Anxiety vs. Perfectionism: When High Standards Become Illness
Anxiety and perfectionism overlap constantly in the driven women I work with. They aren’t the same thing, and they don’t respond to the same treatment. This post lays out the clinical difference, walks through how the two feed each other in the nervous system, and gives you a way to tell which one is actually running your life, so the work you do next reaches the right layer.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Four Hours on a Brief That Was Already Done
- What Is Perfectionism, and How Is It Different From Anxiety?
- Why Do Shame and Threat Feel So Similar in the Body?
- How Does Anxiety vs. Perfectionism Actually Show Up in Driven Women?
- What Does the Work Look Like When Perfectionism Is the Primary Driver?
- Both/And: What Happens When You Have Both, and They Feed Each Other?
- The Systemic Lens: Which Professions Reward Perfectionism Into the Ground?
- How Do You Heal When the Presentations Are This Different?
- Frequently Asked Questions
Anxiety and perfectionism are distinct clinical presentations that overlap constantly in driven women and need different treatment. Anxiety is a nervous system response to perceived threat, marked by hypervigilance, worry, and a body stuck on high alert. Perfectionism is a pattern organized around avoiding shame through flawless performance. When perfectionism is the driver, the threat isn’t external danger. It’s internal exposure. A mistake doesn’t signal risk. It signals that your worth is gone. When both are present, they lock into a loop where the anxiety fuels the checking and the checking confirms the anxiety was right to worry. In my work with driven women, mistaking perfectionism for anxiety is what sends someone into years of the wrong treatment.
In short: Anxiety and perfectionism frequently coexist in driven women but are clinically distinct. Anxiety is a nervous system threat response. Perfectionism is a shame-avoidance strategy. They need different treatment targets even when they show up together.
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Across more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve sat with driven women who arrive certain they have anxiety, when what’s actually organizing the whole thing is perfectionism. Getting that distinction right changes everything about what we do next. The book I keep coming back to here is Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, and his 2014 work The Body Keeps the Score, which documents how shame-based threat lives in the body and can’t be talked out of a person through logic alone (van der Kolk 2014).
Four Hours on a Brief That Was Already Done
| Dimension | Anxiety Disorder | Perfectionism |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A clinical condition involving persistent, excessive worry or fear that’s out of proportion to the actual threat. Anxiety disorders cause genuine impairment that goes well beyond ordinary discomfort. | A psychological pattern of unrealistically high standards paired with harsh self-evaluation. It can be adaptive or corrosive depending on how rigid it becomes. |
| Where the distress lives | Often in the body and in anticipatory dread. The racing heart, the muscle tension, the GI symptoms, the broken sleep. That physiology is usually what drives someone to seek help. | Often in the aftermath. The inner critic grading the performance, the shame when the standard isn’t met, the exhausting work of holding an impossible bar. |
| How they overlap | Anxiety and perfectionism frequently coexist. Perfectionism keeps anxiety alive by generating endless high-stakes moments where ‘failure’ is always possible. | Perfectionism can be anxiety-driven. The impossible standard becomes a way to prevent the feared outcome, which makes the perfectionism a behavioral face of underlying anxiety. |
| When it becomes clinical | When the worry rises to real impairment: avoidance grows, functioning slips, relationships suffer, and the distress is heavy enough to need treatment. | When the standards turn so rigid and the self-criticism so harsh that they cause real distress, interfere with functioning, or produce avoidance of anything where ‘perfect’ isn’t guaranteed. |
| For driven women | Often invisible from the outside. The performance keeps going while the inside is all dread and exhaustion. | Perfectionism in driven women is often culturally rewarded. ‘High standards’ and ‘attention to detail’ read as professional assets until they turn into an internal tyrant that makes rest and joy impossible. |
| What treatment addresses | Anxiety: nervous system regulation, cognitive work on threat appraisal, behavioral exposure to feared situations, and trauma work when the anxiety has traumatic roots. | Perfectionism: building tolerance for imperfection and for finishing, reaching the core beliefs about worth, and growing a kinder internal standard. |
Meredith is 47, a managing partner at a boutique law firm. Last Sunday she spent four hours revising a twelve-page brief. She knew it was done. Really knew. Her co-counsel had already told her it was excellent. She revised it anyway, twice more, until the light outside her office had gone flat and grey. She’s been in therapy three months, and her therapist recently floated the phrase generalized anxiety disorder. Meredith has been carrying that phrase around like a stone in her coat pocket. It doesn’t quite fit. She isn’t afraid of things going wrong in the abstract. She’s afraid of being wrong. Those aren’t the same fear at all.
