The 2026 Live Cohort

Fixing the Foundations

The structured path
your relational trauma recovery has been missing.

A 6-week clinical course for driven, ambitious people who've done the books, the therapy, the work — and are still running the same patterns. Built on Judith Herman, MD's three-phase model — the recognized gold standard of trauma recovery.

Open to anyone, any gender, any gender expression.

Join the Waitlist · September Cohort

15,000+ Clinical Hours 9-State LMFT W.W. Norton Author

Maine coast at early morning — the contemplative stillness of Annie Wright's clinical work

Live Cohort Cart Opens In --days --hours --min

For the person who's already tried everything

You've done the work.

Read the books. Tried the therapy. Built the impressive life. And somewhere underneath all of it, the same patterns keep running. The same exhaustion. The same loop.

Because understanding your patterns isn't the same as moving through the phases that actually change them. The foundation was never repaired — and that's not your failure. It's the work that's still waiting.

You might recognize yourself

Tap what feels true.

If four or more of these resonate, you're exactly who this course was built for.

You over-function in every relationship — and you're exhausted by it.

You intellectualize your childhood, but your body hasn't caught up.

You've done years of therapy, but still feel stuck in the same loop.

You perform "fine" so well that no one knows how heavy it actually is.

You attract the same type of partner — or avoid intimacy altogether.

You know your patterns intellectually but can't seem to stop them.

You've built an impressive life that secretly exhausts you to maintain.

You keep waiting to feel "ready" — but readiness never arrives on its own.

Your nervous system stays braced — even when nothing is actually wrong.

Closeness pulls you toward shutdown, distance, or quiet panic.

You abandon yourself in small ways to keep the connection intact.

Grieving what you didn't get as a child feels disloyal or off-limits.

Join the Waitlist · September Cohort

The transformation

From running the patterns to ending them.

Six weeks of clinically sequenced work. Specific shifts, not vague promises.

Before

You manage every relationship
Old triggers run the show
Boundaries feel impossible or aggressive
You know "why" but can't stop the loop
Self-criticism is your default operating mode
Therapy gives insight but not change
Your nervous system stays braced even in safe relationships
Closeness flips into shutdown, distance, or panic
You attract familiar dynamics and call it chemistry
You abandon yourself to keep the connection
Conflict feels like a threat to your survival
Grief about your childhood feels disloyal or dangerous to touch

After

You participate without over-functioning
You notice the activation — and stay
Boundaries are clear, calm, and held
You have a map and a method that works
Self-compassion replaces self-attack
You're moving through the phases, not stuck in them
Your nervous system can settle inside connection, not just outside it
Closeness stays closeness — you can stay present in it
You recognize the old pattern before it picks the partner
You stay with yourself and the other person at the same time
Conflict becomes information, not annihilation
You can grieve what happened without it collapsing who you are

Why this course exists

Three things make it different.

Evidence-Based

Built on Judith Herman, MD's three-phase model of trauma recovery — the recognized gold standard, taught in trauma centers and graduate programs worldwide. Grounded in attachment theory, neurobiology, and relational psychology.

Clinically Sequenced

The order matters more than the content. You can't grieve what you haven't named. You can't reconnect until you've mourned. This course respects the architecture of how humans actually heal.

Built for Real Life

Video, audio, and full transcripts for every lesson. A 180+ page clinical workbook. Self-paced, returnable, lifetime access. This isn't a weekend intensive — it's a resource you'll come back to for years.

Where this fits

Built by a clinician. Not a coach.

Most trauma programs online are built by coaches, content creators, or generalists. Fixing the Foundations was built by a licensed clinician with 15,000+ hours specializing in relational trauma recovery — and grounded in the same evidence-based framework Annie uses with her private clients.

