The Best Types of Therapy for Childhood Trauma: A Trauma Therapist’s Complete Guide
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Not all therapies are created equal when it comes to healing childhood trauma — and what works for single-incident PTSD often isn’t sufficient for the complex, developmental wounds that form across years of childhood experience. This guide walks through the most evidence-based modalities available, how they work at the neurological level, and how to think about which approach fits where you are in your healing process right now.
- The Body That Remembered What the Mind Tried to Forget
- What Makes Childhood Trauma Different
- The Neurobiology of Traumatic Memory
- The Evidence-Based Modalities: What Works and Why
- How Treatment Needs Shift Across the Stages of Healing
- Both/And: You Don’t Have to Choose Just One Approach
- The Systemic Lens: Why Childhood Trauma Goes Undertreated
- How to Match Modality to Your Specific Presentation
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Body That Remembered What the Mind Tried to Forget
Elena is forty-four years old and has not been able to eat dinner at a table with her partner without her shoulders tensing since she was in her mid-twenties. She’s tried to name the association. She’s written about it in journals. She’s traced it, in therapy, to the particular quality of silence that filled her childhood dining room — the way her father’s mood could convert an ordinary Tuesday night into something that required every ounce of a child’s attention just to navigate safely.
Intellectually, Elena knows she’s an adult now. She knows her partner is not her father. She knows the dinner table is just a piece of furniture. And still, every evening around six o’clock, her body begins a process she doesn’t authorize: shoulders rising toward her ears, jaw tightening, appetite narrowing to nothing. Twenty years of knowing hasn’t changed this. The knowing is real. The body has its own memory.
Elena is a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company. She thinks about mechanisms for a living. She wants to understand, with the same precision she brings to her work, why insight isn’t sufficient — why understanding the origin of a pattern doesn’t automatically release you from it. And she wants to know what would actually work.
The question she’s asking is the right one. The answer isn’t simple, but it’s more specific than most resources acknowledge. Healing childhood trauma requires engaging with the level of the nervous system where trauma actually lives — and different modalities offer different access points to that level. In my clinical work, helping women find the right combination of approaches for their specific presentation is one of the most important things I do. Here’s what I know about how each of the major modalities works, and how to think about which ones belong in your particular healing.
What Makes Childhood Trauma Different
The first thing to understand is why childhood trauma is a distinct clinical category that requires specific approaches — not just more of what works for adult-onset PTSD.
Developmental trauma refers to traumatic experiences that occur during childhood or adolescence — the critical period of neurological, psychological, and relational development — particularly experiences involving the primary caregiving relationships. The term was developed and championed by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University and author of The Body Keeps the Score, who argued that the existing PTSD diagnostic category failed to capture the complexity of trauma that occurs within and through attachment relationships. Developmental trauma disrupts not just memory consolidation but the entire architecture of self-development, emotional regulation, relational capacity, and embodied experience. Unlike single-incident trauma, which disrupts a stable pre-existing psychological structure, developmental trauma shapes the structure itself — meaning the wound is not an event the person has; it’s part of how the person was built. (PMID: 9384857)
In plain terms: If you grew up in a household where you were physically safe but emotionally unsafe — where a parent’s moods were unpredictable, where love felt conditional, where your feelings were regularly dismissed or punished — your nervous system didn’t experience discrete traumatic events. It developed inside a traumatic environment. The wound isn’t a bad memory. It’s the shape you had to take in order to survive that environment. And that shape — the hypervigilance, the perfectionism, the over-reliance on control, the difficulty trusting safety — follows you into adulthood because it was built into you from the inside out.
This distinction matters enormously for treatment decisions. Modalities designed for single-incident PTSD — like standard Prolonged Exposure — can be insufficient or even counterproductive when the traumatic material is complex, pervasive, and deeply woven into the client’s relational patterns and sense of self. Complex or developmental trauma requires phase-based treatment, body-based approaches, relational healing, and modalities specifically designed to work with the fragmented, pre-linguistic memory systems where early developmental wounds are stored.
Understanding your own presentation — whether your childhood trauma is primarily discrete events, a chronic relational environment, or some combination — will help you have more productive conversations with potential therapists and make better decisions about which modalities to prioritize.
