The Family Money Story You Are Still Trying to Survive
For driven women, the financial patterns that feel hardest to shift rarely started with you. They started in the family system you were raised inside. Its roles, its loyalty binds, its class scripts, and the quiet rules about who can have, who must give, and what money is allowed to mean. This post unpacks how the family money story shapes adult financial life, why it’s so persistent, and what real differentiation looks like. Without abandoning the people you love.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Bills on the Counter, the Story Underneath
- What Is a Family Money Story?
- The Neurobiology: How a Family System Becomes a Body
- How the Family Money Story Shows Up in Driven Women
- Loyalty Binds, Class Scripts, and Financial Secrecy
- Both/And: You Can Love Your Family and Stop Living Inside Their Money Story
- The Systemic Lens: Money Carries Roles, Rules, and Belonging
- How to Heal: Differentiation as a Path Forward
- Frequently Asked Questions
The family money story is the set of beliefs, behaviors, and emotional associations around financial security that you absorbed in childhood emotional neglect, often without realizing it, and are still unconsciously enacting in your adult financial life. In my clinical work with driven women, I see money patterns that look like self-sabotage but are actually the nervous system executing the survival strategy it learned: whether that is never having enough, never keeping what you earn, or compulsively accumulating without ever feeling secure. Healing the family money story requires working at the level of nervous system and attachment, not just financial literacy.
The Bills on the Counter, the Story Underneath
The front door clicks shut behind Mei. In her arms. Groceries, a lunch she packed for her partner, the mail. On the kitchen counter, a small stack of unopened envelopes she’s been walking past for a week. The house is quiet in that specific weeknight way: the hum of the fridge, the faint, scorched smell from the toaster that morning.
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She sets the bags down. Her chest tightens before her hand even touches the envelopes. Not enough. Not safe. Not allowed to have more. The words aren’t hers, exactly. They’re older than that, more inherited.
She’s a woman in her early forties with a steady income, a healthy emergency fund, and a calendar full of people who would say she has it together. And still, the bills on her counter are not just bills. They are an old conversation.
They are a story she’s been quietly trying to survive her entire adult life.
Across the city, in a different kitchen, Jenny is holding her phone. A bonus has hit her account that afternoon. A real one, not a small one. Her family group chat is lit up with a thread about a cousin’s wedding. Her thumb hovers. Don’t say anything. They’ll ask. They’ll need.
She locks the phone and slides it into a drawer like it’s evidence. The relief is instant. So is the loneliness underneath it.
In my work with clients like Mei and Jenny, what I see consistently is this: the financial patterns that feel hardest to budge. The rescuing, the hiding, the obligation, the freeze. Almost never started with the woman in front of me.
They started in a family system, often generations before she was born, and live now in her body as if they were her own. They aren’t. They were absorbed.
What Is a Family Money Story?
Before we go further, it helps to name what we’re talking about. The family money story isn’t a metaphor. It’s a specific, observable pattern in family systems theory and the trauma literature. A transmission of beliefs, roles, and emotional rules around money that travels across generations whether the family talks about money or not.
The family money story is the collective set of beliefs, emotional responses, roles, and behavioral rules around money transmitted within a family system, shaping how individuals experience and act on financial matters across the lifespan. The framework draws on the Family Stress Model developed by Tricia Neppl, PhD, developmental psychologist at Iowa State University, and her colleagues, whose 2016 longitudinal paper in Journal of Family Psychology demonstrated that economic pressure inside a family system creates emotional distress and parenting disruption that ripples into the next generation (PMID 26551658). The intergenerational pathway is corroborated in 2022 work by Cynthia Harter, PhD, and John Harter, PhD, economists, showing adverse childhood experiences predict adult financial stress at every income level (PMID 34522076).
In plain terms: The family money story is the story about money you grew up inside. What was said and what was hushed, who managed it, who suffered, who was blamed, who got rescued, what money was allowed to mean. It lives in your body before it ever lives in your bank account. And it doesn’t disappear when your income changes. It just gets quieter, and trickier, and harder to see.
What makes the family money story so durable is that it’s rarely taught explicitly. Almost none of my clients can recall a parent explaining the family’s financial values. Instead, they absorbed the story by being in the room. Through tone, silence, and who got tense at the mailbox.
