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Divorce or Celibacy? The Impossible Choice of the Outgrown Marriage
Ocean and water imagery accompanying Divorce or Celibacy? The Impossible Choice of the Outgrown Marriage. Annie Wright trauma therapy

Divorce or Celibacy? The Impossible Choice of the Outgrown Marriage

SUMMARY

In my work with driven women, the dead bedroom is rarely about a lack of love. It’s about the profound physiological shift that happens when you outgrow your partner. This post looks at the clinical reality of desire discrepancy, the nervous system’s role in shutting down intimacy, and how to find your way through the space between who he used to be and who he is now.

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

QUICK ANSWER · UPDATED JUNE 2026

Desire discrepancy in marriage is the clinical term for a persistent mismatch in sexual interest between partners, often intensifying when one partner’s psychological and professional growth outpaces the other’s. It’s distinct from low libido. The nervous system actively suppresses desire when safety and genuine attraction are no longer present. For many couples it coexists with real affection, which is exactly what makes the choice so agonizing. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually naming that the relief you feel at the distance is data, not a character flaw.


In short: Desire discrepancy is a clinical mismatch in sexual interest between partners, not a simple libido problem, and it’s especially common when one partner’s growth has outpaced the relationship’s evolution.

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.


WHO I AM AND WHY I KNOW THIS

I’ve drawn these patterns from more than 15,000 clinical hours working with driven women who carry the private weight of a marriage that looks fine from the outside and feels dead on the inside. I keep coming back to the work of John Gottman, PhD, the relationship researcher whose decades of longitudinal couples studies identified the emotional bids that predict long-term disconnection. His 1999 book The Marriage Clinic gave me language for something I’d been watching in session for years: what happens when repair attempts consistently go unanswered.

The Silence at 11 PM

It’s 11:14 PM on a Tuesday, and the only sound in the master bedroom is the hum of the HVAC and the faint, rhythmic scrolling of his thumb on his phone screen. Erin, a forty-seven-year-old VP of Product who spent her day commanding a room of engineers and negotiating a seven-figure vendor contract, lies perfectly still on her side of the king-sized mattress. To the outside world, her life is a masterclass in having it all: the corner office, the beautiful home, the husband who is, by all conventional metrics, a “good guy.” But in this specific moment, staring at the sliver of moonlight cutting across the ceiling, the gap between her public competence and her private desolation is a physical ache in her chest. She realizes, with a quiet, terrifying clarity, that it’s been six months since he last reached for her. Worse, she isn’t even mad about it anymore. She’s just profoundly, bone-deeply relieved.

If any of this sounds familiar, you aren’t broken, and you aren’t alone. In my clinical practice, I sit across from driven women who carry the secret shame of a marriage that looks perfect on paper but feels entirely dead in the bedroom. They don’t talk about it with their friends over brunch. They don’t bring it up in couples therapy because the conflict avoidance is too high. They just quietly manage the distance, pouring their vitality into their careers, children, and friendships, while the space between them and their husbands grows wider and colder. Today, I want to name the unspoken reality of the dead bedroom in the outgrown marriage, and why your lack of desire isn’t a dysfunction. It’s a highly adaptive response to a version of romantic love that has stopped reaching you.

When we look closer at the daily mechanics of your life, the exhaustion becomes palpable. You’re making thousands of micro-decisions every day: anticipating needs, managing risks, smoothing over the rough edges of your family’s experience. By the time you finally lie down at night, your body isn’t looking for connection. It’s desperately seeking recovery. The idea of physical intimacy feels like one more demand on a system that’s already running on empty, one more person asking you for something when you have nothing left to give.

Here’s what I keep seeing in my office. When you’re the one carrying the emotional labor, the ambition, and the growth in the relationship, your body eventually stops seeing your partner as a source of safety and starts seeing him as another task to manage. You can’t desire someone you’re constantly managing. You can’t feel erotic pull toward someone whose depressive under-functioning requires you to be the adult in the room at all times. This isn’t about you failing at intimacy. It’s about your nervous system accurately assessing the landscape of your marriage.

