Annie Wright - Relational Trauma Specialist
Helping ambitious and driven professionals heal relational trauma and build thriving lives on solid foundations.
Trauma-Informed Executive Coaching with Annie
Trauma-informed executive coaching for driven women who are done choosing between success and sanity.
You're not burning out because of your workload.
You’re burning out because your nervous system is treating every Tuesday like a survival event.
You’ve built something genuinely impressive — maybe you’re leading a department, scaling a company, running a practice, or managing a portfolio that keeps you up at night. From the outside, your professional life looks like something other people aspire to.
But you know the truth underneath: you haven’t taken a real vacation in years because your body won’t let you stop checking email. You over-prepare for every meeting like your competence is on trial. You lie awake running worst-case scenarios about a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. You said yes to a project last week that you knew would crush you — and you couldn’t explain why, except that saying no felt physically impossible.
Your exhaustion isn’t a time management problem. It’s not a boundaries problem. It’s not even a work problem. It’s a nervous system problem — and it started long before your career did.
When the boardroom feels like your childhood kitchen.
Maybe you notice that certain colleagues trigger reactions in you that feel wildly disproportionate to the situation — the micromanaging boss who makes your chest tighten the way your critical parent did, the dismissive partner who makes you feel invisible in a way that’s older than this job, the team conflict that sends your nervous system into overdrive like you’re eight years old again, trying to keep everyone happy so nobody leaves.
Maybe you work 70-hour weeks not because you love the hustle, but because stopping feels dangerous. Like if you’re not constantly producing, proving, achieving, someone will realize you don’t actually belong here. Like the thing between you and irrelevance is the next deliverable, the next client, the next yes.
These patterns aren’t coincidence. They’re your nervous system running childhood programs in adult professional settings — and no amount of leadership training, productivity systems, or executive coaching that doesn’t understand this will make them stop.
Trauma-informed executive coaching that goes deeper.
Traditional executive coaching focuses on performance strategies — how to delegate better, communicate more clearly, manage your time. And those skills matter. But if you’ve tried that approach and found yourself right back in the same patterns within weeks, there’s a reason: traditional coaching addresses what’s happening at the surface while ignoring what’s driving the pattern from underneath.
Therapy, on the other hand, often treats achievement as the problem — something to slow down, scale back, examine critically. That misses the mark too. Your ambition isn’t pathology. It’s part of who you are.
My approach as a trauma-informed executive coach lives in the space most professionals can’t touch — the intersection of your boardroom and your basement. Where your leadership patterns have roots in your earliest relationships. Where your professional triggers have nervous system origins. Where the drive that built your career is entangled with survival strategies that are quietly running you into the ground.
This isn’t about adding more tools to an already overwhelmed system. It’s about repairing the foundation underneath your professional life so your success can finally be sustainable — fueled by clarity and mission instead of hypervigilance and dread.
What makes trauma-informed coaching different.
As someone who personally navigated from using achievement to numb difficult emotions and prove my worth to building genuine stability — who founded, scaled, and sold a multimillion-dollar therapy practice while healing my own relational trauma — I bring both clinical expertise and lived experience to this work.
I understand the invisible threads connecting early relational patterns to current professional challenges. I recognize when perfectionism isn’t just about high standards — it’s about managing the terror that anything less than flawless execution could mean rejection, abandonment, or proof that you were never good enough in the first place. When difficulty delegating isn’t about control — it’s about the bone-deep fear that if you’re not personally holding every piece together, people will leave or everything will collapse. When professional burnout isn’t about workload — it’s the predictable result of a nervous system that can’t distinguish between a difficult Q3 and a dangerous childhood.
This work isn’t about dismantling your professional success. It’s about understanding how early relational experiences still shape your relationship with achievement — so you can lead from genuine confidence instead of performed competence, and build a career that enhances your life instead of consuming it.
What We'll Focus On Together
Leading without performing. Navigate professional growth and expanded responsibilities without white-knuckling every step. You’ll develop the internal security to lead from presence rather than hypervigilance — so your authority comes from who you actually are, not the exhausting performance of who you think you need to be.
Achievement that fuels instead of depletes. Build professional rhythms that honor both your ambition and your nervous system. You’ll maintain your drive — and probably sharpen it — while no longer sacrificing your sleep, your relationships, or your ability to sit through dinner without checking your phone.
Decisions from clarity, not survival. Develop the capacity to make high-stakes choices from wisdom rather than anxiety. Stop second-guessing yourself, over-researching every option, or needing three trusted advisors to validate what you already know. When your nervous system isn’t running threat-detection on every decision, your judgment gets remarkably clear.
Confidence that doesn’t require perfect performance. Cultivate genuine self-trust that isn’t contingent on flawless execution or constant external validation. Your competence becomes something you embody rather than something you perform — and the difference is the difference between sustainable leadership and burnout.
