Am I a Covert Narcissist? An Honest Therapist’s Self-Assessment
Driven, ambitious women who’ve been in painful relationships sometimes land on a specific, distressing question: am I actually the covert narcissist here? This post walks through what covert narcissism genuinely is, how it differs from trauma responses and complex PTSD, and offers a 15-question self-assessment with a scoring rubric. The fact that you’re asking this question with real dread is itself meaningful clinical data.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- 3am, Scrolling: The Question That Won’t Let You Sleep
- What Is Covert Narcissism, and What It Isn’t
- The Neuroscience of Empathy and Narcissistic Defenses
- How Covert Narcissism Shows Up in Driven Women
- The Self-Assessment: 15 Questions with a Scoring Rubric
- Covert Narcissism vs. Complex PTSD: The Crucial Distinction
- Both/And: You Can Have Selfish Moments and Still Not Be a Narcissist
- The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Are Disproportionately Convinced They’re the Problem
- What Healing Actually Looks Like From Here
- Frequently Asked Questions
3am, Scrolling: The Question That Won’t Let You Sleep
The room is dark. Camille, 38, a cardiologist in Houston, is lying on her back in bed, her Yeti tumbler cold on the nightstand, everyone else asleep. She’s been replaying the same twenty minutes of dinner conversation for two hours. Her voice rising. Her partner going still. That look she can’t stop seeing. And now she’s here, typing “am I a covert narcissist” into a search bar, chest tight, phone screen cutting blue light across the ceiling.
What got Camille to this moment wasn’t cruelty. It was accumulation. The way she sometimes shuts down mid-conversation. The flash of irritation when she isn’t understood. The creeping suspicion, planted gradually over years in a relationship that never quite settled, that she might be the problem. That the distance she creates might be something more than anxiety. Something darker.
In my work with driven, ambitious women over fifteen years, specifically those who’ve come through painful or confusing relationships, I’ve watched a particular pattern emerge with near-clockwork regularity: the most empathic, self-aware women in my practice are the ones who lie awake worrying they’re terrible people. The women who are actually indifferent to their impact rarely make it through the door.
If you recognize Camille’s moment, I want you to know something before we go any further. The fact that you’re asking this question at all is meaningful. Covert narcissists, as a clinical rule, don’t lie awake worrying that they’re hurting people. That specific, gut-level dread is usually a clue about who you are, not evidence that you’re what you fear. That said, dread alone isn’t enough. You deserve a real answer. So let’s build one carefully.
This content is psychoeducational in nature and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
What Is Covert Narcissism, and What It Isn’t
Covert narcissism is a personality structure organized around fragile self-esteem, chronic envy, and passive entitlement, presented through self-effacement or victimhood rather than the loudness most people associate with narcissism.
COVERT NARCISSISM
Covert narcissism, also called vulnerable narcissism, is a subtype of narcissistic personality disorder characterized by hypersensitivity to criticism, chronic shame, covert entitlement, and a persistent deficit in genuine empathic concern. Rather than presenting through overt grandiosity, it presents through withdrawal, victimhood, or a self-effacing introversion that masks quiet demands for special treatment. Daniel Shaw, LCSW, psychoanalyst, trauma therapist, and author of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation (Routledge, 2014), describes covert narcissists as organizing their emotional lives around hidden demands for admiration while maintaining a self-image of suffering or selflessness.
IN PLAIN TERMS
A covert narcissist doesn’t announce their entitlement. They feel it quietly and expect the world to meet it. The self-absorption is real; the empathy deficits are real. They’re just wrapped in shyness or victimhood instead of loudness. And this is genuinely different from someone who is wounded, scared, or carrying the behavioral residue of a difficult relationship.
The single most important distinction here is between covert narcissism as a personality structure and what Pete Walker, M.A., MFT, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (Azure Coyote, 2013), calls “fleas.” Fleas are the unconscious behaviors trauma survivors absorb from living in close proximity to someone narcissistic. They might look like narcissistic traits from the outside: defensiveness, self-focus, difficulty showing up for others. But they come from a completely different place. Fear, not entitlement. Hypervigilance, not contempt.