In my work with driven women, this exact confusion comes up again and again. Anxiety and perfectionism co-occur, they fuel each other, and from the outside they can look identical. But they’re different clinical constructs, with different origins, different signatures in the brain, and different roads out. Treat perfectionism as though it’s anxiety, or treat anxiety as though it’s just “caring too much,” and the work stalls. The driven woman who has spent years in therapy without reaching the root of it usually isn’t failing. She’s working from the wrong map.
This post is for her. Let’s draw a better one.
What Is Perfectionism, and How Is It Different From Anxiety?
To see how these two experiences interact, you have to define each one precisely. The line between them is where treatment either works or slides right past the real problem.
Persistent, excessive, hard-to-control worry across a range of domains: work, health, money, relationships. It comes with physical symptoms like restlessness, fatigue, muscle tension, and disrupted sleep. David M. Clark, PhD, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, has spent his career showing that at bottom, GAD is a threat-detection problem. The nervous system over-signals danger even when nothing proportional is actually there.
In plain terms: Anxiety is your alarm system misfiring. Your brain scans for threats that aren’t there, or treats a small threat like an emergency. It isn’t telling you that you’re wrong. It’s telling you your nervous system is stuck on high alert.
Perfectionism is a different animal. It isn’t first a threat problem. It’s a self-concept problem. Perfectionism grows out of the belief that your worth is conditional on flawless performance. Paul Hewitt, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, and Gordon Flett, PhD, professor of psychology at York University, spent years mapping this, and the framework I return to most is theirs. They describe three distinct forms:
- Self-oriented perfectionism: demanding flawlessness from yourself.
- Other-oriented perfectionism: demanding flawlessness from everyone around you.
- Socially prescribed perfectionism: believing that others demand flawlessness from you.
The framework developed by Paul Hewitt, PhD, and Gordon Flett, PhD, naming three forms of perfectionism: self-oriented (personal demands for flawlessness), other-oriented (demanding perfection from others), and socially prescribed (perceiving that others demand flawlessness of you). Each form carries different psychological consequences and different treatment implications.
In plain terms: Perfectionism goes well beyond being picky. It’s a system for managing self-worth through performance, and it takes a different shape depending on who you’re aiming the demand at. The most corrosive form for driven women is usually socially prescribed: the bone-deep belief that approval will get pulled the moment you slip.
The clinical difference is this. Anxiety is fear of what might happen. Perfectionism is fear of not being enough. Anxiety wants to dodge danger. Perfectionism wants to dodge shame. On a Sunday night over a laptop they can look identical. They don’t respond to the same intervention.
Why Do Shame and Threat Feel So Similar in the Body?
Anxiety and perfectionism share neurological real estate, which is part of why they’re so easy to confuse. They reach the brain’s threat circuitry through different doors, and that difference is what treatment has to respect.
Anxiety, as a threat-detection problem, centers on the amygdala over-firing. The alarm center floods the system with distress signals, and the prefrontal cortex, the part that handles reasoned appraisal, struggles to bring the volume down. The result is chronic hyperarousal, a body braced for danger that isn’t in the room. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and EMDR work well here because they target those misfiring alarm circuits and help the thinking brain re-engage.
Perfectionism reaches the same circuitry by a different route. Anticipated failure triggers shame, and shame, neurologically, registers as a profound social threat. Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, research professor at the University of Houston and author of The Gifts of Imperfection, has documented how different shame is from guilt. Guilt says “I did something bad.” Shame says “I am bad.” When a driven woman with perfectionism braces for a mistake, her brain isn’t clocking a danger to her body. It’s clocking a threat to her whole sense of self.