	Weekly Therapy	Books & Podcasts	Trauma Coach Programs	Fixing the Foundations
Led by	Licensed clinician	Author / host	Coach (unlicensed)	Licensed psychotherapist & relational trauma specialist · 15,000+ clinical hours · W.W. Norton author · Psychology Today contributor
Clinical framework	Yes	Varies	Often surface-level	Herman's three-phase model — gold standard of trauma recovery
Structured sequencing	Emergent	No	Topic-based	7 phases, ordered
Workbook & exercises	No	Rare	Light worksheets	180+ pages
Live access to clinician	1:1	No	Coach, not clinician	12 live group sessions with Annie
Lifetime access	Per session	Yes	Often 1 year	Yes
Cost over 6 weeks	$4,050+	$60	$497–$2,000+	$1,997

← Swipe to see all columns →

By the end of six weeks

What you'll walk away with.

A nervous system you can finally trust.

The somatic literacy to catch activation the moment it starts — and the tools to come back to yourself instead of performing, shutting down, or leaving. Not perfectly. But consistently enough that your body stops feeling like a place you have to manage.

The end of “why do I keep doing this?”

The specific relational templates you inherited — named, traced, and visible. You'll catch the pattern in motion instead of waking up six months in wondering how you got here again.

The weight you've been carrying alone, finally put down.

The childhood you deserved, the parent you needed, the relationships that should have been safe — all of it processed in a structured clinical container instead of carried in silence. The heaviness in your chest lifts. You can think about your past without your nervous system seizing up. What you've been holding for twenty or thirty years stops being yours alone to hold.

A self that feels like yours.

Underneath the inner critic, the perfectionist, the people-pleaser, the over-functioner — there is a you who has been waiting to come forward. The survival beliefs that have been running your life — “I'm too much,” “Love always leaves,” “I have to earn it” — quiet down. The voice underneath them — steadier, clearer, more yours — gets louder. You stop performing who you think you need to be and start recognizing who you actually are.

Relationships that feel different from the inside.

The skills to say no without a 48-hour shame spiral. To have hard conversations without performing. To stay in conflict without it becoming catastrophe. Connection that doesn't require you to disappear.

A life that finally feels like yours — before you run out of time to live it.

Most driven, ambitious people spend decades building lives that look right and feel hollow. After six weeks, you'll know which parts of your life you were actually choosing — and which parts were assigned to you by a younger self trying to survive. You'll stop being a stranger inside your own days. The years ahead start to feel like yours to spend, not yours to endure.

Seven phases · Forty-nine lessons

The curriculum.

Seven phases. Forty-nine lessons. Each one grounded in the clinical research that actually moves the needle on relational trauma — sequenced in the order the nervous system can metabolize them.

Phase I

Understand what actually happened to you — and why it isn't your fault.Phase I · Orientation & Foundational Motivation · 7 lessons

The opening arc. You'll map your House of Life, learn the window of tolerance (Dan Siegel, MD), and get the neurobiological frame that ends decades of what's wrong with me? Sets the foundation everything else stands on.

By the end of Phase I: you finally have language for what happened to you — and a clinical frame that ends the self-blame.

Phase II

Stop living in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.Phase II · Somatic & Nervous System Stabilization · 7 lessons

Polyvagal Theory in plain language (Stephen Porges, PhD). Co-regulation. Titration and pendulation (Peter Levine, PhD). Working with hyperarousal, hypoarousal, and freeze. The Healthy Mind Platter. By the end, you have a body that can be in the room with hard things without flooding or shutting down.

By the end of Phase II: you can catch activation the moment it starts — and bring yourself back to baseline without performing calm.

Phase III

Quiet the inner critic. Soften the perfectionist. Stop being run by who you had to be at five.Phase III · Parts Work & Inner Child · 7 lessons

A full Internal Family Systems arc (Richard Schwartz, PhD). The Inner Critic as your most misunderstood protector. Manager parts. Firefighter parts. The exiled inner child, met carefully. Unblending. Self-energy as the unburdened core. The lesson clients rewatch four times.

By the end of Phase III: the parts of you that have been at war with each other for decades start working together — led by the calm, clear Self underneath them.

