By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026How Do I Know If My Drive Comes from Passion or from Childhood Wounds?
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Most driven women aren’t asking the wrong question. They’re asking an incomplete one. The real inquiry isn’t whether your ambition is healthy or wounded. It’s what’s actually fueling it, and whether you’re choosing it or being driven by it. In this post, I walk you through the clinical diagnostic markers that distinguish passion from compulsion, explain how wounds and genuine desire often coexist, and offer a path toward drive that finally feels like yours.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Sundance Moment: When the Win Doesn’t Land
- What Do We Actually Mean by “Drive”?
- The Science of Motivation: Two Engines Running at Once
- The Diagnostic Questions: How to Tell What’s Fueling You
- When the Wound Becomes the Work
- Both/And: Passion and Wounds Can Coexist
- The Systemic Lens: Why We Don’t Ask This Question Sooner
- How to Begin the Honest Inquiry
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Sundance Moment: When the Win Doesn’t Land
The applause has barely faded when Naomi, 37, feels it. Not the swell of satisfaction she expected, but something sharper, almost embarrassing. She’s just accepted an award at Sundance. The film she spent four years making, the one her editor said was the best documentary he’d touched in a decade, has won. People around her are crying happy tears. And Naomi’s first thought, before the flashbulbs, before the speech, before anything else, is a sentence her mother said to her when she was twelve: Art is a waste of time, Naomi. Serious people don’t spend their lives making pictures.
She stands at the podium and realizes, with a clarity that is simultaneously devastating and clarifying, that she has been making films at her mother for fifteen years. Every project a rebuttal. Every award a reply. The work is genuinely good. That’s not in question. The craft is real. The love for the medium is real. But the fuel? The relentless, sometimes joyless urgency that kept her working through illness and breakups and exhaustion? That fuel has a different source entirely.
Both things are true. And that truth. Held honestly, without collapsing one side to make the other more comfortable. Is where real healing begins.
This is perhaps the most nuanced question I hear from the driven, ambitious women I work with: How do I know if my drive comes from genuine passion, or from the wounds I carry from childhood? It’s the right question. And I want to be clear from the start: it’s not a question with a clean, either/or answer. The clinical reality is considerably more textured. And considerably more hopeful. Than a simple diagnosis of “wounded” or “healthy.”
What follows is a careful, honest inquiry into the source of your ambition. Not to pathologize it. Not to strip it away. But to help you understand it clearly enough that it can finally become yours.
What Do We Actually Mean by “Drive”?
Before we can answer whether your drive comes from passion or wounds, we need to agree on what we mean by drive itself. In clinical terms, drive refers to the sustained motivational force that orients a person toward goals over time. It includes ambition, persistence, the capacity to delay gratification, and the ability to return to a pursuit after setbacks. Drive is not the same as urgency. Though urgency can feel like drive. And it is not the same as compulsion. Though compulsion can masquerade as drive so effectively that even the person experiencing it can’t tell the difference.
What distinguishes genuine drive. What psychologist Edward Deci, PhD, Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester and co-developer of Self-Determination Theory, would call autonomous motivation. Is the felt sense of choice and aliveness. When your drive is rooted in genuine passion, the pursuit feels expansive. There’s a quality of “I get to” underneath the “I must.” The effort may be demanding, even exhausting, but there’s a core of willingness beneath the fatigue.
When drive is rooted in wound. In what I call survival motivation. It has a different texture entirely. It doesn’t feel like choice. It feels like necessity. Like you couldn’t stop even if you wanted to. The urgency is less about the work and more about what will happen if you don’t keep going. That distinction is subtle on the surface and enormous underneath.
Intrinsic motivation refers to engaging in an activity for its own inherent satisfaction. Because it is interesting, enjoyable, or personally meaningful. Extrinsic motivation refers to engaging in an activity for separable outcomes: approval, status, avoidance of punishment, or external reward. According to Edward Deci, PhD, and Richard Ryan, PhD, co-developers of Self-Determination Theory at the University of Rochester, intrinsic motivation is associated with greater creativity, resilience, psychological well-being, and sustained engagement over time. Extrinsic motivation, particularly when it is controlled or fear-based, is associated with burnout, anxiety, and reduced authentic engagement. Even when it produces impressive external results.
