A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now

A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now

Therapy Topics • January 18, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Relational trauma refers to the emotional wounds that come from difficult or harmful experiences in close relationships, often in childhood, which shape how you feel, think, and connect with others — and with yourself. It is not about one isolated event or just ‘bad parenting,’ but about patterns where your needs and desires were overlooked because you had to prioritize others’ emotions, especially if you were the family’s emotional caretaker. This matters deeply here because if you lost touch with your own wants and feelings, your goal-setting might be a replay of those old survival strategies — keeping everyone else safe while you remain unseen and disconnected. Understanding relational trauma is the key to reclaiming your desire, your voice, and your agency in how you move forward.

• You might be exhausted by endless goal-setting because your drive to succeed is actually fueled by achievement trauma—anxiety and the need to prove your worth—instead of genuine curiosity or excitement.
• Achievement trauma, rooted in relational trauma from always being the emotional caretaker, disconnects you from your own desires and makes your goals feel like performances that drain you before they even begin.
• Healing this means learning to recognize how fear interrupts your motivation and gently shifting toward goals that arise from what truly excites you, allowing your nervous system to reclaim safety and your ambition to feel alive.

Before I share this letter, I want you to know about something.

If you spent December holding everyone together—the family, the team, the emotional temperature of every room you walked into—and now you’re staring at January wondering why you can’t seem to want anything for yourself…

This is for you.

1. A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now
2. So what changed?
3. Explore More on Relational Trauma Recovery

A Letter About How I Actually Set Goals Now

As I’ve mentioned many times in this Substack, I write the content I most need—or that I’ve worked through and am still learning. This is particularly true for the January goal-setting content I’ve been sharing with you this month.

Up until about five years ago, I was the classic example of making a long list of resolutions that didn’t come from my soul. They didn’t come from my heart. They were completely informed by fear.

Fear around my body and how it was perceived in the world. Fear about finances—this maladaptive belief that there would never be enough, that it would all be taken away from me. Fear about proving myself professionally. And social influence around what I thought I should be doing.

It’s a tale as old as time, I know. But for me, it correlates to something deeper: for most of my life, the fuel for my drive and ambition was fear, not a sense of generativity or mission or connection to my intuition.

Inevitably, the goals I created from that place were also the goals I created in impossible quantities. More than three people could accomplish in a year—or even two years. I was always setting myself up for failure. And then came the self-flagellation when I inevitably fell short.

Even when I went after those goals with everything I had, the amount and the pace felt deeply punitive. It would lead me to self-soothe in some pretty maladaptive ways, just to get a break from the strain.

Needless to say, it wasn’t a great recipe for goal-setting. Or for visioning my life for the next year.

So what changed?

About five years ago, I moved through even deeper layers of my relational trauma recovery work. I did some profound EMDR processing and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy that finally—finally—rewired the deep-seated fear channels in my brain tied to money, performance, and worth.

That’s when I began to feel a power shift. A shift in my way of being in the world. A shift in how I approached everything related to my profession, my finances, and the goals I set in my personal life.

The shift meant I was reducing the fuel of fear and finding a different fuel. One that felt more like it was coming from a deep knowing—a sense of mission and purpose and genuine desire to take care of myself and my body.

This was around the time I started to re-engage with my spiritual side, too.

That part of me had been present as a kid and as a young adolescent. But then I really amputated it off as I coped with my unresolved childhood trauma through drive, achievement, and academics. It got put on the backburner for a very, very long time.

It would crop up occasionally. Like the day I had both the LSAT study book and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves sitting side by side on my tiny desk in my yurt at Esalen. But then it would go underground again, because I didn’t prioritize it. (PMID: 8453200)

About five years ago, though, everything shifted. Not only did I do a very deep layer of relational trauma recovery work with multiple evidence-based modalities, but I also started reconnecting and reintegrating that soulful side of me.

The combination of pursuing my goals less from fear and more from a sense of generativity and mission—combined with the integration of this intuitive, soulful part of myself—has totally transformed the way I approach goal-setting.

Instead of treating my goals now as a list of things that must be done in order to keep me safe, keep my life afloat, or that feel like the goals I should be setting, I actually spend quite a bit of time in November reflecting on what I’ve accomplished and what I’d like to craft of my life in the coming year.

Why November?

Because I spend the month of December building my vision boards.

I know that might sound pretty woo-woo—spending a month building vision boards. But let me explain.

I treat vision boards like an art form.

