- Fisher, Janina, PhD. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. Routledge, 2017.
- van der Kolk, Bessel, MD. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.
- Linehan, Marsha, PhD. DBT Skills Training Manual. Guilford Press, 2015.
- Herman, Judith, MD. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
Your Coping Toolkit as a Living Document
One last thing I want you to take away from this: your coping toolkit isn’t a one-time project. It’s a living document. What works in one season of your life may not work in another. A tool that’s perfect when you’re in a regulated baseline state may not be accessible when you’re in acute stress. Tools that required significant scaffolding when you were beginning this work may eventually become second nature. And your toolkit needs to evolve as you do. (PMID: 9384857)
Building in regular check-ins , quarterly, say, or after any significant life transition , to review what’s working, what you’ve stopped doing that used to help, and what you might want to experiment with next keeps the toolkit alive rather than letting it calcify into another list of things you’re not doing. This isn’t another obligation. It’s a practice of ongoing self-knowledge and self-care that honors the fact that you are not static, and your needs aren’t either.
You deserve a coping toolkit that actually fits your life , not a generic prescription for what wellness is supposed to look like, but a carefully developed, deeply personal set of practices that supports your specific nervous system in your specific circumstances. If you’re ready to build that with professional support, trauma-informed therapy is the most reliable container for that work.
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.
ANNIE’S SIGNATURE COURSE
Fixing the Foundations™
The deep work of relational trauma recovery. At your own pace. Annie’s step-by-step course for driven women ready to repair the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives.
Warmly, Annie
It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed, especially when managing trauma alongside a demanding life. Start small by integrating brief, intentional moments of self-care, like a five-minute breathing exercise or a mindful walk. Consistency with even short practices can build resilience and create space for healing without adding to your burden.
Yes, feeling guilty about prioritizing your needs is incredibly common, particularly for driven women who may have learned to put others first. This guilt often stems from past experiences, including trauma or emotional neglect, that taught you your needs were secondary. Recognizing this pattern is the first step towards reclaiming your right to self-care.
When trauma symptoms arise, focus on grounding techniques that bring you back to the present moment. Try deep diaphragmatic breathing, engaging your five senses by noticing sights, sounds, and textures around you, or using a weighted blanket for comfort. These tools can help regulate your nervous system and create a sense of safety.
It’s a valid question to ask if your self-care is truly supportive or merely a distraction. Genuine self-care for trauma often involves practices that gently connect you to your body and emotions, inviting a sense of safety and presence. If your routine consistently leaves you feeling more disconnected or anxious, it might be worth exploring with a therapist whether avoidance is at play.
Trauma can indeed erode self-trust, making decisions about your well-being feel daunting. Begin by experimenting with small, low-stakes self-care activities and pay attention to how your body responds. Gradually, as you observe positive effects, you can rebuild trust in your ability to choose what genuinely supports your healing path.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
- Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
- Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
- Attachment Styles Guide
- Complex PTSD Guide
- EMDR Therapy for Women
- Inner Child Work Guide
- Trauma and the Nervous System
- Intergenerational Trauma
Why Coping Tools Work Differently for Trauma Survivors
There’s something important that mainstream wellness culture rarely explains: the same coping tool that works reliably for someone without a trauma history may not work at all , or may actually make things worse , for someone with one. This isn’t a failure of the tool or the person. It’s a feature of how trauma reorganizes the nervous system.
Take meditation as an example. For many people, sitting in stillness and directing attention inward is restorative. For someone with a trauma history, particularly one involving childhood abuse or chronic threat, turning attention inward can feel activating rather than calming. The mind moves toward the unprocessed material. The stillness that feels peaceful to one person feels like threat to another. This doesn’t mean meditation can’t be part of a trauma survivor’s coping toolkit , it often can, with modification and pacing. But it does mean that the standard instruction to “just meditate” misses crucial nuance.
Peter Levine, PhD, trauma researcher and developer of Somatic Experiencing, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, has documented how unresolved trauma creates a kind of nervous system dysregulation that conventional relaxation techniques don’t always reach. The nervous system isn’t just “stressed” , it’s been fundamentally reorganized around the experience of threat. Healing requires working with that reorganization directly, not just layering relaxation on top of it. (PMID: 25699005)
What this means for your coping toolkit: be curious, not rigid. If a coping tool consistently doesn’t work for you , if breathwork makes you more anxious, if journaling about your feelings leads to overwhelm rather than relief , that’s information. It may mean you need a different pacing, a different entry point, or a different tool entirely. Working with a trauma-informed therapist can help you figure out which tools are most calibrated to your specific nervous system profile.