In plain terms: If you’re doing it because it genuinely matters to you, that’s intrinsic. If you’re doing it because something bad happens (internally or externally) if you stop, that’s extrinsic. And it can look identical from the outside while feeling completely different on the inside.
The complicating factor is this: most driven women I work with have both operating simultaneously. There is genuine passion. Real love for the work, authentic investment in the outcome, true care about the people they serve. And there is wound-fuel layered over it, underneath it, braided through it so thoroughly that separating the two requires patient, honest, often therapeutic inquiry.
That’s not a flaw in you. That’s a feature of how childhood shapes the psyche.
The Science of Motivation: Two Engines Running at Once
To understand why passion and wounds so often coexist in the same person, it helps to understand what’s happening neurobiologically when a child grows up in an environment of conditional love, criticism, neglect, or chaos. When a child’s sense of safety or worth is contingent on performance. On achieving, on being exceptional, on not making mistakes. The nervous system learns a specific equation: achievement equals safety; stillness equals danger.
This is not a metaphor. This is a neurological reality. The developing brain, shaped by experience in ways we now understand through decades of developmental neuroscience, encodes survival strategies as automatic patterns. A child who discovers that excelling in school softens an otherwise cold parent, or that winning keeps the criticism quiet, or that being exceptional is the only way to be seen. That child builds a nervous system that treats drive as survival. By the time she’s thirty-five and running a surgical department or winning awards or building a company, the engine is so integrated into her identity that it doesn’t feel like a survival response. It feels like who she is.
Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work on early development remains foundational, introduced the concept of the true self and the false self to describe precisely this dynamic. When a child’s authentic impulses, emotions, and desires are consistently met with misattunement, criticism, or conditional acceptance, she learns to construct a false self. A performing self. That manages the environment and meets others’ expectations. The false self can be extraordinarily capable. It can build careers, win awards, hold families together. What it cannot do is rest, because its entire purpose is vigilance. (PMID: 13785877)
Developed by Donald Winnicott (1896, 1971), British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, the true self refers to the spontaneous, authentic expression of a person’s own impulses, creativity, and genuine desires. The self that emerges when a child’s environment is “good enough” to allow authentic experience. The false self is a protective structure that develops when the environment requires the child to comply, perform, or adapt her authentic self to meet the needs and expectations of caregivers. Winnicott argued that the false self can be socially successful and even admired, while the true self remains hidden, unexpressed, and starved of contact.
In plain terms: If you’ve spent your life performing capability rather than inhabiting it. If your drive feels more like a role you play than a life you’re living. You may be operating from a false self that was built to survive an environment that couldn’t hold the real you.
The psychologist and author Alice Miller, PhD, whose landmark 1979 book The Drama of the Gifted Child has become essential reading in developmental trauma circles, wrote extensively about what happens to the highly capable child whose gifts are harnessed in service of a wound. Miller observed that such children. Often praised for their sensitivity, their performance, their ability to “handle” things. Learn to develop their abilities in directions that serve emotional needs rather than authentic desire. The result is tremendous competence with a persistent, gnawing sense of emptiness. The achievement doesn’t land. The win doesn’t satisfy. Something is always slightly wrong with the finish line.
This is not a moral failure. It is the predictable outcome of a nervous system that was trained to achieve before it was given permission to simply be. And the fact that it’s common. Remarkably, systemically common among ambitious women who grew up in homes with emotionally unavailable, hypercritical, chaotic, or demanding caregivers. Is worth saying plainly. If this is your experience, you are not broken. You are patterned. And patterns, unlike brokenness, can be worked with. You can explore more about how childhood emotional neglect shapes adult drive, or read about how perfectionism and trauma intersect in ambitious women.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- 52% of female academic physicians reported burnout vs 24% of males (2017) (PMID: 33105003)
- 40% of women aged 25-34 years had at least a three-year university education; substantial relative increase in long-term sick leave among young highly educated women (PMID: 21909337)
- 75.4% high burnout prevalence among mental health professionals (mostly women implied) (Ahmead et al., Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health)
- More than 50% of Ontario midwives reported depression, anxiety, stress, and burnout (Cates et al., Women Birth)
The Diagnostic Questions: How to Tell What’s Fueling You
So how do you actually begin to answer the question? Not the philosophical version. “am I passionate or wounded?”. But the practical, embodied version: Right now, in this specific pursuit, what is running the engine?
