The Family Money Story You’re Still Trying to Survive
The way you handle money as an adult is rarely about math. For driven women, it’s almost always a nervous system still running the family money story it learned at five. The scarcity, the secrecy, the shame, the status pressure. This post looks at how those early financial wounds quietly shape boardrooms, businesses, and partnerships, and what it actually takes to write a new story without abandoning the woman who survived the old one.
- The Spreadsheet at 11:47 PM
- What Is a Family Money Story?
- What Does Inherited Financial Fear Do to the Nervous System?
- How Does the Family Money Story Show Up in Driven Women?
- Shame, Secrecy, and the Status-Equals-Worth Trap
- Both/And: Your Money Story Protected You AND It Is Quietly Bleeding You Out
- The Systemic Lens: Why Capitalism, Culture, and Patriarchy Keep the Story Alive
- How Do You Write a New Money Story From the Nervous System Up?
- Frequently Asked Questions
A family money story is the set of beliefs and emotional patterns around money that a child absorbs from their family of origin, often before they have language for it. For driven women, the adult relationship with money is rarely about math; it’s about a nervous system still running the family’s original financial script, whether that script was scarcity, shame, or the equation of status with worth. These patterns persist below conscious awareness even after significant financial success. In my work with driven women, financial anxiety is usually unresolved childhood fear wearing a budget spreadsheet.
The Spreadsheet at 11:47 PM
It’s 11:47 on a Tuesday night and Leila, a 41-year-old founder of a Series B health-tech company, is sitting at her kitchen island with a half-finished glass of wine and three browser tabs open. One tab’s her business bank account, comfortably north of seven figures. One tab’s her personal brokerage. The third is a spreadsheet she rebuilt herself in Google Sheets, because the wealth manager’s PDF didn’t quite calm the thing inside her chest that needed calming.
The numbers are good. Objectively, they’re very good. Her CFO’d describe her as financially conservative. And yet here she is, doing what she’s done on Tuesday nights for as long as she can remember: counting, recounting, stress-testing a future where it all goes away. She’s done this calculation eleven times this month. The answer’s always the same. It’s never enough.
Leila isn’t bad with money. Leila’s excellent with money. What Leila is, is a 41-year-old woman whose body is still trying to survive a story she didn’t write. A story her parents handed to her, and their parents handed to them, in moments she barely remembers and moments she’ll never forget. The IRS calls her wealthy. Her nervous system calls her seven years old, listening through a bedroom door to her father’s voice tightening over a stack of bills.
In my work with driven women, Silicon Valley founders, surgeons, partners at law firms, this is one of the most common quiet conversations we end up having. Not “how do I make more money.” That part, they’ve cracked. The conversation is: why doesn’t the money I already have feel like safety yet? And underneath that question, almost always, is a family money story still running the show.
This post’s about that story. How it forms, how it gets wired into the body, how it shows up in adult financial life despite an extraordinary income, and how to begin rewriting it. Not through more spreadsheets, but through the slow, brave work of meeting the version of yourself who first learned what money meant. If this sounds familiar, you might also find it useful to read what I’ve written about relational trauma and the way it threads through every domain of adult life, money included.
What Is a Family Money Story?
A “family money story” is shorthand for something clinical and specific: the constellation of beliefs, emotions, body memories, and relational patterns about money that a child absorbs from their family of origin, usually before they have language for any of it. It isn’t only what your parents said about money. It’s what their faces did when bills arrived. It’s whether you ever heard them argue about a credit card statement through a thin wall. It’s the way your grandmother folded a twenty-dollar bill into your hand and whispered “don’t tell your mother.”
For driven women, the family money story is rarely a neutral set of “financial values.” It’s an emotional inheritance, and often, a trauma inheritance. Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, draws a distinction I keep coming back to: trauma isn’t only about catastrophic events. It also includes the enduring impact of betrayal, powerlessness, and unpredictability inside our closest relationships. When money becomes the medium through which a family’s anxiety, control, or shame moves, money itself becomes a trauma trigger.