NARCISSISTIC FLEAS
A term popularized by Pete Walker, M.A., MFT, “fleas” are survival behaviors and attitudinal patterns people unconsciously absorb from living in close proximity to a narcissistic or abusive person. They include emotional shutdown, reflexive people-pleasing, explosive reactions when a boundary is finally crossed, and harsh self-criticism. They look like narcissistic traits from outside the relationship but originate in fear-based adaptation.
IN PLAIN TERMS
Fleas are learned coping tools, not character traits. They feel a lot like narcissism from the inside, especially the self-absorption that happens when you’re just trying to survive. But they’re rooted in fear and they can change. Covert narcissism, without significant therapeutic intervention, typically doesn’t.
Understanding this difference is the foundation of everything that follows. It’s what makes the self-assessment meaningful: not just a list of symptoms to count, but a framework for understanding where your behaviors come from and what they’re organized around.
The Neuroscience of Empathy and Narcissistic Defenses
Neuroscience now shows that empathy is not a single trait but a cluster of distinct neural processes, and those components can be selectively impaired in personality disorders while remaining intact in trauma survivors.
EMPATHY: THREE NEURAL COMPONENTS
Tania Singer, PhD, neuroscientist and founding director of the Social Neuroscience Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, distinguishes three separable components: cognitive empathy (understanding what someone else is experiencing), affective empathy (feeling it with them), and compassionate concern (being moved to act on that feeling). Research by Singer and Claus Lamm published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009) shows these components can be independently disrupted in personality disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder.
IN PLAIN TERMS
You can understand intellectually that someone is hurting without feeling it, or without caring enough to act. Covert narcissists often retain cognitive empathy (they can read the room) while showing deficits in affective empathy and compassionate concern. Trauma survivors, by contrast, often have the opposite problem: they feel too much, and their empathy becomes overwhelming or dysregulated.
This neuroscience matters for self-assessment because it tells us where to look. Janina Fisher, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors (Routledge, 2017), writes that trauma changes the brain’s capacity for self-other differentiation. When you’ve been chronically hypervigilant, focused on reading another person’s mood for safety signals, your own emotional experience can feel distant or inaccessible. This gets mistaken, by the survivor and by others, for emotional coldness.
But emotional distance from yourself is not the same as lack of empathy for others. The driving force matters. Trauma-related emotional numbing comes from overwhelm and self-protection. Narcissistic empathy deficits come from a fundamentally self-organized psychological structure that doesn’t make room for the full reality of other people.
Heinz Kohut, MD, the pioneering self psychologist and author of The Analysis of the Self (International Universities Press, 1971), showed that narcissistic personality structures form early, constructed in childhood from specific relational wounds. They’re not chosen. That doesn’t make them less real or less damaging. But it does mean that the person asking “am I a covert narcissist” after a painful adult relationship is rarely the right clinical target. The people who grew up having their needs met through manipulation and passive entitlement don’t tend to be the ones spending evenings in distress about it.
If you’re in the middle of untangling this question, Clarity After the Covert walks through a specific protocol for recognizing covert narcissistic patterns and understanding which ones belong to you and which ones you absorbed from someone else.
How Covert Narcissism Shows Up in Driven Women
Driven women who’ve been in relationships with covert narcissists often develop a specific kind of self-doubt: they begin to suspect that their own ambition, directness, or emotional unavailability is evidence of covert narcissism.
COMPOSITE VIGNETTE
Camille, 38
She came in on a Tuesday in November, rain on the windows of my office, still in her white coat because she’d come straight from a shift. She had her Yeti tumbler from the morning, long cold, twisted in her hands the whole session. She’d started our work together asking to understand why she kept “making everything worse” in her marriage.
“I just shut down,” she said, and then kept going without pausing, the way people do when they’ve rehearsed something so many times it comes out in a single breath. “He says something that doesn’t feel right and instead of talking about it I just go completely quiet. For hours. And I know that’s awful, I know it is, but I can’t seem to stop doing it. So that’s covert narcissism, right? The silent treatment. That’s what they all do.”