In my clinical work with driven and ambitious women, I’ve found several diagnostic questions to be consistently illuminating. These aren’t meant to be answered once, intellectually, from the comfort of a good day. They’re meant to be sat with, returned to, and ideally explored in therapy or with a skilled coach. But even the act of beginning to ask them is itself a form of honest inquiry that most driven women have never been given permission to do.
Question One: Does your drive feel expansive or compulsive? This is the most foundational question, and it requires you to drop below cognition into sensation. Expansive drive has a quality of opening. When you’re engaged in the work, you feel more alive, more present, more yourself. There may be difficulty and discomfort, but underneath is a sense of alignment. Compulsive drive feels different. It has an edge of desperation, a quality of “I have to” rather than “I want to.” The work may feel meaningful in the abstract, but the urgency of it. The inability to rest, to celebrate, to be satisfied. Points to something other than pure passion.
Question Two: Do you feel choice or compulsion? Could you, hypothetically, set this down? Not forever. Not abandoning your calling. But pause it for a week, a month, without feeling as though your very identity or safety would collapse? Genuine passion can tolerate pause. Wound-driven ambition often can’t, because the achievement isn’t just the work. It’s the armor. Stopping would mean confronting whatever the achievement is holding at bay. This connects directly to what you’ll read about workaholism as a trauma response. The inability to stop isn’t discipline, it’s often the nervous system doing its job.
Question Three: What happens when you imagine not being ambitious? This is perhaps the most revealing question. When you hold the possibility of stepping back. Not failing, not collapsing, just choosing a quieter life. What arises? If the primary feeling is relief, even temporarily, that’s important information. If the primary feeling is terror, that too is important information. Not because ambition is bad, but because terror points to a nervous system that has equated visibility and achievement with survival. Take a moment with the nervous system and career self-assessment to explore whether your drive might be your nervous system speaking.
Question Four: What happens after you achieve something significant? Does the win land? Do you feel the satisfaction in your body, even briefly? Or does the target immediately move, the accomplishment feel hollow, the pleasure evaporate within hours and leave you already looking toward the next thing? The inability to experience lasting satisfaction after achievement is a clinical sign worth paying attention to. It’s explored thoughtfully in the work on the arrival fallacy. Why achievements feel hollow. When the finish line never arrives, it’s often because the wound is running the race, not the passion.
Question Five: Who are you doing this for? Not in the conscious, stated-values sense. Of course you’d say you’re doing it for the clients, the patients, the mission. But underneath that, when you’re brutally honest: is there a specific face that appears when you imagine succeeding? A critical parent? A dismissive teacher? An ex who said you’d never amount to anything? Naomi had her mother. The specificity of who we’re arguing with through our achievements is often the clearest signal that a wound is involved.
When the Wound Becomes the Work
There is a concept in psychoanalytic theory worth naming here: sublimation. And before we define it clinically, I want to say plainly that sublimation is not a pathology. In fact, it is considered by many theorists to be one of the most mature and generative of the psychological defense mechanisms.
Sublimation is a defense mechanism, originally described by Sigmund Freud and elaborated by later psychoanalytic theorists, in which unacceptable or painful impulses, emotions, or experiences. Often rooted in trauma, grief, or unmet need. Are channeled into socially acceptable and often productive activities. Unlike repression or denial, sublimation does not bury the underlying material; it redirects it. The surgeon who was once a sick child, the trauma therapist who survived her own relational wounds, the documentary filmmaker who grew up feeling silenced. These are examples of sublimation at work. The underlying pain becomes fuel for meaningful contribution.
In plain terms: Sublimation means your wound found a productive outlet. Your pain made something real. That’s not a reason to dismiss the drive. It’s a reason to understand it, because when you understand it, you can tend to both the wound and the work.
The critical nuance here is that sublimation produces genuinely good things in the world. Naomi’s films are real. They matter. The fact that they were partly fueled by her mother’s dismissiveness doesn’t make them less true, less skilled, or less valuable. Heather, 39, is a real pediatric surgeon. She saves real children’s lives. Her care for her patients is genuine, deep, and unwavering. The fact that she also became a surgeon partly because a child who saves lives can never be called worthless. That her wound is braided into her calling. Doesn’t make her a fraud or her work less important.