We need to look at what happens when ambition asymmetry bleeds into your physical connection. When his world is contracting, shrinking to the couch, the phone, the scroll, and your world is expanding, the friction isn’t just emotional. It becomes somatic. Your body keeps a record of every time you’ve had to shrink yourself to make him comfortable, every sigh, every sarcastic comment, every moment you realized you were entirely alone in the heavy lifting of your shared life.

Let’s unpack the clinical mechanics of what’s actually happening in your body and your marriage when the bedroom goes quiet, and why the standard advice to “just schedule date night” isn’t only unhelpful, but actively harmful to your nervous system.

What Is Desire Discrepancy?

When we talk about the dead bedroom, we have to start with the clinical terminology that strips away the shame and moral failing our culture attaches to sexless marriages. In my work with driven women, the most common presenting issue isn’t that they hate sex. It’s that they’ve entirely lost the thread of their own desire within the specific context of their marriage. They feel broken. They feel like they’re failing at being a “good wife.” But what they’re actually experiencing is a well-documented clinical phenomenon.

DEFINITION DESIRE DISCREPANCY

A relational dynamic in which partners experience persistently mismatched levels of sexual interest, frequency, or preferred types of sexual activity, often resulting in a pursuer-distancer cycle that deepens the underlying emotional disconnection. I’ve read and re-read Esther Perel, MA, the psychotherapist and author of The State of Affairs, on this exact pattern. Her framing has stayed with me: this discrepancy isn’t inherently pathological. It’s a normative challenge in long-term pair bonding that requires differentiation to work through successfully.

In plain terms: It’s the painful reality of one person wanting physical intimacy more than the other, and the quiet, corrosive resentment that builds on both sides when you can’t figure out how to bridge the gap. You aren’t broken for not wanting it, and he isn’t a monster for wanting it. You’re just caught in a systemic mismatch.

Desire discrepancy is the silent killer of the good-on-paper marriage. It’s the elephant in the room during every anniversary dinner and every quiet Sunday morning. But in the outgrown marriage, the discrepancy takes on a specific flavor. It’s not just that you have different libidos. It’s that your lack of desire is a direct reflection of the ambition asymmetry in your lives. You’re expanding: reading, going to therapy, building your career, deepening your friendships. He’s contracting: withdrawing into screens, avoiding conflict, settling into a low-grade depressive under-functioning.

You can’t manufacture desire in a vacuum. Desire requires a spark, a sense of mystery, a feeling of being met by an equal. When you’re managing the household, the calendar, the emotional temperature of the home, and your own demanding career, your husband stops feeling like a partner and starts feeling like a dependent. It’s biologically difficult to feel erotic desire for someone you’re parenting.

The resentment that builds in this space is toxic, but it’s also entirely understandable. You’re angry that you have to ask for basic partnership. You’re angry that his default state is passivity while your default state is action. And this anger, unexpressed and unacknowledged, settles into your tissues. It becomes a physical barrier between you. You can’t soften into the arms of someone you’re quietly furious with. You can’t surrender to pleasure when your nervous system is braced for disappointment. The dead bedroom is simply the physical manifestation of this unexpressed rage.

This is where the shame cycle begins. You feel guilty for not wanting him. He feels rejected, and his resentful anger leaks out in passive-aggressive comments. You feel his anger, which makes your nervous system feel even less safe, which drives your desire further underground. It’s a perfect, terrible loop, and it’s not one you can break by forcing yourself to have duty sex.

We have to look at the neurobiology of why your body is saying no. It’s not a malfunction. It’s a highly intelligent protective mechanism.

Why Does the Body Shut Down Desire?

To understand why you haven’t wanted to be touched in months, we have to look under the hood of your nervous system. Driven women are often so disconnected from their bodies, living entirely from the neck up to survive the demands of their careers, that they don’t realize their bodies are screaming at them. Your lack of desire isn’t a character flaw. It’s a physiological response to chronic relational strain.

In my work with clients, I see this pattern consistently: sexual desire isn’t just an on/off switch. Emily Nagoski, PhD, the sex educator and author of Come As You Are, describes it as a complex interplay of accelerators and brakes in the brain. The first time I read her work, it reframed everything I’d been observing clinically for years. For driven women in outgrown marriages, the brakes are being pressed constantly.