Sitting there with Camille, I felt the specific quality of sadness that comes when someone has done too much reading in the wrong direction. She had studied the clinical literature on covert narcissism with the same rigor she’d brought to her medical boards. She’d built an airtight case against herself. What she hadn’t been able to see from inside the evidence she’d gathered was that emotional shutdown after feeling criticized, after years of marriage to someone who regularly revised their shared history to make him the wronged party, is not a personality structure. It’s a nervous system response.
She left that session still uncertain. That felt right. The certainty could wait.
What I’ve come to understand across fifteen years of this work is that driven women are particularly vulnerable to this specific confusion for two reasons. First, their capacity for rigorous self-examination, the same quality that made them excellent physicians or lawyers or executives, gets turned inward during a crisis and produces exhaustive evidence against themselves. Second, the behaviors that look like covert narcissism from outside (emotional withdrawal, irritability, difficulty prioritizing relationships over work) are often the exact survival strategies that got them through environments where their emotional needs were treated as burdens.
A woman who learned early that her needs were too much, too loud, too demanding, doesn’t become emotionally self-sufficient because she’s narcissistic. She becomes emotionally self-sufficient because that was the adaptation required to stay in relationship with people who couldn’t meet her. And then she meets someone who calls that self-sufficiency selfishness, and the old wiring lights up: I am the problem. I was always the problem.
Understanding what covert narcissism actually looks like across the full arc of a relationship is part of what makes this distinction possible to hold. The patterns are specific. They’re consistent. They’re organized around entitlement, not fear.
The Self-Assessment: 15 Questions with a Scoring Rubric
This 15-question clinical reflection tool is designed to help you distinguish between trauma-based coping patterns and the more enduring, structured patterns that characterize covert narcissism.
For each question, choose the answer that most honestly reflects your consistent experience. Not your worst moments, not your best. Your pattern. This assessment is not a diagnosis. It’s a clinical reflection tool. If your results are distressing, please bring them to a therapist rather than using them as a verdict.
Q2. When a close friend shares exciting news, I typically feel:
Q3. When I receive criticism, even gentle feedback, my honest first reaction is:
Q4. When I think about the people I’m close to, my baseline feeling toward them is:
Q5. When someone lets me down or disappoints me, I:
Q6. When I think about my own needs vs. the needs of people I love, I:
Q7. In my close relationships, I tend to use victimhood or suffering:
Q8. When I do something wrong or hurt someone, my primary internal experience is:
Q9. My self-worth tends to:
Q10. When I withdraw emotionally from someone (go quiet, shut down, pull away), it’s usually because:
Q11. When I reflect on past relationships that ended badly, I typically:
Q12. In conversations, I’m honest that:
Q13. When someone in my life achieves something significant and I’m struggling, my response is:
Q14. If someone I care about tried to set a firm limit with me, my deep-down reaction would be:
Q15. I’m taking this self-assessment because:
HOW TO SCORE YOUR RESULTS
Add up your total points from all 15 questions. Use these ranges as a starting framework, not a verdict.
0 to 10 points: Your patterns look much more like trauma responses than covert narcissism. The self-focus, emotional withdrawal, and relational anxiety you experience are consistent with what people develop after living through difficult or abusive relationships. You’re not the monster you fear you are.
11 to 20 points: There are patterns worth examining. They might be trauma-driven, they might be areas of genuine growth, or they might reflect relational habits that formed in survival mode. A skilled therapist can help you untangle what’s coming from where. This is a reason to seek support, not a sentence.
21 to 30 points: Consistent patterns here deserve honest, professional attention. This doesn’t mean you’re broken or beyond help. It does mean that the self-examination you’re doing right now needs to happen with a therapist, not just a quiz. Many people with these patterns can and do change with sustained, genuine therapeutic work.
31 to 45 points: If you’ve answered honestly, these results suggest persistent patterns across empathy, entitlement, and accountability that are worth taking seriously. Please consider reaching out to a trauma-informed therapist who works with personality-level patterns. This range doesn’t make you a bad person. It means something significant is happening that deserves real attention.
Note: This assessment is a clinical reflection tool designed by Annie Wright, LMFT. It is not a diagnostic instrument and should not be used to diagnose yourself or others.
“To know but not to know, to keep secrets from oneself: that is the central dilemma of the survivor.”
