Emotional Flashbacks: Why You Suddenly Feel Like a Terrified Child in the Middle of Your Adult Life (And What to Do About It)
Most people know what a classic PTSD flashback looks like. Far fewer know that complex trauma can produce a different pattern entirely: a sudden flood of childhood shame, terror, or smallness with no image attached to it at all. Therapist Pete Walker named this pattern the “emotional flashback.” In this piece, I walk through what the term does and doesn’t mean, why it turns up so often in driven women’s professional lives, and what to do (and not assume) in the moment it hits.
- The Meeting That Became a Childhood Bedroom
- What Is an Emotional Flashback?
- The Neurobiology of Emotional Flashbacks
- Common Triggers for Emotional Flashbacks in Driven Women
- The Four Trauma Responses in Emotional Flashbacks
- A Grounding Protocol for the Moment It Hits
- Both/And: The Flashback Isn’t the Truth. And the Feeling Is Real
- The Systemic Lens: Why This Stays Invisible in Professional Women
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Meeting That Became a Childhood Bedroom
It’s 2:50 on a Wednesday afternoon, and Penina is sitting in her glassed-in office with a half-eaten Sweetgreen salad going warm on her desk. She’s 45, a VP of Operations at a mid-size logistics company, the person her team calls when a vendor contract falls apart at 6 p.m. on a Friday. Her performance review starts in ten minutes. She has already reread her self-assessment four times.
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Her supervisor isn’t an unkind man. He opens with two specific compliments, the kind that show he actually read her work. Then he says, gently, that her communication style in cross-functional meetings could be “a little more collaborative.” One sentence. Delivered kindly, in an otherwise glowing review.
“I don’t understand what happened to me,” Penina tells me two weeks later, turning a pen over and over in her hands. “One second I was fine, and the next second I was six years old again, standing in my father’s study, waiting for him to finish reading my report card. My shoulders came up. My chest actually caved in, like something was pressing on it. I couldn’t get words out. I just sat there nodding, and inside I was thinking, he’s disappointed in me, he’s always going to be disappointed in me, and I don’t even know where that thought came from because my boss said maybe two sentences about my meeting style.”
Sitting with Penina that day, I felt the particular mix of recognition and concern I’ve come to know well after fifteen years of clinical work with driven women. Not because her reaction was unusual. Because it was so familiar, and because so few of the women who have it know what to call it.
What struck me most wasn’t the intensity of what she described. It was how quickly she moved to explain it away. “I’m sure I’m being dramatic,” she said, before I’d said a word. “It was one sentence. He was being nice about it, even.” That instinct, to minimize a nervous-system response before anyone else has a chance to question it, is itself part of the pattern. Driven women are often the most skilled people in the room at talking themselves out of their own experience.
What happened to Penina that Wednesday afternoon is often described, in the complex-trauma literature, as an emotional flashback. Not a flashback in the classic sense. No images, no film reel of a specific remembered event. A sudden flood of the emotional state of a much younger Penina, triggered by a present moment that rhymed with an old one. She wasn’t remembering her father’s disappointment. She was, for a few unbearable minutes, back inside it. The office had become the study. And she had no name for what had just happened to her until she sat across from me and we started building one together.
What Is an Emotional Flashback?
“Emotional flashback” is a descriptive term, not a formal diagnostic category in the DSM-5 or ICD-11. It was coined by Pete Walker, MA, a psychotherapist writing from both his own experience of complex trauma and his clinical work with survivors, in his 2013 book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Walker used it to describe a pattern he saw often in complex-trauma survivors: a sudden, disproportionate flooding of an old emotional state, such as shame, terror, or helplessness, triggered by a present-day cue that echoes an earlier relational injury, without the visual or sensory re-experiencing that characterizes a classic PTSD flashback.
In plain terms: Some people describe suddenly feeling like the child they once were: terrified, ashamed, small, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary adult afternoon. Not because they’re remembering a specific scene. Because something in the room echoed an old one. The office starts to feel like a childhood bedroom. A boss’s mild note starts to feel like a verdict on your worth. This is a pattern some clinicians find useful for making sense of an otherwise confusing reaction, not a self-diagnosis checklist and not the only possible explanation for sudden, intense fear or shame.