DEFINITION THE DUAL CONTROL MODEL OF SEXUAL RESPONSE

A neurobiological framework positing that sexual arousal is governed by two independent systems: the Sexual Excitation System, which responds to sexually relevant stimuli, and the Sexual Inhibition System, which suppresses arousal in the presence of perceived threats, stress, or relational unsafety.

In plain terms: Your brain has a gas pedal and a brake pedal for sex. When you’re carrying the entire mental load of your marriage, managing his quiet depression, and feeling entirely unseen, your foot is permanently jammed on the brake. No amount of lingerie or date nights will work if the brake is engaged.

Think about what constitutes a “threat” to your nervous system. It doesn’t have to be a tiger in the bushes. For the driven woman, it’s the exhaustion of coming home from a ten-hour day to find him scrolling on the couch while the sink is full of dishes. It’s the subtle, contemptuous sigh he lets out when you mention a win at work. It’s the profound loneliness of sitting next to someone who has stopped trying.

Your nervous system registers these moments as unsafe. And when you don’t feel safe, your body shuts down the systems that aren’t necessary for immediate survival, including your libido. You move into a state of chronic sympathetic activation (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze and fawn). In these states, physical intimacy isn’t just unappealing. It feels invasive.

This is why the advice to “just do it anyway” is so damaging. When you force yourself to have sex while your body is in a state of shutdown, you’re actively traumatizing your own nervous system, teaching it that its signals of distress will be ignored. This leads to the duty sex era, where you’re sleeping with him to prevent a fight, not to be close. That’s a recipe for profound somatic debt.

Your body is incredibly wise. It’s shutting down desire because the relational container is no longer structurally sound enough to hold it. Until we address the foundational cracks in the marriage, the ambition asymmetry, the emotional labor monopoly, the resentful anger, the desire won’t return. You can’t life-hack your way out of a nervous system response.

How Does This Show Up in Driven Women?

The dead bedroom doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow, quiet erosion of physical connection that often goes unnoticed until the gap is too wide to bridge. For driven women, this erosion is masked by the sheer velocity of their lives, so busy building the company, managing the team, running the household, that the lack of sex just feels like a logistical inevitability. Until it doesn’t.

Consider Shalini, a thirty-eight-year-old managing director at a consulting firm. She spends her days making high-stakes decisions, holding space for her team’s anxieties, and projecting absolute competence. She comes home to a husband who is kind, steady, and entirely stalled in his career. He hasn’t read a book in five years. His primary hobby is watching YouTube videos about lawn care. He isn’t abusive, he isn’t having an affair, but he’s fundamentally checked out of the heavy lifting of their shared life.

Shalini notices the shift in her body first. When he walks up behind her in the kitchen and puts his hands on her waist, her shoulders instantly tense. She doesn’t lean back into him. She subtly shifts her weight forward, creating a millimeter of distance. It’s not a conscious rejection. It’s an automatic somatic response. Her body is saying, “I’m already carrying too much. Don’t ask me for more.”

“I used to think something was wrong with me,” she told me one Thursday, still in her blazer from a board meeting, a lukewarm oat milk latte sweating a ring onto my side table. “Now I think something is finally right with me. I just don’t know what to do with that.”

She starts staying up later, finding reasons to answer emails at the kitchen island until she knows he’s asleep. She wears sweatpants to bed. She stops initiating any physical touch: no hugs, no hand-holding, no casual brushes in the hallway, because she knows that any touch might be read as an invitation for sex, and she doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage his disappointment if she says no.

Sitting with Shalini that afternoon, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize in hundreds of driven women: not confusion about what’s happening in their marriages, but exhaustion at having to keep proving it’s real. This is the reality of the outgrown marriage. The physical distance is a symptom of the emotional and intellectual distance. When you’re constantly expanding and he’s constantly contracting, the friction between your trajectories makes physical closeness feel discordant. You can’t merge your body with someone whose energy feels like an anchor pulling you down.