The vision boards I made in 2022 were poster-sized. One for my personal life, one for my professional life. I bought frames for them—poster-sized frames—and I kept them in front of my laptop, near my desk, every single day. They were informed by how I want to feel, and less about the concrete accomplishments, though there were very deliberate images of what I wanted to achieve.

Let me give you some examples of what I put on those boards.

A picture of my dream house—the one I ended up purchasing in my dream town through an incredible story and confluence of circumstances. (That could be an entire Substack letter someday.)

Selling my company. Which I did at the top of 2025.

Publishing a book. Never did I imagine that a top literary agent and a top publishing house would reach out to me without me ever sending in a proposal.

I’m not kidding when I say that the bulk of what was on those two vision boards came true.

I know that sounds wild to believe. But my husband and my best girlfriends are witness to it.

How Trauma-Shaped Goals Backfire for Driven Women

In my clinical work with driven and ambitious women, one of the most revealing questions I ask is: “Where did this goal come from?” Not as a challenge, but as genuine curiosity. Because what I’ve found, consistently, is that many of the goals driven women are working toward — the title, the number in the account, the body, the relationship structure — originated not in a clear-eyed assessment of what they actually want, but in an early and usually unconscious response to a wound.

Tessa is a 40-year-old managing director who came to therapy after achieving the partnership she’d been chasing for eight years. She described feeling, in the week after the announcement, not elated but “oddly hollowed out.” She couldn’t understand it. She’d worked eighteen-hour days, made enormous sacrifices, done exactly what the goal required. And it hadn’t delivered what she expected. When we started working backward — asking where the goal had come from, what she’d believed would happen when she achieved it — she landed on something that surprised her: she’d been chasing the partnership partly because her father had told her, when she was eleven, that she wasn’t smart enough for that kind of career. “I was proving something,” she said. “I just didn’t know who I was proving it to anymore.”

Trauma-shaped goals have a particular quality: they’re non-negotiable. They can’t be questioned, modified, or abandoned without triggering a deep anxiety that feels existential. This is a diagnostic signal. Goals that come from genuine desire have flexibility — you can imagine adjusting them, timing them differently, caring about them without being controlled by them. Goals that come from wounds have an urgency that feels like survival, because at the level of the nervous system, they are.

Desire vs. Defense: Learning to Tell the Difference

The central question in trauma-informed goal-setting is not “what do you want to achieve?” but “where does this wanting come from?” Not because ambition is suspect — it isn’t. But because when we can distinguish between goals that come from desire and goals that come from defense, we can finally pursue the things that will actually satisfy us.

In my work with clients, I’ve identified some signals that a goal is coming from a wound rather than a want: it feels urgent rather than chosen; giving it up would feel catastrophic rather than disappointing; achieving it is almost entirely about what others will think; the finish line keeps moving; you struggle to explain why you want it beyond “I just need to.” None of these automatically mean the goal is wrong to pursue. But they’re worth examining — because pursuing a wound-goal is exhausting in a different way than pursuing a desire-goal. Wound-goals don’t refuel you. They demand payment.

What I’ve found in my own practice of goal-setting, and what I hold space for with clients, is the willingness to ask: what do I actually want, separate from what will prove I’m okay, separate from what will make the people who doubted me finally believe in me? This question isn’t quick to answer. It sometimes requires sitting with a lot of discomfort, and often some grief for the goals we chased without realizing they were compensations. But it opens something. It creates room for goals that feel like life rather than obligation. If this kind of work resonates, individual therapy and executive coaching are both pathways into it — along with the Fixing the Foundations course, which addresses these dynamics directly.

Both/And: Your Drive and Your Wounds Can Both Be Real

The driven women I work with often arrive in therapy with an unspoken fear: if they stop pushing, everything falls apart. If they let themselves feel what they’ve been outrunning, they’ll never get back up. So they frame the choice in binary terms — keep performing or collapse. In my clinical experience, neither option is necessary.

Jenny is an executive at a major tech company who hadn’t taken a sick day in three years. When she finally came to therapy, it wasn’t because she decided to — it was because her body decided for her. Migraines, insomnia, a jaw so clenched her dentist flagged it. She told me, “I can’t afford to fall apart,” and I told her the truth: she was already falling apart. She just hadn’t given herself permission to notice. What Jenny needed wasn’t to dismantle her drive. It was to stop treating her own pain as an inconvenience to her productivity.