The Neurobiology of Traumatic Memory
To understand why different therapies work differently, you need a basic model of how traumatic memory is stored and why it persists as bodily and emotional experience rather than ordinary narrative memory.
Explicit memory refers to consciously accessible, narrative memory — the “this happened, and then this happened” recollection that allows us to tell the story of our lives. Implicit memory refers to procedural, bodily, and emotional memory that operates below conscious awareness — the accumulated learning about how the world works, how relationships function, what is safe and what is dangerous, stored in the body and the nervous system without narrative form. Traumatic experiences, particularly those occurring before language acquisition or under conditions of overwhelming stress, are stored primarily in implicit memory systems. Research by Joseph LeDoux, PhD, neuroscientist and professor at New York University and author of The Emotional Brain, has demonstrated that fear memories are processed through the amygdala and stored as emotional and somatic reactions that can be triggered without conscious recall of the original event. This is why trauma responses frequently feel like current experience rather than past memory.
In plain terms: Elena’s shoulders don’t know it’s 2026. Her implicit memory — stored in her body, in her nervous system, in the wordless sensorimotor learning of a child at a tense dinner table — responds to present cues as if the past is still happening. She doesn’t remember the fear, exactly. She feels it. That’s the difference between explicit and implicit memory, and it’s the reason that simply remembering and understanding what happened often doesn’t change the bodily experience. To heal implicit memory, you have to work at the level where it lives: in the body, in the nervous system, in the felt sense of experience rather than the narrative of it.
Bessel van der Kolk’s foundational research using neuroimaging has shown that during traumatic recall, the Broca’s area — the brain region responsible for language and narrative — actually goes offline. Simultaneously, the right hemisphere, which processes emotional and somatic experience, lights up intensely. This neuroimaging finding has profound clinical implications: trauma, in the moment of its activation, literally cannot be processed through language. You can’t talk your way through a state in which the language centers of your brain aren’t functioning. You need approaches that engage the right hemisphere, the body, and the subcortical emotional memory systems directly.
This is the central neurological argument for why body-based, somatic, and bilateral stimulation approaches like EMDR have such strong outcomes for trauma: they access the systems where traumatic memory actually lives, rather than relying solely on the cortical, narrative processing that talk therapy primarily engages.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Hedges g=0.17 (SE=0.12) for phase-based over trauma-focused on PTSD symptoms (n=356) (PMID: 41277877)
- Hedges' g = -0.423 for ACT on trauma-related symptoms reduction (PMID: 39139037)
- Hedges' g = -0.67 for psychological treatments on trauma-related appraisals in youth PTSD (PMID: 39481991)
- SMD = -0.43 for group TF-CBT vs controls on PTSD (11 RCTs, n=1942) (PMID: 38297972)
- g = -0.662 for EMDR on PTSD symptoms (PMID: 25047681)
The Evidence-Based Modalities: What Works and Why
Here is a clinically honest overview of the major evidence-based modalities for childhood trauma, how each one works, and what it’s particularly well-suited to address.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
EMDR, developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD, uses bilateral stimulation — typically guided eye movements or alternating taps — within a structured eight-phase protocol to help the brain process traumatic memories that have become “stuck” in an unprocessed, emotionally activated form. The bilateral stimulation appears to engage the brain’s natural memory consolidation process, helping fragmented traumatic memories become fully processed and stored as past rather than perpetually relived as present. (PMID: 11748594)
EMDR has the strongest evidence base of any modality for PTSD, with over 30 randomized controlled trials supporting its efficacy. It’s particularly well-suited for: discrete traumatic memories with clear emotional charge, somatic symptoms connected to specific events, and adults who have done sufficient relational and stabilization work to approach trauma memories without being overwhelmed. For complex developmental trauma, EMDR is typically most effective when combined with relational work and body-based stabilization, and when the protocol is adapted for the complexity and chronicity of the traumatic material.
