Couples Therapy vs. Individual Trauma Work: Which Comes First?
Whether to start with couples therapy or individual trauma work is one of the more consequential clinical decisions in a woman’s healing process, and it gets answered too quickly more often than it should. This post lays out the neurobiological case for sequencing carefully, describes the clinical signals that point toward one path or the other, and offers a practical framework for driven women facing relational distress alongside their own unprocessed history.
Last updated: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Eight Months In, and She’s Still Disappearing
- What Each Modality Actually Does
- The Neurobiology: Why Sequence Matters
- When Individual Trauma Work Should Come First
- When Couples Therapy Should Lead
- Both/And: The Integrated Path
- The Systemic Lens: Why the Mental Health System Often Gets This Wrong
- How to Heal: A Framework for Making the Decision
- Frequently Asked Questions
Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) is a structured, attachment based couples treatment developed by Sue Johnson, EdD, that reshapes negative interaction cycles driven by unmet attachment needs. When one or both partners carry unresolved trauma, moving straight into couples work can backfire, because the relational vulnerability it asks for can overwhelm a nervous system that hasn’t built an adequate window of tolerance. There’s no universal rule here. But in my work with driven women, I’m often assessing nervous system stability before we decide together what should come first.
In short: There’s a real neurobiological case for sequencing thoughtfully. Couples sessions introduce a kind of relational activation that an unstabilized nervous system often can’t process productively, so the order matters more than most people realize.
If you’re ready for the full healing arc, not a single piece of it, my signature program Fixing the Foundations is the structured path your relational trauma recovery has been missing.
I’ve sat with this sequencing question across more than 15,000 clinical hours, watching what happens when it’s answered well and when it isn’t. Sue Johnson, EdD, developer of emotionally focused therapy and professor emerita at the University of Ottawa, built the evidence base showing attachment security has to be addressed for couples interventions to hold over time.
Eight Months In, and She’s Still Disappearing
| Dimension | Individual Trauma Work | Couples Therapy |
|---|---|---|
| The sequencing question | Individual trauma work often needs to come first when trauma responses are clearly driving the relational dynamics. Couples therapy layered on top of unprocessed trauma tends to hit the same wall repeatedly. | Couples therapy can begin in parallel when both partners have enough stability. But if significant unprocessed trauma is present in one or both partners, the couples work often hits a ceiling fast. |
| What each addresses | Your own nervous system, your attachment patterns, your relational history, and the specific ways past harm is surfacing in your relationship right now. This is intrapsychic and relational. | The relational system between two people: communication patterns, conflict dynamics, repair capacity, and the shared narrative of the relationship. This requires both partners. |
| When couples therapy first makes sense | Individual trauma work has produced enough stabilization that couples therapy can work at the relational level without constantly running into individual dysregulation. | When the primary problem is relational rather than individual, and both partners are relatively stable, and the issue is truly about the relationship’s patterns rather than one partner’s unprocessed history. |
| The risk of couples therapy with unprocessed trauma | The traumatized partner may feel further blamed or dismissed. Couples therapy assumes a level of psychological groundedness that active trauma responses can undercut. | Couples therapy can sometimes reinforce a harmful dynamic. When one partner’s trauma responses get treated purely as relational problems, the resolution can end up favoring the less symptomatic partner. |
| What I tell clients who come in wanting couples work first | I’m honest with them: if individual trauma is clearly driving what’s happening in the relationship, individual work first gives the couples work somewhere to go. Without it, we tend to keep circling the same wall. | I assess for what’s actually driving the difficulty. Sometimes it really is the relationship system, and sometimes it’s one person’s unprocessed history surfacing as a relational problem. |
| Can both happen at once? | Yes. In plenty of cases, individual trauma work and couples therapy run in parallel with different clinicians, and this is often the most efficient path when both needs are truly present. | The communication between the individual therapist and the couples therapist matters here. With proper consent, coordination between clinicians can keep the work from pulling in different directions. |
Christan is 52, a hospital administrator. She’s been in couples therapy with her husband Doug for eight months. The therapist is skilled in the Gottman Method. The sessions are structured. Week after week, Christan finds herself doing the same thing: shrinking, over-explaining, apologizing for things that weren’t hers to apologize for. The therapist has named the pattern gently more than once. Christan understands it intellectually. Its origin stays just out of reach. She can describe what she does in the room. She hasn’t yet understood why she keeps disappearing in front of a man she’s been married to for twenty-two years.