The implicit and explicit narrative about money, its meaning, its danger, its moral weight, its relationship to love and worth, that a child internalizes from their family of origin, embedded in the nervous system before conscious memory and carried forward into adult financial behavior.
In plain terms: Your family money story isn’t a budget your parents taught you. It’s the unconscious answer your body learned to questions like: Is there enough? Am I safe? Do I have to perform to deserve resources? Is money love, or is it control? Is it shameful to want? Is it shameful to have? Driven women often arrive in midlife with seven-figure portfolios and a body still answering those questions the way it did at age six. The portfolio doesn’t soothe the questions, because the questions weren’t financial in the first place. They were relational.
Family money stories tend to fall into a handful of recurring patterns I’ve seen again and again in driven women. There’s the scarcity story: there’s never enough, even when there’s more than enough. There’s the hoarding story: holding on is the only way to survive. There’s the shame story: wanting money makes you greedy; having money makes you suspect. There’s the secrecy story: we don’t talk about it, we don’t ask, we don’t tell. There’s the conflict story: money is what we fight about and what tears us apart. And there’s the status-equals-worth story: what you earn is what you are.
Most women I work with carry not one of these stories but a braided combination of three or four, usually one from each parent, plus a cultural overlay. The braiding’s what makes them so hard to untangle. When you’ve spent forty years inside the same braid, it stops looking like a story and starts looking like reality.
The family money story isn’t your fault. You didn’t choose it. You absorbed it the way you absorbed your first language, before you knew there were other languages. The work isn’t to feel guilty for inheriting it. The work’s to recognize it clearly enough that you can choose, as an adult, what you keep and what you set down.
What Does Inherited Financial Fear Do to the Nervous System?
Money decisions feel like math. They aren’t. They’re nervous system events, plain and simple.
When a driven woman opens her bank account, looks at a credit card statement, contemplates a big purchase, negotiates a salary, or considers letting an employee go for budget reasons, her body is running a threat-detection scan in milliseconds, long before her prefrontal cortex weighs in with reason. If that scan finds a match to a stored danger memory from childhood, the body responds as if it’s seven years old again, even when the spreadsheet says she’s safe.
I’ve spent years returning to the work of Stephen W. Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and originator of polyvagal theory, who has spent decades mapping how the autonomic nervous system continuously scans the environment for cues of safety or threat, a process he calls neuroception. Neuroception’s happening beneath awareness. When the cues a child grew up reading, a parent’s tightening voice, a sigh over a checkbook, a slammed door after a money argument, get linked to financial situations, the nervous system files money itself as a threat category. Decades later, the body’s still flagging it.
This is why a financially driven woman can sit down with her wealth advisor and feel, inexplicably, like she’s about to be in trouble. Her body hasn’t received the memo.
A concept developed by the late Bruce S. McEwen, PhD, neuroendocrinologist at Rockefeller University, describing the cumulative biological wear and tear caused by chronic activation of the body’s stress response systems over time.
In plain terms: If your nervous system has been on low-grade financial alert since you were a child, counting, anticipating, performing, controlling, your body has been paying interest on that stress for thirty or forty years. The exhaustion you can’t quite explain, the sleep that doesn’t restore you, the chest tightness on the first of the month even though every bill is paid: that’s allostatic load. It’s the somatic price tag on a family money story that never let you fully rest.
The phrase I keep returning to from Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher associated with the Trauma Research Foundation and author of The Body Keeps the Score, is how he describes trauma living in somatic and procedural memory, the implicit, body-based memory systems that run without conscious thought. For women carrying a family money story, this shows up as the visceral tightening when an unexpected charge appears, the sinking feeling before a money conversation with a partner, the dissociative fog when it’s time to look at the credit card bill. These aren’t character flaws. They’re body memories doing exactly what they were trained to do.