Somatic Experiencing (SE)
Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, PhD, biophysicist and psychologist and author of Waking the Tiger, works with the body’s survival responses rather than the narrative content of traumatic memories. SE posits that trauma is fundamentally the incomplete discharge of survival energy — the fight/flight/freeze responses that got mobilized during a threatening experience but never fully completed. By tracking body sensations and working with the “felt sense,” SE helps clients complete these interrupted survival responses and discharge the stored energy that keeps the nervous system in chronic activation. (PMID: 25699005)
SE is particularly well-suited for: pervasive somatic symptoms (chronic tension, pain, hyperarousal, or shutdown) that don’t connect clearly to specific memories, early developmental trauma that predates language, and presentations where intellectual processing has reached its limits. Many driven women find SE profoundly disorienting at first — it asks you to slow down and pay exquisite attention to body sensations, which is the opposite of the cognitive speed that defines their professional lives. That disorientation is often the first signal that something is happening at a level that nothing else has reached.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS, developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, works with the multiplicity of the psyche — the parts that carry traumatic wounds (Exiles) and the protective parts that developed to keep those wounds from overwhelming the system (Managers and Firefighters). IFS helps clients develop Self-leadership: the capacity to approach wounded parts with curiosity and compassion rather than being overwhelmed or controlled by them. The unburdening process in IFS — where Exiles release the traumatic beliefs and feelings they’ve been carrying — can produce profound and lasting shifts in core beliefs about safety, worth, and belonging. (PMID: 23813465)
IFS is particularly well-suited for: relational trauma where the wounds are embedded in deep beliefs about the self, perfectionism and achievement-driven patterns where protective parts are highly developed, and presentations where the client needs a framework that honors the intelligence of their defenses rather than pathologizing them. It’s also one of the most sustainable approaches for self-directed ongoing practice, with the caveat that Exile work should always be done with professional support.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, PhD, clinical psychologist and founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, integrates somatic awareness with attachment theory and mindfulness within a relational psychotherapy framework. Where SE focuses primarily on completing survival responses, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy works with the full range of movement patterns, postures, and procedural learning that constitute the body’s implicit relational knowing — the ways the body learned, in childhood, to organize itself around particular relational patterns. (PMID: 16530597)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is particularly well-suited for: attachment-based childhood trauma, chronic relational patterns that feel embodied and automatic, and presentations where the therapeutic relationship itself is a central mechanism of healing rather than just the context for technique-based interventions.
Trauma-Focused Relational Psychotherapy
Long-term relational or psychodynamic therapy — when conducted by a trauma-specialized clinician who understands the attachment-based dimensions of complex childhood trauma — offers something that time-limited, technique-focused approaches can’t fully replicate: the sustained experience of a consistent, safe, attuned relationship across time. For women whose fundamental wounds are relational — whose early experience taught them that love is conditional, safety is temporary, and other people can’t be trusted — the therapeutic relationship itself is the primary healing mechanism.
As Allan Schore, PhD, neuropsychoanalyst and research professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, has articulated extensively, right-brain-to-right-brain attunement between therapist and client creates neurobiological change that technique alone cannot produce. The corrective emotional experience of being consistently seen, met, and valued across hundreds of sessions modifies the implicit relational templates that were formed in an environment where those experiences were absent. (PMID: 11707891)
How Treatment Needs Shift Across the Stages of Healing
Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, identified three phases of trauma recovery that remain the foundational clinical framework: safety and stabilization, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection and integration. Different modalities are best suited to different phases, and failing to honor the phase structure — particularly by rushing into trauma processing before adequate stabilization — is one of the most common clinical errors in trauma treatment. (PMID: 22729977)
In Phase One — safety and stabilization — the primary therapeutic task is helping the client develop enough nervous system regulation, internal resources, and external safety to approach traumatic material without being overwhelmed. Modalities particularly useful in this phase include: regulation-focused somatic work, IFS resource development, psychoeducation about trauma and the nervous system, and relational therapy focused on building the therapeutic alliance. EMDR preparation (resource installation, development of the safe place and inner resource techniques) also belongs in this phase.