Boundaries that don’t require a recovery period. Create professional limits that protect your energy without the elaborate justifications, guilt spirals, or fear of abandonment that currently make every “no” feel like a hostage negotiation. You’ll learn to say no the way your colleagues seem to — like it’s just a normal word, not an act of war.
Communication without rehearsal. Stop reading emails five times before sending. Stop rehearsing conversations in the shower. Stop analyzing every interaction for signs that you’ve said the wrong thing. You’ll develop a professional voice that balances expertise with genuine connection — because your body no longer treats communication as a performance review.
Professional triggers that lose their charge. Address why certain colleagues, feedback styles, or situations send your nervous system into overdrive. That VP who reminds you of your critical parent? The team dynamic that feels like your childhood dinner table? We’ll work with these triggers directly — not by avoiding them, but by changing how your body responds to them.
We can also work toward whatever specific professional goals you have — negotiating compensation, navigating a career transition, building a team, launching a business — all within a trauma-informed framework that addresses the patterns underneath the symptoms.
Ready to lead from a steadier foundation?
Who trauma-informed executive coaching is for. My coaching works best for women who are:
Committed to meaningful work but exhausted by the cost. You’re building something that genuinely matters — and you’re paying for it with your sleep, your health, your presence at home, and a low-grade anxiety that never fully shuts off. You check email obsessively not because you want to, but because your nervous system won’t let you stop.
Smart enough to see the patterns but stuck in them. You can diagram your perfectionism on a whiteboard. You’ve read the books. You know your hypervigilance is connected to something older than this job. But understanding it intellectually hasn’t changed how you actually show up when the pressure hits.
Done with surface-level fixes. You’ve tried the leadership workshops, the productivity systems, the time-blocking, the meditation apps. Some of it helped for a week. None of it stuck — because none of it addressed why your body treats rest like a threat and feedback like an attack.
Managing professional success alongside personal complexity. You’re navigating career growth while also dealing with relationship challenges, parenting stress, aging parents, or family dynamics that compound the internal pressure you already carry. You need someone who understands that your professional patterns don’t exist in a vacuum — they’re connected to everything else.
Successful on the outside, unsettled on the inside. You’ve hit milestones that were supposed to feel satisfying. They don’t. There’s a persistent is this it? underneath the achievements, and you’re starting to suspect that the next promotion, the next revenue target, the next win isn’t going to fix it either.
Ready to invest in real transformation. You understand that trauma-informed executive coaching requires both meaningful investment and emotional honesty. You’re not looking for a quick fix or a cheerleader. You’re ready for someone who will go where traditional coaches can’t — into the space where your professional patterns meet their deeper origins.
What my clients experience before we start working together.
On the edge of professional burnout — unable to slow down without anxiety or guilt, unable to keep going without something breaking.
Disconnection from work that once felt meaningful — going through the motions of a career that used to light them up, wondering when the spark disappeared and whether it’s coming back.
Uncertainty about whether it’s possible to maintain professional excellence and have a life that doesn’t feel like it’s held together with caffeine and cortisol.
A growing awareness that they’ve tried everything the professional development world has to offer — leadership coaching, executive retreats, 360 reviews, strengths assessments — and they’re still stuck in the same patterns. Still over-functioning, still over-preparing, still unable to rest.
Most clients come to me having already invested significantly in their professional development. They’re not lacking strategies. They’re lacking someone who understands that the issue isn’t their skill set — it’s their nervous system.
Why you can’t slow down even when you know you should.
Some part of you learned early that slowing down was dangerous. That your value depended on your output. That staying alert, staying useful, staying ten steps ahead was the only thing between you and disaster. This part of you is brilliant — it got you where you are by making sure you never stopped achieving, never stopped proving, never stopped scanning for problems before they hit.
But this same part can’t tell the difference between then and now. It operates as though your professional success is still about survival — like one mistake could mean abandonment, like rest is the same as giving up, like the people around you will leave if you stop being indispensable.
Your body treats a critical Slack message like a threat to your safety. It responds to delegation like you’re handing away the one thing that keeps you valuable. It registers a slow Tuesday as danger — because somewhere in your wiring, stillness and vulnerability are the same thing.
This is why willpower alone doesn’t work. This is why traditional executive coaching doesn’t stick. And this is exactly why a trauma-informed approach changes everything — because it reaches the nervous system, not just the mind.
Why This Trauma-Informed Approach Works
I bring a combination of expertise that addresses what other approaches miss — and why most driven women cycle through coaches and programs without lasting change.
Clinical understanding. With over 15,000 clinical hours working with ambitious women healing relational trauma, I recognize the invisible patterns that drive professional perfectionism, make delegation feel impossible, and turn achievement into a survival strategy. I don’t just see the leadership challenge. I see the nervous system underneath it.
