First-Generation Women at Goldman, Blackstone, and a16z: The Specific Loneliness of the Lobby Badge Gate
Dani has swiped her Goldman Sachs badge more than four hundred times, and the lobby still doesn’t feel like hers. The badge gate isn’t just a door. It’s a daily instrument that measures a class line she’s crossed but hasn’t yet been welcomed across. This piece looks at the specific, embodied loneliness first-generation women carry inside elite finance firms, and what it actually takes to stop performing a class you weren’t born into without losing the job you earned.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The loneliness first-generation women describe at firms like Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and a16z isn’t isolation. It’s proximity to a class of belonging they were never issued a key to.
- Class passing is documented labor: performing fluency in a class you weren’t raised inside, sustained for twelve-hour days, year after year.
- Questions like “where did you summer?” function as microaggressions. The body registers them as threat before the mind finishes parsing the words.
- Decoding an elite firm’s unwritten rules isn’t the same as being embraced by it. Earned and unbelonged can both be true on the same morning.
- When firms diversify by class without changing the underlying rituals, the adaptation cost lands on the hire’s nervous system.
- Healing doesn’t require quitting the job. It requires enough internal safety to stop performing fluency every waking hour.
- Dani Has Swiped Her Goldman Badge Four Hundred and Ninety-Two Times and the Gate Still Feels Conditional
- Who I Am and Why I Know This
- The Specific Loneliness of Being the First-Generation Woman in a Room Built by and for the Inherited Class
- Why “Where Did You Summer?” Is Not a Casual Question on Wall Street
- The Six Class-Coded Rituals First-Gen Women Decode in Their First Eighteen Months
- The Cost of Code-Switching at the Goldman / Blackstone / a16z Frequency, Twelve Hours a Day
- Both/And: You Earned the Badge AND the Building Was Not Built With You in Mind
- Systemic Lens: When a Firm “Diversifies” by Class Without Changing the Rituals, the Cost Falls on the Hire’s Body
- What It Looks Like to Stop Performing Inherited-Class Fluency Without Quitting the Job
- Frequently Asked Questions
Dani Has Swiped Her Goldman Badge Four Hundred and Ninety-Two Times and the Gate Still Feels Conditional
Dani leans forward under the fluorescent wash of the lobby lights, a Brooks Brothers jacket tag still tucked behind her sleeve seam. It’s 6:52 on a Monday morning. A Pret coffee, large, oat milk, no sugar, has already gone lukewarm in her hand. The security guard’s eyes flick to her badge as she swipes it, and the gate buzzes open with its usual mechanical certainty. The weight in her chest doesn’t lift.
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A text from her mother sits unanswered in her pocket. Abuela’s pressure is up again, call when you can. Sent at 5:41 a.m. Newark time. Dani is fourteen months into this job. She’s done the math more than once: four hundred and ninety-two swipes, give or take a few sick days. The lobby fills with analysts around her, and her body does the thing it still does most mornings, tightening at the edges, bracing, as if someone might ask for a second form of identification proving she belongs here.
Roslyn’s voice comes back to her from a hallway conversation the week before. “Where do your parents summer?” Dani had answered honestly. Newark. The laugh that followed wasn’t cruel, exactly. It was reflexive, the sound of someone hearing a punchline they hadn’t expected. Dani smiled and let the elevator carry them both up.
Who I Am and Why I Know This
I’m Annie Wright, a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach who has spent more than fifteen years working with driven women, many of them first in their families to hold a job title their parents don’t fully understand. A meaningful share of my caseload has come from finance: analysts, associates, and partners at firms whose names carry weight the moment you say them out loud.
I want to be careful here about what I can and can’t claim. I’m not an economist, and I haven’t run a study on class mobility inside investment banks. What I have is fifteen years of clinical hours with women living this exact tension, and a working familiarity with the research on class passing and microaggressions that gives language to what I keep seeing in the room. Where I’m drawing on research, I’ll say whose work it is. Where I’m drawing on clinical observation, I’ll say that plainly too.