Christan is receiving couples therapy. What she likely needs first is to understand why she disappears, which is individual trauma work. That sequencing gap is costing her eight months, real money, and continued strain on her marriage while the piece underneath it goes unaddressed.
This isn’t a comment on the skill of the couples therapist she’s seeing. It’s a comment on a question that tends to get answered too fast, and too often in one direction: which comes first? The honest answer depends on what’s actually generating the distress in front of you.
What Each Modality Actually Does
Before the sequencing question can be answered, it helps to be precise about what each approach actually treats. They operate on truly different levels.
Couples therapy works on the relational system: the patterns between partners, the communication, the attachment behaviors, the accumulated injuries. Evidence-based approaches like the Gottman Method lean behavioral and skill-based, teaching couples practical tools for managing conflict and building intimacy. Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), developed by Sue Johnson, EdD, professor emerita at the University of Ottawa, is attachment-based and emotion-focused, aiming to restructure the negative interactional cycles that keep couples stuck in disconnection.
Developed by Sue Johnson, EdD, professor emerita at the University of Ottawa, EFT is an attachment-based couples therapy approach that identifies and restructures the negative interactional cycles maintaining relational disconnection. A 2022 review in Current Opinion in Psychology describes EFT as one of the more empirically supported couples interventions, working by helping partners decode the attachment needs underneath protest behaviors like anger, withdrawal, and pursuit.
In plain terms: When your partner withdraws or erupts, they’re usually not trying to hurt you. They’re expressing an attachment need in the only language they learned how to speak it in. EFT helps couples learn each other’s underlying language and respond to it directly.
Individual trauma therapy works on the intrapsychic world: developmental history, attachment wounds, trauma held in the nervous system, and the patterns of self that formed out of early relational experience. The goal is to process past trauma, regulate the nervous system, and build a more integrated sense of self, creating a stronger internal foundation to bring into relationship.
A term popularized by Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, the window of tolerance describes the zone of nervous system arousal within which a person can function most effectively. Above that window sits hyperarousal: anxiety, panic, reactivity. Below it sits hypoarousal: shutdown, dissociation, numbness. Trauma tends to narrow this window considerably.
In plain terms: When Christan’s nervous system is already narrowed by old trauma, couples therapy is asking her to do relational repair from a dysregulated state. It’s a little like being asked to learn a new language mid-panic-attack. The learning doesn’t land, no matter how good the teaching is.
The Neurobiology: Why Sequence Matters
The neurobiological case for sequencing thoughtfully is compelling, and it’s a conversation driven women rarely have with their therapists or with themselves before booking that first couples session.
When one or both partners carry active relational trauma, couples sessions can inadvertently activate real trauma responses: freeze, fawn, or fight. The couples therapist, however skilled at relational dynamics, may not be equipped to process trauma at that depth. The harder problem underneath it: the trauma is being activated by the very relationship that’s supposed to be the healing container.
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, founder of the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT), writes about nervous system co-regulation between partners. When one partner’s nervous system is dysregulated by trauma, it affects the other partner’s nervous system too, creating a cycle of mutual reactivity that no amount of communication skill-building interrupts at the root.
Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance and author of Trauma and Recovery, lays out a staged model of trauma treatment: stabilization before processing, processing before integration. When unprocessed trauma is actively destabilizing someone’s nervous system, asking that person to simultaneously do relational repair is often more than the system can hold. The relational work can’t land because the internal stability to engage with it isn’t there yet.