Walker distinguishes what he called emotional flashbacks from classic PTSD flashbacks in one central way. A classic flashback involves vivid sensory re-experiencing: images, sounds, physical sensations tied to a specific remembered event. What Walker described involves none of that imagery. Only the emotional weather of an earlier time, arriving in the body without a caption. That’s part of why the pattern is so easy to miss. Without a mental picture attached to it, it can just feel like an outsized reaction to something small, and the person having it is often the last to recognize what’s happening.
Walker also wrote about the specific emotional textures he saw recur in his clients: a shame that felt fundamental rather than situational, a grief tied to feeling unsupported or unseen, and four survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) that tend to activate alongside the flooding. These ideas come from Walker’s own clinical observation and self-report. They’re widely used in complex-trauma treatment circles, and they haven’t been validated the way a formal diagnostic criterion set has. It’s worth holding that distinction honestly: useful clinical language isn’t automatically the same thing as settled science.
It’s also worth saying plainly what this pattern isn’t. A sudden wave of intense fear, shame, or dread doesn’t always mean someone is having what Walker described, and it doesn’t always trace back to childhood trauma. Acute stress, panic attacks, sleep deprivation, grief, certain medical conditions, and ordinary human overwhelm can all produce something that looks similar from the outside. Reading this article isn’t a way to diagnose yourself or anyone else. If a pattern like this is new, worsening, disorienting to the point of losing time, or accompanied by thoughts of harming yourself, that’s a reason to talk with a licensed clinician promptly, not a reason to work through a self-help checklist alone.
I say this to every client who arrives already fluent in the language of trauma, having read the books, followed the accounts, built their own working theory before we’ve had a single session. Fluency with a framework isn’t the same as an accurate diagnosis. Sometimes the framework fits precisely. Sometimes what looks like an old pattern resurfacing is actually a body that hasn’t slept properly in three weeks, or a nervous system reacting to an unsafe present-day situation that has nothing to do with childhood at all. Part of good clinical work is holding the framework loosely enough to ask, every time, whether it’s actually the right one.
The Neurobiology of Emotional Flashbacks
The term “amygdala hijack” comes from Daniel Goleman, PhD, psychologist and science journalist, in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. Goleman used it to describe a fast, automatic activation of the amygdala, the brain’s threat-detection structure, that outpaces the slower, more deliberate processing of the prefrontal cortex. Some clinicians borrow this term to talk about the felt experience Walker described: a threat cue registers before conscious, contextual thinking has a chance to weigh in, and the body responds to the past as though it were the present.
In plain terms: Think of it like a smoke detector that got calibrated during an actual kitchen fire years ago and never fully recalibrated. It’s not broken. It’s doing exactly what it learned to do. Which means it can go off during burnt toast, a raised eyebrow in a meeting, or a slightly clipped email, long before the thinking part of your brain gets a vote.
I recently spent an afternoon rereading sections of Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, and I keep returning to his description of how the brain stores emotional memory separately from narrative memory. Explicit memory can tell you what happened. Implicit memory can hold how it felt, sometimes without any accompanying story at all. In complex trauma, that implicit layer can carry old emotional associations, associations that activate when the nervous system meets a cue that resembles the original situation, whether or not the current moment is actually dangerous.
Which is why ambitious, articulate women can spend years in talk therapy, understanding exactly what happened to them, narrating it fluently, even teaching it to others, and still find their chest caving in over a mild comment in a performance review. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for weighing context and regulating emotional response, tends to go quieter during this kind of flooding. That’s part of why it feels so disorienting from the inside: the very capacity that would normally say “this is different from before” is temporarily harder to access.
The concept of the window of tolerance, developed by Daniel Siegel, MD, psychiatrist, and elaborated in the polyvagal-informed work of Deb Dana, LCSW, therapist and author, is useful here. An emotional flashback, in Walker’s framing, is one way of describing an experience of moving outside that window: the nervous system meets more activation than its current regulatory capacity can absorb. Much of trauma-informed work is aimed at widening that window over time, so a person can stay more regulated when a cue lands, and return to steadier ground more quickly when they don’t.