The Specific Loneliness of Being the First-Generation Woman in a Room Built by and for the Inherited Class
Dani’s loneliness isn’t the loneliness of isolation. It’s the loneliness of proximity: being physically present in a room that was never designed with her in mind. The Goldman lobby, the Blackstone offices on Park Avenue, the a16z campus in Menlo Park. None of these spaces are neutral. They carry the accumulated weight of a class of people whose parents belonged to country clubs Dani’s parents have never set foot in.
This loneliness lives in the body before it reaches language. It’s the tightening in the throat when a senior associate mentions a family compound in Nantucket. The quickened pulse at the word “legacy,” used casually to mean something about admissions that has nothing to do with merit. It’s the specific ache of sensing that your family’s sacrifices, the double shifts, the community college nights, the years of coupon-clipping that put you here, are either invisible to the room or, worse, a story someone finds charming at a dinner party.
Alfred Lubrano, a journalist and the author of Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, coined the term to describe the cognitive and physical labor of performing fluency in a social class you weren’t raised inside. I first came across Lubrano’s book years ago, recommended by a client who said, “This is the first thing I’ve read that describes my actual life,” and I’ve handed it to more clients since than almost any other book on my shelf that isn’t a clinical text.
In plain terms: You work every day to speak the language, wear the clothes, and move through rooms like you belong there. Even when your body still remembers exactly where you’re actually from.
In the vast lobby of 200 West Street, Dani is a small figure against the scale of Goldman’s headquarters, glass and polished stone and the low hum of early commuters. Fourteen months in, the room still reads to her like a language she’s translating rather than speaking natively. Every swipe of her badge answers a mechanical question. It doesn’t answer the other one: whether she’s actually welcome on the floor above.
Her jacket still has the clearance tag tucked behind the seam, a small private admission that she bought it on sale and hasn’t told anyone. What Dani carries every morning through that gate is what the research on class passing and code-switching calls invisible labor: the tightened jaw, the accelerated heartbeat, the constant low-grade vigilance of a body that’s learned this room can turn on her without warning. It’s one of the most under-named forms of exhaustion I see in first-generation clients, because nobody at the firm has a category for it, and neither, often, do they.
Why “Where Did You Summer?” Is Not a Casual Question on Wall Street
The question that lands hardest for Dani isn’t really a question about summer. It’s a sorting mechanism, and her body knows this even when her mind is still catching up. “Where do your parents summer?” is small talk only for the person who already has an easy, unremarkable answer. For Dani, it’s a test she didn’t study for, administered in an elevator, graded instantly.
Derald Wing Sue, PhD, a psychologist whose work on microaggressions I return to constantly in my own clinical thinking, defines these moments as brief, often unintentional exchanges that communicate exclusion. I remember reading his research years into my practice and feeling something click into place about clients I’d been seeing for months. What I’d been treating as generalized anxiety in several first-generation professionals was, in a number of cases, something more specific: a nervous system responding, in real time, to a steady diet of exactly the kind of interaction Sue describes, just recoded as socioeconomic class instead of race.
Derald Wing Sue, PhD, professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, defines microaggressions as brief, commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that communicate exclusion. Applied to class, the exclusion is based on socioeconomic origin rather than race or gender alone.
In plain terms: It’s the small, often unintentional comment that says “you don’t belong here,” and your nervous system hears it long before your conscious mind finishes the sentence.
Here’s what this looks like in an actual Tuesday-afternoon body. Dani answers “Newark.” Roslyn laughs, not maliciously, just reflexively. Dani’s heart rate spikes. Her jaw tightens. Something drops in her stomach, the same drop she gets when a client relationship goes sideways mid-deal. She smiles, nods, keeps the conversation moving, because stopping the elevator to explain her mother’s two jobs is not something the room has room for. That whole sequence, question, laugh, spike, mask, takes about four seconds. It costs her the rest of the morning.
Workplace culture at firms like Blackstone and a16z compounds this in ways that rarely show up in an engagement survey. Golf outings. Yacht weekends. Membership-only clubs where the real relationship-building happens. These aren’t neutral bonding rituals. For a first-generation woman, they function as a second interview process that never appears in the offer letter, where the price of admission is a childhood she didn’t have.