Janina Fisher, PhD, clinical psychologist and trauma specialist trained at Harvard Medical School, frames trauma responses as a fragmentation of the self into protective parts. A driven woman’s money story is often carried by one or more of these parts: the part that hoards because hoarding once kept the family afloat, the part that overspends because deprivation was once unbearable, the part that performs financial competence because vulnerability around money once meant punishment. Each of these parts, Fisher emphasizes, deserves understanding before it deserves to change.
Martin H. Teicher, MD, PhD, director of the Developmental Biopsychiatry Research Program at McLean Hospital, has documented the enduring neurobiological signatures of childhood stress on adult brain structure. Adult success doesn’t, by itself, rewire the brain. Only deliberate, attuned, nervous-system-aware healing does that.
This is the part that most financial-literacy advice misses entirely. You can’t budget your way out of a body memory. You can’t will yourself into financial peace when your nervous system was trained to expect financial war.
How Does the Family Money Story Show Up in Driven Women?
What makes the family money story so hard to spot in driven women is that it tends to wear extremely respectable clothing. It looks like discipline. It looks like ambition. It looks like leadership. Very often, it’s a résumé that everyone around you envies.
Leila, the founder I described at the top of this post, grew up in a household where money was a barometer of her father’s mood and her mother’s silence. Her father had been an immigrant who clawed his way into a small business, and his pride was wound tightly around what he could provide. When the business was good, he’d be expansive and warm. When the business was tight, the air in the house went thin. Leila, bright, attentive, already an excellent reader of rooms by age five, learned to track the air. She learned that her job was to need less, want less, ask for less, and earn approval through achievement that her parents could brag about to relatives.
By twenty-three, she’d paid off her own student loans. By thirty-three, she was a founder. And by 11:47 on a Tuesday night, she was still doing the same calculation she’d done at thirteen, just with bigger numbers. The calculation was never about money. It was about safety. The woman doing it was, in some functional sense, still the child outside her parents’ door, listening.
This is how the family money story shows up in driven women: as chronic underearning of the self even while overearning in the market, paying yourself last, undercharging clients. As compulsive financial vigilance, checking accounts more than is functional, an inability to enjoy money you’ve already earned. As secret financial shame, feeling like a fraud despite the numbers. As fawning around money, lending to family who don’t pay back, financially carrying friendships that aren’t reciprocal. As control disguised as competence, managing every dollar yourself because trust was never modeled at home.
And often, as a particular kind of hidden burnout: the woman who’s the financial engine of her household, her family of origin, sometimes her chosen family too, who hasn’t asked herself in a decade what her money is for. This pattern is so common in the women I see in trauma-informed executive coaching that I now name it out loud in the first session. The relief on their faces is its own diagnosis.
Shame, Secrecy, and the Status-Equals-Worth Trap
If you scratch most family money stories carried by driven women, you’ll find shame underneath. Sometimes it’s the shame of having grown up without. Sometimes it’s the shame of having grown up with, and feeling guilty for it. Sometimes it’s the shame of outearning a parent, a sibling, a partner. Sometimes it’s the shame of still, somehow, not feeling like enough.
Shame around money is uniquely isolating because it’s uniquely unspeakable. Most professional women I work with would more readily tell me about a difficult sex life than what they actually earn, or what they fear about losing it. Money’s the last taboo. And shame, as Brené Brown, PhD, MSW, research professor at the University of Houston, has spent her career documenting, can’t survive being spoken. It grows dense and immovable in the silence.
Couple shame with secrecy, the unspoken family rule that we don’t talk about it, and you get a quiet, lifelong financial loneliness. She’s the strategist, the negotiator, the household CFO, with nowhere safe to say I’m scared or I’m so tired. The competence becomes its own cage, and it’s a comfortable one.
“Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It’s an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there’s enough, and that we’re enough.”
