open conflict. Her parents provided for her materially but rarely connected with her emotionally, and she learned early to suppress her own needs and doubts, presenting a composed exterior while feeling invisible underneath it.

It’s late October, and the evening comes early now. Divya keeps her mother’s old ceramic mixing bowl on the counter, the one thing she took from her childhood home, and some nights she just holds it while the kettle heats. Tonight her toddler’s dinner plate hits the floor with a clatter, and instead of reacting, Divya feels the room go soft and far away. Her son is crying. She can hear him. She isn’t sure she can feel him.

“I used to think I was calm,” Divya told me. “It took me a long time to understand that calm and shut down aren’t the same thing. My body just learned that going quiet was safer than needing anything.”

Listening to her, what struck me was how thoroughly she’d mistaken a survival strategy for a personality trait. That single reframe, that the shutdown was something that happened to her rather than something wrong with her, changed how she related to it.

Divya’s evenings often trigger this same shutdown response, her nervous system bracing for the unpredictable emotional weather of parenting. The 6 PM hour is a familiar battleground, exhaustion colliding with the pressure to be perfect for a child who just wants her mother present. Her work is learning to identify and tolerate her own emotional needs as separate from her child’s, while building new relational habits that treat vulnerability as strength rather than a liability. Her story underscores something narrative trauma theorists call coherence, the ability to make sense of one’s own story and integrate the past with the present, a milestone many mothers find is the real turning point (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999).

Both women are living out a version of the same underlying mechanism. Disrupted attachment from childhood emotional neglect or earlier harm strongly predicts exactly these kinds of challenges in parenting and emotional regulation (Karatzias et al., 2022; Madigan et al., 2006). Mothers with disorganized or anxious attachment histories often find nervous system regulation hardest in precisely the caregiving moments that matter most.

What I find most useful about Sarah’s story and Divya’s story side by side is how different the same underlying wound can look on the outside. Sarah’s pattern is loud. It shows up as a raised voice, a slammed cabinet, a sharp comment she regrets within the hour. Divya’s pattern is quiet. It shows up as a kind of pleasant, competent distance that no one in her family has ever questioned, because it looks so much like calm. Neither pattern is worse than the other. Both are a nervous system doing the only thing it learned how to do under pressure, and both are workable once a mother can see the pattern clearly enough to name it out loud.

This is also where domain matters. A mother who grew up with a parent who raged will often develop a sensitized alarm system, primed to detect conflict early and respond big, the way Sarah does. A mother who grew up with a parent who withdrew or went silent will often develop the opposite adaptation, learning that disappearing inward is safer than showing need, the way Divya does. Neither of these women chose their wiring. Both are now doing the work of rewiring it, on purpose, in real time, in front of children who are watching closely whether they mean to or not.

Complex Trauma and the Parenting Body

Complex PTSD is a useful frame for understanding why this work is so layered for so many mothers. I recently read Marylene Cloitre and colleagues (2013), whose research identifies complex PTSD symptoms, ongoing emotional dysregulation and interpersonal difficulty chief among them, as a common legacy of childhood trauma that shapes both parenting capacity and a person’s internal sense of safety. This isn’t the same as a single traumatic event. It’s an accumulated weather system, built over years, that a mother carries into every bedtime and every school pickup.

I recently read Ruth Lanius, MD, and colleagues (2010), whose work shows that complex PTSD symptoms often surface in the context of ongoing relational stress, where the pressure comes from both inside and outside a person’s life at once. For a mother, that might mean an unsupportive partner, financial strain, and her own unresolved history all pressing on the same nervous system in the same week. Supporting mothers well means addressing all of that together: partner dynamics, community resources, and cultural expectations, not just individual coping skills in isolation.

I recently read Janina Fisher, PhD, clinical psychologist and trauma expert, whose frameworks describe how trauma-shaped nervous systems often swing between hyperarousal and hypoarousal, an experience of being simultaneously reactive and shut down, overwhelmed and far away at the same time (Fisher, 2017). Recognizing this duality is the first real step toward getting some flexibility back. Practices like breath regulation, somatic grounding, and simple attention to internal states rebuild the pathways that support calm, connected engagement, allowing a mother to stay present and responsive instead of reactive or checked out.