I think of the window of tolerance the way I think about a circuit breaker in an old house. A well-wired system can absorb a lot of current before it trips. A system that’s already carrying more load than it was built for trips at the smallest additional draw, a hair dryer, a space heater, a single extra lamp. The goal in trauma work isn’t to eliminate every possible trigger in a person’s life. That’s not realistic, and it isn’t the point. The goal is to widen the system’s capacity so ordinary current stops tripping the breaker.
None of this is static. The width of a person’s window of tolerance can change based on how much sleep they got, whether they’ve eaten, how much unrelated stress is already sitting in the body that day. I’ve watched the same client have almost no reaction to a piece of blunt feedback on a well-rested Tuesday, and completely unravel in response to something nearly identical on a depleted Friday. This is one reason blanket advice rarely works well here. The nervous system a person brings into a room changes the meaning of what happens in it.
Common Triggers for Emotional Flashbacks in Driven Women
In my clinical work with driven women, the triggers I hear about most often aren’t specific events so much as specific emotional textures: the texture of being evaluated and found wanting, the texture of being dismissed mid-sentence, the texture of conflict or visible disapproval, the texture of being needed in a way that feels bottomless.
The specific triggers that come up again and again include critical or corrective feedback, even mild feedback delivered kindly; conflict with a partner or colleague; the experience of being talked over or not seen; being needed in a way that feels overwhelming; and, more counterintuitively, success and visibility themselves.
What ties these together isn’t the severity of the trigger. It’s the specific emotional register it activates. A blunt, harsh criticism from a stranger rarely produces this kind of flooding, because it doesn’t resemble anything from the original relational template. A mild, almost throwaway comment from someone whose approval matters can produce it instantly, because the relational structure, someone with authority over you, delivering a verdict, is the exact shape of the old wound. Intensity of the trigger and intensity of the response are, counterintuitively, often unrelated.
I’ve watched this confuse partners and colleagues more than almost anything else in this territory. A husband who says something objectively harsher on a Tuesday gets a shrug. A slightly clipped one-line text from him on a Thursday produces two hours of quiet devastation. From the outside, it looks inconsistent, even irrational. From the inside, it makes complete sense once you know what the second message actually resembled. The mismatch between trigger size and reaction size is often the single clearest sign that something older is being activated, not the current relationship itself.
That last one is worth sitting with, because it surprises almost everyone the first time I name it. A woman who has spent her whole career working toward a specific milestone, a promotion, an award, a keynote invitation, sometimes finds that reaching it triggers exactly this kind of flooding rather than the relief she expected. Visibility can activate an old fear of being truly seen: the fear that if people look closely enough, they’ll find the person underneath who feels fundamentally not enough. The achievement, paradoxically, can feel more dangerous than the striving ever did.
The Four Trauma Responses in Emotional Flashbacks
Walker described four survival responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, that tend to show up alongside this kind of flooding. Noticing which one tends to dominate for you is often the first useful piece of self-knowledge in learning to work with it.
Fight can look like sudden, disproportionate irritability or anger: a flash of rage at a minor frustration, a sharper tone with a partner than the moment called for, an inner critic that turns outward and lands on someone else.
Flight can look like sudden, overwhelming anxiety, an urge to escape the room, or a compulsive need to stay busy: checking email obsessively, unable to sit still, unable to let a thought finish before reaching for the next task.
Freeze can look like sudden dissociation or numbness: a blank stare, an inability to form words, the sense of watching yourself from a slight distance.
It’s 3:40 on a Tuesday, and Veronika is standing at the front of a fintech company’s biweekly product review with a laser pointer in one hand and her carefully rehearsed slides on the screen behind her. She’s 39, a director who built this review process from scratch two years ago. A senior engineer cuts in, mid-sentence, with a flat, “That’s not actually how it works.” He isn’t shouting. He isn’t even particularly rude. But Veronika feels herself leave.
