I Want to Feel It Here, Not Up Here: From Cognitive Insight to Embodied Change
If you’ve done years of talk therapy, read the books, and mapped every wound to its origin, and still feel fundamentally the same, this post explains why. The head-body gap is real, it’s measurable, and it’s especially common in driven women whose intelligence became their primary coping tool. EMDR and somatic approaches offer a different way in, one that reaches where talk therapy alone often can’t. This article is educational and does not replace individualized clinical assessment or treatment.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT. This post is educational in nature and isn’t a substitute for individualized therapy, diagnosis, or treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact a licensed provider or local emergency services.
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.
- The Question She Asked After Eleven Years in Therapy
- What the Head-Body Gap Actually Is (And Why Smart Women Fall Into It)
- The Neuroscience of Why Talk Therapy Plateaus: What Your Brain Actually Needs
- How the Head-Body Gap Shows Up for Driven Women: Seven Specific Patterns
- What EMDR Actually Does: Plain English for the Over-Thinking Woman
- Both/And: Your Insight Is Real AND It Isn’t Enough
- The Systemic Lens: Why Smart Women’s Pain Gets Intellectualized Out of Existence
- What Embodied Therapy Can Look Like: A Week-by-Week Sense of the Arc
- Frequently Asked Questions
The head-body gap describes a pattern in which someone holds accurate intellectual insight about a psychological wound but doesn’t experience a corresponding emotional or somatic shift, so behavior and felt experience stay largely unchanged despite years of cognitive understanding. It’s especially common in driven women whose intelligence became a primary survival tool, which trains the mind to analyze rather than feel. Insight tends to be necessary but not sufficient for change on its own. Body-based approaches like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing are among the modalities clinicians and researchers associate with closing that gap for many clients, though individual results vary and this isn’t a guarantee of outcome. In my work with driven women, the frustration of “knowing but not feeling” is one of the most common things I hear from clients who’ve already done real therapeutic work.
In short: The head-body gap describes the frustrating split between cognitive insight about trauma and the embodied change that often shifts behavior and felt experience. It’s a divide that talk therapy alone frequently can’t close, and body-based modalities like EMDR are among the approaches associated with reaching what words alone sometimes can’t.
I’ve spent more than 15,000 clinical hours with driven women who arrive already fluent in their attachment histories and still feel stuck, which is some of the clearest evidence I’ve seen that intellectual knowledge and somatic integration are separate processes. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, offers a neurobiological framework I return to often: traumatic memory tends to be encoded in the body rather than in the narrative centers of the brain (van der Kolk 2014).
The Question She Asked After Eleven Years in Therapy
The therapy office in Minneapolis is bright that morning. White walls, bare January branches through a single window, a white noise machine humming faintly outside the door. It’s Thursday, 7:08 a.m., and Rana is sitting exactly upright in the chair across from her therapist, the way she sits in every meeting she’s ever chaired.
She’s just finished a precise, well-organized summary of why she developed her pattern of emotional shutdown. “Avoidant attachment.” “Parentified child dynamic.” “Learned helplessness schema.” Each phrase lands like a citation. Her therapist nods. Rana looks down at her folded hands and says, “I know all of this. I’ve known it for years. So why doesn’t it feel any different?”
Rana can map her entire psychological architecture without hesitating. She knows which parent contributed which wound, which developmental period shaped which defense. Eleven years of showing up, talking, analyzing, understanding. She’s 40, and she schedules therapy at 7 a.m. because it’s the only hour she can reliably protect from everything else that wants her attention.
And she’s still numb from the chest down. Not unintelligent about her feelings. Numb. There’s a difference between knowing something in your head and knowing it in your body, and Rana has been living in her head for so long that she’d nearly forgotten there was anywhere else to live.
If some part of Rana’s story lands somewhere familiar, if you’ve built a sophisticated understanding of your own history while remaining somehow untouched by it, this post is for you. I want to say clearly, up front: there’s a version of therapy that lives almost entirely in the mind, and for the women who are best at using it, it can quietly become one of the most sophisticated avoidance strategies they’ve ever built without meaning to.