Individual trauma work, done first, stabilizes the nervous system, widens the window of tolerance, and builds the capacity to engage safely and effectively in couples work later. This isn’t a detour from the relationship. It’s closer to the foundation the couples work is quietly waiting on.
I recently sat with Allan Schore, PhD’s, 2021 paper on interpersonal neurobiology, and one idea has stayed with me since. Schore, clinical faculty at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and a leading researcher in neuropsychoanalysis, describes the right hemisphere as the primary home for early relational learning: implicit, affect-laden, wordless. When one partner’s right brain is firing a defensive attachment response, the four-year-old’s dread or the adolescent’s shame, no amount of left-hemisphere communication coaching interrupts it at the source. Individual trauma therapy, particularly body-based and parts-oriented approaches, works at the level where the wound actually lives.
What I see consistently with driven women who’ve been through multiple rounds of couples therapy without lasting change isn’t a failure of commitment or intelligence. It’s a structural mismatch. They’ve been doing relational work before the internal work that would make it viable. Their nervous system is still running old code, written before this marriage, before they were old enough to choose any of it. Individual therapy is where that code gets rewritten. Couples therapy then has something solid to build on.
“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, c. 1864
When Individual Trauma Work Should Come First
Courtney is 43, a corporate attorney. She started couples therapy with her husband three months after discovering his emotional affair. In sessions, her window of tolerance was consistently flooded. Her nervous system read nearly everything her husband said as a threat, even the ordinary sentences. Despite the couples therapist’s skill, it became clear Courtney needed individual stabilization before couples work could truly go anywhere. Her acute betrayal trauma made it nearly impossible to engage constructively in relational repair, and the couples therapist, to her credit, named this directly and recommended Courtney pause couples work while she got individual support in place.
There are a handful of clinical indicators that point toward prioritizing individual trauma work first:
- Active PTSD or Complex PTSD (CPTSD): When someone is in a state of chronic post-traumatic dysregulation, relational attunement becomes very difficult. The couples work has nowhere to land yet.
- Acute betrayal trauma: The shock of discovered infidelity or a significant violation can overwhelm a person’s capacity for much beyond survival. Individual stabilization usually needs to happen before relational repair can begin in earnest.
- Domestic violence or coercive control history: In these situations, couples therapy is contraindicated. Individual safety planning and trauma therapy are the appropriate interventions, not joint sessions.
- Developmental trauma actively destabilizing the marriage: When childhood relational wounds are playing out in the marriage itself, Christan disappearing the second she senses Doug’s disappointment, individual processing of those origins is often necessary before couples work can gain traction.
- Severe attachment dysregulation: When early developmental trauma has produced deeply ingrained insecure attachment patterns that flood the present-day relationship, individual work can help re-pattern those internal working models before couples work asks more of them.
None of this is about choosing one partner over the other or assigning blame. It’s about recognizing that when one person’s nervous system is too dysregulated to participate in relational repair, asking them to do it anyway doesn’t actually help the relationship. It tends to harm both people further.
When Couples Therapy Should Lead
While individual trauma work is often a necessary first step, there are real circumstances where couples therapy is the right primary vehicle for healing, particularly when the distress originates mostly in the space between partners rather than in one partner’s unprocessed individual history.
Couples therapy tends to make sense as the lead intervention when:
- Communication breakdown is the main issue: A persistent difficulty communicating needs and feelings clearly, leading to chronic misunderstanding and escalating conflict that both partners contribute to fairly equally.
- Ruptures have piled up without repair: A history of unresolved conflicts that have worn down trust over time, without adequate repair attempts, and where both partners have played a part in the erosion.
- The partnership itself is shifting: Major life transitions, becoming parents, a significant career change, identity evolution, that require renegotiating roles and expectations together.
- A specific relational crisis is underway: Situational stressors like a significant loss, financial strain, or parenting conflict, where both partners are functional individually but struggling to move through the moment together.