“I kept talking,” she tells me later, staring at her hands. “I know I kept talking, because nobody in the room looked confused. But I wasn’t in my own head anymore. My voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone else. I couldn’t tell you a single thing I said for the next four minutes. I got through it. And then I sat in the bathroom stall for twenty minutes with my hands shaking, and I could not for the life of me explain to myself why.”
Sitting with Veronika as she described it, I felt the quiet click of recognition I’ve come to associate with the freeze pattern specifically, the one that’s hardest for capable, accomplished women to catch because it so often looks, from the outside, like composure. What the engineer’s dismissal seemed to activate wasn’t really about him. It echoed, for Veronika, an old dynamic with an older sibling who talked over her at the dinner table for years. She wasn’t in a product review. Some part of her was back at that table. Her nervous system, in that moment, had no reliable way to tell the difference.
Fawn can look like sudden, compulsive appeasement: agreeing before you’ve thought it through, a smile arriving before the thought behind it, a sudden and uncharacteristic inability to say no.
Most of the driven women I work with don’t have one pure response. They have a dominant one under mild activation, fawn during a slightly tense meeting, say, and a different one entirely under severe activation, freeze during a real confrontation. Learning your own pattern across different intensities is more useful than trying to fit yourself neatly into a single category.
A Grounding Protocol for the Moment It Hits
Before walking through this, it’s worth naming something Penina said to me almost verbatim in our third session: most driven women find language for this pattern late, often by accident, usually after years of white-knuckling through it. That’s not a failure of intelligence or willpower. It’s what happens when a capable nervous system was shaped by an early environment that didn’t offer it what it needed. Knowing that tends to change how a person receives the steps that follow.
Pete Walker outlined a well-known set of self-management steps aimed at the moment the flooding hits, when, per the neurobiology above, careful reflective thinking is harder to access. I want to be clear about what this is and isn’t: a widely used, informally described set of grounding practices, not a clinical treatment protocol, and not a guarantee that following it will make the flooding stop. Some people find parts of it helpful. Others need more, or different, support, and that’s not a failure of the steps or of the person using them.
Name it. Saying, even silently, “some part of this might be an old pattern showing up” can create a sliver of distance between the feeling and the assumption that it’s telling you the whole truth about the present.
Remind yourself where you are. “I feel afraid, and I’m also an adult, in this room, on this date.” The feeling can be real without the danger being current.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
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Remember you’re allowed boundaries. You’re allowed to pause a conversation, to ask for a minute, to leave a situation that’s actually unsafe. This matters especially for a fawn-leaning pattern, where automatic appeasement can lead to agreeing to things that don’t serve you.
Speak gently to the part of you that’s activated. Some people find it helps to offer a kind of internal reassurance: I know this feels enormous. I’m still here. Something in this softens the intensity for some people; it isn’t a fix, and it doesn’t work the same way for everyone.
Notice if it feels like it will last forever. In the middle of this kind of flooding, the feeling can seem permanent. It generally isn’t. Most people find these states pass, often faster than they expect, even when it doesn’t feel that way at the two-minute mark.
Locate your adult body. Noticing your actual size, your actual resources, the actual year, can help anchor a nervous system that’s been pulled toward an old sense of smallness.
Use your senses. Naming what you can see, hear, and physically feel right now draws on present-moment sensory processing, which can help counterbalance the pull toward the past.
Slow your exhale. A longer exhale than inhale is one of the more directly accessible ways to nudge the autonomic nervous system toward calm; it isn’t a cure, and it doesn’t work identically for every body.
Question the inner critic’s timing. The harsh internal narration that often accompanies this state isn’t a reliable narrator of your current worth. Noticing that it showed up doesn’t mean believing what it’s saying.
Let grief move if it’s there. Sometimes what surfaces underneath the fear is grief, old and unprocessed. Letting it move, rather than immediately managing it away, is part of longer-term healing for many people, though this is often better supported with a trained clinician than attempted entirely alone.