Cognitive insight, knowing exactly why you are the way you are, is necessary but rarely sufficient on its own. The body holds the other half of the story, and this post is about what it takes to finally hear it.
What the Head-Body Gap Actually Is (And Why Smart Women Fall Into It)
The head-body gap is the experience of having full cognitive understanding of a trauma pattern while remaining largely unaffected, emotionally and somatically, by that understanding. It’s common. It’s measurable in the clinical patterns clinicians see across thousands of sessions. And it shows up disproportionately in driven women whose intelligence was their primary survival resource long before it became a professional asset.
A defense mechanism characterized by the use of intellectual, analytical, or theoretical frameworks to create distance from the emotional and somatic dimensions of a distressing experience. First named in psychoanalytic theory, intellectualization has since been widely documented in cognitive and trauma-focused therapy as a common way trauma survivors avoid felt-sense processing. It tends to be especially prominent in people whose intelligence functioned as a primary survival resource and social asset.
In plain terms: It’s when you’ve read every book about your feelings and can explain them flawlessly, and you still don’t actually feel them. Knowing what’s wrong has quietly become a way of not having to feel what’s wrong.
Intellectualization gets rewarded almost everywhere driven women live. School grades analytical precision. Careers reward rational problem-solving over emotional disclosure. Driven women who succeeded in those systems learned early that the way to win is to stay in their heads, and they brought that same strategy into the therapy room, where it worked there too, at least at first. Working and healing aren’t always the same thing.
A colloquial but clinically meaningful term for the split between cognitive and narrative processing of a traumatic experience and its somatic and emotional integration. Marked by high verbal fluency about one’s own psychological history alongside persistent emotional numbness, affective constriction, or somatic disconnection. Common in driven women with complex relational trauma histories who’ve engaged extensively in talk therapy.
In plain terms: You can tell the story of your trauma with precision, insight, and sometimes even humor, and when you’re done telling it, you feel exactly the same as you did before you started. The words are there. The body hasn’t moved.
Why “I Know What’s Wrong” Can Become Its Own Trap
The map isn’t the territory. Understanding the anatomy of your wound isn’t the same as healing it. Daniel Siegel, MD, clinical professor at UCLA School of Medicine and founder of interpersonal neurobiology, has argued for years that insight, while necessary, isn’t sufficient: the brain’s implicit memory systems that hold trauma aren’t fully accessible through explicit verbal narration alone (Reisz et al. 2018). The part of the brain that generates stories about what happened is different from the part of the brain where the experience still lives, and those two parts don’t always talk to each other in the way we’d like.
This is part of why intellectualization can look like emotional unavailability in driven women. Not because they lack emotional depth, but because their emotional depth is often inaccessible through the exact channels they’ve been trained to rely on. It’s also why the missing piece is almost never more understanding. It’s a different kind of access altogether.
The Neuroscience of Why Talk Therapy Plateaus: What Your Brain Actually Needs
Talk therapy is processed largely in the brain’s language centers and narrative-making regions. Trauma, though, tends to be stored subcortically, in regions that don’t speak in words at all. That mismatch is a meaningful part of why intelligent, self-aware women can spend a decade in talk therapy and still feel fundamentally unchanged underneath it.
Bessel van der Kolk spent decades using neuroimaging to document what happens in the trauma-affected brain (van der Kolk et al. 2024). One of his most cited findings, that Broca’s area, responsible for speech, can go offline during trauma-recall states, is a big part of the argument for why talk therapy alone may not fully reach where trauma is stored. The left prefrontal cortex, which generates narrative and logical sequencing, quiets down. Trauma often speaks first in images, sensations, and physiological states, not in sentences. I think about this finding almost every week in session, usually right around the moment a client says something like Rana did: I know this already, so why doesn’t it feel different.
Francine Shapiro, PhD, psychologist and founder of EMDR, developed the approach after a chance observation in 1987 that spontaneous lateral eye movements seemed to reduce distress associated with disturbing memories. Her research, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in 1989, documented meaningful trauma-symptom reduction following EMDR treatment. As of 2024, EMDR has been named an evidence-based treatment for PTSD by the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a designation built on hundreds of replicated trials across three decades.