And yet, the guilt is immense. Driven women are fixers, problem-solvers, used to being able to optimize every area of their lives. The fact that they can’t “fix” their lack of desire feels like a personal failure. They read the articles, they buy the books, they try to manufacture the spark. But you can’t optimize a nervous system that’s accurately responding to a lack of safety and equality.

The tragedy is that the husband often interprets this withdrawal as a personal rejection, rather than a systemic response to the relationship dynamic. His resentful anger builds, he withdraws further, and the cycle deepens, lived out in the six inches of space between you in bed.

What Does Pretending Cost the Body?

When you live in the gap between what your marriage looks like to the outside world and what it feels like in the dark, the toll isn’t just emotional. It’s physical. The body keeps a record of every unsaid truth, every swallowed boundary, and every time you performed closeness when you actually felt miles away.

In my work with clients living inside these marriages, I hear a version of this feeling expressed again and again: a kind of invisible grief for the life that looks whole from the outside but feels hollow within.

“Sometimes the very same person we build a home with is the one we can no longer desire. We want security and adventure, comfort and aliveness, the familiar and the unknown, from a single relationship. The impossible choice is rarely between two people. It’s between two versions of a life.”

Esther Perel, psychotherapist and author of Mating in Captivity

For the driven woman, the somatic cost of the dead bedroom often shows up as chronic tension, unexplained fatigue, or autoimmune flare-ups. You’re burning massive amounts of energy just to maintain the facade of normalcy, managing his fragility and the dissonance of loving someone you no longer want to touch.

This is where we see the phenomenon of duty sex. You sleep with him not because you desire him, but because it’s easier than the passive-aggressive sighing and the heavy silence that fills the house when he feels rejected. But duty sex is a form of self-abandonment.

When you repeatedly override your body’s “no,” you teach your nervous system that it can’t trust you. This is why so many women in outgrown marriages describe feeling numb or entirely disconnected from their bodies. The numbness isn’t a lack of feeling. It’s a defense against the reality you’re living in.

You might find yourself redirecting your need for physical affection toward your children or your pets. You hug your kids fiercely, you let the dog sleep on your chest, but you flinch when your husband brushes your arm. This redirection is your body’s attempt to get its basic needs met without engaging the fraught dynamic of your marriage.

We have to stop pathologizing this response. Your body is protecting you from a situation that feels draining and unsafe. The path forward isn’t to force your body to comply with a broken system. It’s to tell the truth about the system itself.

Both/And: Honoring the Past While Naming the Present

One of the most agonizing parts of the outgrown marriage is the cognitive dissonance of holding two conflicting truths at the same time. You can deeply love the man you married, remember the passion you used to share, and simultaneously feel zero desire for the man sitting next to you on the couch today. This isn’t a betrayal of your history. It’s an acknowledgment of your present reality.

We have to move away from the binary thinking that says a marriage is either entirely good or entirely bad. In my clinical practice, I constantly guide driven women toward Both/And framing. It’s the only way I’ve found to process the complexity of a relationship that has stalled.

You can hold both of these truths: he’s a good father, a kind person, and someone who supported you when you were building your career. AND, he’s stopped growing, his depressive under-functioning is exhausting to manage, and your body has shut down its desire for him in response to the ambition asymmetry.

Consider Erin again. She looks at photos from their honeymoon in Greece fifteen years ago and feels a sharp pang of grief. They were so connected then. They talked for hours over wine. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She loves the memory of who they were. But when she looks at him now, scrolling on his phone, disengaged from the life they built, quietly resentful of her success, she feels nothing but a heavy, tired obligation.

“I keep waiting to feel like a bad person for this,” Erin said, turning her wedding ring in slow half-circles the way she does every session, “and instead I just feel tired. Is that worse?”

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The Both/And framework lets Erin grieve the loss of the passionate marriage without gaslighting herself about the reality of the dead bedroom. She doesn’t have to pretend the current dynamic is acceptable just because the past was beautiful, or demonize him to justify her lack of desire. She can simply name the truth: “I love who you were, and I care about who you’re, but I can’t desire a partner who requires me to over-function to this degree.”