Reach for a safe person. Connection with someone who can help you feel steadier, what clinicians sometimes call co-regulation, is one of the more consistently cited supports across this literature.
Try to trace the trigger, later. Once the intensity has passed, it can help to gently ask what specifically set it off. This is about building a map, not assigning blame.
Be patient with yourself. This pattern, however it’s understood clinically, isn’t evidence of weakness or failure. It reflects a nervous system that adapted to something real. Adapting again, toward more steadiness, tends to take time and consistency rather than a single insight.
“In a flashback, the past is not remembered. It is relived. The body responds to a danger that is long over as if it were happening right now, which is why reason alone rarely turns the alarm off.”
Babette Rothschild, MSW, somatic trauma therapist and author of The Body Remembers
Both/And: The Flashback Isn’t the Truth. And the Feeling Is Real
The most important both/and in this work is this: the flooding is very likely not an accurate report on your present reality, and the feeling underneath it’s completely real. Both things can be true at once. The shame that rises in that meeting isn’t reliable evidence that you’re not enough. Your supervisor’s one sentence of feedback isn’t, in fact, proof of your fundamental defectiveness. The tension with your partner isn’t, in fact, the beginning of the end. Whatever pattern is activating is pulling from somewhere else, and it isn’t the truth of this moment.
And the feeling itself doesn’t need to be argued with. The shame is real. The fear is real. The sense of smallness is real. None of that makes you weak, or dramatic, or broken. It’s a real emotional experience, one that likely never got fully processed the first time around, surfacing now because something in the present resembled something in the past. The feeling is real. It just belongs, largely, to an earlier chapter, not to this one.
Holding both of these at once, the flooding isn’t the whole truth, and the feeling is still worth meeting with compassion, is close to the center of learning to work with this pattern. The aim isn’t to dismiss what you’re feeling. It also isn’t to accept the flooding’s narrative at face value. The aim is to feel the feeling with some tenderness while gently questioning the story it’s telling you about the present.
Penina put it more simply than I ever have, near the end of our work together. “I stopped trying to make the feeling go away,” she told me. “I just started asking it how old it thought I was.” That question, asked gently and without judgment, tends to do more than any single grounding technique. It doesn’t resolve the pattern. It just puts a little air between the person having the feeling and the feeling itself.
The Systemic Lens: Why This Stays Invisible in Professional Women
This pattern is particularly hard for professional women to recognize and name, for a few compounding reasons. First, most professional settings require the suppression of visible emotion in real time. A woman flooded with shame in a boardroom can’t pause the meeting to name what’s happening. She has to keep functioning, which prevents the kind of recognition and processing that might otherwise shrink the intensity of the next episode.
Second, a driven woman’s sense of self is frequently organized around competence, and this kind of flooding can feel like competence’s exact opposite. A sudden collapse in the middle of a meeting, a flooding of old, small feelings, a temporary inability to think clearly: these can feel deeply threatening to an identity built on being the one who manages everything. Naming what’s happening, even privately, asks a woman to admit a vulnerability that her whole professional architecture may have been built to conceal.
Third, our shared cultural vocabulary doesn’t have great language for this experience. A woman who tells a colleague, “I think I just had an emotional flashback,” is unlikely to be met with recognition. The available cultural shorthand tends to be “overreacting,” “too sensitive,” or “having an off day.” That gap in language makes the pattern harder to recognize, harder to name, and harder to ask for support around, which is exactly why I think it’s worth naming carefully and precisely, including its limits.
Longer-term work with this pattern often draws on the three-stage frame Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, described for trauma recovery broadly: establishing safety, processing what happened, and rebuilding connection. The safety stage tends to focus on nervous-system regulation and widening the window of tolerance. The processing stage often involves approaches like IFS parts work, EMDR, or somatic therapy, ideally with a trained trauma clinician rather than alone. The reconnection stage centers on rebuilding relationships and a sense of belonging that counteracts the isolation this pattern can create. None of this is a promise of a fixed timeline or a guaranteed outcome. It’s a widely used map, not a formula.
