Annie Wright, LMFT
Relational Trauma Specialist & Executive Coach
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
You've done the work.
It's Sunday afternoon. The book on your nightstand is the third one this year on attachment, or trauma, or nervous system healing. Your therapy appointment is Tuesday. Your calendar is optimized, your life on paper is impressive, 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 proverbial foundation was never repaired, and that's not your failure. It's the work that's still waiting.
What it actually feels like
“I used to wake up at 2 a.m. in a full-body panic and lie there for hours. That doesn't happen anymore. Annie's work has changed my life. I still have work to do, but for the first time, I actually believe it's going to be different.”
Camille, Tech Executive · Fixing the Foundations™ Beta Cohort
Tap what feels true.
If four or more of these resonate, you're exactly who this course was built for.
From running the patterns to ending them.
Six weeks of clinically sequenced work. Specific shifts, not vague promises.
- 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
- 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
If this is the work you have been looking for, get on the waitlist for the September cohort.
Join the Waitlist · September Cohort60 seats · Cart opens Sept 8 · Cohort starts Sept 22
Three things make it different.
Evidence-Based
Every phase in this course maps to Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and the researcher who first named the three-phase model of trauma recovery in her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery. Her framework, safety and stabilization, remembrance and mourning, reconnection and integration, is the one I have been teaching from for fifteen years. It is what trauma centers and graduate programs still use because, in my clinical experience, nothing else respects the actual architecture of how a nervous system heals.
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.
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 | Judith Herman, MD'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 |
What you'll walk away with.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Both/And. Your patterns were brilliant AND they're now in the way.
Here's the reframe I want you to hold before you decide anything about this course.
The over-functioning that got you here was brilliant. The perfectionism, the vigilance, the ability to read a room the second you walked into it, the way you learned to earn love by being useful, by being needed, by being the one who had it figured out. These were not character defects. In my work with driven individuals, I've come to think of these as the wise adaptations of a small girl who learned that being competent kept her safe.
Camille, the tech executive you met at the top of this page, used to say it this way, sitting on the couch in my office at 4:47 on a Tuesday afternoon: "I built the whole thing on being the one who never falls apart. It worked. And now I don't know how to stop."
The both/and lives here. Your patterns were brilliant AND they are now costing you the marriage, the sleep, the body, the presence with your children. You do not have to choose which one to believe. The way through is holding both.
"Addiction begins when a woman loses her handmade and meaningful life, and then tries to find it again, in ways that don't work."Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves
The addiction Estés is naming here is not always to a substance. Often, in the driven individuals I work with, it is an addiction to being needed. To being useful. To performing so seamlessly that no one, including you, notices what it is costing. Fixing the Foundations™ is not a course about stripping the patterns away. It is a course about thanking them for what they did, setting them gently down on the table between us, and building a life that finally belongs to the person underneath.
The Systemic Lens. Why so many driven individuals arrive here having done everything and still feel stuck.
This is the section I want you to read slowly, because it names the piece almost no one names for you.
What you are carrying is not personal. It is patterned. In my clinical work with driven individuals, over fifteen years and thousands of first sessions, I have watched the same three structural forces produce the same set of symptoms in person after person.
The first is late-stage capitalism, which has redefined worth as output. If you were raised in an American professional-class household in the last thirty years, you were taught, explicitly and implicitly, that a person's value is measured in what they produce. The therapy you've done cannot outrun the culture that trained you.
The second is the attention economy, which has turned self-improvement into a content stream. You have read forty-three articles this year alone about nervous system regulation. You have listened to seventy podcasts on attachment. And you are still exhausted. The mechanism of harm is precise: an endless stream of information about your nervous system is the opposite of the sustained clinical container your nervous system actually needs. Consumption is not treatment.
The third is professionalized femininity, the cultural performance where the driven individual is expected to have it figured out, in public, all the time. Elena, an attorney who joined the beta cohort, said it in the first session: "I have been the woman who has it figured out since I was nine years old. I do not know how to be any other woman." That's not a personal failing. That's a structural inheritance.
You are not broken. You are not lazy. You are not behind. You are someone who has been trained, by every institution that ever rewarded you, to solve your own healing the way you solve a business problem. Here's how that inheritance lives in a Tuesday afternoon: it's the seven open tabs on your laptop when you should be sleeping. It's the supplement protocol you optimized last quarter and the sleep tracker you no longer look at because the data made you anxious. It's the way your partner touches your shoulder and you flinch, not because of them, but because your body has been managed for so long it no longer recognizes contact that doesn't have a goal attached.
Fixing the Foundations™ is the sustained clinical container the attention economy cannot give you. It is the six weeks where the optimization impulse is invited to rest, and the person underneath the optimization is invited into the room.
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.
Forty-nine lessons. Seven phases. Built for the person who keeps running the same pattern.
Join the Waitlist · September Cohort60 seats · Cart opens Sept 8 at 9am ET
Six months from now.