By the time a driven woman is in her thirties or forties wondering why she can’t stop sending money to a sibling, she is often still inside a story finalized before her tenth birthday. This is one layer of relational trauma in driven women that financial advice almost never reaches.
The Neurobiology: How a Family System Becomes a Body
The reason the family money story is so hard to think your way out of is that it isn’t, primarily, a thought. It’s a nervous-system pattern. Laid down early, in the body of a child who had no choice but to attune to the emotional climate around her.
Intergenerational transmission refers to the passage of patterns of stress response, emotion regulation, and relational behavior from one generation to the next through caregiving, modeling, and the developing child’s nervous system. The biological substrate has been articulated by Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of polyvagal theory, who established that “felt safety” is a biological state determined unconsciously through neuroception (PMID 35645742). Vincent Felitti, MD, and colleagues’ Adverse Childhood Experiences study, published in American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1998, established the dose-response link between early adversity and lifelong dysregulation across emotional, relational, and economic domains (PMID 9635069).
In plain terms: A child’s body is built by being near other bodies. If the bodies around her clenched at the mailbox, her body learned that the mailbox was dangerous. If the kitchen went silent when money was mentioned, her body learned that money was a thing you survived around. Not something you discussed. Decades later, that same body is still running the program, even if her résumé says the danger is long over.
Consider the mechanics. A child watches her the mother wound open a bill and exhale slowly. The mother says nothing. But the child’s nervous system reads the tightening shoulders, the quick glance toward the father, the pause before the next sentence. And stores it.
Over a thousand repetitions, it becomes a rule: money is the thing that makes the people I love clench. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score , has spent decades documenting how this embodied learning persists long after the original conditions have changed.
What makes this especially relevant for driven women is that ambition does not erase the imprint. Ambition is often a response to it. A way the nervous system tries to outrun the original threat by building a life that is supposed to feel safe.
The trouble is, the body building the safe life is the same body that learned, at six, that money meant her mother went silent. So she ends up with a healthy bank balance and a body that still flinches at the mail.
There’s no contradiction. There’s just an old program running on its original schedule. This same dynamic shows up in money trauma in driven women more broadly, and it’s why the spreadsheet, on its own, is never the answer.
How the Family Money Story Shows Up in Driven Women
The family money story rarely announces itself. It hides inside small, repeating moments that look. From the outside. Like personality, or generosity, or carefulness, or “just how I am with money.” Here’s how I see it presenting in driven women:
- An automatic yes to a sibling’s emergency, followed by a quiet, exhausted resentment you don’t quite let yourself feel
- A reluctance to share good financial news with family. A promotion, a bonus, a windfall. Even when nothing has been asked of you
- A persistent feeling of “not enough” that doesn’t match the math of your actual life
- Difficulty asking your partner about money, or knowing exactly what’s in your joint accounts, even when the relationship is stable
- A vague guilt around any visible enjoyment of your earnings
- A sense that your money is on loan from someone. Your family, your past self, the universe. And could be called back at any moment
- A quiet certainty that to grow your wealth past a certain line would be to betray someone
Take Mei. By any external metric, she’s doing well. A senior operations leader at a Bay Area company, married, with a paid-down mortgage and a real retirement account.
She is also, by family designation, the rescuer. The one who gets the call when a brother loses a job, a cousin needs a deposit, a parent’s roof needs urgent repair. She wires the money, recalculates her budget, and tells herself it’s nothing.
The knot under her sternum disagrees, but she’s stopped consulting it.
What surfaces when we slow down with Mei is not the present-day operations leader.
It’s Mei at nine, listening to her mother on the phone with a creditor, watching her father’s jaw tighten, absorbing. Without anyone saying it. That the family was held together by whoever could absorb the most without complaint.
The role she now plays was assigned to her decades before she had any say in it. This is one face of the fawn response showing up in finances. And it almost always traces back to the family system.
Then there’s Jenny. Jenny is a senior physician in her early forties. The first woman in her family to earn what she earns, by a wide margin. The bonus that hit her account would change a relative’s life.
She is also keenly aware that any acknowledgment of it in the family group chat would change the texture of every subsequent conversation. So she does what she has done for years: she makes the money invisible.
