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Choosing from Wound vs. Choosing from Desire: The Two Operating Systems of the Trauma Survivor
Choosing from Wound vs. Choosing from Desire is a clinical framework distinguishing two motivational systems at work in a trauma survivor’s major life decisions. Wound-driven choices are defensive, organized around avoiding old danger. Desire-driven choices come from healed ground and actual longing. This post explains both systems, how to tell which one is behind your own choices, and what it takes to let desire back into the driver’s seat.
- The Life She Built Was Exactly What She’d Needed to Survive
- What Is Choosing from Wound vs. Choosing from Desire?
- The Psychology of Wound-Driven Choice
- How Wound-Driven Choosing Appears in Driven Women
- The Midlife Reckoning: When the Life You Built Stops Fitting
- Both/And: You Made Good Choices AND They Were Made Under Duress
- The Systemic Lens: Who Gets Permission to Choose from Desire
- Small Desires Before Large Ones
- Learning to Choose from Desire: The Path Forward
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Life She Built Was Exactly What She’d Needed to Survive
It’s 6:50 on a Tuesday morning, and Ziva is sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of coffee she hasn’t touched. She’s 41, a partner at a mid-sized architecture firm, the kind of career her parents describe to relatives with visible pride. Her husband is upstairs, still asleep. He’s steady, unhurried, nothing like her father. The apartment is quiet and deliberately hers. Warm plaster walls she chose herself, a rug she saved for, none of the noise she grew up with. She built all of it, carefully, over two decades, and this particular morning she is looking at the whole architecture of her life with something that isn’t pride.
If you already know your pattern but can't seem to actually change it, my self-paced course Picking Better Partners closes the gap between knowing and choosing differently.
“I think I built everything I needed,” she tells me later that week, in my office. “But I don’t think I built what I wanted. I’m not sure I know what I want. I’m not sure I’ve ever been allowed to ask.”
Sitting with Ziva that first session, I felt something I’ve felt with hundreds of driven women across fifteen years of practice. Not alarm. Something closer to recognition. The life in front of her was not a mistake. It was a solution, built by a very young part of her to a very old problem, and it had worked for a long time.
She chose the job that guaranteed financial security because she grew up in a house where money disappeared without warning. She chose a partner who was steady and uncomplicated because her nervous system had learned, early and permanently, that unpredictability meant danger. She chose a city a careful distance from her family because proximity had always felt like a threat she couldn’t name. None of those choices were wrong. They kept her safe. They built a real, livable life. But they were made by the part of her that was managing threat, not the part of her that might have wanted something else entirely. What I’ve come to call Choosing from Wound versus Choosing from Desire is the name I’ve given to that gap: the space between the life a person builds to survive and the life she might build if desire, rather than fear, were finally allowed to choose.
If you’ve ever looked at your own carefully constructed life and felt something you couldn’t name, a hollowness underneath the achievement, a question that starts with “but is this actually what I want?”, this post is for you.
What Is Choosing from Wound vs. Choosing from Desire?
Choosing from Wound vs. Choosing from Desire is a framework I use with clients to name the motivational system that’s actually been driving their major life decisions, and whether that system is organized around survival or around something they actually want.
Here’s the distinction.
Choosing from Wound is what happens when unhealed trauma is in the driver’s seat. The choices are defensive: organized around avoiding the specific dangers or losses of the original wound rather than moving toward what the person actually wants. The woman who grew up in poverty chooses a financially secure career not because it’s where her gifts lie, but because insecurity feels like real threat. The woman who grew up with an unpredictable parent chooses a steady, controlled partner not because he lights her up, but because unpredictability is terrifying. These choices often produce good outcomes. But the motivation underneath them is defensive, not self-chosen. The wound is choosing.
Choosing from Desire is what becomes available once the wound has healed enough that the nervous system is no longer running mostly in threat-management mode. There’s enough psychological safety, enough solid internal ground, to ask the question the wound never allowed: what do I actually want? Not what is safe. Not what protects against the original pain. What feels alive. What is mine.
The transition between these two systems is often the central work of midlife therapy for the women I see. They’ve spent the first half of adulthood executing the wound’s survival strategy brilliantly. Then, somewhere between 35 and 45, the strategy starts to feel insufficient. Not wrong. It worked. But insufficient, because surviving isn’t the same as living, and the wound never wrote instructions for what comes after the danger has passed.
A clinical framework distinguishing two motivational operating systems in the life of a trauma survivor. Wound-driven choosing refers to major life decisions, career, partnership, geography, organized around avoiding the specific dangers or losses of the original trauma. A defensive, threat-management mode in which unhealed injury holds the primary decision-making authority. Desire-driven choosing refers to choices made from a healing nervous system operating from curiosity, longing, and self-determination rather than threat avoidance. The framework draws on Self-Determination Theory, Jungian individuation, and attachment theory’s distinction between the defensive strategies of insecure attachment and the exploratory freedom of secure attachment, mapping the movement from survival-organized living to self-authored living as a central arc of trauma recovery.
In plain terms: For most of your life, your choices have been made by your wound, not by you. Your wound chose the career that guaranteed you’d never be as poor as you were. It chose the partner who’d never hurt you the way you’d been hurt. That life may be good. But it isn’t the same as the life your desire would choose. Healing is the work of putting desire back in the driver’s seat.
I want to be clear about something: recognizing that your choices have been wound-driven isn’t the same as saying they were wrong. Many wound-driven choices produce real, good outcomes. The financial security the wound chose is real security. The reliable partner is a real, good person. What changes in the healing work isn’t the evaluation of the outcome but the relationship to it: the capacity to hold what was built from the wound with honesty, and then begin, carefully, to ask what desire would add.
The Psychology of Wound-Driven Choice
The framework maps onto a distinction that’s well established in motivational psychology, with specific resonance for trauma survivors.
Richard Ryan, PhD, professor of psychology at Australian Catholic University, and Edward Deci, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Rochester, developed Self-Determination Theory, one of the most empirically supported frameworks in motivational psychology, to describe the continuum from controlled motivation (driven by external requirements, fear of consequences, or absorbed obligation) to autonomous motivation (driven by real interest and intrinsic engagement) (PMID: 11392867). What I call Choosing from Wound corresponds closely to controlled motivation: the person is in motion, but the motion is propelled by managing threat rather than by the pull of real interest.
Choosing from wound isn’t choosing from the absence of motivation. It’s choosing from the presence of a very specific, very strong motivation: survival. The wound-driven woman is often extraordinarily motivated. She works harder than anyone else in the room. She is relentless. But the motivation is fear-organized rather than desire-organized, and that has consequences that only become clear over time.
From an attachment perspective, wound-driven choices are the behavioral expression of insecure attachment strategies. Mario Mikulincer, PhD, and Phillip Shaver, PhD, have documented that insecure attachment produces specific secondary strategies, hyperactivating (pursuing closeness anxiously) or deactivating (maintaining rigid self-sufficiency), designed to manage the threat of relational loss rather than to actually seek connection (Attachment in Adulthood, Guilford Press, 2007). These strategies work the same way wound-driven career and life choices do: intelligent, functional, and organized primarily around not repeating the original wound rather than toward what the person actually wants.
A concept central to the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, describing the lifelong process of integrating the various parts of the psyche, including the persona, the shadow, and the deeper self, into a coherent, unified whole. Jung proposed that the first half of adult life is typically organized around adapting to the external world (career, status, social role), while the second half calls for a deeper integration of the self that was suppressed or underdeveloped in service of that adaptation. The transition between these orientations, which Jung associated with midlife, frequently involves a reckoning with choices that were made by social conditioning, family expectation, or trauma rather than by the self underneath them.
In plain terms: Jung was describing, in the early twentieth century, exactly what I watch my clients experience in their 30s and 40s: the moment when the life built for survival starts to feel insufficient, and something deeper begins asking for more than the first half of life could provide. That reckoning isn’t a crisis. It’s an invitation.
The Jungian model maps closely onto the Choosing from Wound / Choosing from Desire transition. In Jung’s account, the first half of life is organized around building an adequate persona, the social self that can function in the world. For many trauma survivors, that persona-building is organized around more than social adequacy. It’s organized around survival: the wound hands down very specific instructions about what to build and what to avoid, and the result is often a persona of considerable external success sitting over a quiet internal mismatch.
James Hollis, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, describes the midlife transition as the moment the persona’s requirements stop being sufficient and the deeper self begins making its presence known, often through restlessness, or the specific dissonance of a life that looks right from the outside and feels wrong from the inside. That is precisely the presentation of Choosing from Wound: everything functional, and something essential missing.
How Wound-Driven Choosing Appears in Driven Women
In my clinical work, wound-driven choosing appears in a handful of consistent, recognizable patterns among driven women.
The career that guaranteed what the wound was terrified of losing. Financial security chosen from a childhood of financial anxiety. Stable employment chosen from a household of chaos. Academic achievement chosen from a home where love was conditional on performance. The career is real and often truly excellent. But it was chosen by the part of her managing a specific historical threat, not the part of her that might have wanted to be a photographer, or spend a decade doing work that mattered more to her than the salary ever could.
The partner chosen from the wound’s opposite. She chose someone who was the antithesis of whoever hurt her most. If the wound involved a volatile parent, she chose someone steady. If it involved emotional unavailability, she chose someone overtly warm. These partners are often good people. But “not the person who hurt me” isn’t the same sentence as “the person I actually want,” and the difference becomes apparent over time in ways that confuse both parties.
The geography of escape. She chose cities, jobs, and contexts specifically because they were far from the wound. The distance was real, and it served its purpose. But there’s a difference between far from the wound and toward what I actually want. Many of my clients discover, years after the escape, that they’ve never asked whether it’s the city they’d choose now, freely, with the wound out of the driver’s seat.
Ziva’s architecture practice belongs to this pattern almost exactly. Over the months of our work together, the wound becomes visible in the room. She grew up with a mother whose anxiety ran the household and a father who responded to that anxiety by disappearing into work. The family’s entire emotional economy was organized around managing the mother’s distress. Ziva’s own desires, the things that lit her up, the things she was curious about, were never forbidden. They were simply never asked about.
“But do you love architecture?” I ask her one afternoon.
A long pause. “I’m good at it,” she says carefully.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Another pause. Then, quietly: “I don’t know. I’ve never actually asked myself that question.”
That moment, not the answer, she doesn’t have one yet, is the beginning of Choosing from Desire. The question itself, asked out loud for the first time in forty-one years. The relational trauma quiz can be a useful starting point for identifying which wound has been sitting in your own driver’s seat.
The Midlife Reckoning: When the Life You Built Stops Fitting
The moment the wound-to-desire transition becomes unavoidable is what I call the midlife reckoning. It isn’t always midlife literally. For some women it happens at 32, for others at 50. But it carries a consistent quality: the life built from the wound has been built as well as it’s going to be, and it’s still not enough.
This is the experience that brings many of my clients into therapy. Not a breakdown. Something quieter, closer to the collapse of a premise they’d been living on: that if they built the right defenses, they would eventually feel okay. That the wound, successfully managed, would eventually stop running the show.
What they find instead is that managing the wound isn’t the same as healing it. The defenses work. The life is safe. And the inner life is still organized around avoiding something that ended decades ago. Desire has been overridden by wound-management for so long that many of these women, and this is the part that moves me most in session, simply don’t know what they want. Not because they’re indecisive. Because they’ve never once been allowed to ask.
“So much of what we call choice is really just the wound choosing for us. The old fear picks the partner, the job, the fight, and calls it preference. Freedom begins the moment we can feel the difference between what we’re running from and what we actually want.”
Terrence Real, family therapist and author of The New Rules of Marriage
Gabor Maté, MD, physician and trauma researcher and author of The Myth of Normal, names a foundational tension in the development of traumatized children: the conflict between attachment and self-expression. When the price of attachment, belonging, safety with a caregiver, is the suppression of her own feelings and wants, a child will always choose attachment. She has no choice. She can’t survive without it, and if the attachment requires suppressing what she actually feels and wants, she suppresses it.
Choosing from Wound is the adult expression of that childhood trade. The wound keeps choosing the way the child learned to choose: prioritizing whatever secures connection and safety over whatever is actually desired. Choosing from Desire becomes possible once the threat that made the trade necessary no longer exists, once the inner child is no longer running the show, and the adult woman can negotiate the relationship between safety and self-expression from a position of real agency rather than childhood necessity.
This transition is always marked by some mourning. The life built from the wound has to be honored before it can be revised. The choices made under constraint have to be acknowledged as choices made with the intelligence and resources available at the time, not failures, but responses to real conditions. The grief for the desires that never got expressed belongs in this process. It isn’t a detour. It’s part of the work.
Both/And: You Made Good Choices AND They Were Made Under Duress
The Both/And at the center of this framework is this: the choices made from the wound were good choices given what was known and available at the time, and they were made under a form of internal duress that’s worth naming plainly. Both are true. Holding both is what makes room for what comes next.
Collapsing into “those choices were wrong” produces shame and paralysis. The wound-built career was not a mistake. The wound-chosen partner may be a truly good person she deeply cares for. Dismantling that recognition in the name of healing would be its own form of harm.
Collapsing into “those choices were fine and there’s nothing to examine” keeps the wound in the driver’s seat indefinitely. The choices may have been good, and they may also have been the only choices available to a self managing a threat, and acknowledging that opens a door to something more.
Zofia is 39, a data scientist at a biotech company, and the one in her family of origin who’s kept everything together since childhood. Her family’s dynamics were organized around her mother’s chronic depression: everyone accommodated it, structured their lives around not destabilizing it. Zofia became remarkably competent at anticipating needs, managing systems, producing outcomes that held the family’s equilibrium in place.
She chose data science because it was logical, systematic, and paid exceptionally well. She chose it from the wound: the child who needed to be the most reliable person in the room grew up to become a professional whose entire job is being the most reliable person in the room.
She’s good at it. Really good. But sitting with her two years into our work, she tells me something she’s never said out loud before: “I’ve been thinking about marine biology. Since I was twelve. I’ve always thought about it. I just, I can’t explain why I didn’t go toward it. I just didn’t.”
She can explain it, actually. The wound can. Marine biology didn’t guarantee the stability the wound required. It wasn’t what the family needed her to become. It was a desire, purely hers, existing outside the wound’s architecture, and the wound’s operating system had no instruction set for a desire that wasn’t also survival-relevant.
“You’re allowed to want that,” I tell her.
She looks at me with something I’ve seen before in this kind of work. A mixture of relief and something close to fear. Relief because she’s carried that want for twenty-seven years. Fear because wanting it now means acknowledging the years the want was there and she didn’t follow it.
That’s the both/and in practice: the data science career was built well, and it was built by the wound. The marine biology dream was real, and it got set aside. Both are true. Both can be held. From that holding, something new becomes possible to consider. If you’re in this territory yourself, the Fixing the Foundations™ course offers a structured path through this kind of reckoning, and individual therapy is where the deeper relational work most fully unfolds.
The Systemic Lens: Who Gets Permission to Choose from Desire
The transition from Choosing from Wound to Choosing from Desire isn’t equally available to everyone, and that systemic dimension needs to be named directly.
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Choosing from desire requires a level of material and psychological safety that isn’t equitably distributed. A woman still in real material precarity doesn’t have the luxury of choosing work based on real interest. A woman still in real danger, from an abusive relationship, a hostile workplace, ongoing discrimination, can’t prioritize desire over survival. The wound-to-desire transition assumes the wound’s original threat has actually resolved, and that resolution isn’t accessible equally.
For the driven women I work with, material conditions are often present. The wound’s original threat, poverty, instability, an unsafe household, has usually been addressed by the very competence the wound produced. What constrains the transition for these women isn’t material scarcity but something more internal: the persistent sense that choosing from desire is a luxury they haven’t earned, a want that the competent, responsible version of themselves isn’t supposed to have.
This is where gender matters. Women are socialized to subordinate their own desires to others’ needs. The wound intersects with that socialization: the girl who learned her own desires were unwelcome at home grew up in a culture that also frequently communicates that women’s desires are secondary, self-indulgent, or irresponsible. From childhood: your needs are a burden. From culture: your desires are selfish. Together, they produce a woman with almost no internal permission to want things for herself.