JUDITH HERMAN, MD · PSYCHIATRIST, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL · TRAUMA AND RECOVERY
Covert Narcissism vs. Complex PTSD: The Crucial Distinction
The overlap between covert narcissism and Complex PTSD is one of the most clinically important distinctions in this conversation, and one of the most frequently missed by both clinicians and the people living inside these patterns.
Christine Courtois, PhD, clinical psychologist, trauma specialist, and author of Healing the Incest Wound (W.W. Norton, 1988), describes Complex PTSD as arising from prolonged, repeated interpersonal trauma: the kind that happens inside families, partnerships, and institutions over years. Symptoms include difficulty regulating emotions, profound shame, distorted self-perception, and relational hypervigilance. Look at that list, and you can see exactly why the confusion happens.
COMPLEX PTSD (C-PTSD)
Complex PTSD is a clinical formulation describing the lasting psychological effects of prolonged, repeated interpersonal trauma, especially when escape was limited and when the perpetrator was someone the victim depended on. As described by Christine Courtois, PhD, and Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery (Basic Books, 1992), C-PTSD involves disruptions in emotional regulation, consciousness, self-perception, relationship patterns, and systems of meaning.
IN PLAIN TERMS
C-PTSD means your nervous system got rewired by sustained danger or neglect, usually inside a relationship that was supposed to be safe. The reactions that look “disordered” from outside are adaptations. They made sense. They kept you going. And with the right support, they can change.
Emotional dysregulation, shame, relational difficulties: these can look like narcissistic traits from outside the relationship. The internal driver is the difference. C-PTSD symptoms are organized around fear: fear of abandonment, fear of disapproval, fear of one’s own feelings. Covert narcissistic patterns are organized around entitlement and self-protection from perceived slights. Same surface behaviors. Different engines entirely.
For women who’ve been in relationships with a covert narcissist parent or partner, this distinction is especially loaded. Gaslighting, the systematic undermining of your perception of reality, is one of the primary tools of covert narcissistic abuse. If you were told repeatedly that your reactions were the problem, that your hurt was proof of your toxicity, that your needs were evidence of selfishness: you may have internalized a narrative that has very little to do with who you actually are.
Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist and professor emerita at the University of Oregon, who developed the theory of betrayal trauma, adds a crucial layer here. Survivors of relational betrayal often develop what Freyd calls “betrayal blindness”: an unconscious mechanism that keeps them from fully registering the abuse in order to maintain the attachment. This means many women carry invisible wounds they don’t yet have accurate words for, let alone a clear sense of who caused what.
If you’ve spent time learning how to spot a covert narcissist and found yourself recognizing both the abuser’s patterns and your own reactive behaviors: that recognition is clinically meaningful. It tells us something about what you’ve been through, not who you fundamentally are.
Both/And: You Can Have Selfish Moments and Still Not Be a Narcissist
The capacity to behave selfishly, withdraw, or act out defensively was a wise survival strategy AND it may now be creating the exact disconnection you’re trying to heal.
COMPOSITE VIGNETTE
Nadia, 34
She came in one morning in early spring wearing a blazer she’d clearly put on in the car, her briefcase open on the floor, still in court shoes. She was an M&A attorney, driven, precise, used to building airtight arguments in every setting. She’d described a moment she was ashamed of: she’d snapped at her partner for asking about dinner when she was flooded from a brutal deposition. Then she’d gone quiet for three hours.
“That’s what a covert narcissist does,” she said. Not a question. A verdict she’d already reached before she got here. “The silent treatment. The shutdown. I’ve read all about it. I do that. I know I do that.”
I felt something settle in me as she said it. The certainty. The way she’d closed the case before it was examined. I’ve sat with dozens of women who’ve reached this exact conclusion, and in my clinical experience, the pattern that predicts the conclusion almost every time isn’t narcissism. It’s exhaustion meeting a childhood that taught them their emotions were too inconvenient to be handled in real time.
Nadia left still not fully sure. That was honest. What I did tell her before she went: the ability to feel genuine remorse, to want to do better, to sit with the discomfort of having hurt someone, is not what covert narcissism looks like. That particular capacity is exactly what narcissistic personality disorder tends to impair.