What surfaces with Jenny is a class script. A rule, never spoken aloud but binding, that to rise above the family is to abandon it. Her mother sacrificed everything so Jenny could have an education. The success Jenny has built is, on one level, the family’s success.
On another level, it is felt as a betrayal. So Jenny hides. It keeps the bonds intact. And costs her a subtle, persistent loneliness her closest friends don’t fully see.
Loyalty Binds, Class Scripts, and Financial Secrecy
Underneath the surface presentations. The rescuing, the hiding, the freeze. There are usually three structural mechanisms doing the actual work. Naming them precisely matters, because each one responds to slightly different healing.
A loyalty bind is a structural feature of family systems in which an individual feels emotionally compelled to remain aligned with family expectations or roles, even when those expectations conflict with her well-being or autonomy. The construct is grounded in family systems theory and in the foundational work of Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist, in Trauma and Recovery (1992), where she described how survival in unsafe systems requires children to suppress aspects of themselves that threaten the family’s organizing rules. In money, loyalty binds prevent financial differentiation through the perceived threat of disconnection. Consistent with the intergenerational pathway documented in the Family Stress Model (PMID 26551658).
In plain terms: A loyalty bind is when stepping outside the family’s money rules feels like a betrayal. Even when those rules are quietly hurting you. It’s why you keep saying yes when your body is clearly saying no. It’s why you hide good news. It’s why “just set a boundary” never quite works. The bind is real, and it has to be honored before it can be loosened.
For Mei, the loyalty bind is the dominant mechanism. The unspoken family rule was: we take care of each other, no matter the cost; if you don’t, you’re not really one of us. Refusing a request would feel, to her body, like exile. So she pays.
The bind is what makes “just set a boundary” land like a foreign-language instruction. Her nervous system reads boundary-setting as a threat to belonging. And that’s what has to be worked with, slowly and relationally, before any boundary can hold.
A class script is a culturally and familially transmitted narrative that shapes expectations and behaviors around money, consumption, ambition, and social belonging within a community of origin. Class scripts operate beneath conscious awareness and encode rules about who is allowed to have, who must give, what visible success means, and what upward mobility costs in family loyalty. Early class messaging predicts adult financial behavior independent of current income. Including in the work of Cynthia Harter, PhD, and John Harter, PhD (PMID 34522076).
In plain terms: A class script is the unspoken rulebook about money you absorbed from the world you grew up inside. What “people like us” do with money, what counts as enough, what counts as showing off, what kind of success is allowed before you start to feel like a stranger in your own family. It rarely gets said out loud. It almost never has to.
For Jenny, the class script is the loudest layer. She is a first-generation wealth creator inside a family that survived through frugality and sacrifice. The script she inherited isn’t don’t succeed. It’s subtler: if you succeed, succeed quietly. Don’t make us feel small.
Her hiding isn’t deceit. It’s an attempt to obey a rule her body absorbed long before she had a paycheck of her own. Healing it requires making the rule visible and slowly building tolerance for the discomfort of being seen.
Financial secrecy describes the systematic concealment of money information. Earnings, debts, assets, decisions. Within family systems, typically as a protective adaptation to environments where open discussion was unsafe, shameful, or destabilizing. It is widely observed in the family economic stress literature and is associated with reduced trust and reduced help-seeking. L.P. Hilbert and colleagues’ 2024 study in Psychological Research demonstrated experimentally that financial scarcity perception increases avoidance behavior independent of actual financial reality. A mechanism that drives both individual avoidance and the secrecy patterns embedded in family systems (PMID 39158712).
In plain terms: Financial secrecy is when money becomes a thing your family doesn’t talk about. Or only talks about in code, or only after a crisis. It looks protective, and on a short timeline it sometimes is. On a long timeline, it isolates everyone in the family from each other and from their own clear thinking. Breaking secrecy doesn’t mean broadcasting. It means starting to tell yourself the truth.
Both Mei and Jenny live with financial secrecy, in different shapes. Mei absorbs financial responsibility silently. Jenny hides her success to protect the family’s self-concept. Both are inside a system that handles money the way it handled most other vulnerable topics. By not handling it. Families that struggle to talk about money usually also struggle to talk about feelings, illness, and grief. Money is the canary.