Real-world business experience. I founded, scaled, and sold a multimillion-dollar therapy practice. I know what it’s like when your nervous system treats normal business decisions like life-or-death emergencies. I’ve lived the pressure, the sleepless nights, the compulsive checking, the inability to step away. I’m not theorizing about entrepreneurial stress. I’ve white-knuckled my way through it — and I’ve healed my way out of it.
Personal transformation. My own journey from using achievement to numb difficult emotions to building genuine stability means I understand what it’s like when slowing down feels dangerous and rest triggers anxiety. I don’t just empathize with these patterns. I’ve lived them, done the deep work to change them, and come out the other side still ambitious, still driven — but no longer running on fumes.
The intersection nobody else touches. Most executive coaches don’t understand trauma. Most therapists don’t understand the boardroom. I work in the space where those two worlds collide — where your leadership patterns have basement origins, and where healing those origins transforms everything you build on top.
How Coaching Works
Session Structure
We dig into what’s actually happening — not just the professional challenge on the surface, but the nervous system pattern driving it from underneath. Every session produces concrete next steps you can take immediately, grounded in an understanding of why your system responds the way it does.
Between-Session Support
When you’re facing a high-stakes presentation, a difficult conversation, or a decision that’s keeping you up at night, you can reach out for real-time guidance. Some moments can’t wait for next Thursday’s session — and a trauma-informed perspective in the moment can change the outcome entirely.
Progress Tracking
We track both the external shifts — how work is actually going, what’s changing in your leadership, what feedback you’re getting — and the internal shifts that matter just as much. Sleeping through the night. Delegating without panic. Sitting through a meeting without rehearsing your exit. Real change shows up in both places.
Personalized Development
Everything we do is tailored to your specific situation, your particular nervous system patterns, and where you want to grow next. No generic leadership frameworks. No one-size-fits-all protocols. Your professional challenges are as unique as the early experiences that shaped them — and your coaching should reflect that.
The difference between coaching and therapy.
Both are valuable. They serve different purposes.
My therapy practice focuses on deeper healing of relational trauma — processing stored trauma responses, rewiring core nervous system patterns, and addressing the foundational material directly. It’s the deep excavation work.
Trauma-informed executive coaching takes those same insights about how your nervous system and relational patterns shape your professional life — and applies them to what’s happening now. We stay focused on the present and future: how you’re leading, deciding, communicating, and building today, and where you want to go next. We don’t spend sessions processing childhood material directly. We work with how it shows up in your Monday morning.
If you’re experiencing significant emotional overwhelm, need to process trauma directly, or are working through major relationship or mental health challenges, therapy may be the better starting point. If you’re functionally strong but professionally stuck in patterns you can’t outperform, coaching is likely your entry point. And sometimes the answer is both — and I’m happy to help you figure out which fits where you are right now.
Your ambition isn't the problem. What's underneath it might be.
Your skills and drive have gotten you further than most people will ever go. That’s real. That’s yours. Nobody is asking you to shrink that.
But here’s what 15,000 clinical hours and my own journey through achievement-as-survival have taught me: there is a version of ambition that enhances your life, and a version that slowly consumes it. The difference isn’t the ambition itself. It’s what’s fueling it — mission or survival, desire or dread, genuine confidence or the desperate need to prove you deserve to be in the room.
When you address the patterns underneath — when your nervous system finally gets the update that you’re no longer that child whose safety depended on being perfect, useful, or indispensable — your ambition doesn’t disappear. It transforms. You lead with presence instead of hypervigilance. You build with clarity instead of compulsion. You rest without guilt and work without dread.
You don’t have to keep white-knuckling your way through professional success. There’s a different way to be ambitious — one that enhances your life instead of consuming it.
Ready to build something solid underneath everything you've built?
Whether you’re ready to start this work now or still figuring out what’s possible, I’m glad the part of you that knows something needs to change brought you here.
There’s no rush. You’ve been managing these patterns for years — a few more days to think it through won’t change anything. But there’s also no benefit to waiting if you’re ready to stop performing your way through a career you actually want to enjoy.
If you’re tired of cycling through professional development that doesn’t stick — and ready for a trauma-informed executive coaching approach that addresses why your nervous system keeps overriding your best intentions — I’d be honored to work with you.
Fill out this brief form or email support@anniewright.com to schedule a consultation, and we’ll figure out whether this is the right fit for where you are right now.
Your drive and ambition don’t have to come at the cost of your sleep, your relationships, or your peace of mind. There’s a way to be professionally extraordinary that doesn’t require your suffering as fuel.
I’ve watched it happen hundreds of times. And I believe it’s possible for you.
— Annie Wright, LMFT