Peter Levine, PhD, somatic psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, argues in In an Unspoken Voice (2010) that trauma is fundamentally a disruption in the body’s instinctive responses to threat, the freeze, flight, or fight impulses that never got to finish. Healing, in Levine’s framework, means helping those interrupted physiological responses complete, not simply talking about them.
The theoretical model underlying EMDR therapy, developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD. It proposes that the brain has an innate information-processing system that normally metabolizes disturbing experiences by integrating them into existing adaptive memory networks. When that system gets blocked by overwhelming stress or trauma, memories can be stored in a dysfunctional, unprocessed form that retains its original emotional charge, physical sensations, and distorted beliefs. EMDR is understood by researchers to help reactivate and support that natural processing.
In plain terms: Think of it like a file that got corrupted partway through saving. The event happened, but your brain never quite finished filing it correctly. Every time something triggers that file, you can feel the original feelings almost as if the event were still happening now. EMDR is designed to help your brain finish processing and filing it, though the pace and depth of that shift varies by person.
The research on somatic therapy and practical tools from The Body Keeps the Score points toward the same conclusion: the body isn’t a passenger in healing, it’s closer to the vehicle. For driven women running almost entirely on cognitive GPS, learning to read the body’s signals is often the work that finally changes something talking alone hadn’t.
How the Head-Body Gap Shows Up for Driven Women: Seven Specific Patterns
Driven women stuck in cognitive insight tend to show a specific cluster of therapy-stall markers, and most have been in treatment for years without anyone naming what’s actually happening.
Seven Signs You’ve Hit the Cognitive Ceiling in Therapy
- You can explain your attachment style, your childhood wounds, and your relational patterns with real clinical precision, but your relationships haven’t actually changed much.
- You leave therapy sessions feeling intellectually satisfied but emotionally flat, like you just finished a good lecture rather than a session.
- You describe painful experiences in a detached, almost journalistic tone rather than with felt emotion. “And then I realized that…” instead of a lived reaction.
- Multiple therapists have told you that you’re very insightful, and you’ve started to quietly wonder if that’s actually part of the problem.
- You feel emotions as thoughts (“I think I’m sad”) more easily than as sensations (“there’s pressure in my chest”).
- You can identify triggers in the moment but can’t quite feel them, or you feel them only afterward, once you’re already analyzing what happened.
- You’ve read every relevant book, The Body Keeps the Score, Daring Greatly, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and you feel seen by all of them without feeling especially different.
Rana drives home from her Thursday session. It’s 8:15 a.m., faculty meeting in forty-five minutes. She reviews the session the way she reviews meetings, scanning for action items. Her therapist made a genuinely good point about the link between her mother’s emotional unavailability and her current difficulty letting her partner get close. Rana agrees with the analysis completely. She finds it interesting, almost, the way you’d find a well-organized paper interesting.
She notices, with the same precision she brings to everything, that she doesn’t feel anything about it. The insight is there, clearly labeled, filed correctly. But nothing has actually moved. She merges onto the highway. She’s been circling this loop for eleven years.
What I want women like Rana to understand, and what I tell them directly early in our work together, is that this isn’t therapy failure. It’s a therapy ceiling. Talk therapy built the platform she’s standing on. She needs a different ladder to go higher, not a better explanation of the platform. The childhood trauma literature is fairly clear that insight is the beginning of healing, not the end of it, and for the women I work with who’ve plateaued in exclusively verbal therapy, the real question usually isn’t whether they’ve done the work. It’s whether they’ve done all of it.
What EMDR Actually Does: Plain English for the Over-Thinking Woman
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a structured, research-supported therapy that uses bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories that have been stored in a dysregulated, unintegrated form. That’s the clinical sentence. Here’s what it tends to mean, in practice, for the women I work with.
What Actually Happens in an EMDR Session
- History and treatment planning. Understanding your history, identifying target memories, and setting goals together.
- Preparation. Building your capacity to regulate and feel grounded before processing begins. For driven women, this phase often feels anticlimactic. It’s actually the foundation everything else stands on.