- No active individual trauma is flooding the container: Both partners have enough nervous system stability to engage in the relational work without becoming overwhelmed by it.
In these situations, both partners are truly part of both the problem and the solution. Individual therapy for one partner, however effective, can’t unilaterally resolve a two-person system problem. The dynamic needs both people present and engaged for the work to hold.
Both/And: The Integrated Path
For many driven women, the most effective path isn’t either/or. Individual trauma work and couples therapy work as complements rather than competitors. Sometimes the integration needs careful sequencing; sometimes both can run at once, when each partner has enough individual stability to hold it.
Take a composite of a client I’ll call Melissa, 46, a nonprofit CEO. She’s in individual Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, exploring why she fawns in her marriage, a pattern rooted in an exiled part that learned early that having needs was dangerous. At the same time, she and her husband are in couples EFT, repairing patterns across eighteen years together. Her individual work informs the couples work: as she gains insight into her fawning in IFS, she brings a different self-awareness into EFT sessions. The couples work, in turn, shows her which internal parts get activated and when. Neither approach alone would’ve gotten her as far.
What I see consistently is that sequencing matters more than most people expect. Starting individual work first, even for a few months, can turn couples therapy from a place where old patterns repeat into a place where new ones get practiced. The individual work builds the internal foundation. The couples work gives that foundation somewhere relational to go.
If you’re weighing whether individual therapy should come before or alongside couples work, that’s often the right question to be sitting with. A complimentary consultation is a reasonable place to think through the clinical picture together.
Christan, after eighteen months of individual therapy, went back to couples work with Doug. Same therapist, same Gottman framework. This time, something had shifted. She could name, in real time, when she was starting to disappear, and track the sensation that came right before the shrinking: a constriction across her chest, a dimming behind her eyes. Instead of following the old pattern automatically, she could pause. Say something. Stay in the room. Her individual therapy had given her the internal room that made the couples work possible in a way it hadn’t been before.
That’s the integrated path in practice: not two competing therapeutic projects pulling at the same limited attention, but two modalities that build on each other in sequence, each one making the other more effective.
If you’re not sure where you land in this. Whether you have enough internal stability for couples work right now, or whether individual therapy is the more essential first step. That’s worth exploring with a trauma-informed clinician before committing to a direction. My Fixing the Foundations™ is a starting point for naming which childhood patterns are most active for you, and a complimentary consultation is a good context for thinking through the sequencing question for your specific situation.
The Systemic Lens: Why the Mental Health System Often Gets This Wrong
The mental health system, particularly Employee Assistance Programs and generalist therapists working from a full caseload, tends to default to recommending couples therapy the moment a woman presents with marital distress. The reasoning is understandable: couples therapy has a clear, legible presenting problem, and it’s often faster to access than individual specialty trauma care.
But the clinical cost of that default can be real. A woman with active relational trauma rooted in her developmental history, funneled straight into couples therapy without adequate individual preparation, can find that couples therapy, even with a highly skilled practitioner, becomes a sophisticated setting for repeating her original wounds. The very dynamics meant to build connection can trigger old trauma responses instead. What was supposed to feel healing can start to feel like being re-injured in front of an audience.
David Wallin, PhD, psychologist and author of Attachment in Psychotherapy, has written about how attachment patterns formed in early childhood shape how people show up in couples therapy. When those patterns are driven by unprocessed trauma, the relational work can stall: the person gets more articulate about naming her dysregulation without the underlying wound ever being touched.
Peter Fonagy, PhD, FBA, professor of contemporary psychoanalysis at University College London, writes about mentalizing, the capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states, as central to healthy couple functioning. When trauma impairs that capacity, couples therapy struggles to gain traction no matter how skilled the therapist is.
Women with complex trauma histories need individual treatment before or alongside couples work, not as an afterthought tacked on once the couples work has stalled. The system rarely sequences this well, largely because doing so takes more time and can cost more. That systemic gap can leave driven women feeling misunderstood and more entrenched in the very patterns they came in hoping to heal.