That’s why perfectionism generates so much anxiety. When your worth hangs on flawless performance, every possible failure becomes an identity-level threat. The anxiety is real. It’s just being fed by a wound in the self-concept underneath it, and medication or CBT alone won’t reach that layer.
Hewitt and Flett’s work on perfectionism and suicide risk deserves to be named plainly. Their research points to a serious, often underrecognized link between maladaptive perfectionism and vulnerability to suicidal thinking. This isn’t a personality quirk. Socially prescribed perfectionism is among the most dangerous forms, and it deserves clinical attention rather than a compliment about your standards.
What matters most for driven women is what happens to the body over time. Sustained shame-based threat, the kind perfectionism produces daily, wears on the body’s stress-regulation system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulates. Cortisol stops following its normal daily rhythm. What follows reaches past psychological exhaustion into the physiological: fractured sleep, a suppressed immune system, inflammatory markers accumulating quietly across years. I’ve watched this show up as “burnout” long before anyone will name the perfectionism underneath. The body keeps its ledger before the mind will admit there’s anything to count.
The dispositional tendency to respond to perceived failure with shame, a global negative verdict on the self (“I am bad”), rather than guilt about a specific behavior (“I did something bad”). Distinguished from guilt by Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, and others, and more strongly tied to depression, addiction, and disconnection. Shame proneness is frequently the engine underneath maladaptive perfectionism.
In plain terms: Shame feels different from guilt, and it does more than sting. Guilt moves you toward repair. Shame makes you want to disappear. When perfectionism is running the show, shame is usually underneath it: the sense that a mistake stops being a mistake and becomes proof of who you are.
How Does Anxiety vs. Perfectionism Actually Show Up in Driven Women?
The clinical picture is different for each, and knowing which one you’re looking at changes everything about the work.
Bridget is 41, an ER attending. Her heart races before procedures she’s done hundreds of times, and worry about patient outcomes rides home with her and wakes her at 3 a.m. The sleep trouble started about six months ago. Her fear is physiological and out of proportion to her actual skill. Here’s what tells me it’s anxiety rather than perfectionism: she has no perfectionism profile at home. She’s genuinely fine with “good enough” in her kitchen, her closet, her weekends. What she has is anxiety, and it responds well to treatment. EMDR for the specific anxious memories, CBT for the worry patterns, a psychiatric evaluation if the picture calls for it. The anxiety is the target.
Meredith is the four-hour-brief woman. She isn’t afraid of a bad outcome. She’s managing the unbearable sensation of not-quite-right, which has quietly become her nearest approximation of self-worth. That sensation isn’t an alarm misfiring. It’s a self-concept built on conditional approval. No dose of medication will quiet it, because the alarm isn’t the problem. What’s writing the content of the alarm is the problem.
What I see most often, though, is a third woman entirely. She can’t cleanly tell the two apart, because she’s had both for so long that they’ve fused. She’s lived inside the loop long enough that she genuinely can’t find the seam where the anxiety ends and the perfectionism begins. For her, the question isn’t “which one do I have.” It’s “how did these two things build a house together in my nervous system, and how do we take it apart without bringing the roof down?”
Which brings me to a line I ask driven women to sit with.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
MARY OLIVER, poet, “The Summer Day”
What Does the Work Look Like When Perfectionism Is the Primary Driver?
Alice Miller, PhD, psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, is the writer I hand people first here. Miller traces, with real precision, how children whose gifts got rewarded while their emotional needs went unmet learn to perform worth instead of feel it. The child whose parents lit up at the A-plus and went quiet at ordinary struggle absorbs an equation: excellence equals love. That equation doesn’t dissolve when you grow up, get licensed, make partner, or close the Series B. It just gets more sophisticated.
When perfectionism is the primary driver, treatment has to reach the self-concept wound, the underlying belief that approval is conditional on flawless performance. The behavior alone is never the target. The four-hour revision isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom of a much older story about what you have to be in order to deserve care.
The approaches that reach this layer include:
- Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy: what is the perfectionist “part” afraid will happen if it stops? What is it protecting? The answers are almost never about the brief. They’re about something much earlier.