Both/And means this: you can be the person who delivers exceptional results at work and the person who cries in the car afterward. You can be fiercely competent and quietly terrified. You can want more and still appreciate what you have. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the full truth of what it means to be a driven woman navigating a world that rewards your output but not your wholeness.

The Systemic Lens: The Weight You Carry Isn’t All Yours

Driven women are systematically taught to locate the source of their suffering internally. If you’re burned out, you need better boundaries. If you’re anxious, you need more mindfulness. If your relationships are strained, you need to communicate better. This framing isn’t accidental — it serves a function. It keeps the focus on individual behavior and away from the structural conditions that make individual behavior so costly.

Consider what the typical driven woman manages in a single day: high-stakes professional work, emotional labor in relationships, mental load of household management, caregiving responsibilities, her own physical and mental health, and the performance of equanimity required to be taken seriously in all of these domains. No one designed this workload to be sustainable because no one designed it at all. It accrued — the result of decades of women entering professional spaces without the domestic and structural supports being redesigned to accommodate that shift.

In my clinical work, I’ve found that naming these systemic forces is itself therapeutic. When a driven woman realizes that her struggle isn’t evidence of personal inadequacy but a predictable response to impossible conditions, something shifts. The shame loosens. The self-blame softens. And she can begin to make choices based on what she actually needs rather than what the system tells her she should be able to handle.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Set Goals That Actually Fit the Life You’re Trying to Build

In my work with driven, ambitious women, I’ve noticed something consistent about the way conventional goal-setting advice lands: it doesn’t quite fit. It’s designed for people who need motivation, and that’s not typically the problem. The women I work with have more than enough drive. What they often lack is a way of setting goals that’s connected to what they actually value, rather than what they’re supposed to want, or what they used to want, or what they chose at a different life stage with a different understanding of themselves. Setting goals differently isn’t about doing less. It’s about doing something that actually matters to you rather than running a race whose finish line you’ve never consciously chosen.

The first shift I’d invite is from goal-setting as a performance to goal-setting as a listening practice. Before you write anything down, before you construct a plan, spend real time asking yourself: What do I actually want my life to feel like? Not what do I want to achieve, not what would look like success from the outside — but what would feel right, spacious, and genuinely mine? That question is harder than it sounds, especially if you’ve spent years calibrating your ambitions to external metrics. Many women I work with discover, when they slow down enough to actually listen, that some of what they’ve been chasing was never really theirs to begin with.

One framework I’ve found genuinely useful for this kind of values-clarification work is Internal Family Systems (IFS). When you bring a goal to your internal system and ask “who wants this?” — you often find multiple answers. There’s the part that wants it because it proves something. The part that wants it because it’s what’s expected. The part that’s afraid of what it would mean to want something different. And then, if you keep listening, sometimes there’s a quieter part that has a genuine desire — one that’s been waiting to be heard beneath all the noise. IFS helps you make contact with that quieter voice, and to set goals that serve your whole self rather than your most defended parts.

Sustainability is a core criterion for any goal I’d encourage you to take seriously. If a goal requires you to consistently override your body, deprive yourself of sleep, or sacrifice everything else that feeds you — it’s not a goal, it’s a punishment. For women who’ve been operating at the edge of their capacity for a long time, this reframing can feel radical. A therapist who understands the specific pressures facing driven women can help you distinguish between goals that energize you and goals that are just a continuation of the self-depletion you’ve been practicing. Therapy with Annie offers exactly that kind of nuanced, non-generic support.

I’d also suggest making space for grief as part of the goal-revision process. When you begin to examine whether your goals are actually yours, you sometimes discover that some of what you’ve been working toward isn’t something you want anymore. That’s a loss — even when it’s also a relief. Grief about outgrown ambitions, paths not taken, and years spent optimizing for the wrong outcomes is real and deserves acknowledgment, not just reframing into a positive lesson.

For women navigating significant transitions — a career change, a life restructuring, a recalibration of priorities — combining therapeutic work with executive coaching can be powerfully effective. Therapy addresses the inner architecture — the values, the fears, the parts in conflict. Coaching addresses the practical forward motion — what steps, what structures, what accountability supports the new direction. Together, they create the conditions for change that actually holds.

You’re allowed to set goals that fit you as you are now, not as you were ten years ago, or as you imagined yourself when you were building the life you’re currently questioning. That kind of alignment between inner knowing and outward action is possible — and it’s one of the most grounding things I see people build in my practice.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer