Codependency vs. Enmeshment: What’s the Difference and How to Heal Both
| Dimension | Codependency | Enmeshment |
|---|---|---|
| Core dynamic | One person’s sense of worth and identity becomes organized around caretaking, fixing, or managing another person’s wellbeing, emotions, or problems. | The boundaries between two people. Often family members. Become so porous that individuality, separate feeling, and autonomous thought are functionally impossible. |
| Who initiates the dynamic | Codependency is often enacted by one person. The codependent. Who brings a particular caretaking orientation to relationships that may or may not be enmeshed. | Enmeshment is a systemic pattern. Both or all people in the system participate in maintaining blurred limits, whether they experience themselves as givers or receivers. |
| What’s entangled | The codependent’s sense of worth, purpose, and emotional regulation are entangled with the other person’s state. If they’re not okay, I can’t be okay. | Thoughts, feelings, identities, and physical space become merged. Family members may finish each other’s sentences, assume they know what the other feels, or respond to each other’s emotions as if they were their own. |
| Origin | Often traced to childhood environments that rewarded caretaking or made love contingent on managing a parent’s distress. Originally adaptive, now generalized. | Often a multigenerational family system pattern. Not just a response to a specific parent but a family-level structure that’s been maintained across generations. |
| How they show up in adult relationships | Difficulty saying no, prioritizing others’ needs to the exclusion of one’s own, staying in relationships past the point of health, and organizing identity around being needed. | Difficulty knowing what you actually think or feel without checking it against a family member, guilt about having separate experiences, and a sense that having your own life is a betrayal. |
| What healing requires | Developing a self that isn’t organized around caretaking. Building genuine access to one’s own needs, limits, and worth as separate from what you do for others. | Differentiation. The capacity to be in relationship with someone while remaining a distinct person; this often requires sustained individual therapy and sometimes family systems work. |
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
Codependency and enmeshment are two of the most commonly conflated terms in the relational trauma world. And while they overlap, they describe distinct dynamics with different roots and different implications for healing. This post breaks down both concepts clearly, explores how they develop in driven women’s families of origin, and maps out what genuine relational autonomy looks like as a destination.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Phone That Never Stopped Ringing
- What Is Codependency?
- The Neuroscience of Relational Self-Loss
- How These Patterns Show Up in Driven Women
- What Is Enmeshment?
- Both/And: You Can Love Someone AND Need Separation From Them
- The Systemic Lens: When Enmeshment Gets Coded as Love
- How to Build a Genuinely Separate Self
- Frequently Asked Questions
Codependency and enmeshment are related but distinct relational patterns. Codependency describes a behavioral pattern of over-functioning for others and under-attending to yourself, typically rooted in early experiences with an unpredictable or addicted caregiver. Enmeshment describes a structural failure of psychological boundaries in which individual identities, emotions, and needs become fused across generations or within a family system. You can be codependent without being in an enmeshed family system, and enmeshment can produce relational patterns that look like codependency but have different roots. Both patterns respond to therapy, but they require different entry points. With the driven women I sit with, the overlap is common, and getting the distinction right changes where we begin.
In short: Codependency describes a behavioral pattern of self-abandonment in service of others, while enmeshment describes a structural boundary failure within a family system in which individual identities become fused.
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Over more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve found that women who’ve grown up in both codependent and enmeshed family environments often carry confusion about where one pattern ends and the other begins, and that clarity is itself therapeutic. I keep coming back to Murray Bowen, MD, the psychiatrist whose family systems theory introduced the concept of differentiation of self. In his 1978 book Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, Bowen described how emotional fusion within family systems shapes relational functioning across generations, and his framework is still the one I reach for most often when I’m trying to help a client name what’s actually happening in her family.
The Phone That Never Stopped Ringing
Aiko, a composite drawn from many years of this work, is forty-four and runs a private equity firm out of a glass office where her assistant knows not to schedule anything before 9am on Mondays, because Mondays are for her mother’s calls. Three of them, usually, before noon. Once because her mother saw something on the news that worried her. Once because she had a dream about Aiko’s sister. Once because she wanted to know if Aiko had eaten breakfast. Aiko has not, in her adult life, gone more than two days without speaking to her mother. Not from genuine want, but from a formless dread she can’t quite name, a dread that’s been the background hum of her entire adult life.
“We’re just a close family,” she told me the first time I asked about it, turning her phone face down on her knee without seeming to notice she’d done it. It took months of careful work to see what was underneath that description. A family system in which closeness was purchased at the price of selfhood. In which her mother’s emotional regulation depended on Aiko’s availability. In which differentiation, having a separate opinion, a separate need, a separate life, was experienced as abandonment. Sitting with her, I felt the particular quiet that comes when a woman who runs entire deal teams cannot locate, inside herself, permission to let the phone ring. What she’d been calling close, she began to understand, was enmeshment.
In my work with driven women, codependency and enmeshment come up constantly, often in the same story, often as deeply tangled together as the family systems they developed in. Understanding the distinction between them isn’t about assigning blame or pathologizing love. It’s about getting precise enough to do the specific healing work each pattern requires. Aiko is still working on letting the phone ring. Some Mondays she manages it. Some Mondays she doesn’t, and we talk about that Monday too.
What Is Codependency?
Codependency is a relational pattern characterized by excessive focus on another person’s needs, moods, and wellbeing at the expense of your own, often to the point of losing access to your own needs and sense of self. It was originally described in the context of relationships with people who struggled with addiction, where it was termed “co-alcoholism,” but clinical work later extended the concept to any relationship in which one person’s emotional functioning becomes organized around managing, fixing, or caretaking another.
I still remember the first time I read Codependent No More. Melody Beattie, the author and co-dependency recovery pioneer whose work has now been read by millions, defined a codependent person as someone who has let another person’s behavior affect her, and who becomes obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior. What stayed with me wasn’t the definition so much as how precisely it matched what I was seeing in my own office with women who would have scoffed at being called codependent. Not just enabling someone else’s dysfunction, but genuinely not knowing where you end and the other person begins.
A relational pattern, originally described in the context of addiction family systems, characterized by excessive focus on another person’s emotional states, needs, and behavior, at the cost of attending to one’s own inner life, needs, and self-development. Codependency involves habitual self-abandonment in the service of managing or caretaking another, often motivated by anxiety about the other person’s wellbeing or by a deep-seated belief that one’s own worth is contingent on being needed. It develops most commonly in family systems where a child’s needs were consistently subordinated to a parent’s emotional or practical requirements.
In plain terms: Codependency is the pattern of organizing your life around someone else’s inner weather while losing track of your own. It’s being so attuned to what everyone else needs that you don’t know what you need. It’s making yourself useful to the point of making yourself invisible.
Codependency is best understood not as a character flaw but as a developmental adaptation. Think of it as the logical nervous system response of a child who learned that her emotional needs were secondary, that her worth was contingent on usefulness. Which means in practice that the very caretaking skill that kept that child safe becomes, twenty years later, the thing that keeps an adult woman exhausted in a marriage, a friendship, or a leadership role that was never actually asking her to disappear. The problem is that these skills follow her into adulthood and apply to every relationship, whether or not the original conditions still exist.
The Neuroscience of Relational Self-Loss
The codependency pattern has neurobiological correlates that help explain why it’s so tenacious and why willpower alone can’t shift it.
Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, has written extensively about differentiation as a core developmental task, and it’s a framework I find myself returning to constantly in session. Here’s the clinical version: differentiation is the process by which a person develops a stable, coherent sense of self that can remain intact while in genuine connection with another. Now here’s what that actually requires. Early caregiving experiences that simultaneously provide attunement, meaning I see you, I feel you, and separateness, meaning you’re a distinct person with your own inner life that I respect. When caregiving is chronically organized around the caregiver’s needs, differentiation gets compromised. Which means in practice that the child develops a self that’s primarily built through responsiveness to others rather than authentic self-expression. Years later, that shows up as a woman in a board meeting who can read every person in the room and still couldn’t tell you what she actually wants.
A family systems concept, developed by Salvador Minuchin, MD, child psychiatrist and family therapist and founder of structural family therapy, describing a relational pattern in which boundaries between family members are diffuse or absent, such that members’ emotional states, identities, and functioning are entangled in ways that compromise individual autonomy. In enmeshed family systems, closeness is maintained at the cost of individuation. Separate opinions, separate emotional experiences, and separate life choices are experienced as threats to family cohesion rather than as healthy expressions of individual selfhood. (PMID: 14318937)
In plain terms: Enmeshment is when the family system doesn’t have enough space for you to be genuinely, separately yourself. It might look like closeness from the outside, but inside it feels like there’s no air. No room to have a thought, a feeling, or a choice that belongs only to you.
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score is probably the book I recommend most often to clients beginning to understand their own family history. One idea that has shaped my clinical thinking most is his observation that chronic caretaking of a dysregulated parent, a specific form of enmeshment sometimes called parentification, can itself be traumatic for the child. A child’s nervous system gets asked to perform the developmental task of adult emotional regulation before it has developed its own. The resulting patterns, hypervigilance to others’ emotional states, an automatic suppression of the child’s own experience, get encoded at the level of the nervous system and persist into adulthood. Which is why a forty-year-old woman can sit in my office, professionally accomplished, and still flinch at a parent’s disappointed voicemail.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- High enmeshment (+1 SD) combined with high maternal relationship instability (+1 SD) associated with b = 0.80 increase in children’s externalizing problems (p < .001) (PMID: 29698005)
- Child-mother attachment dependency positively correlated with emotional/behavioral problems mother report (r = 0.16, p < .10); actor effect β = 0.24 from father dependency (p = .016) (PMID: 36672018)
- Child-mother attachment security negatively correlated with mother-reported emotional problems (r = -0.25, p < .01); actor effect β = -0.29 (p = .002) (PMID: 36672018)
How These Patterns Show Up in Driven Women
In driven women, codependency and enmeshment often present with a distinctive flavor. The caretaking is organized. Efficient, even. And the woman may not recognize it as the same dynamic she’s read about in the recovery literature, which often describes more obviously dysfunctional family systems. Her family wasn’t addicted or violent or chaotic. It was emotionally complex and close in ways that consumed her.
Suri, a composite drawn from many years of this work, is a forty-five-year-old hospital administrator whose family is, by every external measure, warm and loving. Her mother calls daily. Her siblings coordinate every holiday down to the seating chart. And Suri has spent her entire adult life managing the emotional climate of those relationships. Smoothing conflicts. Never quite saying what she actually thinks, because what she actually thinks might upset someone. “I’m the one everyone calls when something’s wrong,” she told me once, holding a mug of tea she’d let go cold on the arm of the chair. “I just don’t know who I’d call.” It looks like generosity. It feels, from the inside, like a slow erosion of herself.
What I see consistently in clients like Suri is that the emotional neglect was subtle but pervasive. She was never seen as a separate person with her own inner life that deserved as much space as everyone else’s. Her role was relational lubricant, the one who made connection possible for everyone else. And that role, translated into her professional and personal adult life, looks exactly like the driven woman who is excellent at leading and genuinely bewildered by why she feels so utterly depleted. Suri still takes the weekly dinner. She’s just started, this year, leaving twenty minutes before dessert, and calling it what it is instead of apologizing for it.
What Is Enmeshment?
Where codependency describes a relational pattern a person carries across her relationships, enmeshment specifically describes a family system characteristic. It’s the structural lack of differentiated boundaries between family members that makes genuine individuation difficult or impossible.
In an enmeshed family system, there’s often a quality that gets described as very close but which functions more like fusion. Separateness is threatening. Choosing a different career than your parents expected, marrying outside the family’s preferences, having opinions that diverge from the family’s consensus, all of it carries a disproportionate relational charge. The message, usually implicit and unspoken, is that closeness requires sameness. Having your own life is a kind of disloyalty.
Salvador Minuchin, MD, the child psychiatrist and family therapist who founded structural family therapy, identified enmeshment as one of the primary family structural patterns associated with symptom development in children. Not because love was absent, but because the family system’s organization prevented individuation from occurring. The child can’t develop a clear sense of who she is because separateness is never truly allowed.
“I felt a Cleaving in my Mind. / As if my Brain had split. / I tried to match it. Seam by Seam. / But could not make them fit.”
EMILY DICKINSON, Poet, Poem 867
Both/And: You Can Love Someone AND Need Separation From Them
Here’s the Both/And that many driven women find the most difficult to hold. You can love your family deeply AND need genuine psychological separation from them. Love and enmeshment aren’t the same thing. Closeness and self-erasure aren’t the same thing. Being a devoted daughter, sister, or partner isn’t incompatible with also being a fully differentiated, autonomous self.
The hardest part of this Both/And is that in enmeshed family systems, the separation needed for genuine selfhood has often been framed, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly, as rejection. Needing space means you’re cold. Having your own opinion means you think you’re better than everyone else. Untangling what’s genuinely love from what’s the family system’s defensive apparatus is painstaking work. Of course it feels disorienting. You’re trying to separate two things that were fused together before you had language for either one. But it’s necessary, because genuine connection requires two separate people who freely choose to be present to each other. Not two halves of a fused system.
This is work that trauma-informed therapy is specifically designed to support. My Fixing the Foundations™ course addresses the family system dynamics that created these patterns and provides a structured framework for beginning to differentiate without catastrophe.
The Systemic Lens: When Enmeshment Gets Coded as Love
One of the most important systemic dimensions of enmeshment is the way it gets culturally coded as virtue. As closeness, loyalty, devotion, family values. In many cultural, ethnic, and immigrant family systems, the collective is genuinely valued over the individual in ways that don’t necessarily produce the harm of pathological enmeshment. The difference lies in whether genuine individuation and selfhood are permitted to coexist with collective bonds.
For driven women from cultural backgrounds where family loyalty and self-sacrifice are deeply valued, the healing work involves a particular kind of careful discernment. It means distinguishing between the genuine goods of your cultural heritage, community, belonging, relational interdependence, and the specific ways those values may have been deployed to prevent your own development as a full, separate person. This isn’t a project of rejecting your culture. It’s a project of carrying it consciously rather than compulsively.
There’s also a gender dimension. The expectation of relational caretaking falls disproportionately on women in most cultural systems, which makes the patterns described here gendered as much as developmental. Of course you’re tired. You were doing a job you never applied for, and doing it well enough that everyone assumed you wanted it.
How to Build a Genuinely Separate Self
Differentiation, the gradual development of a genuinely separate self that can be in genuine connection without losing itself, is the destination. And it’s reached through a process that’s neither fast nor linear but is thoroughly possible.
Saanvi, a composite drawn from many years of this work, is a thirty-nine-year-old architect who grew up in a family she describes as everyone in everyone else’s business, all the time. She came to therapy after her mother’s health crisis triggered a complete collapse of the limits Saanvi had spent a decade trying to establish. “I had actual rules,” she told me in an early session, still in her site boots from a client walkthrough, a rolled set of blueprints wedged under one arm. “No calls after nine. No unannounced visits. And then she got sick and every rule just evaporated, and I don’t even know if I’m angry about that or relieved.” In the aftermath, we did the most focused work she’d ever done on what she actually wanted, what she actually felt. Not as positions in relation to her family, but as genuine expressions of who she was. The Saanvi who emerged was, in her words, recognizably me for the first time.
Differentiation in practice looks like this. Knowing what you feel without needing someone else to confirm it. Having opinions you can hold lightly rather than defend desperately or abandon under pressure. Being able to be close to someone without losing yourself in them. Setting limits from a place of genuine care rather than from exhaustion or resentment.
This kind of work requires sustained support, ideally individual therapy with a clinician who understands the family systems and developmental dimensions of these patterns. It’s also supported by my Fixing the Foundations course, which provides a structured framework for understanding how your family of origin shaped your relational templates. The free assessment quiz is a useful starting point for identifying which foundational wounds are most active in your current life. And the Strong & Stable newsletter is the weekly community for women doing this exact work.
The version of you that exists on the other side of this work, grounded in your own experience, capable of genuine care without self-erasure, in relationships that are freely chosen rather than compulsively maintained, isn’t a fantasy. It’s what healing actually produces, when given adequate time, adequate support, and the willingness to do the real work rather than the expedient version. You’ve been managing other people’s worlds with extraordinary skill. It’s time to come home to your own. That homecoming is the proverbial house of life™ finally being lived in by the person it was built for, instead of staffed like a hotel for everyone else’s needs. Connect when you’re ready to begin.
If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
Warmly,
Annie
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Q: What’s the clearest difference between codependency and enmeshment?
A: Enmeshment is a family system structure. It describes the relational field you grew up in, where boundaries between family members were diffuse and individuation was implicitly or explicitly discouraged. Codependency is a relational pattern you carry, the tendency to lose yourself in caretaking and focus on others across your relationships. They often develop together, since enmeshment tends to produce codependent adults, but they’re not the same thing. You can be in a non-enmeshed adult relationship and still bring codependent patterns to it from your family of origin.
Q: How do I establish limits with an enmeshed family without destroying the relationship?
A: Slowly, with support, and with realistic expectations. Enmeshed family systems often respond to limits with what family therapists call limit-testing: increased demands, guilt, appeals to loyalty, escalation. This is the system trying to restore its equilibrium, not evidence that your limits are wrong. Establishing genuine autonomy within an enmeshed family system usually involves multiple cycles of limit-setting and pushback before a new equilibrium is established. Therapy provides essential support for holding steady through those cycles.
Q: I feel guilty when I take time for myself. Is this codependency?
A: Chronic guilt around meeting your own needs is a hallmark of codependency, particularly when the guilt is automatic and independent of whether anyone is actually harmed by your choice. The internalized voice that says you should be taking care of someone right now, or who are you to need rest, is the voice of the family system that trained you to subordinate your needs to others’. Recognizing that voice as a legacy of your history rather than a moral truth is a significant step in recovery.
Q: Can I be enmeshed with a romantic partner, not just a family of origin?
A: Yes. While enmeshment is technically a family systems concept, the relational patterns it produces absolutely manifest in adult romantic partnerships. You might find yourself unable to make decisions without your partner’s input, feel responsible for their emotional states, struggle to have opinions that differ from theirs, or experience their displeasure as threatening to your sense of self. These are enmeshment dynamics in an adult relationship, and they’re addressed through the same differentiation work that addresses family-of-origin enmeshment.
Q: What does healthy interdependence look like, versus codependency?
A: Healthy interdependence involves two people with distinct, well-developed senses of self choosing to lean on each other, support each other, and be genuinely affected by each other, from a place of genuine choice and genuine fullness rather than from fear or compulsion. You know you’re in healthy interdependence when you can care deeply for someone without losing access to yourself, when you can say no without catastrophizing, when you can receive care without guilt or deflection, when the relationship adds to your life rather than organizing it.
Q: Is codependency the same as people-pleasing?
A: People-pleasing is one of the behavioral expressions of codependency, but codependency is broader. Codependency includes the loss of self, the compulsive caretaking, and the difficulty knowing and acting on one’s own needs, of which people-pleasing is one manifestation. You can be a people-pleaser without full codependency, since some people-pleasing is socially adaptive and situational, and codependency involves deeper layers than just behavioral accommodation. It includes the inner experience of having organized your sense of self around others’ perceptions and needs.
Related Reading
Beattie, Melody. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself. Hazelden, 1986.
Minuchin, Salvador. Families and Family Therapy. Harvard University Press, 1974.
Bowen, Murray. Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson, 1978.
Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. New Harbinger, 2015.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
The Difference Between Care and Self-Erasure
One of the most important distinctions for women recovering from codependency and enmeshment to internalize is the distinction between genuine care and self-erasure dressed as care. These two things can look identical from the outside. Both involve doing things for others, attending to others’ needs, being present and helpful and available. But they’re powered by entirely different internal states.