In Phase Two — remembrance and mourning — the therapeutic work moves into direct engagement with traumatic memories and the grief that healing requires. This is where EMDR processing, SE trauma completion, and IFS unburdening are most active. The pacing of Phase Two work should be carefully titrated based on the client’s capacity: too fast risks retraumatization; too slow may mean inadequate contact with the material that needs processing.
In Phase Three — reconnection and integration — the therapeutic task shifts toward helping the client build a life that reflects who they are becoming rather than who they were shaped to be by their trauma. This phase often involves renewed investment in relationships, purpose, and identity — and may draw on coaching, relational therapy, and community support as much as on clinical technique.
Dani is a thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur who had done two years of trauma processing work before realizing she’d skipped Phase One almost entirely. She’d found an EMDR therapist within a month of deciding to heal and had gone straight into processing the most acute traumatic memories from her childhood. The processing produced real shifts — but she was also consistently destabilized after sessions, struggling to function at work, and developing a fear of the therapeutic work itself. When she began working with a new therapist who recognized she needed to go back to stabilization — to build the internal resources and regulatory capacity that Phase One requires — everything changed. The trauma processing that had felt terrifying became manageable. She’d had the right tool. She’d just tried to use it before the foundation was ready.
Both/And: You Don’t Have to Choose Just One Approach
One of the most important things I want to convey to driven women who are evaluating their therapeutic options is that the question “which therapy is best for childhood trauma?” contains a false premise. The research supports the view that integrated, multimodal treatment produces the best outcomes for complex developmental trauma — not any single modality used in isolation.
What this looks like in practice: a relational therapeutic foundation that provides safety and attunement across all phases of treatment, combined with EMDR or SE for somatic and traumatic memory processing, IFS for working with the parts-based protective structures that organize the system, and psychoeducation and skills-based work for nervous system regulation. The proportions and timing of each modality shift across the stages of healing, but none of them is fully sufficient without the others.
“Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life and tries to fill the void with whatever is near.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Women Who Run with the Wolves
Elena — our research scientist with the tense shoulders — eventually worked with a therapist who integrated somatic approaches and IFS with a strong relational foundation. What she found was that the somatic work reached something that years of insight-focused therapy hadn’t touched. Within four months of beginning Somatic Experiencing alongside her talk therapy, the dinner table tension began to ease. Not because she’d constructed a new narrative about her father. Because her body had finally been given a way to complete the process it had been holding since she was seven years old.
The both/and for driven women is this: you can have deep intellectual understanding of your trauma and still need body-based approaches to heal it. You can value the efficiency of technique-based modalities and also need the sustained relational container that long-term therapy provides. You can benefit enormously from self-directed practice and still need professional support for the territory that self-practice can’t safely reach. None of these are contradictions. They’re the honest complexity of healing something that was built into you from the beginning.
The Systemic Lens: Why Childhood Trauma Goes Undertreated
We can’t have an honest conversation about the best therapies for childhood trauma without acknowledging that access to those therapies is deeply unequal — and that driven women, despite often having more resources than average, face specific systemic barriers that are worth naming.
The first barrier is the inadequacy of the DSM framework for complex developmental trauma. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not include a diagnostic category for complex PTSD or developmental trauma. This means that clinicians who need to work within insurance billing frameworks are often forced to use diagnostic codes — major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD — that don’t accurately capture what they’re treating. This misalignment shapes treatment recommendations, insurance authorizations, and the overall clinical framing of the work in ways that are often inadequate for the actual complexity of the presentation.
The second barrier is the shortage of trauma-specialized therapists and the inadequacy of standard training. Most graduate programs in clinical psychology, marriage and family therapy, and social work provide limited training in evidence-based trauma treatment. A clinician can graduate with a master’s degree in clinical psychology having never learned to administer EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, or IFS. The burden of specialized trauma training falls on individual clinicians to seek out and fund themselves, which means training is unevenly distributed across the profession.
Third: the specific way that success obscures need for driven women. The mental health system, like most systems, tends to allocate resources toward visible distress. A woman who is functioning at a high level professionally — managing a team, making important decisions, presenting a competent and contained exterior — will frequently be undertreated because her functioning is mistaken for health. The chronic cost of that functioning — the hypervigilance, the emotional suppression, the relational patterns that keep driving into the same walls — is invisible to a system that isn’t looking for it.