- Assessment. Identifying the target memory’s core image, the negative belief attached to it, the emotion, and where you notice it in your body.
- Desensitization. Bilateral stimulation, typically eye movements, tapping, or alternating audio tones, while you hold the target memory in mind.
- Installation. Strengthening a more accurate, positive belief to gradually replace the trauma’s distorted one.
- Body scan. Checking for any residual physical disturbance.
- Closure. Returning to baseline and stabilizing before you leave.
- Reevaluation. Reviewing progress next session and identifying what to target next.
What you’ll likely notice in an EMDR session is that you’re not just telling your story again. You’re processing it. The bilateral stimulation is designed to help your brain do something it often couldn’t do on its own: metabolize what happened, rather than keep replaying it.
Why Driven Women Who “Know Too Much” Often Do Especially Well with EMDR
Here’s the part that surprises a lot of clients: the analytical capacity that gets in the way in talk therapy tends to become an asset in EMDR. Driven women often understand what’s happening in the protocol, engage with it precisely, and report accurately on what they’re noticing. In EMDR, cognitive understanding functions as the entry point, not the destination. The rest of the processing happens somewhere past where thinking alone can take you.
Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, whose work on body-inclusive trauma approaches runs parallel to EMDR’s bottom-up methodology, has documented fairly consistent outcomes for clients who’ve plateaued in exclusively verbal therapies. Her research suggests that accessing the body’s physical patterns, posture, movement, physiological activation, is often necessary before narrative-level processing can move forward. The body isn’t just along for the ride. In a lot of ways, it’s driving.
A core technical component of EMDR therapy in which the therapist delivers alternating sensory stimulation to both sides of the client’s body, most commonly through guided horizontal eye movements, alternating auditory tones delivered to each ear, or alternating tactile taps. Bilateral stimulation is understood to activate both brain hemispheres at once, supporting dual processing of traumatic material, the emotional and somatic elements alongside the cognitive and narrative ones, in a way that can allow for integration rather than simple replay.
In plain terms: During bilateral stimulation, both sides of your brain get engaged at the same time. This appears to activate the brain’s natural information-processing system, the same one that trauma tends to disrupt, and can help it finally do what it couldn’t do when the event first happened: metabolize it, file it, and stop treating it like an ongoing emergency.
Both/And: Your Insight Is Real AND It Isn’t Enough
Eleven years of talk therapy aren’t wasted. The insight you’ve built is real, and it’s almost certainly protected you in ways you can’t fully see from where you’re standing. AND it isn’t enough on its own. Both things are true at the same time.
Good talk therapy lays down the cognitive rail. It gives you language, narrative, insight, and the capacity to reflect on yourself, and that’s not nothing. For a lot of women, it was genuinely everything they needed at the time.
But the body holds the other rail, and you need both to actually move forward. EMDR and somatic work are, for many clients, how that second rail gets laid. In my practice, I think of these as complementary, not competitive. The driven woman who’s spent years building her cognitive platform isn’t starting over when she begins EMDR. She’s adding a modality that can reach what her existing tools, on their own, haven’t been able to.
Anika is 33, a McKinsey consultant based in Washington, DC. It’s 1 a.m., and she’s on a red-eye flying back from a client site. Her laptop is open, a half-written deck glowing in front of her. A podcast about complex trauma plays in one earbud, an episode she’s heard before, one she could basically narrate herself at this point. She has six “EMDR near me” tabs open across two browsers. She has never once made an appointment. She can describe the adaptive information processing model and polyvagal theory in enough detail to impress a graduate student. She has started nothing.
She closes the laptop. Stares out the dark window at nothing in particular. She wonders, not for the first time, what it would actually feel like to change, rather than to understand change from a comfortable distance.
That distinction, between understanding change and feeling it, is close to the whole point of this post. It’s the distinction that trauma recovery often turns on, and it’s one that cognitive insight alone tends not to bridge. The intelligence that got you this far usually isn’t what takes you the rest of the way. Something else is required, and that’s not a failure on your part. It’s just information about where the next step actually is.