- Self-compassion practices: Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and founder of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, has spent her career showing that self-compassion isn’t self-indulgence. It’s one of the most effective antidotes to the shame that fuels perfectionism. Her validation work on the Self-Compassion Scale is a 2020 study I cite often (PMID: 32125190), and the pattern it names is that self-compassion reliably lowers perfectionism, anxiety, and depression while raising resilience.
- Psychodynamic work: understanding the original relationship where worth became conditional, usually a parent whose love arrived with strings attached, is often what has to happen before any behavior change will hold.
Wondering whether executive coaching or individual therapy is the right container? The answer usually hinges on how deep the wound runs. Coaching can shift behavioral patterns. Therapy reaches where they came from. For most of the perfectionism I see in driven women, the origin work is the necessary work.
Let me get specific about what that self-concept work involves. When Meredith and I look at the four-hour revision together, the entry point isn’t the behavior. It’s the feeling underneath it, the not-quite-right sensation that keeps sending her back to the document. When we slow down and get curious about that feeling, what surfaces is older than the brief and older than the firm. It’s a body-level sense that something is wrong. Not with the brief. With her. That whatever she makes will somehow reveal she isn’t enough.
That feeling didn’t start at work. It started in a family where her intellectual excellence was the main currency of belonging, where her ordinary moments, tired or uncertain or middling, didn’t draw the same warmth her achievements did. The brief isn’t the problem. It’s a screen she projects an older, more existential question onto: Am I enough, even when what I produce isn’t perfect?
The goal of the depth work isn’t to answer that question intellectually. She can already do that. Yes, of course she’s enough. The goal is to help her nervous system reach an answer it actually believes. And that takes more than insight. It takes experience, repeated over time, of being in a relationship where her ordinary self is met with care. That’s what therapy offers that insight on its own can’t.
It’s also why perfectionism work runs longer and less tidily than anxiety work. You aren’t recalibrating an alarm. You’re rebuilding a foundational belief about whether you’re worthy of care. That doesn’t happen in six sessions. It happens in the slow, accumulated experience of being genuinely seen, by someone who doesn’t need your performance in order to keep showing up.
If you’ve spent years being told your perfectionism is a strength, or you’ve only just begun to suspect the four-hour revision isn’t really about the brief, the free quiz on my site is a first step toward seeing which childhood patterns are most active for you right now. The Strong & Stable newsletter brings a weekly clinical read on exactly these patterns.
Both/And: What Happens When You Have Both, and They Feed Each Other?
Celeste is 44, a chief financial officer, and she has both. A diagnosed anxiety disorder, and socially prescribed perfectionism that no one has named for her yet. Her anxiety tells her something bad is coming. Her perfectionism tells her the only way to stop it is her own flawless performance. They amplify each other in a closed loop. Medication might quiet the alarm, but the perfectionism keeps manufacturing alarm-worthy material. Insight alone might name the perfectionism, but it won’t settle the neurobiological anxiety underneath. Neither one, chased on its own, reaches the whole problem.
In my clinical experience, this is the most common presentation for driven women in demanding fields. And here’s the both/and I want you to hold. Anxiety treatment kept her nervous system afloat, AND it will never be enough on its own, because it doesn’t touch the self-concept wound generating the content. Perfectionism treatment reaches that wound, AND it needs the anxiety work first to create enough internal room to do it. Both are true. The two streams don’t compete. They sequence.
A therapist who can hold both at once, tracking the nervous-system dysregulation and the self-concept wound in the same room, is the clinician who can finally help Celeste break the loop. Not choosing a side. Holding the whole thing.
Monique is 38, a VP of Product, and she came in saying “I’m just anxious.” Six weeks in, what surfaced was a decades-long pattern of socially prescribed perfectionism, rooted in an immigrant family where academic performance was the main currency of parental approval. Her anxiety was real. But the perfectionism was writing the script. Once we named both, the work turned. She stopped treating her anxiety like a malfunction and started reading it as the predictable output of a self-concept that had never once been allowed to rest.
If you want to look at the foundational relational patterns underneath your perfectionism, my Fixing the Foundations™ course was built for exactly this: understanding the childhood origins of the patterns running your adult life.