What this means practically: you may need to advocate more forcefully for trauma-specialized treatment than someone with more visible impairment. You may need to be explicit, with clinicians and with insurance, that your functional performance is not the same as your psychological health. And you may need to be more willing than feels natural to invest your own financial resources in care that the system won’t adequately fund — because the care that actually works for complex developmental trauma is often only available outside the insurance model.
None of this is right. It’s the reality. And knowing it helps you navigate it more effectively.
How to Match Modality to Your Specific Presentation
Here is a practical framework for thinking about which modalities are most relevant to your specific presentation, based on the clinical features that tend to map onto different approaches.
If your primary symptoms are somatic and body-based
Chronic tension, pain, hyperarousal, panic, physical symptoms that don’t have a medical explanation, or a sense of being “in your head” with little access to your body — these presentations indicate that somatic work (Somatic Experiencing or Sensorimotor Psychotherapy) should be a primary component of treatment. The body is where the trauma lives most actively, and approaches that work through cognitive or narrative processing alone will have limited reach.
If you have clear traumatic memories with significant emotional charge
If there are specific memories, scenes, or relational experiences from childhood that still carry strong emotional activation — that you can recall and feel, not just recall — EMDR processing is likely to be highly effective. The structured EMDR protocol is particularly well-suited to processing specific memories with identifiable associated beliefs and somatic markers.
If your primary pattern is relational and you recognize it repeating
If your childhood trauma primarily shows up in your relationships — in attachment patterns, in the way intimacy either feels unavailable or overwhelming, in the recurrence of specific relational dynamics despite your intellectual awareness of them — relational therapy and IFS are likely to be the most relevant modalities. The wound is relational; the healing will be primarily relational.
If your defenses are highly developed and your protective parts are strong
If you’re someone who understands your patterns cognitively but finds it hard to actually feel the emotional content of your childhood experiences — if you intellectualize, stay in your head, or find that other therapeutic approaches have produced insight but not felt shift — IFS may be particularly valuable. IFS works directly with the protective parts that are keeping the most wounded material contained, and does so in a way that respects their intelligence rather than fighting them.
The most important thing is to start. The perfect therapeutic plan, found through research and analysis, is less valuable than beginning actual clinical work. The right modalities will reveal themselves through the process of working — through what resonates, what surfaces, what shifts, and what remains stubbornly unchanged despite your best efforts.
Elena’s shoulders eventually softened. Not through insight, not through willpower, not through understanding the mechanism — though she now understands the mechanism well. They softened because her body finally got to complete something that a seven-year-old couldn’t finish. That completion was possible because she found an approach that reached the level where the wound actually lived. That level is reachable. For you, too.
If you’re ready to explore what treatment is the right fit for your specific history and nervous system, I’d welcome the conversation. Trauma-specialized therapy for driven women is the center of my clinical work, and I’ve watched hundreds of women move from chronic functional excellence to something closer to genuine wellbeing. The road is specific to you. But it exists.
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Q: Can medication help with childhood trauma, and should I be on it while doing therapy?
A: Medication can play a useful supporting role in trauma treatment, particularly when symptoms like depression, hyperarousal, or anxiety are severe enough to impair the client’s capacity to engage in therapy work. SSRIs, SNRIs, and medications targeting hyperarousal (like prazosin for nightmares) can create enough regulatory stability that the therapeutic work becomes more accessible. However, medication addresses symptoms — it doesn’t process trauma. The research is consistent that for complex childhood trauma, therapy is the primary treatment, and medication is, at best, a useful adjunct. Van der Kolk’s research notably found that EMDR produced better and more durable outcomes than fluoxetine for trauma. If you’re considering medication, work with a psychiatrist who understands trauma rather than a GP prescribing based on symptom checklists, and maintain clear communication between your prescriber and your therapist.
Q: How is trauma-focused CBT different from regular CBT for trauma?