The Systemic Lens: Why Smart Women’s Pain Gets Intellectualized Out of Existence
Driven women’s tendency to intellectualize distress isn’t purely a personal quirk. It’s largely the product of systems that specifically taught them to value cognition over sensation, and to treat emotional need as a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be felt.
Schools Trained You for This
The educational system rewards the verbal mind and defines intelligence mostly as the capacity to articulate and explain. The body’s signals, fatigue, tension, dread, grief, were never really on the rubric. Driven women who succeeded in school learned early that the way to win was to stay in their heads. That became a liability once the body started asking to be heard too.
Careers Reward the Prefrontal Cortex
Executive culture, medicine, law, consulting, academia. Nearly every professional environment driven women inhabit rewards rational problem-solving and quietly discourages emotional disclosure. In those environments, the woman who can analyze a situation gets valued, while the woman who visibly feels it can be read as a liability. This is structural, not personal. It’s the water these women swim in every day, and it reinforces the head-body gap a little more each time she succeeds at work by staying in her head.
Therapy Culture Has Sometimes Enabled It
Plenty of therapeutic modalities are themselves almost entirely verbal, and therapists can end up inadvertently reinforcing the cognitive track as if it were sufficient on its own. When a client presents as insightful and articulate, a therapist can mistake verbal fluency for emotional processing. The client leaves feeling understood but unchanged. That’s a structural limitation of the modality, and it’s part of why understanding complex relational trauma usually requires going beyond what words alone can hold.
The Class Dimension
For women who used intellectual competence as a way out, whose minds got them out of a difficult home into a career the family never expected, the cognitive defense isn’t just cultural. It’s survival history. The intelligence that helped her leave and build is often the same intelligence that now keeps her from feeling what that climb actually cost. Of course some part of her doesn’t want to put that tool down. It’s kept her safe a long time. Dismantling intellectualization means respecting what it protected, not just naming it as a problem, and understanding the roots in childhood trauma is part of that fuller picture.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver, poet, from “The Summer Day”
What Embodied Therapy Can Look Like: A Week-by-Week Sense of the Arc
Embodied change, the kind where you stop just knowing things and start actually feeling differently, rarely happens in one session. For most clients, it tends to build gradually, as the nervous system slowly gathers evidence that it’s safe to feel again. Here’s a general sense of what that can look like, understanding that every person’s timeline is different.
The First Few Sessions: Building Safety Before Processing
EMDR doesn’t usually begin with trauma processing. It begins with resourcing: building your capacity to regulate, to access calm, to feel grounded. This phase often feels anticlimactic to driven women (“I thought we’d get started already”). It’s actually the entire foundation. You can’t process much from a state of overwhelm, so resourcing isn’t a delay. It’s preparation for work the nervous system can complete once it starts.
The Middle Sessions: When Things Surface
EMDR processing can bring up more before it brings up less. For women who’ve intellectualized their pain for decades, initial contact with felt-sense processing can feel disorienting, sometimes alarming. That’s a normal part of the process for many clients, not necessarily deterioration. Material that’s been frozen in the body starts to move again, and that movement can feel like a lot at first. Pace and experience differ by person, and a licensed clinician should be guiding and monitoring that process throughout.
The Later Sessions: When the Body Starts to Speak
Many clients describe a shift that’s genuinely hard to put into words. Not “I understand this differently” but “this doesn’t feel the same in my body anymore.” A memory that used to activate a racing heart and a tightening throat can become, after processing, something closer to a neutral fact. The charge has eased. I still think about the way one client described it: not a better paragraph about her childhood, but the first time in years she could tell the story and feel her own hands in her lap instead of somewhere far away. That’s closer to what Rana was really asking about at 7:08 a.m. in Minneapolis. Not a better explanation of her feelings. The actual capacity to have them again.
If you’ve done the cognitive work for years and feel ready for the body work too, individual therapy with me includes EMDR as part of a trauma-informed approach built for driven women. You can connect for a free consultation here. If you’re not ready for one-on-one work, Fixing the Foundations™ is a solid entry point, and the quiz can help you find where to start.