Worth naming directly: if you’re in a situation involving domestic violence, emotional abuse, or coercive control, couples therapy isn’t just unlikely to help. It can increase risk. Individual safety planning is the appropriate first step, and your safety comes before any sequencing question at all.
There’s also what happens to a woman with unprocessed trauma when a couples therapist tells her to be more vulnerable, share her needs more openly, lean in rather than withdraw. For a woman whose nervous system learned early that expressing a need led to withdrawal, punishment, or ridicule, being coached this way in a couples session can be seriously destabilizing. She isn’t resisting the therapist’s guidance out of stubbornness. She’s protecting herself from a threat her body still remembers.
The exact skills couples therapy asks women with developmental trauma to practice, vulnerability, need expression, direct conflict engagement, are often the very behaviors that weren’t safe in their families of origin. Individual trauma therapy makes those skills easier not by teaching them better, but by addressing the nervous system’s learned conviction that practicing them is dangerous in the first place.
In my clinical experience, the women most affected by this sequencing gap are often the ones most motivated to fix the marriage. They’ve done the reading. They’ve booked the appointments. They truly want to do the work. Then, often after months of expensive sessions, the relational work keeps circling back to the same point of breakdown, not because they weren’t trying, but because the internal piece that would let the work land is still missing. That recognition can feel discouraging at first. What I want it to feel like instead is clarifying: there’s a reason the work isn’t moving yet, and a path that can move it.
How to Heal: A Framework for Making the Decision
For driven women facing relational distress and trying to figure out what to prioritize, here’s the practical framework I use in my own clinical thinking.
First: assess your window of tolerance. When you’re in conflict with your partner, or even in a hard conversation, how dysregulated do you actually get? If you routinely find yourself completely flooded, unable to think, speak, or access your own values in the moment, individual work to widen your window of tolerance should probably come first.
Second: identify where the primary distress is coming from. Is the conflict mostly about patterns between you and your partner right now? Or is it mostly about your own history playing out in the marriage? Christan’s disappearing behavior wasn’t really about Doug. It was about something she learned long before Doug existed in her life. Individual therapy is the more appropriate vehicle for that kind of work.
Third: vet any couples therapist for trauma-informed training. If your couples therapist isn’t trauma-informed, if they rely primarily on skill-based models without accounting for how complex trauma shapes relational dynamics, they may end up re-injuring you without meaning to. The Gottman Method is truly valuable, but it’s not sufficient on its own for couples where complex trauma is actively present. Ask directly: “What’s your approach when one or both partners has a trauma history that’s affecting our sessions?”
Fourth: consider coordination between therapists. If you’re in both individual and couples therapy at the same time, ideally your two therapists have some kind of coordinated relationship, or at minimum, both know the other’s work is happening. I regularly coordinate with couples therapists for my individual clients. The two streams of work inform each other in concrete ways when there’s communication between providers.
I offer individual therapy for driven women facing exactly this kind of complexity: understanding their own patterns, widening their window of tolerance, and building the internal foundation that makes relational healing possible. I don’t provide couples therapy directly, but I frequently refer clients to trusted trauma-informed couples therapists and stay actively involved in coordinating care.
Your support should be sequenced to fit your actual healing, not whatever order is most administratively convenient for the system you’re moving through.
One of the more consistent predictors of positive therapy outcomes, across modalities, is the quality of the therapeutic relationship itself. For individual trauma therapy, that often means finding a clinician who truly understands your world: a driven woman, a physician, an attorney, an executive. The cultural context of your profession and the way ambition, caretaking, and trauma interact in your life aren’t background details. They’re central to the clinical picture.
This is why I work specifically with driven women across physician, tech, legal, and executive contexts. Not because the underlying human themes are different. They’re not. But because the context those themes live inside shapes what the work needs to address.
Relatedly, the Fixing the Foundations™ course offers a structured way to start understanding the relational patterns underneath the marital distress: the childhood origins of how you show up in intimate relationships, the wounds that predate the marriage and quietly shape it from underneath. For some women, the course provides a foundational map before individual therapy. For others, it runs alongside individual work as a structured complement.