A: Trauma-focused CBT (TF-CBT) is a specific, structured protocol developed primarily for children and adolescents with PTSD, with a substantial evidence base particularly for childhood sexual abuse and acute trauma. For adults with complex developmental trauma, standard CBT — which focuses on cognitive restructuring and behavioral exposure — is often insufficient because it doesn’t adequately address the somatic, relational, and identity-level dimensions of complex trauma. Cognitive restructuring is helpful for maladaptive beliefs, but it can’t complete an interrupted survival response or repair a relational template formed in infancy. If you’re an adult seeking treatment for complex childhood trauma, CBT alone is unlikely to be the right primary approach — look for therapists who offer TF-CBT in combination with somatic or relational modalities, or who specialize in the body-based and parts-based approaches discussed in this article.
Q: Is group therapy useful for childhood trauma?
A: Group therapy can be a profoundly valuable component of trauma recovery — particularly for addressing the isolation and shame that childhood trauma often creates. Hearing other people describe your exact experience, in a contained and professionally facilitated group, breaks the sense that you are uniquely broken or uniquely complicit in what happened to you. For women specifically, trauma-focused groups can offer a quality of witnessed community that individual therapy doesn’t replicate. That said, group therapy is generally not a replacement for individual trauma treatment — it’s a complement to it. The specific, titrated processing of traumatic memory and the individual nervous-system work that complex trauma requires needs to happen in individual treatment. Group therapy can powerfully support the relational healing and community reconnection that are part of later-stage recovery.
Q: I had a bad therapy experience in the past. How do I know it will be different this time?
A: A bad therapy experience is genuinely painful — particularly when you were vulnerable enough to seek help and the experience left you feeling worse rather than better. Your caution is completely appropriate. What’s important to understand is that a bad therapy experience is often a mismatch problem, not an indictment of therapy itself. The most common mismatches for women with childhood trauma are: a generalist therapist without trauma specialization, a technique-focused approach without sufficient relational foundation, a therapist who was not attuned enough to your specific way of being in the world, or timing (beginning trauma processing before adequate stabilization). Armed with the information in this article, you can ask significantly better questions in consultation calls than most people know to ask, identify the specific green flags and red flags, and make a more informed choice. Bad therapy happens. Good therapy — with the right person, at the right time, using the right approach — is genuinely transformative. The two experiences are not the same.
Q: How do I know if I’m healing, or just intellectualizing about healing?
A: This is the question I most want driven women to ask themselves, because it cuts to the heart of one of the most common ways that intelligent, analytically-minded people avoid the actual work of trauma recovery. The signs of genuine healing are felt and behavioral, not just cognitive. You respond to old triggers differently — not because you’ve decided to, but because the charge has actually reduced. Your body feels different in previously activating situations. Relational patterns that felt compulsive begin to feel like choices. You can tolerate feelings that used to be intolerable, not because you’re suppressing them but because your window of tolerance has expanded. You find yourself making different decisions in relationships without having to think your way through them. Intellectualizing about healing looks like: reading more books, accumulating more insight, being able to explain your patterns with increasing sophistication — while the felt experience remains unchanged. Both kinds of work have value, but they’re not the same thing. If you’ve been in the intellectual layer for a long time without felt shift, that’s worth bringing directly to your therapist.
Q: Is it possible to fully recover from childhood trauma, or is this lifelong management?
A: Full recovery from childhood trauma is possible — and I say that based on watching it happen repeatedly in my clinical work, not as an abstract aspiration. “Full recovery” doesn’t mean you have no memory of what happened or that your history disappears. It means that the traumatic experiences no longer organize your life. The memories are accessible without being overwhelming. The relational patterns have genuinely shifted rather than just being managed. The survival strategies that once felt compulsive become choices. Your nervous system can tolerate connection, rest, and uncertainty without defaulting to the old alarm responses. The past is the past rather than perpetually present. For complex developmental trauma, this is genuine deep work that takes years, not weeks. It requires the right therapeutic relationships, the right modalities, and a willingness to engage with levels of your experience that are uncomfortable and unfamiliar. But it is achievable. You don’t have to manage your trauma for the rest of your life. You can actually heal it.
Related Reading
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
- Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2021.
- Ogden, Pat, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain. Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
- LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
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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, 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. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