The Systemic Lens: Which Professions Reward Perfectionism Into the Ground?
You can’t talk honestly about perfectionism in driven women without naming the systems that create it, reinforce it, and then pathologize the individual for having it.
Law firms don’t merely tolerate perfectionism. They select for it on the way in and punish its absence on the way up. The partner-track attorney who doesn’t revise her brief four times gets labeled “not detail-oriented.” The surgeon who isn’t haunted by every outcome gets called “not appropriately careful.” Academic medicine rewards the physician who’s never satisfied with her own work. Finance rewards the analyst still checking the deck at midnight. These cultures don’t produce perfectionism by accident. They grow it on purpose, then decline to catch the humans carrying it.
The socially prescribed perfectionism Hewitt and Flett document, the belief that others demand your flawlessness, isn’t a delusion in these places. The demand is real. The system builds the condition, then hands the woman the diagnosis.
This lens matters clinically because it changes the shame equation. When a driven woman can name the professional culture as a genuine contributor, not an excuse, but an actual external force that shaped her interior, the self-blame starts to move. She didn’t develop perfectionism because something is wrong with her. She developed it responding rationally to irrational demands, possibly starting in childhood and running straight through her professional formation.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s an adaptation. And adaptations that have stopped serving you can be updated, once they’re seen clearly.
For the driven women I work with in individual therapy and executive coaching, naming the systemic context is often the most relieving conversation we have. You didn’t make yourself this way alone. The world you were trained inside helped make you this way. And you can change your relationship to it without throwing out the standards that genuinely matter to you.
There’s a gender dimension here that rarely gets said out loud. Driven women get penalized for professional mistakes more heavily than equally driven men, while they’re also expected to be warmer, more available, and more self-effacing. That isn’t a hunch. It’s documented. Women receive more critical feedback about confidence and demeanor alongside the technical review, while men get feedback mostly on the work itself. The woman who responds by becoming exquisitely careful isn’t being irrational. She’s reading the room accurately.
The trouble is that the adaptations helping her survive an unfair environment are the same ones that, over years, cost her body and her mind. This is the conversation women most need and least often get. Not “you should be less of a perfectionist,” but “you built these patterns in response to real demands, and we can help you carry them more lightly.”
How Do You Heal When the Presentations Are This Different?
The path forward depends on what’s actually driving your experience. This is the part I slow way down on in a first session, because I’ve watched too many driven women commit years to the wrong protocol before anyone asked which thing they were actually treating.
If anxiety is the primary driver, the evidence-based work is effective and often relatively quick. EMDR for specific anxious memories, CBT for chronic worry, and somatic regulation for the nervous system. Sometimes a psychiatric evaluation for medication is worth considering, to steady acute symptoms before deeper processing begins. The aim is to recalibrate the threat-detection system so it responds in proportion to real risk.
If perfectionism is the primary driver, the work is deeper and asks for more patience. It’s not about fixing a behavior. It’s about reaching a self-concept wound. Where did worth become conditional? Which relationships taught you that approval required flawlessness? What does the perfectionist part of you believe will happen if it stops? IFS, self-compassion practices, and psychodynamic exploration of early relational history are the main vehicles. This isn’t fast. It’s the work that actually changes the pattern.
If you have both, which many driven women do, the sequence matters. Steady the nervous system first, so there’s enough internal room for the deeper self-concept work. Then use that room. The free quiz on my site is a good place to start identifying which childhood patterns are most active for you.
Both anxiety and perfectionism are treatable. Neither one means something is broken in you. Both are responses, to threat, to early relationship, to professional worlds that asked more than was reasonable. Of course you’re tired. You’ve been running a nervous system on high alert and grading yourself against an impossible bar, sometimes for decades, often without knowing that’s what you were doing. Seeing which response you’re living inside is the first real step toward something different.
Meredith is a few months further into the work now. The four-hour revisions haven’t vanished. A brief still came home with her last month, and she still opened it twice on a Sunday. But somewhere around the second open she noticed the not-quite-right feeling, named it out loud in her kitchen, and closed the laptop anyway. “It’s still loud,” she told me. “It’s just not the only voice in the room now.” That’s what the shift looks like. Not the absence of the standard. A little more room around it.