This level of honesty is terrifying. It requires you to drop the mask of the perfect marriage and face the profound loneliness of your reality. But it’s also the only way to begin thawing the numbness in your body. When you stop lying to yourself about what you actually feel, your nervous system can finally stop working so hard to suppress the truth.

You’re allowed to outgrow the dynamic you agreed to a decade ago, to want a partner who meets you at your current level of expansion, and to listen to your body when it tells you the current arrangement is no longer sustainable.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Culture Blames You

We can’t talk about the dead bedroom in the outgrown marriage without applying the Systemic Lens. The guilt you feel for not wanting your husband doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s constructed by a culture that places the burden of marital success, and sexual frequency, squarely on the shoulders of women.

Driven women are caught in an impossible double bind. You’re expected to shatter glass ceilings, build wealth, and lead teams with ruthless competence. But the moment you walk through your front door, you’re expected to transition into the role of the soft, accommodating, endlessly available wife, to carry the mental load of the household, manage his emotional fragility, and still have the energy to feel spontaneously aroused at 10 PM.

When you inevitably fail at this impossible task, the culture tells you that you’re the problem. The articles in women’s magazines tell you to “spice things up,” to “schedule intimacy,” to “make him feel like a man.” The implicit message is always the same: if the bedroom is dead, it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough.

This systemic gaslighting ignores the reality of the emotional labor monopoly, the fact that desire requires space, equality, and a sense of being met. When you’re the primary breadwinner, the default parent, and the emotional thermostat of the home, you don’t have a partner. You have another dependent. And the culture’s refusal to hold men accountable leaves you carrying the blame for the resulting sexual shutdown.

We have to reject this narrative entirely. Your lack of desire isn’t a failure of your femininity or your commitment to the marriage. It’s a biologically appropriate response to a systemic imbalance. You can’t life-hack your way out of patriarchy.

When we apply the Systemic Lens, we remove the pathology from your body and place it where it belongs: on the unequal, unsustainable structure of the marriage itself. You’re not broken. The dynamic is broken. And until the dynamic changes, your body will continue to say no.

Is There a Path Forward?

Healing from the dead bedroom doesn’t start with trying to have more sex. It starts with radical, unflinching honesty about why the sex stopped in the first place, and with listening to your body instead of trying to override it.

The first step is to stop the self-abandonment of duty sex. You have to rebuild trust with your own nervous system by honoring its boundaries. If your body says no, the answer is no. This will likely cause conflict. His resentful anger may flare up. The quiet distance may become loud and uncomfortable. But that conflict is necessary. It’s the sound of the truth finally entering the room.

The second step is to name the ambition asymmetry and the emotional labor monopoly out loud. You can’t fix a dynamic you refuse to acknowledge. This requires differentiation: the ability to hold onto your own reality even when your partner is upset or defensive. You have to be willing to say, “I can’t desire you when I’m managing your life for you. I need a partner who is reaching, growing, and taking responsibility for his own emotional world.”

This isn’t a demand for him to make more money or get a promotion. It’s a demand for him to re-engage with his own vitality. Desire thrives in the space between two whole, autonomous adults. If he’s willing to do his own work, to take on his share of the emotional labor, to meet you in your expansion, there’s a path forward. The desire can return when the safety and equality return.

But you also have to face the possibility that he won’t. He may choose to stay on the couch, choose the comfort of his contraction over the discomfort of growth. If that’s the case, you have to decide what you’re willing to live with: a platonic, roommate marriage, or the somatic cost of staying in exchange for the illusion of an intact family.

There’s no easy answer, and there’s no quick fix. But there’s profound relief in finally telling the truth. You don’t have to carry the shame of the dead bedroom anymore, or pretend everything is fine when your body is screaming that it isn’t. You’re allowed to want more. You’re allowed to require a partner who meets you fully.

If what you’ve read here names something you’ve been carrying alone, if you recognize yourself in Erin’s story or Shalini’s, or feel the exact gap this post names, Fixing the Foundations was built for exactly this moment. It’s my signature self-paced program for driven women repairing the psychological foundations beneath impressive lives: the patterns that quietly shape who you marry, what you tolerate, and how you know when you’ve outgrown it. You can explore the curriculum and join at your own pace here.