Phase IV

Put down what you've been carrying alone since you were a child.Phase IV · Grief & Mourning · 8 lessons

Disenfranchised grief (Kenneth Doka, PhD) and ambiguous loss (Pauline Boss, PhD) — the language for what you've been feeling your whole life without being able to name it. Annie's Five Losses of Relational Trauma framework. Grieving the parent you needed. Somatic mourning, ritual, and witness. The phase closes by moving from grief into compassion.

By the end of Phase IV: the grief you've been carrying alone for years finally has a place — and the compassion that grief opens becomes the bridge into the rest of the work.

Phase V

Stop repeating the pattern. Start choosing differently.Phase V · Relational Repair · 7 lessons

Attachment revisited. Earned secure attachment and coherent narrative (Mary Main, PhD; Daniel Siegel, MD). Boundaries as love. Conflict as connection. Rupture and repair (Gottman). Titrated intimacy and vulnerability. Breaking repetition compulsion — the pull toward what is familiar, and how to choose what is actually nourishing.

By the end of Phase V: you can name the relational template that's been running your life — and you have the clinical skills to actually choose differently.

Phase VI

Take back your body, your voice, your anger, your joy — everything that got lost along the way.Phase VI · Reclamation · 7 lessons

Reclaiming the body (van der Kolk; Resmaa Menakem; Levine). Reclaiming voice. Reclaiming pleasure and sexuality (Emily Nagoski, PhD). Reclaiming play and creativity (Donald Winnicott; Stuart Brown, MD). Reclaiming anger as sacred information (Gabor Maté, MD). Reclaiming joy past foreboding. Reclaiming Self — True Self and individuation (Winnicott; Jung).

By the end of Phase VI: the parts of your full range that trauma stole — voice, pleasure, play, anger, joy — are coming back online. Messily, imperfectly, but really.

Phase VII

Live a life that feels good — and finally aligned with who you actually are.Phase VII · Integration · 6 lessons

The version of you underneath the trauma — the one you barely got to meet because you were always managing, surviving, performing — that's who you're building a life around now. The neurobiology of durable change (Donald Hebb, PhD; Norman Doidge, MD). Maintenance over perfection — Judith Herman, MD's Stage 3 of reconnection. Relapse and return without losing the gains. Community and co-regulation. A letter to your future self. The finale: self-trust as the deepest injury and the deepest repair.

By the end of Phase VII: you're living a life that feels like yours — not the one your trauma built to keep you safe, the one that actually feels good. With a clear plan for the inevitable returns of old patterns, and a foundation you can keep building on for the rest of your life.

Imagine this

Six months from now.

Calm morning shoreline — the life you're building because you actually want it

You're at dinner with someone you care about, and they say something that used to send you spiraling. This time, you notice the activation in your body — and you stay. You don't perform calm. You don't leave. You don't over-explain. You just stay present, because your nervous system actually knows it's safe.

You wake up on a Sunday and the first thing you feel isn't dread or the need to be productive. You feel settled. Not because everything is perfect — but because you're no longer bracing for the thing that always comes next.

Your mother calls. The voicemail sits in your inbox the way it always has. But this time you don't spend the rest of the afternoon writing imaginary responses in your head, replaying childhood, leaking into your evening. You feel what comes up, you put a hand on your chest, and you call her back when you're ready. Or you don't. Either is fine. The decision doesn't cost you a day.

You're in a meeting and someone challenges you. The old version of you would have over-prepared for a week, lain awake the night before, replayed it for three days after. This version notices the heat rise in your chest, takes a breath, and answers from somewhere steadier than the part of you that has always needed to be airtight. You sound like yourself. You leave the meeting without needing anyone's reassurance.

You say no to something and the world doesn't end. There's no 48-hour shame spiral, no drafting and redrafting the apology text, no quiet certainty that you've ruined the relationship. You said no because no was the right answer. The discomfort passes by Tuesday.