What I want to say, finally, to the woman who’s been in couples therapy for eight months and is still disappearing: your instinct that something is missing isn’t wrong. The work isn’t failing because of a character flaw. It may be failing because the sequencing is off. Individual trauma work, understanding why you disappear and building the capacity to stay present, may be the missing piece that makes the relational repair possible.
Q: Should I do individual therapy before couples therapy?
A: It depends on what’s generating the distress. If you’re carrying active trauma symptoms, PTSD, acute betrayal trauma, severe attachment dysregulation, individual work first is generally recommended: it stabilizes your nervous system and builds the capacity relational repair requires. If the issues are mainly communication patterns and both partners have reasonable stability, couples therapy can be a fine starting point.
Q: Can unprocessed trauma sabotage couples therapy?
A: It can. When one or both partners carries active relational trauma, couples sessions can inadvertently activate fight, flight, or freeze responses, and the skill-building couples therapy offers often can’t land when someone is flooded. A trauma-informed approach matters here, and individual stabilization often needs to precede or run alongside the relational work.
Q: What if my partner won’t do individual therapy?
A: Your own individual work still matters, regardless of what your partner chooses. When you shift your patterns, stop disappearing, stop over-accommodating, the relational system shifts too. It won’t fix everything alone, and may even create new tension as you assert yourself differently. But your healing isn’t contingent on your partner’s willingness to do his.
Q: Can I see the same therapist for both individual and couples therapy?
A: Generally, this isn’t recommended. A therapist working with you individually needs to prioritize your well-being without reservation, which conflicts with the neutrality couples therapy requires. Separate therapists who coordinate care offer the cleanest container for each type of work.
Q: How does EFT differ from the Gottman Method?
A: Both are evidence-based, with solid research support. The Gottman Method is more behavioral and skill-based, focused on communication techniques and conflict management. EFT, developed by Sue Johnson, is attachment-based and emotion-focused, restructuring the negative interaction cycles rooted in insecure attachment. For couples where one or both partners carry significant trauma, EFT’s attachment orientation often gets more traction.
Q: What if we’ve been in couples therapy for years and nothing changes?
A: Stalled couples therapy over a long stretch often signals that unprocessed individual trauma is getting in the way. It may be worth pausing to invest in individual trauma work, particularly for whichever partner tends to get flooded or reactivated repeatedly in sessions, or finding a couples therapist with deeper trauma-informed training.
Q: How do I tell if my marriage problems are relational or my own trauma?
A: This is best explored with a trauma-informed therapist directly. One useful signal: if your reactions feel disproportionate to what’s actually happening, if a specific look from your partner sends you into a response that clearly belongs to an older situation, that’s often individual trauma material. If the problems are mostly about what both partners say and do to each other in the present, that’s more likely relational territory couples therapy can address.
Q: Can couples therapy make trauma worse?
A: It can, when approached without trauma awareness. In the presence of active, unprocessed trauma, couples therapy can inadvertently re-injure someone by repeatedly activating fight, flight, or freeze responses without the internal resources to process and discharge them. A trauma-informed couples therapist watches for this and knows when to slow down or recommend individual stabilization alongside the couples work.
Related Reading
Gottman, John M. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books, 2015.
Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown Spark, 2008.
Wallin, David J. Attachment in Psychotherapy. Guilford Press, 2007.
Perel, Esther. The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Harper, 2017.
Tatkin, Stan. Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship. New Harbinger, 2011.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399 408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Disorganized 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.
- Schore AN. The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity. Front Psychol. 2021;12:648616. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648616. PMID: 33959077.
- Greenman PS, Johnson SM. Emotionally focused therapy: Attachment, connection, and health. Curr Opin Psychol. 2022;43:146 150. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.06.015. PMID: 34375935.
Warmly, Annie
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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, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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