You’ve spent so much of your life optimizing, achieving, and making things work for everyone else. It’s time to turn that fierce, brilliant attention toward your own healing. Your body is waiting for you to listen. You don’t have to live in the silence at 11 PM forever. You have the power to honor your own boundaries and step into a life that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

THE RESEARCH

The patterns described in this article are supported by peer-reviewed research. Below are key studies that illuminate the clinical territory we’ve been exploring.

  • Janne M Tullius, PhD, researcher at the Department of Social Medicine, University of Groningen, writing in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (2022), found that parental divorce causes, rather than merely accompanies, increases in adolescent emotional and behavioral problems, with these mental health effects emerging after the divorce and persisting into adulthood, making divorce a distinct traumatic stressor warranting clinical attention (PMID: 33566187).
  • Rosemary Basson, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and OB/GYN at the University of British Columbia, writing in Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy (2000), established that women’s sexual desire is often responsive rather than spontaneous, emerging in response to intimacy and relational context rather than occurring unprompted, a model that challenges the linear Masters-and-Johnson framework and normalizes many women’s experience of low spontaneous desire (PMID: 10693116).
  • Nicholas J S Day, PhD, researcher in personality disorders, and Brin F S Grenyer, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Wollongong, writing as senior author in Journal of Personality Disorders (2020), found that partners and family members of individuals with pathological narcissism experience significant psychological burden including anxiety, depression, and trauma symptoms, with many reporting their distress was invalidated or unrecognized by others, including clinicians (PMID: 30730784).

If you’re standing in the specific, lonely place where the choices seem to be leave a marriage that isn’t working or quietly resign yourself to a life without touch, without desire, without being truly met, I want to slow this down with you. That framing feels like the whole truth when you’re inside it, and it’s worth questioning. You can love the life you built with someone and also grieve what’s gone missing inside it, both at once, and holding both is not betrayal. It’s honesty. There’s rarely a clean, painless answer here, and anyone who offers you one is selling something. What there is, is the possibility of getting clear, slowly, about what you actually need to feel alive in a partnership, and whether that’s something you can build toward together or not. You’re allowed to want more than endurance. You’re allowed to take the time to figure out what’s real before you decide anything. This is tender, complicated work, and it deserves care rather than a rushed verdict. When you’re ready for support, I’m here.

Warmly,
Annie

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Is it normal to completely lose my sex drive in a long-term marriage?

A: Yes, it’s incredibly common, especially in marriages where there’s an ambition asymmetry or an emotional labor imbalance. Your lack of desire is often a healthy, adaptive response from your nervous system signaling that the relational dynamic feels unequal or unsafe. It’s not a sign that you’re broken.

Q: Should I force myself to have sex just to keep the peace?

A: No. Engaging in duty sex when your body is a “no” can be actively traumatizing to your nervous system. It teaches your body that its boundaries don’t matter and often leads to deeper somatic shutdown, numbness, and resentment. Healing requires honoring your body’s limits first.

Q: Can desire return if my husband starts trying again?

A: It can, but it requires sustained, structural change, not just a few weeks of him doing the dishes. Desire thrives on equality, differentiation, and mutual growth. If he genuinely addresses his under-functioning and meets you as an equal partner, your nervous system may begin to feel safe enough to allow desire to return.

Q: Why do I feel so guilty about not wanting him?

A: You feel guilty because our culture places the burden of marital and sexual success entirely on women. You’re conditioned to believe that if the marriage is struggling, you must not be trying hard enough. This systemic gaslighting ignores the reality of his under-functioning and makes you carry the blame for a shared dynamic.

Q: How do I talk to him about this without destroying his ego?

A: You can’t control his reaction, and managing his ego is part of the over-functioning that got you here. You have to speak from your own experience using “I” statements: “I’m carrying too much of the mental load, and my body is shutting down in response.” The goal is honesty, not comfort.

Related Reading

  • Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. Harper, 2006.
  • Nagoski, Emily. Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life. Simon & Schuster, 2015.
  • Schnarch, David. Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
  • van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.

References

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

  • Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity. HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist, and a 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 is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years (W.W. Norton, 2027).

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