This is where the clinical picture matters for a mother who’s wondering whether what she’s dealing with is just stress or something more layered. Complex trauma tends to show up as a cluster: a persistent sense of not being enough, difficulty trusting your own read on a relationship, a nervous system that treats ordinary conflict like a five-alarm fire. None of that is a character flaw, and none of it means a mother is somehow unfit to parent well. It means her body is carrying more history than any single evening can hold, and the pathway forward has to account for that history rather than pretending it isn’t there.

Narrative coherence, weaving fragmented memories into an integrated story a person can actually hold, is a cornerstone of this kind of healing (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). I recently read Mary Main, PhD, whose research identified how unresolved trauma in a parent connects to disorganized attachment in that parent’s child (Madigan et al., 2006). Disorganized attachment tends to show up in caregiving that is simultaneously frightening and comforting to a child, which quietly perpetuates cycles of dysregulation across generations. When a mother recognizes this pattern in herself, she can begin to interrupt it with something new, a process that asks for nervous system regulation, honest curiosity, and steady relational skill-building over time.

Both/And: Breaking the Cycle Without Breaking Yourself

Breaking intergenerational trauma is not a straight line between “good” parenting and “bad,” or “healed” and “broken.” It’s a both/and. You are both the mother who sometimes loses her patience and the woman who deeply wants to do better. You carry the pain of your own childhood and you also build new experiences for your children, sometimes in the very same hour. Your nervous system can be both reactive and capable of regulation, and neither fact cancels out the other.

I recently read Janina Fisher, PhD, whose trauma work names this both/and directly: you are not your trauma, but your trauma shaped you. Holding both truths at once invites compassion instead of shame, curiosity instead of self-criticism. It treats nervous system responses as survival strategies rather than character flaws, which is a different thing entirely from making excuses.

Sarah put it plainly one afternoon: “I am exhausted and cranky at 6 PM, and I also deeply want to be present and loving.” Holding both realities at the same time is what creates room for change. It loosens the grip of shame and self-rejection that so often fuels the very reactivity a mother is trying to move past.

The both/and extends to the daily practice of parenting itself. Ruptures, the moments a mother loses patience or snaps, don’t erase all the good work that came before. Repairing those moments through honest, mindful communication builds trust rather than eroding it, and the nervous system genuinely learns safety through repeated cycles of rupture and repair (Siegel, 2012). Divya has found this true in her own life. She still has evenings where she goes quiet on her son before she catches it. What’s different now is what happens twenty minutes later: she comes back, names what happened out loud, and lets the repair be part of the story instead of hiding the rupture like evidence of failure.

Holding the both/and means accepting that healing is nonlinear, occasionally messy, and entirely human. That’s not a lower standard. It’s a more honest one.

I think of both/and as the opposite of the inner voice that shows up at 6 PM insisting there are only two categories: mother who has it together, or mother who is failing. Real life doesn’t sort that cleanly. A single evening can hold a snapped comment at 6:02 and a genuine, unhurried laugh at 6:40. Both belong to the same woman, the same night, the same relationship. Learning to let both be true, without needing the good moment to cancel out the hard one or the hard one to erase the good one, is much of what this work actually is.

The Systemic Lens: Why Mothers Carry This Alone

No mother exists in isolation, and breaking a trauma cycle requires a systemic lens that takes in family, culture, and society, not just one woman’s willpower at 6 PM on a Tuesday. Murray Bowen, MD, founder of family systems theory, showed how anxiety and emotional patterns move through generations, shaping individual behavior and relationships along the way (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).

From this vantage point, a mother’s nervous system reactivity isn’t only a personal struggle. It’s also a reflection of relational dynamics she inherited from her own family of origin. The emotional temperature of a family system, how feelings are expressed, suppressed, or managed, creates patterns that quietly shape parenting style long before a woman ever has children of her own.

Cultural narratives about motherhood weigh heavily here too. The myth of the perfect mother amplifies guilt and shame for women who are already carrying plenty of both, while economic pressure and social isolation add more weight to an already loaded system. A mother doing this work alone, without community or support, is fighting the pattern with one hand tied.