Lynne Twist, global activist, fundraiser, and author of The Soul of Money
Then there’s the status-equals-worth trap. If you grew up somewhere the implicit math was your bank account is your value, you absorbed two messages: striving is survival, and any drop in income or visibility is a drop in personhood. So you keep climbing, not because you love the climb, but because the alternative’s like disappearing.
This is part of why so many of the women I see can’t rest. Rest feels like falling, like becoming invisible the way they were invisible at home when the money was tight. So they keep performing competence, keep building, well past the point where any rational financial planner would tell them they can stop. The planner’s talking to the spreadsheet. The body’s talking to a six-year-old.
This is also why traditional financial advice so often fails driven women. The advice’s not wrong. It’s just aimed at the wrong layer. You can’t fix a relational trauma with a Roth IRA. You can certainly use the Roth IRA, but only after the woman holding it stops being the seven-year-old holding her breath. For more on how relational wounds disguise themselves as practical problems, this is a thread I trace through my full betrayal trauma guide and in the work I do one-on-one with clients.
Both/And: Your Money Story Protected You AND It Is Quietly Bleeding You Out
One of the most important shifts I see driven women make in this work is the move from or to and. From I’m either grateful for what my family gave me or angry about what they didn’t, to both can be true. From I’m either a financial success or a woman with money wounds, to both, simultaneously, in the same body. The both/and isn’t a softening. It’s precision.
Your family money story protected you. Genuinely, it did. The hypervigilance that exhausts you now is the same hypervigilance that made you a seven-year-old who could read a room and adjust fast enough to keep things stable. The drive that built a company is the same drive that proved to a critical parent you were worth keeping safe. These protections weren’t stupid. They were survival, plain and simple. And they’re now costing you sleep, presence with your children, the ability to enjoy what you’ve built, and decades of allostatic load your body will quietly bill you for later if no one helps you set the bill down.
Maya’s a 47-year-old partner at a major law firm. Her family money story’s different from Leila’s. Maya grew up in a household that looked, from the outside, comfortably upper-middle-class. The inside told a different story, though. Her parents fought about money relentlessly, not because there wasn’t any, but because money was the chosen battlefield for control, resentment, infidelity, contempt. Maya learned, by nine, that money is what people use to hurt each other when they don’t have the language for what’s actually wrong.
So Maya became a litigator. She’s made enormous amounts of money over the years. She also chose a partner whose finances she ended up quietly carrying, without telling him, without telling her friends, without telling her therapist for the first two years we worked together. Her family money story said: love is bought, love is transactional, and if you don’t pay you don’t get to keep it. Her body believed it. Her bank account’d prove it, over and over.
The both/and for Maya looked like this: the part of her that paid for everything was the same part of her that had survived her childhood by becoming useful. That part’d earned its place. It had also, by mid-forties, gotten her into a marriage where she was financially invisible and emotionally starving. We didn’t ask her to fire the part. We asked her to thank it, and then to let other parts of her have some real estate too. Bari Tessler, MA, somatic financial therapist and author of The Art of Money, calls this kind of work “money healing,” and notes that it moves at the speed the body can actually integrate, not the speed the mind would like.
This is what both/and makes possible. It allows you to honor the strategy that got you here without pretending it’s the strategy that’ll take you forward. To thank your family of origin for what they did manage to give you, and to set down what was never yours to carry.
The Systemic Lens: Why Capitalism, Culture, and Patriarchy Keep the Story Alive
No woman’s money story exists in isolation. To treat this as purely a personal-psychology problem is to do the patriarchy’s work for it. The family money story you inherited was assembled in a specific cultural and economic context, and it’s actively reinforced, every day, by larger systems that profit from your unease.
Consider the data, because it’s telling. American women still earn, on average, less than men for equivalent work, and Black, Latina, and Indigenous women earn meaningfully less still. Women are far more likely to take on unpaid caregiving labor, invisible on a balance sheet and corrosive on a nervous system. These aren’t personal failures. They’re structural conditions.