What it means is that the wound has not yet been witnessed. Has not yet been metabolized. Has not yet been offered the reparative care it deserves. And until it is, the drive remains. In part. A conversation with a ghost.
Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, offers a particularly useful framework here. In IFS, different “parts” of the self carry different histories, fears, and motivations. A driven woman typically has a part that is genuinely passionate. That loves the work for its own sake, that would do it even if no one were watching. She also typically has a part that is managing. Working furiously to prevent some deeper pain from surfacing, using achievement as a way to keep the vulnerable, wounded parts safely locked away. Schwartz calls these “manager parts,” and they are often extraordinarily effective. They are also exhausting, because their job is never finished. The assessment of whether your nervous system is running your career is often the first honest look at whether a manager part has been in charge for years.
“Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.”
Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” c. 1861
Mary Oliver’s question is so often quoted that it has become almost decorative. But it’s worth asking yourself slowly, honestly, in relation to your specific ambitions right now: Is what you’re doing with your one wild and precious life something you chose. Or something you were driven toward by a self that had no other option? Both can be true simultaneously. The question isn’t designed to shame you. It’s designed to help you find out where you actually are.
Both/And: Passion and Wounds Can Coexist
This is the section I want you to carry with you, because it is where the most important clinical truth lives: your passion and your wound are not mutually exclusive. Healing does not require you to conclude that your drive is “just” a wound, any more than it requires you to pretend the wound doesn’t exist. The work. In therapy, in coaching, in honest self-inquiry. Is not to choose one side. It’s to see both clearly.
Heather, 39, has been a pediatric surgeon for eleven years. She became a surgeon because she wanted to save children’s lives. That is true. She remembers being seven years old, reading about doctors in a picture book, feeling something specific and real ignite in her chest. A sense of calling that she can still access decades later when she scrubs in on a difficult case. She also became a surgeon because she grew up in a home where her worth was conditional, where her father’s love was offered only when she was useful or exceptional, where the implicit message was that ordinary was dangerous. A child who saves lives cannot be called worthless. That is also true.
Her therapist helps her see. Over months of careful, patient work. That these two truths are not in competition. They are braided together, and separating them doesn’t require abandoning either one. It requires learning to distinguish the felt sense of each: when she’s in genuine passion, she notices spaciousness, curiosity, even joy at the complexity of a case. When the wound is running, she notices a different quality. A tightness, a vigilance, a sense of “I have to prove” that is less about the patient in front of her and more about an internal audience judging her performance.
The both/and is not a consolation prize. It’s the actual landscape of most driven women’s inner lives. What changes through healing. Through trauma-informed therapy or trauma-informed coaching. Is not the presence of ambition. It’s the quality of it. The wound gradually stops driving and becomes context. The passion, freed from its job of managing the wound, can actually expand.
This is the paradox that Alice Miller observed in the most gifted of her clients: the ones who had used their sensitivity and capability to manage a painful environment were often the ones whose authentic gifts were most extraordinary. Once those gifts were no longer in service to the wound. The wound gave the gift its urgency. Healing gives it its freedom. Explore this further through the thread on healing childhood wounds without losing your ambition, which addresses this paradox directly.
Here is what I tell clients who are afraid that healing will flatten them: Healing doesn’t make you less driven. It makes your drive yours. The compulsion softens. The choice expands. The achievement, when it comes, actually lands. Not because you’re performing it for a ghost, but because you’re living it for yourself.
The Systemic Lens: Why We Don’t Ask This Question Sooner
It would be a mistake to explore the question of passion versus wounds without acknowledging what keeps most driven women from asking it for decades. This isn’t a personal failing. It is the predictable outcome of systems. Familial, cultural, economic. That benefit enormously from wound-driven ambition and have very little interest in helping women distinguish the two.
We live in a culture that worships productivity and pathologizes rest. That celebrates the woman who “never stops” and quietly dismisses the woman who sets boundaries, takes sabbaticals, or admits that she’s exhausted. From an early age, ambitious women receive powerful socialization that links their worth to their output. This socialization doesn’t originate with the individual family. It’s reinforced by schools, workplaces, media, and economic structures that require workers who are driven by something more urgent than mere enthusiasm. A workforce running on fear and shame is a workforce that is productive and controllable in ways that intrinsically motivated people simply aren’t. Read more about the specific ways this plays out for women in finance who can’t stop working, or the hidden cost of executive burnout.