If what you’re noticing feels sudden, severe, disorienting to the point of losing time, or unsafe in any way, including thoughts of harming yourself, please treat that as a signal to reach out to a licensed mental health professional or urgent care resource promptly, rather than working through grounding steps alone. This article is educational. It isn’t a diagnostic tool, and it isn’t a substitute for an individualized clinical evaluation.
If you have ever been leveled by a wave of terror or shame that seemed to come from nowhere, feeling for a moment like a small, helpless child in a grown woman’s body, I want to name what that most likely was. It was an emotional flashback, and it is one of the most disorienting features of complex trauma precisely because there is no image attached, only the raw feeling. You can know intellectually that you are safe now and, at the same time, have a nervous system that is convinced you are not. Both can be true at once, and holding both is the beginning of the work. You are not going backward. You are meeting an old wound with new resources. When you’re ready for support in that, I’m here.
Warmly,
Annie
Q: How do I know if what I’m experiencing is an emotional flashback or just a strong emotional reaction?
A: There’s no test that settles this definitively, but clinicians who use this framework often point to a few features: the intensity feels out of proportion to the current situation, the feeling has a childlike quality of smallness or helplessness, a harsh internal voice arrives quickly, and it’s hard to access adult perspective in the moment. A strong reaction to an objectively difficult situation isn’t automatically this pattern. If you’re unsure, that uncertainty is worth bringing to a trauma-informed clinician rather than resolving on your own.
Q: Does sudden, intense fear always mean I’m having an emotional flashback or that I’ve unresolved trauma?
A: No. Sudden or intense fear and shame can come from many places: panic attacks, generalized anxiety, sleep deprivation, medical conditions, acute stress, grief, or simply an ordinary bad day. This framework is one possible lens, not the default explanation for every hard feeling. If a pattern is new, worsening, or hard to make sense of, a licensed clinician can help sort out what’s actually going on, rather than assuming trauma is the cause.
Q: Can I use the grounding steps described here on my own?
A: Many people find some of these steps useful to try independently in the moment. They’re not a treatment protocol, and they don’t work identically for everyone. If the underlying pattern is frequent, intense, or tied to a significant trauma history, working with a trained trauma clinician alongside any self-management tools tends to be more effective than using the steps in isolation.
Q: Is having this pattern the same as having Complex PTSD?
A: Not necessarily. This kind of emotional flooding is often described as one feature some people with complex trauma histories report, but it isn’t, by itself, a diagnosis. A Complex PTSD diagnosis, where clinically appropriate, involves a broader symptom picture assessed by a licensed clinician. If you’re noticing this pattern alongside other symptoms, a consultation with a trauma-informed clinician is a reasonable next step, not something to self-diagnose from an article.
Q: Why does this seem to happen most at work, where I feel most in control?
A: This is one of the more consistent patterns I hear about in my work with driven women. Professional environments are dense with the exact relational dynamics, evaluation, hierarchy, visibility, that can echo old templates, even when nothing is objectively wrong. Its showing up at work isn’t evidence you’re unprofessional. It may simply mean the workplace offers a steady supply of cues that resemble something older.
Q: What’s the difference between this and ordinary anxiety?
A: Anxiety is generally future-oriented: anticipation of a threat that hasn’t happened yet. What’s described here is more backward-oriented: an old emotional state resurfacing in response to a present-day cue. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside, they can look and feel similar, which is exactly why an individualized assessment from a trauma-informed clinician is more useful than trying to self-sort the two.
Q: When should I seek professional or urgent support rather than trying to manage this on my own?
A: If what you’re experiencing is new, rapidly worsening, disorienting to the point of losing time or a sense of who or where you’re, accompanied by thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, or simply feels unsafe, that warrants prompt attention from a licensed mental health professional or an urgent care or crisis resource, not a self-help article. Grounding tools can be useful for everyday intensity. They’re not a substitute for clinical evaluation when symptoms are severe or safety is in question.
Related Reading
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote, 2013.
- Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True, 2021.
- Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote, 2013.
- Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam Books, 1995.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
- Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
- Rothschild, Babette. 2000. The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
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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 Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