Driven women also carry cultural narratives that shape what they’re “allowed” to want. The Good Daughter says: don’t outearn your father. The Good Wife says: defer to his earnings. The Good Mother says: sacrifice your own retirement account before touching the private-school fund. The Good Woman says: be financially competent but not financially powerful. These narratives weren’t invented by your family. Your family was inside them, the way fish are inside water, unaware there’s any other element.
Murray Bowen, MD, psychiatrist and founder of family systems theory at Georgetown University, taught that no individual can be understood apart from the multigenerational emotional system she was born into. The family money story, the cultural story, the gendered story: they nest like Russian dolls, and a driven woman opens all of them at once when she tries to renegotiate her relationship with money.
This is also why generic personal-finance content aimed at women so often falls flat. It’s treating the symptom without naming the structure. Bari Tessler, MA, names this explicitly: money healing is personal and political, and the two can’t be separated. Real financial healing requires both: the inner repair of the wounded child, and the outer reckoning with a culture that profits from her staying slightly afraid forever.
You won’t fix this in a quarter. You might not fix it in a decade. But you can begin, in your one body and your one life, to stop colluding with it. That’s enough.
How Do You Write a New Money Story From the Nervous System Up?
Healing a family money story isn’t a finance problem. It’s a nervous system problem with financial expressions. So the path forward has to start where the wound lives: in the body, in the relational field, in the implicit memory. And then move outward into behavior.
Here’s the rough architecture I walk women through, in both trauma-informed therapy and executive coaching:
One. Name your specific story, out loud, to someone safe. Not “I have money anxiety.” Specifically: “I’m the daughter of a father who measured worth in dollars and a mother who hid money from him, and I’m 41 years old and I can’t sit still on a Tuesday night.” Specificity is medicine. Vagueness keeps the story alive.
Two. Get curious about your body in money moments. Where do you tighten when you open the bank app? What happens to your breath when a client owes you money? What does your chest do when a partner brings up a big purchase? Porges’s work suggests these are neuroceptive signals. Data, not pathology.
Three. Map the parts. Following the parts-oriented trauma work of Janina Fisher, PhD: which part of you hoards? Which part overspends? Which part performs financial competence? Each part has a job. None of them are the enemy.
Four. Grieve. There’s real grief in noticing what your family of origin couldn’t give you around money: the sense of enoughness, the freedom from vigilance, the modeling of a regulated nervous system. The grief isn’t a detour. It’s the doorway.
Five. Build relational safety around money. Herman has long taught that trauma recovery requires the restoration of safe connection. Build at least one or two relationships, therapist, coach, peer, partner, group, where you can say true things about money without shame. The isolation has to break.
Six. Re-author behavior, at the body’s pace. Once safety is in place, you can experiment: charging full fee, setting a boundary with a family member, telling your partner what you actually earn. This is where new neural pathways live, in repeated experiments the nervous system feels are survivable.
Seven. Stay in community. Family money stories were built in relational context, and they heal in relational context. This is part of why I built Fixing the Foundations™, to give women a structured, trauma-informed container for this kind of slow, layered work, and why so many readers stay close through my Sunday newsletter.
If you’re not sure where to start, the simplest first step is also the bravest one: notice. Notice the body. Notice the story. Notice the part of you who first learned what money meant in your family of origin. She has been working very hard for a very long time. She deserves to be noticed before she’s asked to change. For a deeper diagnostic of which childhood patterns are quietly shaping your adult life, my Fixing the Foundations™ is a good place to begin. And if you want to talk about whether this is work we should do together, you’re welcome to reach out directly.
To the woman reading this who has been doing the math at 11:47 on a Tuesday night for as long as she can remember: you aren’t broken. You’re a person whose body learned, very early, that vigilance was love and counting was safety. There’s a way to set that down without abandoning the girl who built it. We go at your pace, and we go together.
Warmly, Annie.