There is also the specific cultural inheritance of women who grew up in difficult homes: the double bind between the message that ambition is unfeminine and the message that worthiness must be earned. Women who navigate this particular matrix often arrive at adulthood with drive that is extraordinary in its force and utterly confused about its purpose. They push and achieve and cannot explain. Even to themselves. Why it never feels like enough. The guilt that arrives when you’re not working is one of the clearest signs of this dynamic.
And finally, there is the functional silence around this particular question in most therapeutic and coaching spaces. Drive is typically addressed only when it tips over into burnout, breakdown, or crisis. The preemptive inquiry. The careful, non-crisis examination of why you’re driven before you collapse. Is not widely offered or normalized. Which is why you’re here, doing this reading. And why the invitation to begin this inquiry. Ideally with support. Is one I extend with real clinical care. This is precisely the kind of work we do in Fixing the Foundations™, the signature course designed for women ready to understand the architecture beneath their ambitions.
How to Begin the Honest Inquiry
If you’ve recognized yourself in any of this. In Naomi at the podium, in Heather scrubbing in, in the diagnostic questions that landed harder than you expected. Here is what I’d offer as a beginning. Not a checklist. Not a cure. A starting point for the honest inquiry that your drive has been waiting for.
Start with somatic awareness, not analysis. The thinking mind is extraordinarily good at explaining, justifying, and rationalizing drive. The body is more honest. Before your next workday begins, place a hand on your chest and notice: Does the prospect of the day feel heavy or alive? Is the urgency in your chest that of someone running toward something, or running from something? This distinction is felt, not reasoned. If you’ve been disconnected from your body’s signals for years. Which many driven women are, having learned early to override sensation in service of performance. This may feel unfamiliar at first. That’s okay. Somatic therapy for ambitious women can help you rebuild this internal listening capacity.
Write the sentence your ambition is secretly proving. Naomi’s sentence was: Art is not a waste of time, Mom. What is yours? If you let yourself be completely honest. Not the polished, values-driven version you’d share in a TED talk, but the raw, private version. What has your drive been arguing? Sometimes the clarity of naming this sentence is enough to create the separation needed for the inquiry to begin. You’re not your sentence. You can hold it with compassion, the way you’d hold a child who was trying very hard to be loved.
Notice the quality of your victories. The next time you accomplish something significant, pay attention to what happens in the first five minutes after. Do you feel it? Is there satisfaction, warmth, a sense of completion? Or does the finish line immediately recede, leaving you already focused on the next target? The inability to receive a win. To let it actually matter in your body. Is one of the clearest indicators that the wound, not the passion, has been running the race. This is directly connected to patterns of high-functioning anxiety where the relief of achievement is always too brief.
Ask what rest feels like. Not conceptually. But actually take a weekend morning and do very little. Notice what arises. Anxiety? Guilt? A panicked sense that you’re falling behind? These responses aren’t character flaws. They’re data. They’re the nervous system, trained over years to treat achievement as safety, encountering a threat: stillness. The guilt you feel when you’re not working is the wound speaking. Listening to it. Without obeying it. Is the beginning of the inquiry.
Consider working with someone who understands this terrain. The honest inquiry into the source of your ambition is genuinely difficult to do alone, because the defenses that protect the wound are intelligent and well-constructed. They have to be. They kept you safe for years. A trauma-informed therapist or coach who has worked with driven women can hold the complexity of both/and without trying to resolve it prematurely. They can help you see the passion and the wound separately without asking you to sacrifice either one. If you’re ready to begin that work, reach out here to explore working together, or take the free quiz to start understanding your patterns.
Read alongside the work. Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child remains, decades after its publication, one of the most clarifying texts for driven women who suspect their ambition has a wound inside it. Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts offers the IFS framework in accessible, compassionate prose. Both books have a particular quality: they name the experience so precisely that readers often feel, for the first time, genuinely understood. That recognition. That you’re not uniquely broken, but recognizably human. Is itself therapeutic.
The last thing I want to say in this section is the most important: Beginning this inquiry is not a risk to your drive. It is an investment in it. The women I’ve worked with who have done the honest excavation of their motivation. Who have identified the wound inside the passion, tended to it, given it appropriate care. Don’t become less driven. They become more sustainably, authentically, freely driven. The compulsion softens. The joy returns. The work, which was already good, becomes more fully theirs. That is not a small thing. That is perhaps the most radical act of ambition possible: to choose your drive instead of being chosen by it.