If this lands and you want to explore whether working with me makes sense, I’d be glad to talk. The support that helps reaches the root of what’s happening rather than tidying the surface.
Warmly, Annie
Q: Is perfectionism a mental health disorder?
A: Perfectionism isn’t a standalone DSM-5 disorder, but maladaptive perfectionism is strongly linked to anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and elevated suicide risk. Paul Hewitt, PhD, and Gordon Flett, PhD, treat it as a serious psychological vulnerability, not a personality quirk and not a compliment. If it’s causing real distress or impairing your functioning, it warrants clinical attention.
Q: Can perfectionism cause anxiety?
A: Yes, and understanding this matters. When your self-worth depends on flawless performance, any chance of failure becomes an identity threat, and the brain answers identity threats the way it answers physical ones, with the anxiety alarm. So perfectionism doesn’t merely correlate with anxiety. It generates it. Treating the anxiety without reaching the perfectionism underneath often falls short.
Q: Am I a perfectionist or do I just have high standards?
A: The tell is motivation and impact. High standards come from genuine care about quality and tend to be internally sourced and motivating. Perfectionism comes from fear of failure, shame, or lost approval, and it brings chronic distress, procrastination, self-criticism, and an inability to feel satisfied. If your standards leave you feeling like you’re never enough, that’s perfectionism.
Q: Will therapy fix perfectionism?
A: Therapy can substantially change your relationship to perfectionism, but it takes depth work that reaches the underlying self-concept wound, not the behavior alone. IFS, psychodynamic work, and self-compassion practices have the strongest evidence base. The goal isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to separate your standards from your worth, so a mistake stays a mistake.
Q: How do I know if my perfectionism is a problem?
A: Perfectionism becomes a clinical problem when it causes real distress, impairs functioning, or keeps you from enjoying what you accomplish. Signs include spending disproportionate time on already-finished work, an inability to delegate because others “won’t do it right,” chronic procrastination driven by fear of imperfection, and burnout from impossible internal standards you can never satisfy.
Q: Is perfectionism more common in women?
A: Research suggests socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that others demand flawlessness from you, shows up with particular intensity in women. They’re often held to higher standards across professional, relational, and domestic life at once. When you’re expected to be the excellent attorney, present mother, and composed partner, that pressure isn’t a delusion. It’s rational.
Q: Can self-compassion actually help perfectionism?
A: Yes, and the evidence is strong. Kristin Neff, PhD, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has documented that self-compassion is among the most effective antidotes to perfectionism, because it reaches shame directly. It doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means treating yourself with the kindness you’d offer a friend who erred.
Q: What’s the connection between perfectionism and burnout?
A: Perfectionism is one of the most reliable predictors of burnout. The relentless pursuit of impossible standards, paired with harsh self-criticism when they aren’t met, produces chronic stress and emotional exhaustion. Driven women in demanding professions are especially vulnerable, because the surrounding culture keeps reinforcing the loop. The way out asks for systemic awareness and individual healing work.
Related Reading
Neff, Kristin. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow, 2011.
Hewitt, Paul L., and Gordon L. Flett. “Perfectionism in the Self and Social Contexts: Conceptualization, Assessment, and Association with Psychopathology.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 3 (1991): 456, 470.
Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Basic Books, 1997.
Brown, Brené. The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden, 2010.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Antony, Martin M., and Richard P. Swinson. When Perfect Isn’t Good Enough: Strategies for Coping with Perfectionism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Neff KD, Bluth K, Tóth-Király I, Davidson O, Knox MC, Williamson Z, et al. Development and Validation of the Self-Compassion Scale for Youth. J Pers Assess. 2021;103(1):92-105. doi:10.1080/00223891.2020.1729774. PMID: 32125190.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
- Hewitt, Paul L., and Gordon L. Flett. 1991. “Perfectionism in the Self and Social Contexts.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (3): 456, 470.
- Miller, Alice. 1997. The Drama of the Gifted Child. New York: Basic Books.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking.
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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. She 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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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.