Building Your Coping Toolkit: A Tiered Approach
The most effective coping toolkits aren’t random collections of things that are supposed to be good for you. They’re tiered, intentional systems organized around what actually works for your specific nervous system in specific states. Here’s how I often help clients think about building theirs:
Tier 1: Immediate regulation tools , tools for acute dysregulation that can be deployed in the moment, anywhere, quickly. These are your “emergency kit” tools. Examples: box breathing, cold water on the wrists, orienting to the room (naming what you can see, hear, touch), grounding through the soles of the feet. The goal here is nervous system downregulation, fast. These tools need to be practiced when you’re calm so they’re accessible when you’re not.
Tier 2: Daily maintenance tools , practices that support ongoing baseline regulation, ideally woven into the structure of the day so they don’t require willpower to access. Examples: morning movement, consistent sleep hygiene, structured transition time between work and home, brief daily check-in practice. The research on nervous system regulation consistently shows that baseline matters enormously , the higher your baseline regulation, the less any given stressor will push you outside your window of tolerance.
Tier 3: Deeper restoration tools , the things that actually refill your reservoir rather than just managing the depletion. These are less frequent but more substantial: a weekend away, a slow day with no obligations, a session with your therapist that goes somewhere real, a meaningful conversation with a person who genuinely knows you. These tools require more planning and more permission. They’re often the first things driven women cut when life gets full , which is, functionally, cutting the fuel source.
Ana, a client who came to me after recognizing that her “coping tools” had become another performance category , another place to not be doing enough , found relief in this tiered framework: “It stopped being about ticking boxes and started being about actually having something in each tier. I didn’t have anything in Tier 3. That’s where the problem was.”
Coping Tools and the Window of Tolerance
The effectiveness of any coping tool depends partly on the state of your nervous system when you reach for it. This is one of the most clinically important things I teach clients. And it’s also one of the reasons people sometimes feel frustrated that a tool “doesn’t work” in one moment when it seemed helpful in another.
“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, molecular biologist and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Dan Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, developed the concept of the “window of tolerance”. The zone of nervous system activation in which a person can function effectively, process experience, and use coping tools. When you’re within your window, you’re neither flooded (overwhelmed, reactive, unable to think clearly) nor shut down (numb, dissociated, disconnected). Most coping tools work best within this window.
When you’re significantly outside your window. In a state of acute flooding or shutdown. You may need different, more basic interventions first: movement, cold water on the face, slow breathing, sensory grounding. These physiologically-based interventions can help bring you back into the window, where the more cognitive or emotional coping tools become accessible again.
This has practical implications for how you build your coping toolkit. Rather than having one universal list of things that “help,” it’s useful to have a tiered toolkit: physiological regulation tools for when you’re significantly dysregulated, emotional processing tools for when you’re in your window and can do that kind of work, and maintenance tools for the ordinary days when you’re building the baseline of regulated living. Understanding which tool is for which state is part of what makes a coping toolkit genuinely effective rather than aspirational.
In my work with clients, I often describe this as the difference between a medicine cabinet and a first aid kit. The medicine cabinet is for ongoing health maintenance. The first aid kit is for acute injury. Both matter. Both serve different functions. And knowing which to reach for. And when. Is its own important skill, one that develops over time with practice and good support.
Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience
In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. This is the heart of what I call the Both/And frame.
You can be a driven, capable woman and still be struggling beneath the surface. You can want to heal and still find it terrifying to let your guard down. You can understand intellectually what’s happening in your nervous system and still feel completely overtaken by it. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the texture of a fully lived life.
The driven women I work with often struggle with Both/And because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives. You don’t have to choose between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. You can be both at once.
The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual
When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual. “What’s wrong with me?”. We miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.
This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt. These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support. A culture that rewards productivity over presence. Family systems that confused achievement with worthiness. Gender norms that punish women for the same traits they praise in men.
Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me. And what systems made it possible?” That shift isn’t just linguistic. It’s liberating. It makes room for self-compassion where self-blame used to live, and it allows you to locate the wound accurately. Not in your character, but in your history and the systems that shaped it.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. PMID: 25699005.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
Individual Therapy
Trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational trauma. Licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado (telehealth only), and registered to provide telehealth in Florida.
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Fixing the Foundations
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides 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, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