Both/And: You Can Love Your Family and Stop Living Inside Their Money Story
One of the most important pieces of this work. And one of the most consistently misunderstood. Is the difference between leaving the family money story and leaving the family. They are not the same. Conflating them is a major reason women stay stuck for decades.
You can deeply love the people you came from. You can honor their sacrifices and their generosity. You can recognize that the rules they absorbed were forged in conditions much harder than yours. Economic precarity, displacement, war, racism, gendered constraint. And that those rules made sense for them.
You can hold all of that with real reverence, and still recognize, clearly, that you are not required to keep transmitting the same rules forward.
The Both/And looks like this:
- You can honor your mother’s lifetime of careful frugality and spend on your own care without it being a betrayal
- You can love your siblings and stop being the family ATM
- You can be proud of where you came from and let your success be visible to the people who came up with you
- You can keep the family’s emotional bonds intact and change the financial roles you’ve been playing inside them
- You can grieve what your parents didn’t have and let yourself have it
- You can be deeply loyal and deeply differentiated
This is not abandonment. It’s growth. It is what the family system at its best is supposed to produce. Adults who can carry the lineage forward without having to live inside its old constraints. Some families ask, subtly and not subtly, that you stay small to stay close.
The Both/And is the doorway out of that bargain. It says: I will not choose between belonging and selfhood. I will work, slowly, toward both.
Take Mei, eight months into the work. The next time her brother calls in crisis, she still feels the familiar tightening in her chest. But this time, she doesn’t immediately wire the money. She says, “I hear you.
Let me think about this and get back to you tomorrow.” She holds the discomfort of the pause. She talks to her partner. She talks to her therapist. The next day, she offers something. But a different something, calibrated to her actual capacity rather than to her old role.
The brother is briefly surprised. The family system creaks. Nothing collapses. Mei’s nervous system, slowly, begins to learn that she can stay connected and be a different person. That is differentiation. That is Both/And lived out in real time.
The Systemic Lens: Money Carries Roles, Rules, and Belonging
It would be incomplete to talk about the family money story as if it lived only inside the individual woman, or even only inside her family of origin. It doesn’t. It is shaped and reinforced by systems much larger than the people in the room.
The Family Stress Model, developed and tested by Tricia Neppl, PhD, and her colleagues, demonstrates that economic pressure on a family system creates emotional distress and couple conflict that ripples through parenting and lands in the developing nervous systems of the children ( PMID 26551658 ).
What children absorb isn’t “money is hard.” What they absorb is my mother’s voice changed when she opened the mail; my father got distant when his hours got cut; the kitchen got quieter at the end of the month.
They internalize a felt sense of a family under pressure. And grow up into adults who run that felt sense beneath their own financial decisions, regardless of what their bank balance now says.
Layered on top of the family system is gender. driven women inherit a particular set of cultural and familial expectations about money and caretaking. The implicit job description that they will hold the household’s financial vigilance, model frugality, absorb shortage gracefully, and treat their own needs as luxury or selfishness.
This is structural, not personality-based. Soomin Ryu, PhD, and Lu Fan, PhD, established in their 2023 paper in Journal of Family and Economic Issues that financial worry is significantly associated with psychological distress among U.S. adults, with the burden falling disproportionately on women ( PMID 35125855 ).
The spreadsheet isn't the problem. You already know that.
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The driven woman doing the family’s emotional bookkeeping is not, in most cases, broken. She is performing a role assigned to her by a system much older than she is.
Layered on top of gender is class. And, in many families, race, immigration history, and the specific economic conditions her ancestors survived. A daughter of immigrants who watched her parents work three jobs will absorb a different scarcity script than a daughter of inherited generational wealth. Both scripts carry weight.
This is the layer that sits underneath scarcity that persists after a wealthy childhood , and underneath the very different scarcity that follows generational poverty.
So when a driven woman shows up in my office unable to understand why she can’t stop rescuing, hiding, or shrinking. I’m not interested in convincing her the rules are arbitrary. I’m interested in helping her see the system the rules were forged in. The rules made sense once.
They protected someone. The work of healing the family money story is not to discard them in contempt. It is to understand them well enough to choose which ones still belong in her life.