For somatic tools you can start using now, my post on practical somatic tools from The Body Keeps the Score is a good starting point. If you’re dealing with significant trauma symptoms, working with a licensed clinician gives you support a blog post can’t. The body has been waiting a long time.
Warmly, Annie.
THE RESEARCH
The patterns described in this article are supported by peer-reviewed research. Below are key studies that inform the clinical territory covered here.
- Simonne Lesley Wright, PhD, clinical psychology researcher in PTSD treatment efficacy, writing in Psychological Medicine (2024), found that EMDR therapy performs comparably to other leading psychological treatments for PTSD, including trauma-focused CBT, with both substantially outperforming waitlist controls, supporting EMDR as a first-line evidence-based option across diverse trauma presentations (PMID: 38173121).
- Andrew J. Elliot, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester, writing in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2004), found that fear of failure is transmitted across generations through parenting styles emphasizing conditional love and harsh criticism, creating achievement anxiety that children can internalize and carry into adult performance contexts (PMID: 15257781).
- Danny Brom, PhD, Director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, writing in the Journal of Traumatic Stress (2017), reported that the first randomized controlled trial of Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine’s body-oriented trauma therapy, found significant PTSD symptom reductions compared to waitlist, positioning SE as a promising evidence-based approach that works from the body upward through the nervous system (PMID: 28585761).
Q: What is EMDR therapy and how does it work?
A: EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a structured, research-supported therapy developed by Francine Shapiro, PhD, that uses bilateral stimulation, alternating eye movements, taps, or audio tones, to help the brain reprocess traumatic memories stored in a dysregulated form. It works by engaging both brain hemispheres at once, which is thought to support the brain’s natural information-processing system in integrating material that had been frozen in its original traumatic form. As with any therapy, it should be done with a trained clinician who can tailor the approach to you.
Q: Why isn’t talk therapy always enough for trauma?
A: Talk therapy is processed largely in the brain’s language centers and left prefrontal cortex. Trauma, as documented in Bessel van der Kolk’s research, tends to be stored subcortically, in regions that don’t respond only to verbal narration. During trauma recall, the brain’s speech centers can actually go quieter. EMDR and somatic therapies are designed to access trauma where it lives in the body, rather than only where the verbal mind can reach it.
Q: I’ve been in therapy for years and nothing has changed. What’s happening?
A: This pattern, high cognitive insight alongside persistent emotional flatness, is what many clinicians call the head-body gap. It’s especially common in driven women whose intelligence has become a primary coping resource. You’ve likely mastered the cognitive track of therapy already. The work that’s often missing is the somatic track: body-based modalities like EMDR or Somatic Experiencing that can access what talk therapy alone doesn’t always reach.
Q: Is EMDR evidence-based?
A: Yes. As of 2024, EMDR has been designated an evidence-based treatment for PTSD by the World Health Organization, the American Psychological Association, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. That designation reflects hundreds of replicated randomized controlled trials since Francine Shapiro’s original 1989 publication in the Journal of Traumatic Stress. As with any treatment, outcomes vary by person, history, and clinician fit.
Q: Will EMDR work if I’m very analytical and tend to intellectualize?
A: Many clients who describe themselves this way do well with EMDR. Somewhat counterintuitively, analytical women often make excellent collaborators in the protocol precisely because they can track and report their own process clearly. The difference is that in EMDR, cognitive understanding tends to function as the entry point, not the destination. The bilateral stimulation is designed to carry the processing further, into territory analytical thinking alone often can’t reach on its own.
Q: What does “embodied change” actually feel like?
A: Clients who describe embodied change after EMDR often describe it not as a new understanding but as a shift in felt experience: a memory that used to activate a racing heart and a tight throat becomes something closer to a neutral fact. The emotional charge eases. It tends to feel less like “I understand this differently” and more like “this doesn’t feel the same in my body anymore.”
Related Reading
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Shapiro, Francine. “Efficacy of the Eye Movement Desensitization Procedure in the Treatment of Traumatic Memories.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 2 (1989): 199-223.
- Levine, Peter A. In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010.
- Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2020.
- Ogden, Pat, Kekuni Minton, and Clare Pain. Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
- Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Fearful-avoidant attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby’s unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
- Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-279, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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