You're in your body in a way you haven't been in years. You notice you're hungry before you're shaking. You notice you're tired before you're crashing. You feel something pleasurable and you let yourself feel it for the whole length of it — not bracing for the shoe to drop, not narrating, not earning it first. You laugh and it surprises you a little, how easy it is.

The voice in your head sounds different. Less like a parent you couldn't please. More like someone who's been quietly on your side this whole time. You catch yourself being kind to yourself the way you've always been kind to your closest friend. It still surprises you sometimes. But it's the new default.

You look at your life and you recognize it as yours.

Not the one you built to survive. The one that finally feels good — lived by the version of you that was always there, before the trauma made you forget.

The other side of the decision

What happens if you don't do this work.

It's January again, and the resolutions sound exactly like last year's.

This is the year you'll stop over-functioning. This is the year you'll set the boundary with your mother. This is the year you'll stop performing. You wrote the same thing in your journal twelve months ago. You'll write it again next year. The patterns don't soften with time — they calcify. By 50, by 55, by 60, they're load-bearing walls.

You keep reading the books. The books keep not changing you.

You can quote van der Kolk. You've underlined Pete Walker. You know what hypervigilance is, what disenfranchised grief is, what your attachment style is — and you're still up at 3 AM rehearsing tomorrow's hard conversation. Insight without sequenced clinical work isn't healing. It's vocabulary. And vocabulary doesn't move the patterns.

Your partner gets the version of you still running the protections.

The one who shuts down mid-conversation. The one who picks the fight to test whether they'll leave. The one who can't receive their love without flinching. They don't get the version of you who could be on the other side of this work next year. They get this version, for another decade. Sometimes they don't stay for it.

Your children are absorbing exactly what you absorbed.

The unprocessed grief becomes the inheritance. The walking-on-eggshells, the over-functioning, the way you brace before answering — they're learning all of it before they can name it. You swore you wouldn't pass this down. Without the work, you will. Not because you don't love them. Because love wasn't enough to break it for the generation before you, either.

Your body keeps sending the bill.

The jaw that won't unclench. The Sunday-night dread you've had since you were seven. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't touch. The stomach that knots before phone calls with certain people. The autoimmune flare that arrived the year of the hardest thing. The body keeps the score — Bessel van der Kolk wasn't being poetic. He was being clinical. The bill comes due.

You'll keep waiting to feel "ready."

Ready doesn't arrive on its own. It's built through the work. The version of you who feels ready is on the other side of the seven phases — not somewhere before them. Every year you wait for readiness is another year of the life organized around your wounds instead of around your wants. And one day, the math runs out.

This work is hard. But not doing it is harder. And it gets harder the longer you wait.

What's inside

Everything that's in the course.

Forty-nine lessons across seven phases. A 180+ page workbook with the exercises my private clients actually do — the somatic protocols, parts-work dialogues, grief letters, attachment maps. Twelve live sessions where you bring me your real material in real time. And two of my standalone $197 courses, included.

Three real exercises from the Fixing the Foundations workbook — Mapping My Window of Tolerance, Practicing Titration, and Naming the Parts I Already Know

Three real exercises from inside the workbook
— from Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III.

49-lesson core curriculumSeven phases · hours of teaching video, audio versions for walks, and full searchable transcripts · lifetime access

$2,400

180+ page clinical workbookThe exercises I use with private clients — somatic protocols, parts dialogues, grief letters, attachment maps

$300

12 live group sessions with AnnieTwelve hours with a clinician whose individual rate is $675/hour — that's $8,100 of clinical time · Tues + Fri, Sept 22 – Oct 30 · Live Cohort only

$8,100

Private cohort communityFifty people doing this work alongside you · Live Cohort only

$497

Bonus: Normalcy After the NarcissistLaunch Week OnlyMy standalone course on narcissistic parenting and the work of building a self that isn't organized around someone else's needs

$197

Bonus: Sane After the SociopathLaunch Week OnlyMy standalone course on systematic manipulation — making sense of what happened and rebuilding trust in yourself

$197

Supplementary guide libraryRegulation toolkit, trauma recovery reading list, scripts for hard conversations

$173

Total real value $11,864

Choose your path

Two ways to do this work.