This is the same systemic lens I bring to childhood relational trauma work , and the same lens structured into Fixing the Foundations™ .
How to Heal: Differentiation as a Path Forward
Healing the family money story is not a five-step plan, and any blog post that tells you it is should make you skeptical. What I can offer here is the architecture I see actually work for driven women. The parts that, in combination, produce durable change.
Begin with curiosity, not correction. The first move is not to reform yourself. It is to notice what you do around money. The rescuing, the hiding, the freeze, the over-giving. And to get curious about what role you might be playing inside an older script. Ask: Whose voice is in my head? Whose loyalty am I protecting? The questions don’t need immediate answers. They need a quality of attention.
Map the family system. On paper or with a therapist, name the roles. Who was the rescuer in your family of origin? The hider? The controller? The scapegoat? The invisible one? Where did you fit?
Recognizing that the role was assigned, not chosen, is often the first time a woman gives herself permission to step out of it. This pairs naturally with the kind of work inherited trauma alongside inherited wealth requires.
Make the rules visible. Sit with a journal and finish these sentences without editing: In my family, money meant… My mother’s relationship with money was… My father’s relationship with money was… The unspoken rule about a woman like me having more was… If I succeed past my family, what happens?
What surfaces is the script. Once it’s visible, it loses some of its grip. This kind of money story excavation is, in my experience, one of the highest-leverage moves a driven woman can make.
Practice small, specific differentiation. Differentiation isn’t a single dramatic conversation. It is a thousand small choices that teach your nervous system you can stay connected and be a separate person. A delayed yes. An honest no. A piece of good news shared with one trusted person. A small luxury enjoyed without explanation. The reps matter more than the size.
Build embodied safety. This is where insight has to give way to physiology. Grounding, slow exhale-extended breathing (which engages the vagal brake), gentle movement, and somatic healing for driven women therapy modalities are not optional add-ons. For nervous-system-rooted issues, they are the work. You cannot reason your way out of a body-based response to family loyalty.
Heal in relationship. The family money story was learned relationally. It heals relationally. A trauma-informed therapist, a coaching container, a partner who can hold the conversation without flinching. These are the corrective experiences your nervous system has been waiting for.
Teresa López-Castro, PhD, clinical psychologist, and her colleagues’ 2019 meta-analysis in Journal of Traumatic Stress established that shame is moderately and significantly associated with posttraumatic stress symptoms ( PMC7500058 ). Meaning the shame attached to your family’s money story is a known feature of trauma physiology, and it is highly responsive to relational repair.
This is exactly what we work on in individual therapy and trauma-informed executive coaching .
Pair financial coaching with emotional healing. Driven women rarely need more financial education. They need practical financial scaffolding integrated with nervous-system, family-of-origin, and relational work. That combination is what creates change that holds. And is the architecture of Fixing the Foundations, my signature relational trauma recovery course.
Be patient. The family money story took generations to form and decades to install in you. It will not uninstall in a quarter. The clients who do this work most successfully treat themselves with at least the same patience they extend to their teams. For a gentler entry point, the Sunday conversation in Strong & Stable is a real beginning.
What I want you to know is this: the heaviness you feel around the bills, the family group chat, the bonus you haven’t told anyone about. It is not a character flaw. It is the legible signal of a story handed to you long before you could refuse it.
You don’t have to outearn it, outperform it, or out-discipline it. You have to meet it. And in meeting it. Slowly, relationally, with the right kind of help. You get to start writing a different one. The bills get opened. The role gets renegotiated. The love stays.
Q: How do I know whether my financial patterns really come from my family money story?
A: A useful test is whether the pattern matches the math of your current life. If your behavior with money. The rescuing, the hiding, the freeze, the chronic “not enough”. Persists regardless of how your income changes, that’s a strong signal that what you’re working with is inherited rather than situational. Reflecting on your earliest money memories often surfaces the through-line in a single sitting.
Q: What is a loyalty bind, and how does it show up in money?
A: A loyalty bind is the felt sense that stepping outside the family’s rules would be a betrayal. In money, it shows up as automatic over-giving, an inability to share good financial news, or a chronic pull to stay financially small. Recognizing it as a bind, rather than an inevitability, is the first move toward loosening it.