Holding both/and means letting yourself understand that human beings are capable of selfish behavior, emotional withdrawal, defensiveness, and reactive unkindness, and none of those moments necessarily add up to a personality disorder. Especially when those behaviors concentrate in moments of overwhelm, when they follow a childhood that taught you that your needs were dangerous or unwelcome, when they look completely different in contexts where you feel safe.
Daniel Shaw, LCSW, author of Traumatic Narcissism, describes what he calls “traumatized empathy”: a state where a person’s empathic capacity exists but is impaired, compressed, or made temporarily inaccessible by their own unprocessed pain. This is not the same as a structural empathy deficit. It’s an empathy that’s been wounded and needs rehabilitation, not an empathy that was never quite there to begin with.
Your reactive selfishness was brilliant adaptation AND it is now costing you the intimacy you want. That’s a Both/And. It doesn’t require you to become the villain in order to do the work of changing it. You’re allowed to be imperfect, dysregulated, self-protective, and sometimes hard to be with, and to not be a narcissist. These aren’t mutually exclusive truths.
The Systemic Lens: Why Driven Women Are Disproportionately Convinced They’re the Problem
Driven women are disproportionately likely to ask “am I a covert narcissist?” because every system they’ve moved through has trained them to accept responsibility for relational failures, including those caused by someone else.
Consider what the data actually shows. “Am I a covert narcissist” is among the highest-traffic self-assessment searches on the internet, and the people asking it are overwhelmingly women, and overwhelmingly ambitious ones. This isn’t random, and it isn’t explained by prevalence rates. It’s explained by socialization.
Priya, a 41-year-old tech executive, spent a year convinced she was the covertly narcissistic one in her marriage. Her previous therapist had flagged her emotional unavailability, her defensiveness, her tendency to prioritize work. Her ex-partner had framed her ambition as selfishness so consistently that she’d stopped being able to tell the difference between a limit and an act of cruelty. She’d done the reading, taken every quiz she could find, and built a case against herself with the same analytical precision she brought to her work.
What Priya eventually came to understand, slowly and in pieces, was that she’d been in a relationship with someone who had a covert narcissist’s characteristic pattern of rewriting the relational narrative to make themselves the wronged party. Her “narcissism” was her trauma response to his. Her “selfishness” was her attempt to maintain a self at all. What lives in her body now, the bracing she does before phone calls, the way she second-guesses every sentence in a difficult conversation: that’s what structural gaslighting does. It makes its target into its own most reliable prosecutor.
Women are socialized to be responsible for the emotional climate of their relationships. We’re penalized in every institutional context for the same driven, limit-setting behaviors that are celebrated in men. Patriarchal structures, the ones that define feminine goodness as self-effacement, create a specific vulnerability: when we enter relationships with partners who know exactly which strings to pull to activate that socialized self-doubt, we become uniquely susceptible to internalizing a false story about who we are. The sensation of it is specific. It lives in the Monday morning dread, in the way your throat tightens before you say anything direct, in the particular exhaustion of never quite knowing what’s real.
The Systemic Lens doesn’t absolve anyone of accountability. It asks: Who taught you that you were the problem? Did that person benefit from your believing it? The proverbial house of life™ built on a foundation of chronic self-blame isn’t just unstable psychologically. It shows up in your relationships, your leadership, your ability to trust your own perception. Of course you’re tired. The equation you’ve been trying to solve was never balanced to begin with.
What Healing Actually Looks Like From Here
Whether your assessment pointed toward trauma patterns or genuine traits worth examining, the entry point is always the same: honest, supported self-exploration with someone trained to hold the complexity.
For women whose results suggest trauma responses rather than covert narcissism, the work is about learning to trust your own perception again. It means understanding which of your “difficult” behaviors are actually survival strategies, adaptations to environments where your needs weren’t welcome, where safety required emotional contortion, where ambition was treated as aggression. Therapy that understands the long-term effects of covert narcissistic family dynamics is especially helpful here. Research on C-PTSD treatment outcomes published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress (Cloitre et al., 2009) found that sequenced, phase-based treatment produces significantly better outcomes than single-modality approaches for survivors of prolonged relational trauma.