For comparison: one hour of 1:1 therapy with Annie is $675. One hour of executive coaching is $900. Live Cohort gives you twelve group sessions where you bring your real material to Annie in real time — plus the full curriculum and both mini-course bonuses — for $1,997.

Recommended

Live Cohort · 50 Seats

Fixing the Foundations
Live Cohort

$1,997

or 3 × $699 · payment plans available

Full 49-lesson curriculum, lifetime access
180+ page clinical workbook
12 live group sessions with Annie
Tues + Fri, Sept 22–Oct 30
Private cohort community
Normalcy After the Narcissist ($197 value)
Sane After the Sociopath ($197 value)
Full bonus library + supplementary guides

Self-Paced · Evergreen

Fixing the Foundations
Self-Paced

$997

or 3 × $349 · payment plans available

Full 49-lesson curriculum, lifetime access
180+ page clinical workbook
No live group sessions
No cohort community
One mini-course bonus of your choice
Standard bonus library

From people who've done this work

The work speaks for itself.

"My dad called me today crying and we had a good quick conversation where I told him what I need and he responded very well. My therapist congratulated me on the boundaries I set and have been holding. My dad has never done what he did today. Not even close."

BreCourse Student

"By applying what I learned in this course, I have been able to significantly repair one family relationship and am now slowly mending another. Mom is responding to the boundaries and is less reactive, more respectful. Less reactivity means more calm."

TamaraCourse Student

"Annie's work gave me language for something I'd been trying to articulate for years. The clinical framework is rigorous, but it's also deeply human. I finally feel like I'm healing instead of just coping."

AthenaCourse Student

"I am better able to disengage from my mum when she crosses boundaries or becomes abusive — and I feel like I'm less affected by it in terms of spiralling."

EveCourse Student

"I set a boundary with my father and my brothers that I don't think I ever would have set — or even recognized as needing to be set. Thank you."

AmyCourse Student

"By setting boundaries with my parents I am much more relaxed when I visit — and it no longer takes me weeks to 'get over' it."

MeghanCourse Student

Trusted by fellow clinicians

This work doesn’t just move the people who take it. It moves the therapists who refer it.

“As a therapist myself, Annie’s work is my go-to resource for my clients with complex relational trauma. I can’t count the number of times I have assigned a client the homework of, ‘read Annie Wright’s blog.’ Without fail, my clients report back feeling seen, understood, and less alone.”

Samantha Barr, MA, LPC, NCCLicensed Professional Counselor

“For years, I struggled to find resources that spoke specifically to family estrangement. Annie’s work is the resource I wish I’d had years ago.”

Maegan Megginson, MA, LMFT, LPCLicensed Psychotherapist

“As a therapist, I’ve seen many wonderful, big-hearted clients struggle to navigate difficult relationships with loved ones. Annie’s course is the missing resource I’ve been looking for.”

Krista Niles, MA, LCSWLicensed Clinical Social Worker

“As a fellow trauma therapist, Annie has been someone who I have respected from the very first time I’ve gotten to see her work. She conveys a feeling of humanity and relatability, which is rare in the field of counseling. Her compassion, passion and unending desire to keep expanding her professional skills are visible to all who know her.”

Esther Goldstein, LCSWTrauma Therapist, Educator & Trainer

“Annie is one of the warmest and wisest people I know. She’s an expert on complex relational trauma and specializes in EMDR. Exceptionally generous too, sharing her vast knowledge not just with her clients, but also with the world in the form of her informative free-access blog and writings. Annie is a gem — both as a therapist and as a leader in the mental health profession altogether.”

Kristin Slye, LMFT, REATFounder of Uncovery

“Annie is a skilled, compassionate clinician and a leader in her field. I’ve known her for 10 years and admire her passion for clinical excellence. You can tell Annie truly cares about people; she leads with heart and offers her wisdom through all of her online offerings. Highly recommend working with her if you get the chance.”