The Six Class-Coded Rituals First-Gen Women Decode in Their First Eighteen Months
Dani arrived at the firm with a degree, real technical skill, and a work ethic nobody has ever questioned. What she didn’t arrive with was the hidden curriculum: unwritten rituals that determine who reads as fluent and who reads as still learning the language. In eighteen months, she’s decoded roughly six of them. The vacation-home reference. The dining etiquette at partner dinners. The difference between “networking,” which is sanctioned, and “schmoozing,” which somehow isn’t, despite looking identical from across the room. The cadence of confidence that reads as competence rather than aggression. The unspoken wardrobe rules. The coffee order, trivial until you’ve spent six weeks memorizing someone else’s.
Decoding six rituals in eighteen months is exhausting labor. It demands constant vigilance, a full-body calibration, fitting yourself into a room that feels simultaneously too small and too vast. Here’s the part that took me longest to help clients like Dani sit with: knowing the code isn’t the same as being welcomed by it. You can pass every test and still not be handed the thing you were actually taking the test for.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Audre Lorde, poet and essayist, A Burst of Light
Tina Opie, PhD, associate professor at Babson College, describes cultural code-switching as the identity-shifting behavior people adopt under pressure to conform inside elite professional environments. I’ve come to think of Opie’s framing as one of the more precise descriptions I’ve found for what my first-generation clients narrate in session, because it names the shifting itself as labor, not personality.
In plain terms: You become fluent in two worlds, the one you come from and the one you work in, and you shift between them constantly just to get through the day.
For first-generation analysts like Dani, the question about summer plans is rarely delivered with malice, which is part of what makes it so disorienting. It’s a microaggression precisely because it doesn’t announce itself as one. It quietly confirms, one more time, that her experience is different enough to be a source of mild amusement rather than a shared reference point.
I remember a client early in my practice, outside finance but close enough in structure, who told me, “I know exactly what’s happening when it happens. Knowing doesn’t make it stop hurting.” That sentence has stayed with me for years. The laugh that follows Dani’s answer isn’t cruel. It still costs her something. Her body treats the exposure of her background as a small, repeated threat, and repeated small threats add up to something that looks, clinically, a great deal like chronic stress.
This question functions as a ritualized fluency check, measuring whether your answer matches the expected shape: summer homes, a family boat, a familiar country club. When your answer deviates, Newark instead of Nantucket, it registers as otherness, and otherness activates the sympathetic nervous system the same way any perceived threat does. Dani’s actual job that day is deal modeling. Her unpaid second job is managing what her nervous system does in response to questions like Roslyn’s.
The Cost of Code-Switching at the Goldman / Blackstone / a16z Frequency, Twelve Hours a Day
Code-switching at an elite firm isn’t occasional. It’s a twelve-hour performance repeated most days of the week, for years. By the end of a long day, Dani’s voice has softened into something that isn’t quite her own, the accent smoothed, the vocabulary curated to match the room. Over time, this constant shifting drains something specific: her sense that there’s a version of herself she doesn’t have to manage.
The cost isn’t only emotional. It shows up in muscle tension, in headaches that arrive on a schedule, in sleep that doesn’t restore the way it used to. This is the invisible labor of straddling two worlds, and it rarely gets acknowledged, because from the outside, all anyone sees is a woman who’s clearly thriving.
“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.”
Maya Angelou, poet, “Still I Rise”
Pauline Rose Clance, PhD, the psychologist who originated impostor phenomenon research, described a persistent sense of fraudulence despite clear evidence of competence. The class-based variant, which I see constantly in first-generation clients, ties that fraudulence to socioeconomic origin rather than gender alone.
In plain terms: You know you earned your seat. Your body still insists you’re one bad meeting away from being found out.
The first eighteen months at a firm like Goldman or Blackstone function as an initiation. For first-generation women, that initiation carries an extra layer most peers never complete: decoding class-coded rituals while learning the actual job. Golf swings. The unspoken hierarchy of who speaks first in the elevator. The social choreography of a networking dinner where the real evaluation happens under the small talk.