For women whose results suggest patterns worth taking seriously: the work is possible, and it requires genuine commitment. Not self-flagellation. Commitment. The difference between someone who can change and someone who can’t isn’t the presence or absence of narcissistic traits. It’s the presence or absence of genuine motivation to see how they affect others and to do something different. If you’re reading this, that motivation is present.
In my practice, I work with driven, ambitious women on exactly this territory: the places where psychological history has left residue that external success can’t quite reach. Whether that’s in individual therapy or through the kind of structured relational work in Fixing the Foundations™, the entry point is always curiosity over condemnation, questions over verdicts.
If this specific territory feels urgent, Clarity After the Covert is designed for exactly this: understanding the covert narcissistic patterns you’ve encountered and disentangling what belongs to you from what you absorbed. You don’t need certainty about your diagnosis before you begin. You need a place to start looking carefully. You can also connect with our practice to explore working with a therapist who understands this specific terrain.
Whatever you do next, carry this: the fact that you care this much about who you are in relationship to other people says something significant. You’re not broken. You’re asking a hard question that most people never ask.
Q: If I’m genuinely worried I might be a covert narcissist, does that mean I’m not one?
A: Not definitively, but it’s a meaningful data point. Covert narcissists rarely experience deep, sustained anxiety about being the problem. Their psychological structure tends to protect them from that kind of self-confrontation. The worry itself doesn’t prove innocence, but it does suggest that the capacity for genuine self-reflection is intact, which is a good sign regardless of where your assessment lands.
Q: What’s the real difference between trauma-driven selfishness and narcissistic selfishness?
A: The key differences are origin, flexibility, and remorse. Trauma-driven self-focus tends to be context-dependent, is often accompanied by genuine guilt, and lessens as the underlying trauma heals. Narcissistic self-focus is more consistent across contexts, rarely generates genuine remorse, and doesn’t tend to improve without deep, intentional therapeutic work specifically targeting the narcissistic structure itself.
Q: I scored in the middle range on the self-assessment. What should I do next?
A: Middle-range scores usually indicate a mix: some genuine patterns worth examining alongside some trauma-driven coping strategies. The most useful next step is working with a therapist who can help you differentiate between the two in your specific history. A good trauma-informed therapist won’t either dismiss your concerns or catastrophize them.
Q: Can you be a covert narcissist and not know it?
A: Yes. By definition, covert narcissism involves significant self-deception. But the self-deception typical of covert narcissism tends to run toward feeling wronged and misunderstood, not toward fearing you’ve wronged others. If your internal experience is primarily fear that you’ve hurt someone, rather than certainty that others have failed you, that’s clinically meaningful context worth sharing with a therapist.
Q: How do I actually begin healing if I’m not sure whether I have narcissistic traits or trauma responses?
A: Start with a trauma-informed therapist who has explicit experience with both personality disorders and relational trauma. These are two distinct specialty areas and you need someone who can hold both. The differentiation work itself happens in therapy. Working through Clarity After the Covert can also help you begin mapping the specific patterns while you find the right clinical support.
Q: Is it common for survivors of covert narcissistic abuse to develop narcissistic traits themselves?
A: It’s common to develop fleas: behavioral residue from close contact with a narcissistic person. Developing the full personality structure is much less common. What survivors most often develop is complex trauma, not narcissistic personality disorder. The confusion between the two is exactly why this question gets asked so frequently by people who are actually survivors rather than perpetrators.
Q: Can covert narcissism be healed with therapy?
A: Covert narcissism is more change-resistant than trauma, but it’s not unchangeable. Research on treating narcissistic personality disorder suggests meaningful change is possible with sustained, relationally focused psychotherapy, especially when the person is genuinely motivated rather than seeking therapy primarily to manage others’ perceptions. The key variable is authentic motivation to understand and change the impact you have on people.
If you’re working through covert narcissistic relationship dynamics specifically, Clarity After the Covert ($197) covers the specific module on distinguishing your patterns from the ones you absorbed, the nervous-system work of rebuilding trust in your own perception, and a structured path through the relational aftermath. It’s built for driven women who want to do this work with precision and without waiting for a weekly therapy session to move forward.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious 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. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years (W.W. Norton, 2027).
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
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The Everything Years (W.W. Norton, 2027)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