Genuine care comes from a place of relative fullness. You have enough internal resource to offer something to someone else without depleting yourself. Your care doesn’t depend on a particular response from the recipient. You can offer it and remain intact whether it’s received well, received badly, or not received at all.
Self-erasure dressed as care comes from a place of depletion and anxiety. The giving isn’t freely chosen. It’s compulsive, driven by fear of the other person’s disapproval, by the deeply internalized belief that your worth is contingent on your usefulness. It doesn’t feel like love, from the inside. It feels like obligation, like the cost of staying safe.
Learning to tell the difference, to notice in real time whether a gesture of care is coming from fullness or from fear, is one of the most useful practical skills of codependency recovery. It requires pausing before the automatic response and asking yourself a simple question: am I doing this because I genuinely want to, or because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t? That question doesn’t always produce clear answers immediately. But asking it consistently begins to build the capacity to act from genuine choice rather than compulsion.
This is also, incidentally, how the most effective leaders lead. Not from an anxious need to make everyone happy. From genuine care for the people and the work, expressed through honest communication and the kind of limits that protect both the relationship and the person setting them. The shift from codependent caretaking to real, sustainable care in the professional domain is one of the most significant outcomes of the personal healing work.
Setting Limits Without Burning Bridges
One of the most practically challenging aspects of codependency and enmeshment recovery is the reality of existing relationships. Particularly family relationships. That need to shift without necessarily ending. Many women are figuring out how to change their participation in a family system that isn’t changing around them.
This is genuinely difficult work, and it doesn’t come with a clean success story template. Enmeshed family systems typically respond to differentiation attempts with increased pressure to return to the old pattern. Guilt, escalation, appeals to loyalty. Weathering those responses requires a tolerance for discomfort that can only be built gradually.
The practical principles I find most useful: start with the limits that protect you most from the most costly dynamics, rather than trying to transform everything at once. The goal is change, not revolution. Be clear with yourself about why you’re establishing a limit before you communicate it, because limits communicated from resentment land differently than limits communicated from a grounded understanding of what you need. And expect the initial response to be negative. That response isn’t feedback about whether the limit is appropriate. It’s feedback about the family system’s discomfort with change.
It’s also important to hold realistic expectations about how much the system will change. You can only change your own participation, not everyone else’s patterns. Some relationships will become genuinely closer as they become more honest. Others will thin or end. This is a real cost of the work, and it deserves genuine grief rather than being minimized. The goal isn’t to destroy the family. The goal is to be genuinely, fully yourself within it.
The Professional Dimension: Codependency in the Workplace
Codependency in the workplace is one of the least recognized presentations of this pattern. It deserves explicit attention because the workplace context can make it look like professional virtue.
The codependent pattern in the workplace looks like this. Being unable to say no to additional work because the anxiety about disappointing a supervisor feels intolerable. Managing a difficult colleague’s emotional states rather than addressing the professional issue directly, because their displeasure feels personally threatening. Taking on responsibility for team dynamics that exceed your role, because the discomfort of other people’s conflict activates the same urgency to fix and smooth that family discord did in childhood.
Many driven women are promoted into leadership partly because of these qualities, without anyone naming that the pattern is also costing them. The burnout that results has a specific quality. It’s not just exhaustion from too much work. It’s the exhaustion of emotional labor that’s continuous, because there’s always another person’s emotional weather to manage.
Recovery from organizational codependency involves the same foundational work as recovery from relational codependency. Developing a clearer, sturdier sense of your own needs and values, building the capacity to tolerate others’ displeasure without it feeling existentially threatening, and learning to offer care from fullness rather than fear.
This is work that my trauma-informed executive coaching specifically addresses: the intersection of the inner pattern and its professional expression. The professional environment you actually deserve is one where your competence is welcomed without requiring you to disappear into service of everyone else’s comfort. That environment becomes possible when the inner pattern that’s been creating the other one begins to shift.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA. The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress. Harv Rev Psychiatry. 1994;1(5):253-265. doi:10.3109/10673229409017088. PMID: 9384857.
- Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. fearful-avoidant attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby’s unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
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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 USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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