Breaking the cycle, then, involves boundary-setting, community, and advocacy alongside the internal nervous system work. Recovery here is a relational and cultural project as much as a personal one, which is part of why doing it entirely alone so often stalls out. Mothers who build a small system of support around themselves, a friend who checks in, a coach who understands the pattern, a course that names what’s happening in plain language, tend to move through this work with less shame and more traction.

This systemic view also helps explain why so many driven, capable women feel baffled by their own reactivity. They’ve solved harder problems than a toddler’s bedtime resistance in every other part of their lives. But a boardroom negotiation and a 6 PM meltdown draw on entirely different systems in the body, and competence in one doesn’t transfer automatically to the other. Understanding that the struggle is systemic, not a personal deficiency, is often the first real relief a mother feels in this whole process.

How to Heal: A Course Pathway for Mothers

The evening light softens through the kitchen window as Divya hears the familiar clatter of a dinner plate hitting the floor. Her heart races, the old 6 PM tension settling into her shoulders. She feels the familiar pull, the urge to snap, to control, to fix whatever feels unsafe inside her and around her. But tonight she breathes differently. She has a map now, something that guides her through the moment instead of letting the moment run away with her.

Breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma is a process that brings together nervous system regulation, making sense of your own story, building relational skill, and understanding the wider system you grew up in. This work is embodied and relational and it doesn’t finish on a schedule. It isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence, repair, and the kind of steadiness that gets built one evening at a time.

Here’s the three-layer version of what healing actually asks of you. Clinically: recovery requires simultaneous work across nervous system regulation, narrative integration, and relational repair. In kitchen-table terms: you’re teaching your body a new definition of safe, telling the truth about your own story, and practicing new ways of coming back together after a hard moment. On a Tuesday afternoon, this looks like noticing your shoulders creep toward your ears at 5:45 PM and choosing, on purpose, to take three breaths at the counter before you walk into the living room.

Step 1: Nervous System Stabilization

Mothers often hit their hardest moments in the late afternoon or evening, when exhaustion meets unregulated stress and old reactive patterns take over. Practical tools here include breath awareness, grounding exercises, and nervous system regulation practices that help a mother notice when her nervous system has activated and choose regulation instead of reaction. The “Parent Pause,” a deliberate moment to breathe, feel what’s happening in the body, and reset before responding, is a simple, repeatable place to start. Annie Wright’s Fixing the Foundations course builds this stabilization work step by step, with somatic grounding practices designed for exactly this kind of daily transition.

Step 2: Narrative Coherence

This step is about making sense of your own life story, integrating trauma into a coherent narrative that contextualizes your experience without letting it define you (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). When a mother understands the patterns she inherited, she can make conscious choices about what she wants to carry forward and what she’s ready to leave behind. I recently read Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist, whose book The Shelter of Each Other (Pipher, 2002) speaks to the healing power of storytelling within families. Journaling prompts that explore family dynamics, early memories, and core beliefs build self-awareness and, over time, reduce shame. Annie Wright’s Parenting Past the Pattern course focuses specifically on this narrative and relational rebuilding, with structured prompts for exactly this kind of work.

Step 3: Rupture and Repair

Conflict with children or partners is inevitable, especially when unresolved history colors how a person reacts in the moment. I recently read Daniel Siegel, MD, whose concept of mindsight describes the capacity to recognize and repair relational ruptures as a direct path toward more secure attachment (Siegel, 2012). Repair scripts, short, prepared phrases that acknowledge hurt and invite reconnection, help a mother move from blame or withdrawal toward repair. The Parent Pause supports de-escalation here too. This step asks for a both/and stance: both an imperfect human and a genuinely loving parent, at the same time.

Step 4: Inner Reparenting

Many mothers carry an inner critic shaped by emotional neglect or invalidation from their own childhoods. I recently read Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems therapy, whose framework offers a compassionate way of relating to these inner parts instead of suppressing them (Schwartz, 1995). Practices here include compassionate self-talk, visualization work with a younger version of yourself, and dialogue with the more critical parts of your inner world. This builds a kind of steadiness and self-soothing capacity that ripples directly into parenting.

Step 5: Systemic Engagement and Community

Family-of-origin wounds sit inside larger systems: family, culture, and societal expectation. Murray Bowen’s family systems theory highlights how patterns spanning multiple generations operate underneath individual behavior (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). Boundary-setting, selective family work, and an honest read on cultural scripts help a mother move through family dynamics without losing herself in them. Annie Wright’s Balanced After the Borderline and Direction Through the Dark courses go deeper into this systemic and identity-level work for mothers whose family-of-origin history includes more complex dynamics.

