I didn’t need
less ambition.
I needed a different way to live.

I grew up on a small island off the coast of Maine, with poverty, danger at home and shame about my biological father. When people didn’t feel safe to depend on, achievement did. It was the thing I was good at, a way to protect myself from that shame, and a practical path out of poverty.

And I loved it. I’m naturally ambitious and driven; curiosity, effort and the pleasure of doing something well are real parts of who I am. I became valedictorian, the first in my family to go to college, and earned two B.A.s from Brown University.

Those achievements mattered. They changed my opportunities. But the relational trauma I hadn’t yet acknowledged, the wounds from relationships that should have been safe, didn’t disappear when my circumstances changed.

In 2005, I was serving in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan when the Andijon massacre occurred and we were evacuated. In the upheaval that followed, I could no longer keep my unresolved childhood history at a distance by moving toward the next accomplishment.

Leaving had changed where I lived and what was possible for me. It hadn’t resolved what I’d lived through.

So I bought a one-way ticket to the Esalen Institute, on the cliffs of Big Sur, with one suitcase and a few thousand dollars in savings. I thought I’d stay a month. One month became two, then nearly four years of living and working at the educational retreat center, apprenticing and studying, alongside intensive one-to-one and relational healing work.

Esalen wasn’t simply an interesting place on my résumé. Those years were a substantial part of my recovery and of learning how to relate to myself and other people differently. They weren’t the end of that recovery, but they belonged to a different beginning.

I went on to earn my master’s in counseling psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and train as a psychotherapist. Relational trauma became the focus of my clinical work: how harmful early relationships can shape the ways we trust, protect ourselves, work and love long after childhood.

I’ve since spent more than 15,000 clinical hours working with people and pursued advanced trauma training, including EMDRIA certification in EMDR. My work now reaches people through therapy, courses, writing, coaching and speaking. I also have a forthcoming book with W. W. Norton & Company.

In 2019, when my daughter was three months old, I founded a trauma-informed therapy center in the Bay Area. I scaled it into a multimillion-dollar, multi-state mental health company. I loved building it, and I’m proud of what I built.

I also know what it cost. The responsibility, pressure and relentless work brought profound burnout, a health scare and strain on my family. I’d addressed layers of my relational trauma and built a career helping others do the same, but achievement was still a form of avoidance that was very easy to praise.

I could love the work and use it to keep painful feelings out of reach. Both were true. Workaholism, difficulty resting and not knowing who I was outside my work weren’t resolved simply because I could explain them. Achievement as addiction was the last big avoidance mechanism I had to face.

I sold the company and moved my family across the country to coastal New England for a way of life that felt better for all of us. That meant letting go of a company and a way of life I’d worked hard to build. It wasn’t a small adjustment.

I returned to deeper recovery work. The sale and the move changed the conditions of my life; the personal work was changing what I asked achievement to do for me. I needed more than a different place to live. I needed to learn how to rest and have an identity outside work, without asking the next accomplishment to make me feel safe.

I understand the question. In my own life, I gave up a great deal: I sold the company and left the life we’d built across the country. I won’t describe that as simply learning to take a little more time off.

But I don’t use my decisions as a prescription for yours. I wouldn’t assume that your work needs to end, or promise that everything in your life can stay exactly as it is. The question is what your way of living is costing you, what you want to keep and what needs to change.

Ambition is still part of who I am. The distinction, for me, was learning to recognize work I chose and loved, and work I felt compelled to keep doing because stopping brought me into contact with things I hadn’t faced.