Q: How do I tell whether my money anxiety is about my actual finances or my family of origin?
A: A useful test: if your accountant told you, in writing, that you were objectively safe, would the feeling in your body change? If yes, the anxiety is mostly current-circumstance based. If your body would keep doing what it’s doing regardless of the data, you’re almost certainly running a family money story. The body’s refusal to be reassured by reality is one of the cleanest signals you’re inside an inherited pattern, not a present-day problem.
Q: Why do I feel like a fraud about money even though I genuinely earned what I have?
A: Because in your family of origin, money likely had moral or relational meaning your adult achievements haven’t undone. If you grew up watching money become the thing your parents fought about, hid, or used as control, your nervous system filed money as dangerous, regardless of who’s holding it. Outearning the danger doesn’t dissolve it. Until the wound underneath is met directly, your body will keep treating your own competence as suspicious.
Q: I outearn my partner and I feel resentful, guilty, and scared all at once. Is that a family money story?
A: Almost certainly. Mixed feelings about outearning a partner are extremely common in driven women, and they almost always trace back to early messaging about gender, money, and worthiness. The Good Daughter and Good Wife scripts say a woman is allowed to be competent but not visibly powerful. The resentment, guilt, and fear are often three different parts of you responding to three different inherited rules. They can all be real, all be valid, and all be worth listening to without acting on automatically.
Q: My family is asking me for money in ways that feel uncomfortable. How do I think about that without abandoning them or abandoning myself?
A: There’s no universal answer here, but clinically: financial requests inside a family of origin almost always sit on top of older, non-financial debts. Love that wasn’t given, attention that wasn’t there. Before deciding what to give, get clear on what’s being asked and what part of you wants to say yes. A “yes” from a six-year-old trying to earn love lands differently than a “yes” from the adult version of you, choosing generously on her own terms.
Q: I’ve done a lot of personal-finance work, budgeting, investing, even a money coach. Why am I still anxious?
A: Because personal-finance work addresses behavior and math, but family money stories live in the body and the relational nervous system. You can have a beautifully optimized portfolio and still have a six-year-old inside you who’s never been told she’s safe. The work that moves the needle is somatic and relational, not because budgeting is wrong, but because the wound isn’t in the budget. It’s in the body memory.
Q: Will rewriting my money story damage my relationship with my parents?
A: It might shift it, and that’s often what driven women are most afraid of. But rewriting your money story isn’t a betrayal of your family. It’s a refusal to keep paying with your nervous system for an inheritance you didn’t choose. Some families adapt beautifully when one member starts handling money differently. Some don’t. Either way, your healing doesn’t require their permission, and a good trauma-informed therapist or coach can help you decide what to say, what to hold back, and how to carry the family-of-origin response without abandoning the work.
Q: How long does this kind of healing actually take?
A: Longer than you want, shorter than you fear. Most driven women I work with notice meaningful internal shifts in the first few months, usually around how their body feels in money moments, not yet what their bank account looks like. The behavioral and structural shifts tend to follow over one to three years of consistent, trauma-informed work. There’s no shortcut, but there’s also no version of this where you have to do it alone or in the dark.
Related Reading
Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Lewis_Herman
Porges, Stephen W. “The Polyvagal Perspective.” Biological Psychology 74, no. 2 (2007): 116-143. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17049418/
McEwen, Bruce S. “Protective and Damaging Effects of Stress Mediators.” New England Journal of Medicine 338, no. 3 (1998): 171-179. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9428819/
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Twist, Lynne. The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Tessler, Bari. The Art of Money: A Life-Changing Guide to Financial Happiness. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2016.
Teicher, Martin H., and Jacqueline A. Samson. “Annual Research Review: Enduring Neurobiological Effects of Childhood Abuse and Neglect.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 57, no. 3 (2016): 241-266. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26831814/
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.
- 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)
- Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. New York: Routledge, 2017.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
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, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