I’ve come to call this pattern the second job nobody puts on the org chart: the constant modulation of speech, dress, and body language required to read as fluent in a class you weren’t raised inside, running quietly underneath the actual work of the job. Dani notices this most sharply at the badge gate, which has become a small daily test of whether she still belongs on the other side of it, even as her body keeps signaling that something in the equation still doesn’t add up. Alfred Lubrano’s straddler concept names this precisely: belonging fully to neither the class of origin nor the class of destination. For more, visit the Women in Finance Resource Hub.
Dani isn’t the only one carrying this. At a different fund a mile uptown, the same weight shows up differently, but it shows up.
It’s 9:40 on a Wednesday night, four blocks from the Blackstone offices on Park Avenue, and Adia is still at her desk with a half-eaten Sweetgreen bowl going soft beside her monitor. She’s twenty-nine, an associate two years into a fund she worked eleven years to get a seat at, and the fluorescent overhead light has that late-shift hum that makes everything feel slightly underwater. Her phone buzzes. A cousin’s baby shower invitation, Saturday, two states away. She hasn’t answered yet.
“I used to think the hard part would be the modeling,” she told me, months into our work together, turning her coffee cup slowly on the table between us. “Nobody warns you the hard part is remembering which version of yourself you’re supposed to be in which meeting. I have a whole different voice for the IC deck review than I have for my mom on the phone. I switch it on like a light. I don’t even think about it anymore, and that’s the part that scares me. What if I forget how to turn it back off.”
Sitting with Adia in my office that afternoon, I felt the particular quiet that shows up when a client says something true she hasn’t said out loud before. Not panic. Something closer to grief, arriving late and unannounced.
I’ve come to call this the light-switch self, the version of a first-generation professional that gets so practiced at toggling between worlds that she loses track, eventually, of which setting is actually hers. What Adia was describing wasn’t a communication skill. It was a slow erosion of the felt sense that there’s a self underneath the switching at all.
Both/And: You Earned the Badge AND the Building Was Not Built With You in Mind
At the badge gate, Dani holds a paradox in her body every single morning. She earned the credentials, the interviews, the offer, the analyst seat at one of the most competitive firms in the world. And the gate still feels conditional, as though her badge could be quietly revoked the moment someone decides she doesn’t fit. Both things are true. The gate recognizes her officially. It hasn’t yet recognized her fully.
That tension shows up in small, specific ways. The clearance tag she still hasn’t cut off the jacket. The coffee order she rehearsed rather than chose. The text from her mother that pulls her, mid-swipe, back into a world the building has no language for. None of this means Dani doesn’t belong. It means belonging, for a first-generation woman in this kind of room, is rarely a single yes. It’s a negotiation renewed daily.
Alfred Lubrano defines the straddler as someone living between two social classes without fully belonging to either, a pattern common among first-generation professionals inside elite institutions.
In plain terms: You carry the values of where you came from and the demands of where you landed, and the space between them is lonelier than anyone tells you it will be.
Twelve-hour code-switching isn’t a linguistic exercise. It’s a sustained, full-body performance layered on top of the actual demands of deal work, client management, and the twelve-hour day itself. Tina Opie’s research names the fatigue that accumulates from this kind of sustained identity-shifting, and I think it explains something clinicians in finance-adjacent practices see constantly and rarely name correctly: burnout in first-generation employees that looks, on paper, identical to burnout in their peers, but has an entirely different mechanism underneath it. The nervous system isn’t just tired from the hours. It’s tired from performing fluency for every one of those hours.
This is where class and gender start to overlap in a way that compounds the load. Dani isn’t only managing the class-based impostor phenomenon Clance’s framework describes. She’s managing it inside a broader environment where she’s also carrying the daily weight of being one of a small number of women in the room. The double calculation, am I performing class correctly, am I performing gender correctly, running simultaneously, is exhausting in a way that single-axis frameworks don’t fully capture. Executive coaching built specifically around this kind of identity load can help; explore trauma-informed executive coaching designed for driven women managing exactly this kind of layered performance.