Part of the work in trauma-informed therapy, and in the coaching work I do with driven women, is specifically the act of restoring that permission. The permission to want. The permission to ask what do I actually desire and take the answer seriously. The permission to make choices that serve the self underneath the wound rather than only managing it or serving someone else’s need.
That permission is rarely handed over by the culture. It gets built, slowly, in safe relational containers, through the accumulation of experiences where desire is met with warmth rather than dismissal. The therapy room is one of those containers. The Strong & Stable newsletter is another: a weekly reminder that your inner life is worth attending to, that your questions matter, that you’re allowed to be a woman who wants things and names them.
Small Desires Before Large Ones
The woman who has been choosing from the wound her entire life doesn’t begin the transition by changing careers or leaving her marriage. She begins by making small choices from desire instead: the restaurant she actually wants, not the one that seems most reasonable. The creative project she wants to pursue, not the one with the most obvious use. The afternoon off she actually wants, not the one she’s earned according to some internal ledger. These are practices. They retrain the decision-making faculty to consult desire at all, which is the first step, and it’s a slower one than most driven women expect.
Zofia’s version of this started small. Not marine biology, not yet. A single Saturday, once a month, with no agenda and no productivity attached to it. “I felt guilty the entire first time,” she told me. “Like I was getting away with something.” She kept doing it anyway. Ziva’s version started even smaller: a single hour, once a week, where she let herself sketch buildings that would never be built, that no client would ever see, purely because she wanted to see what her own hand would do without a brief attached. Neither woman rebuilt her life in that hour. But both of them located, for the first time in years, the actual sensation of wanting something with nothing at stake.
Expect the desire to feel unfamiliar, even suspicious, at first. One of the most consistent things I hear from clients moving through this transition is that desire feels strange, almost wrong. “It feels too easy,” one client told me. “Like it can’t be right if it’s what I actually want.” That’s the wound’s commentary, not the truth. Desire is supposed to feel good. That’s how you know it’s desire and not more wound management in disguise.
Learning to Choose from Desire: The Path Forward
The most common thing I hear from women beginning this transition is: “I don’t even know what I want. How do I start?”
That not-knowing isn’t a failure. It’s the honest state of someone who has been choosing from the wound for so long that desire’s voice has gone quiet. It can be found again. Here’s how I’ve watched it happen, session after session, over fifteen years of clinical work.
Start by identifying the wound’s fingerprints on past choices. Not to undo those choices, but to see clearly where the wound was choosing. This is often illuminating on its own: the pattern becomes visible, and the choices made under its authority can be acknowledged for what they were, survival responses to real conditions, without collapsing into either shame or denial.
Notice what the body wants, not what the wound endorses. Desire tends to live in the body before it lives in the mind. What makes you lean forward? What produces something beyond the satisfaction of competence, something closer to aliveness? What did you love before the wound made everything about survival? These questions are imprecise, and the answers may be partial. That’s fine. You’re learning a language you were never taught.
Grieve the wound’s costs before you move forward. The desires that were suppressed, the choices made under duress, the version of yourself that never got permission to emerge. These losses are worth mourning, not rushed past on the way to something new. The grief isn’t a detour. It’s the part of the work that actually changes how the new choices land.
Build the relational container that can hold desire. Choosing from desire requires feeling safe enough that you don’t have to choose from survival, and that safety is built in relationship, in the accumulation of moments where your desires were met with real interest rather than dismissal. Therapy, honest friendships, a partnership that can hold your real self: these are the conditions that make the shift from desire-as-idea to desire-as-choice functional rather than theoretical.
The life you’d choose from desire isn’t guaranteed to look radically different from the life the wound built. For some women, desire and the wound have been pointing in roughly the same direction all along, and the healing is less about changing the life than about changing the relationship to it, choosing it freely rather than managing it out of habit. For others, desire points somewhere truly new. Both are valid outcomes of the same work.