Kim BurrisLicensed Psychotherapist & Founder, The Holistic Counseling Center

About the author

Annie Wright, LMFT

Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author

Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours specializing in relational trauma recovery for driven, ambitious people. Her clients include Silicon Valley executives, physicians, attorneys, and entrepreneurs — people whose external lives look extraordinary and whose internal lives carry the weight of unresolved relational wounds.

She founded, built, scaled, and successfully sold a mental health company with 24 clinicians across nine states — while maintaining a full clinical caseload. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NPR, NBC, and The Information. Her first book with W.W. Norton & Company is forthcoming summer 2027.

She built this course because it's what she desperately wished she could have found 20 years ago, at the start of her own relational trauma recovery journey. It represents 15,000+ clinical hours of training and practice, distilled into the specific framework she uses with her own clients.

15,000+

Clinical Hours

State Licenses

23,000+

Subscribers

Featured in Psychology Today · Forbes · Inc. · NPR · NBC

Questions you're asking yourself

The honest answers.

Tap any question to read the answer

I'm scared this won't work for me. I've tried so many things already.

That's exactly the person this course was built for. Most students arrive with significant prior work — therapy, books, workshops — and still feel stuck. The difference is the clinical sequencing. Understanding your patterns intellectually isn't the same as moving through the phases that actually change them. You are not being asked to take a leap of faith — the page itself shows you the exact phases, the exact lessons, and the exact clinical model. You can see what you would be doing before you say yes.

What happens if I don't do this work right now?

Honestly: most likely, more of the same. The patterns don't soften on their own — they calcify. Another year of over-functioning, of the same loop with the same people, of insight without integration. That's the cost most students never fully name. This work is hard. Not doing it is harder.

Is this a replacement for therapy?

No. This is a psychoeducational course — clinical frameworks, language, and structured exercises for understanding and working through your relational patterns. It is not a substitute for therapy, and Annie is not your therapist through this course. Many students find this material pairs powerfully with their existing therapeutic work — it gives you and your therapist a shared map.

How much time does this require?

Plan for 2–3 hours per week at a steady pace. Each lesson includes a 30–45 minute video, corresponding workbook exercises, and optional reflection prompts. The Live Cohort adds two 75-minute group sessions per week (Tuesdays and Fridays, Sept 22 – Oct 30). All sessions are recorded.

What's the difference between Live Cohort and Self-Paced?

Self-Paced gives you all 49 lessons across seven phases, the workbook, audio versions, transcripts, and one mini-course bonus with lifetime access. Live Cohort includes everything in Self-Paced plus 12 live group sessions with Annie, a private cohort community, and both mini-course bonuses — limited to 50 participants. Only the Live Cohort runs Sept 22 through Oct 30, 2026.

What if I'm not sure my experience "counts" as trauma?

Many students arrive unsure. Part of the work in Phase I and Phase II is building the framework to name what you experienced — without requiring a specific label or diagnosis. If the patterns described on this page resonate, this course is designed for you.

Who is this course for? Is it gendered?

This course is for anyone — any gender, any gender expression. Annie made that decision explicitly during filming and says so on camera. Relational trauma, attachment wounds, and the patterns this work addresses are not gendered conditions. If the material resonates, it's for you. The clinical framework is the same regardless of identity.

Are payment plans available?

Yes. Both tiers offer a three-payment plan: $349 × 3 for Self-Paced, or $699 × 3 for Live Cohort.

Already on Annie's email list? You're not automatically on the FTF waitlist — add yourself above.

If you've read this far

This is the structured path your relational trauma recovery has been missing.

The cohort starts September 22. Cart closes September 18 at midnight ET. After that, the next live cohort isn't until 2027.

Add Yourself to the Waitlist

50 seats · Cohort begins September 22

The structured path
your relational trauma recovery has been missing.

You've done the work.

Tap what feels true.

From running the patterns to ending them.