Systemic Lens: When a Firm “Diversifies” by Class Without Changing the Rituals, the Cost Falls on the Hire’s Body
Most diversity initiatives at elite firms focus on race and gender. Class remains close to invisible as a category of exclusion, which means a firm can hire more first-generation women without touching the rituals and social architecture built for the inherited class. The cost of adaptation gets handed to the new hire.
That systemic failure shows up in a specific place: Dani’s shoulders, her sleep, the nights she replays a meeting wondering if the room has space for her. It’s a cost paid in exhaustion and self-doubt inside institutions that market themselves publicly as newly welcoming.
Derald Wing Sue, PhD, notes that systemic microaggressions based on class show up as environmental and interpersonal signals that quietly maintain existing boundaries, even inside institutions actively trying to diversify.
In plain terms: The system stays the same and expects you to be the one who changes. That expectation is what wears down your body over time.
“The most notable fact our culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.”
Adrienne Rich, poet and essayist, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Of course this is exhausting. Dani isn’t imagining the weight of it, and she isn’t failing at some skill everyone else has already mastered. She’s solving an equation that was rigged before she walked in the door: perform fluency in a class you weren’t raised inside, for twelve hours a day, while doing an objectively demanding job, and don’t let anyone see the seams. That’s not a personal deficiency. That’s the actual math of the situation.
Holding both truths at once, I earned this and this room wasn’t built for me, creates real cognitive dissonance. Dani’s mind knows she belongs on the far side of the badge gate. Her body, more often than not, disagrees. That kind of sustained dissonance can show up clinically as anxiety, a low hum of depersonalization, or the persistent sensation of being on edge in a room where nothing overtly threatening is happening. None of this erases what the badge represents. It marks Dani’s own effort and her family’s sacrifices, both at once.
What It Looks Like to Stop Performing Inherited-Class Fluency Without Quitting the Job
Stopping the performance of inherited-class fluency doesn’t require leaving the firm, and it doesn’t require abandoning ambition. For Dani, and for the first-generation women I’ve worked with who reach this point, it means something quieter: reclaiming a body that has spent years bracing, and finding ways to show up without erasing the parts of herself that got her here.
Sometimes this starts small. Ordering the coffee she actually wants instead of the one she memorized. Letting a moment of real fatigue show in a meeting instead of performing bottomless capacity. Setting a boundary around a Sunday she needs back. It means redefining belonging to include imperfection rather than flawless fluency.
I still think about a client, not from this exact firm but from a nearly identical world, who told me the turning point wasn’t a big confrontation. It was the week she stopped correcting her own accent in meetings and noticed nothing happened. No one commented. No one demoted her. The floor she’d been bracing for, for years, simply wasn’t there that particular week. That doesn’t mean the floor never exists. It means the constant bracing had cost her more than the actual risk warranted, and she hadn’t had a way to know that until she tested it.
Healing this kind of embodied loneliness takes more than individual effort. It requires systemic change most firms haven’t begun to attempt. Inside the space a woman carves out for herself, even a small one, there’s room to breathe differently than she did a year ago.
When a firm diversifies by class without touching the underlying rituals, the cost lands on the bodies of exactly the people it claims to be welcoming. Hiring metrics alone can’t repair embodied exclusion. Over time, the allostatic load, the cumulative wear from sustained stress activation, the vigilance, the code-switching, the class-based impostor phenomenon running in the background, raises real risk for anxiety, depression, burnout, and physical conditions like hypertension. This isn’t abstraction. It’s what chronic activation of the nervous system actually does to a body across years, not weeks.
Addressing this seriously requires more than resilience training for the new hire. It requires firms willing to examine which of their rituals are actually necessary and which are simply inherited gatekeeping dressed up as culture. Programs like Fixing the Foundations™, my signature course for relational trauma recovery, offer one entry point for the internal work. They aren’t a substitute for the institutional change that also has to happen.