Q: Can class scripts shape my finances even if I’m financially comfortable now?
A: Yes, and almost universally. Class scripts shape what feels like “too much,” what counts as showing off, and what upward mobility costs you in belonging. They run beneath income. Which is why a senior physician or executive can earn a significant salary and still feel, somatically, like a teenager who shouldn’t be asking for anything.
Q: Why is financial secrecy so persistent in families, and is it always harmful?
A: Financial secrecy is persistent because, on a short timeline, it appears protective. Over a long timeline, it isolates members from each other and tracks with secrecy around other vulnerable topics. Breaking it doesn’t mean broadcasting. It often starts with telling yourself the truth, in writing or therapy, before any family conversation.
Q: What does differentiation actually mean. And isn’t it just another word for cutting people off?
A: No. Differentiation, as developed in family systems theory, is the capacity to be your own clear self while staying in relationship. Cut-off is reactive distance; differentiation is a steady internal sense of self that doesn’t collapse under family pressure. In money, it looks like making choices aligned with your values without needing to argue, defend, or sever ties.
Q: Is it selfish to set financial boundaries with family?
A: No. It’s a precondition for sustainable relationship. A driven woman who keeps absorbing financial demands at the cost of her own stability eventually has nothing left to offer. And the resentment underneath the giving tends, over time, to corrode the bonds she’s trying to protect. Boundaries are what make long-term love possible.
Q: How does inherited scarcity affect adult financial decisions, even at higher incomes?
A: Inherited scarcity registers in the body as a baseline state of “not enough,” largely independent of current resources. It drives anxiety, avoidance, over-work, and chronic vigilance around money. L.P. Hilbert and colleagues’ 2024 work shows scarcity changes behavior even when actual resources are sufficient. Naming the gap between inherited scarcity and current reality is one of the most clarifying moves in this work.
Q: I recognize myself as the rescuer in my family. Where do I start?
A: Start by noticing the role rather than trying to abandon it. Pay attention to what gets activated when a request comes in. The chest tightness, the urge to fix it immediately. Practice a delayed yes: let me think about it and get back to you tomorrow. That single pause gives your nervous system time to consult something other than the original rule.
Q: Can therapy or coaching actually help, or do I just need a financial planner?
A: A financial planner helps with the math. A trauma-informed therapist or coach helps with the family-of-origin patterns, the loyalty binds, and the nervous-system responses underneath the math. Most driven women I work with need both, and they find that financial advice finally holds only after the trauma layer has been addressed.
Q: Where do I start if I recognize myself in this article?
A: Start small and start somatically. Notice when your family money story gets activated. At the mailbox, in the group chat, after a bonus. And track what your body does without trying to fix it yet. Then, if you want a structured path, look at Fixing the Foundations for the relational trauma layer or work with a trauma-informed therapist or coach.
Related Reading
- Felitti, Vincent J., Robert F. Anda, Dale Nordenberg, et al. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (1998): 245, 258. PMID 9635069.
- Harter, Cynthia L., and John F. R. Harter. “The Link Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Financial Security in Adulthood.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 43, no. 4 (2022): 832, 842. PMID 34522076.
- Neppl, Tricia K., Jennifer M. Senia, and M. Brent Donnellan. “Effects of Economic Hardship: Testing the Family Stress Model Over Time.” Journal of Family Psychology 30, no. 1 (2016): 12, 21. PMID 26551658.
- Porges, Stephen W. “Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety.” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience 16 (2022): 871227. PMID 35645742.
- Hilbert, L. P., M. K. Noordewier, L. Seck, et al. “Financial Scarcity and Financial Avoidance: An Eye-Tracking and Behavioral Experiment.” Psychological Research (2024). PMID 39158712.
- López-Castro, Teresa, Talia Saraiya, Rebecca Zumberg-Smith, and Denise Hien. “Association Between Shame and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 32, no. 4 (2019): 484, 495. PMC7500058.
- Ryu, Soomin, and Lu Fan. “The Relationship Between Financial Worries and Psychological Distress Among U.S. Adults.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 44, no. 1 (2023): 16, 33. PMID 35125855.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- Bowen, Murray. Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. New York: Jason Aronson, 1978.
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.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
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 25,000 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.
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