Healing rarely happens in isolation. Peer support groups, coaching circles, and trauma-informed communities offer validation, shared wisdom, and a kind of accountability that’s hard to build alone. Sarah found this true when she started meeting monthly with a small group of other mothers doing similar work. Divya found it in a coaching relationship that let her practice naming her feelings out loud before she had to do it live, at 6 PM, with her son watching. Community doesn’t replace the internal work. It makes the internal work sustainable.

Together, these steps form a course pathway rather than a single fix. Annie Wright’s course offerings are built to meet a mother wherever she’s starting: Learn for a foundational overview, Fixing the Foundations for nervous system stabilization, Parenting Past the Pattern for narrative and relational rebuilding, and Balanced After the Borderline or Direction Through the Dark for deeper systemic and identity work. For mothers who want individualized support alongside course work, Therapy with Annie offers relational trauma therapy that addresses attachment history and nervous system patterns directly. None of this is a promise of a cure. It’s a structured, educational path built around what the research shows actually helps mothers move through this work, one course and one evening at a time.

To be clear about what this pathway is and isn’t: these courses are educational and developmental, not a substitute for therapy or a clinical treatment. If you’re facing significant mental health concerns, working with a licensed therapist alongside any course work is the safer and more complete path.

By engaging with this kind of structured, informed approach, mothers can move past feeling swallowed by the 6 PM storm and instead build real presence, connection, and steadiness over time. The work honors how layered intergenerational trauma actually is while offering practical, embodied steps to write a new family story with compassion and strength.

To every mother reading this, you are not alone in the space between love and legacy, between the weight of what was and the hope of what could still be. Breaking an intergenerational pattern takes courage, presence, and a kind of relentless kindness toward yourself that most of us were never taught. Each moment you choose connection over reaction, each rupture you repair, each inner voice you soothe rather than silence, changes the story, not only for you but for your children and the generations after them. This work is real: complex, demanding, and genuinely full of hope. You belong to a community of women doing this alongside you, holding room for both the struggle and the grace in it.

Related Reading and PubMed Citations

1. Cloitre M, Garvert DW, Brewin CR, Bryant RA, Maercker A. Evidence for proposed ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD: a latent profile analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology. 2013;4. PMID: 23687563. DOI: 10.3402/ejpt.v4i0.20706.
2. Karatzias T, Shevlin M, Ford JD, et al. Childhood trauma, attachment orientation, and complex PTSD symptoms in a clinical sample: implications for treatment. Development and Psychopathology. 2022. PMID: 33446294. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579420001509.
3. Madigan S, Bakermans-Kranenburg MJ, van IJzendoorn MH, Moran G, Pederson DR, Benoit D. Unresolved states of mind, anomalous parental behavior, and disorganized attachment: a review and meta-analysis. Attachment & Human Development. 2006;8(2):89-111. PMID: 16818417. DOI: 10.1080/14616730600774458.
4. Pennebaker JW, Seagal JD. Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 1999;55(10):1243-1254.
5. Porges SW. The polyvagal perspective. Biological Psychology. 2007;74(2):116-143. PMID: 17049418. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.06.009.
6. Siegel DJ. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; 2012.
7. Kerr M, Bowen M. Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. Norton; 1988.
8. Lanius RA, Vermetten E, Loewenstein RJ, et al. Emotion modulation in PTSD: clinical and neurobiological evidence for a dissociative subtype. American Journal of Psychiatry. 2010;167(6):640-647. PMID: 20360318. DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2009.09081168.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Stone L, West J, Rhodes A, Emerson D, Suvak M, Spinazzola J. Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: a randomized controlled trial. J Clin Psychiatry. 2014;75(6):e559-65. doi:10.4088/JCP.13m08561. PMID: 25004196. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
3. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Disorganized attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby's unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
4. Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
• Pipher, Mary. The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families. Riverhead Books, 2002.
• Schwartz, Richard. Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press, 1995.
• Kerr, Michael E., and Murray Bowen. Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. Norton, 1988.

About the Author

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 (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 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. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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