Ziva, a year into our work, still runs the same firm. She hasn’t quit architecture. What’s changed is smaller and harder to see from the outside: she now asks herself, before saying yes to a project, whether she wants it or whether she’s avoiding the discomfort of saying no. Zofia is still a data scientist. She hasn’t moved to the coast to study marine life. What she has is a running list, kept privately, of the things she’s curious about, and permission, finally, to add to it without justifying each entry. Neither ending is tidy. Both are honest.
What matters is that the choosing is yours. Not the wound’s. Not the survival strategy’s. Yours, freely, in full knowledge of what it costs and what it gives. That’s what Choosing from Desire actually means: not the absence of the wound, but the presence of something more than it.
This post is educational content grounded in Annie’s clinical experience and isn’t a substitute for individualized therapy or diagnosis. If you’re moving through a significant life transition, working with a licensed therapist can offer support tailored to your specific circumstances.
If you’re beginning to see how often your choices have been made by the wound rather than by desire, please be gentle with that recognition. For a long time, choosing from fear wasn’t a mistake, it was intelligence. It kept you safe in an environment where wanting things freely wasn’t allowed or wasn’t safe. So the goal isn’t to shame the wound-driven self. It’s to slowly give the desire-driven self more room to speak. You can honor how well the protective operating system served you and also start letting a truer set of wants guide more of your life, both at once. Neither survival nor desire has to be the enemy. Learning to tell the difference between what you’re fleeing and what you actually long for is some of the most freeing work there is, and it’s rarely done alone. When you’re ready for support in it, I’m here.
Warmly,
Annie
Warmly, Annie
Q: I don’t know what I want. Is that normal, or is something wrong with me?
A: It’s completely normal, and one of the most consistent experiences among women with relational trauma histories beginning this transition. Not knowing what you want isn’t a character flaw. It’s the predictable outcome of years, sometimes decades, in a system where survival was the organizing principle and desire was never consulted. The not-knowing is an honest starting place, not evidence that something’s broken.
Q: How do I know if I’m choosing from wound or from desire in a specific decision?
A: Ask what’s primarily moving you: away from something you’re afraid of, or toward something you actually want. Wound-driven choices are defensive, organized around preventing a feared outcome. Desire-driven choices have an approach quality, something being sought. Try this: if the feared thing were off the table entirely, would you still choose this? If yes, desire is probably involved.
Q: I’m in my 40s and feel like I’ve wasted my life building something from the wound. What do I do with that?
A: The life built from the wound isn’t a wasted life. It’s a life built under specific constraints, for specific purposes, and it may have produced real, good things. The grief for what wasn’t available to choose is legitimate. The shame for the life built in its place isn’t. The transition to Choosing from Desire is available at any age. You’re not late. You’re exactly where the work begins.
Q: What if what I want conflicts with the life I’ve already built?
A: This is the question that brings many women into therapy, and it doesn’t have a simple answer. Discovering that desire and the wound-built life are in conflict isn’t an instruction to immediately dismantle the life. It’s an invitation to a more careful inquiry: what actually fits, what doesn’t, what can change inside the existing structure. Desire surfacing doesn’t demand immediate action. It asks for real attention.
Q: Is this framework only relevant to major life decisions, or does it apply to everyday choices too?
A: Both. Major decisions, career, partnership, geography, are where the wound’s influence is most visible. But everyday choices are where the practice of Choosing from Desire actually develops: what you order when no one’s watching, whether you say yes because you’re curious or because declining feels risky. These smaller choices, made with attention, are how the new operating system builds its muscle.
Q: Can I do this work without therapy?
A: The self-awareness piece, recognizing the wound’s influence on past choices, can develop through reading, journaling, and honest conversation. The deeper transition typically needs a relational container: a relationship in which desire is expressed and met with real welcome. That container can be therapy, a deeply attuned friendship, or a long-term partnership capable of holding this kind of growth. What it usually can’t be is entirely solitary, because the wound itself was relational.
Related Reading
Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68-78. PMID: 11392867
Mikulincer, Mario, and Phillip Shaver. Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. New York: Guilford Press, 2007.
Hollis, James. The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1993.
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. New York: Avery, 2022.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
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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. 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, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