Bonnie Badenoch, a clinician and writer in interpersonal neurobiology whose work I return to often when I’m explaining nervous-system attunement to clients who think in spreadsheets, describes exactly this kind of unacknowledged somatic labor. It’s the cost that rarely gets named outside a therapy room, which is part of why I keep naming it here. A family system shaped by financial scarcity or unpredictability tends to produce a nervous system already primed for threat detection well before the first day of a new job. Dani’s early-morning text about her grandmother isn’t incidental to that; it anchors her in a caregiving role that spans real geographic and class distance, adding weight to a day that’s already asking plenty of her.
In practical terms, this can look like reframing the badge gate itself. Not as a symbol of exclusion, but as a threshold Dani gets to decide the meaning of. When a woman stops performing inherited-class fluency to survive, she risks something real in the firm’s visible hierarchy. She also gains something that doesn’t show up on a performance review: an internal floor that holds even when the room doesn’t fully see her. The somatic work built in therapy with Annie and in Fixing the Foundations gives clients tools to calm a nervous system that’s been hypervigilant about belonging for longer than is useful.
Repairing this kind of layered trauma tends to benefit from more than one entry point: individual therapy, executive coaching, community, structural advocacy where a woman has standing to push for it. If you’re ready to look at this more closely, working one-on-one with Annie combines nervous-system work with leadership development built for exactly this kind of pressure. If you’re not ready for that yet, the newsletter is a lower-stakes place to keep thinking alongside this material.
Dani earned the badge. The building’s rituals weren’t built with her in mind. Holding both, instead of resolving them into a simpler story, is the work. For women ready to start, there are several ways to connect, each meeting the reality of class trauma in finance where it actually lives: in the body, on a Tuesday morning, at a gate that buzzes open every single time and still asks its quiet question anyway.
Warmly, Annie.
Q: Is “class trauma” actually a real thing, or am I overthinking my parents’ jobs?
A: Class trauma is a real, researched pattern, not overthinking. It develops from the embodied experience of crossing class boundaries, often carrying alienation and chronic stress with it. Your parents’ sacrifices are part of that lived reality, and they’ve shaped your nervous system’s sense of belonging in ways that are real even when they aren’t fully conscious.
Q: Why does the building still feel conditional fourteen months in?
A: Elite firm lobbies carry unspoken cultural codes about who belongs, and those codes don’t reset just because you’ve badged in for a year. Your body may still track subtle signals reminding you the space wasn’t built with you in mind. That produces the specific feeling of being recognized but not fully embraced.
Q: How do I answer “where did you summer?” without lying and without shrinking?
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A: That question carries class assumptions baked into its phrasing. You can answer honestly and redirect: “I grew up in Newark, and I love finding new spots closer to home.” Owning the truth plainly, without over-explaining, tends to shift the dynamic more than lying or shrinking would.
Q: Is class-based impostor phenomenon different from gender-based impostor syndrome?
A: Yes. The class-based variant adds a distinct layer, feeling like an outsider because of socioeconomic origin rather than gender or race alone. It often shows up as a conflict between what you’ve genuinely achieved and a body that still insists you’re fundamentally different from the room you’re standing in.
Q: Can I stop code-switching at work without losing my standing?
A: It’s possible, but it’s a process, not a decision made once. Start with moments where authenticity already feels reasonably safe, and expand outward from there. It carries some real risk, but sustained authenticity tends to build more durable trust than performance ever does.
Q: Will therapy actually help with class trauma if my therapist comes from the class I’m passing into?
A: It can, as long as your therapist is trauma-informed and genuinely attentive to class as its own axis of experience, not folded silently into other categories. Look for someone who names class directly and can hold the embodied cost of the passing you’re doing daily.
Q: What do I tell my mother when she asks if this job is “worth it”?
A: That question usually carries both love and worry at once. You can acknowledge the sacrifices you’ve both made and be honest that the job is genuinely hard and sometimes lonely, while naming what it’s opened that you couldn’t have predicted. Honesty, rather than a tidy yes or no, usually deepens the connection.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Angelou, Maya. 1978. And Still I Rise. New York: Random House.
- Lorde, Audre. 1988. A Burst of Light. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books.
- Rich, Adrienne. 1976. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
- Lubrano, Alfred. 2004. Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
- Badenoch, Bonnie. 2008. Being a Brain-Wise Therapist. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
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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, on repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