Whatever brought you to this question. Whether it arrived in a quiet moment of honesty, or landed after a win that didn’t feel the way you expected, or surfaced after years of running at full capacity and wondering why you’re still not satisfied. I want you to know that the asking itself is meaningful. The fact that you’re willing to look this closely at your own motivation is not weakness. It’s the beginning of a freedom that most driven women never find, because they never stop long enough to ask.
The wound that shaped your drive deserves your compassion. The passion that lives inside it deserves your full presence. And you. All of you, wound and gift and everything braided between. Deserve a life that feels like yours. Join me and over 23,000 readers in the Strong & Stable newsletter for the ongoing conversation about building that life. And if you’ve recognized something in yourself today and you’re ready to explore it with support, I’d be honored to be part of that inquiry. Whether through individual therapy, executive coaching, or Fixing the Foundations.
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Q: Can drive be both passion and wounded at the same time?
A: Yes. And for most driven women, it is. Passion and wound are rarely mutually exclusive. The clinical reality is that genuine desire and survival motivation often coexist, sometimes braided so tightly together that they’re difficult to distinguish without careful, sustained inquiry. The goal isn’t to determine which one is “real” and discard the other. It’s to understand both clearly enough that you can tend to the wound separately and let the passion operate from a freer place.
Q: If my drive comes from childhood wounds, does that mean I should stop pursuing my goals?
A: No. Wound-driven motivation has produced extraordinary contributions to medicine, art, justice, science, and nearly every field of human endeavor. The question isn’t whether to pursue your goals. It’s whether you’re doing so in a way that allows the wound to receive care alongside the work. Continuing to achieve while beginning to heal isn’t contradictory. In fact, for most driven women, it’s the only viable path forward.
Q: What does it feel like when drive shifts from wound-based to passion-based?
A: Most women describe it as a qualitative shift rather than a reduction in effort or output. The urgency softens. It’s no longer a sprint away from danger but a walk toward something genuinely desired. Achievements actually land; there’s a felt sense of satisfaction that lasts more than a few hours. Rest becomes possible without guilt or panic. The work feels more spacious, more chosen, more genuinely yours. The output may not decrease. In many cases it increases, because energy that was previously spent managing anxiety becomes available for actual creative and strategic engagement.
Q: Is there a way to do this inquiry without therapy?
A: To a degree, yes. Honest journaling with the diagnostic questions in this post, somatic awareness practices, and reading works like Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child or Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts can open genuine insight. However, the defenses that protect the wound from inquiry are often sophisticated and well-practiced. And they were built to protect you, which means they’re good at their job. Working with a trauma-informed therapist or coach who understands this terrain makes the inquiry significantly more efficient and sustainable. The deeper wounds. Particularly those involving chronic emotional neglect, conditional love, or consistent misattunement. Tend to require a relational container to heal in.
Q: I’m afraid that if I look too closely at my wounds, I’ll fall apart. Is that a legitimate concern?
A: This fear is extremely common among driven women, and it deserves a respectful answer: you won’t fall apart. What you might experience is grief. A recognition of what you needed and didn’t receive, of how hard you’ve worked to compensate, of what the wound has cost you. Grief is not falling apart. It’s integration. Trauma-informed therapy is specifically designed to ensure that inquiry into painful material happens at a pace that feels manageable, with adequate support, and without retraumatization. The goal is never to destabilize. It’s to help the system become robust enough that it no longer needs the wound to fuel it.
Q: How does IFS therapy help with distinguishing passion from wound-driven motivation?
A: Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, is particularly well-suited to this inquiry because it maps the internal landscape without pathologizing any part of it. In IFS, the part of you that is genuinely passionate. That loves the work for its own sake. And the part that is managing the wound through achievement are both welcomed and explored with curiosity rather than judgment. The therapeutic process involves building a relationship between your core Self and these parts, so that the manager parts can gradually relax their grip without feeling abandoned, and the genuine passion can emerge with more room to breathe. It’s a sophisticated framework that many driven women find deeply resonant.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Winnicott, D.W.. Playing and reality. Penguin, 1971.
- Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
- Dickinson, Emily. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1960.
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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, ambitious women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