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.
What happens if you don't do this work.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 inside the workbook
, from Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III.
The Confidence Promise
Here's what I want you to know about putting $1,997 toward this work.
Every sale is final, and I want to tell you why honestly. After the beta cohort I looked at the data carefully. The ones who finished the course said it was worth more than they paid. The ones who didn't finish were almost never the ones who asked for refunds. They were the ones who got busy, or got scared, and quietly stopped.
What I promise you instead is this: the exact phases, the exact lessons, the exact clinical model, and testimonials from real beta students are all on this page. You can see the whole course before you say yes. If something here doesn't sit right, the right answer is probably to wait for cohort 2. And if it does sit right, I want you all the way in.
Annie Wright, LMFT
Three voices from the people who’ve done this work.
“On paper, great. Title, money, the firm respects me. Inside I was running a low hum of anxiety and waiting for it all to come apart. I almost didn’t do it because my childhood wasn’t dramatic, it was just cold, and I figured that didn’t qualify for whatever “trauma work” was supposed to be. It qualified. My daughter and I actually talk now instead of me just managing her calendar, and the thing that’s been sitting in my chest for twenty years has mostly let up.”
“My entire twenties I said yes to everything and ran on cold brew and adrenaline because I figured I was worth whatever I shipped that week. I was basically vibrating all the time. I didn’t need a vacation, I needed a different operating system. Six weeks in and I can turn down a meeting without writing three apology emails first. Wild.”
“I sold my first company for more than I ever thought I’d see and felt basically nothing. Just, cool, what’s next. What finally clicked is that no exit was ever going to fix it, because the broken thing wasn’t out in the world, it was way older than the company. The grieving part was slow and kind of brutal. But I can sit outside with my coffee in the morning now and actually be there for it, instead of already three moves ahead.”
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.
Fixing the Foundations™
Live Cohort
- Full 49-lesson curriculum, lifetime access
- 180+ page clinical workbook
- 12 live group sessions with Annie
Tues + Thu, Sept 22 through Oct 29 - Private cohort community
- Full bonus library + supplementary guides
Fixing the Foundations™
Self-Paced
- Full 49-lesson curriculum, lifetime access
- 180+ page clinical workbook
- No live group sessions
- No cohort community
- Standard bonus library
From the Fixing the Foundations™ Beta Cohort
Eighteen people piloted this work before public launch. Here’s what they said.
“Sixty hours a week keeping other people’s kids alive, and I’d come home with nothing left for my own. I told myself that was just the deal. It isn’t the schedule that changed, it’s that I can feel myself running out now, instead of finding out after I’ve already snapped at someone. I can say no to an extra shift without spiraling about it for two days. My husband said last month it feels like I live here again. He wasn’t wrong, which kind of stung to hear.”
“I thought being wrecked all the time was just what it costs to do work that matters. It didn’t occur to me that the need to save everybody came straight out of the house I grew up in. I can go to bat for my organization now without lighting myself on fire to do it. I sleep through the night more often than not these days, which wasn’t true before.”
“You can build a whole life that looks exactly right and feels like nothing, and have no clue how to say that out loud to anyone. I kept telling myself I’d get to it once I was ready. I just got more tired. What made this land where the coaching and the weekend retreats didn’t was that it actually went somewhere. The life feels like mine now. Best way I’ve got to put it.”
“I work with grief every single day, and I’d written off my own completely, because what was there to grieve? Parents stayed married, money was fine. Apparently that was the whole problem. I can sit with my patients in their grief now without mine flaring up underneath it. I was about a year out from leaving this work. I’m not anymore.”
“I’ve spent my life code-switching and being the one who holds it together for my family. I was so far from my own needs I couldn’t have named one if you asked. What I’m learning is how to stay with myself and the other person at the same time, instead of abandoning myself to keep things smooth. Had a hard talk with my parents last week and didn’t go silent or get defensive, which, for me, is kind of a miracle.”
“Grew up with money being wildly unstable, so I built my entire life around making it. Even with plenty in the bank, my body still acted like we were getting evicted next week. It’s not that I understand the scarcity thing in my head now, I always did. It’s lower than that, harder to explain. The bracing has mostly stopped. I took two weeks off and didn’t check email once, which the old me would’ve found impossible.”
“My inner critic was so loud I just assumed it was my personality, and probably the reason I’d done well. Turns out it was a part of me that had been pulling overtime for years, and once I could hear it as that instead of as fact, it backed off. I don’t torch entire weekends anymore replaying one comment I made in some Friday meeting nobody else even remembers.”
“I was the adult in my family growing up, so stepping into leadership always felt natural, and I was completely fried from over-functioning in every relationship I had. Every other thing I tried just said set boundaries, thanks. This actually showed me where the pattern came from. I’ve stopped clocking what everyone needs and handling it before they ask. Genuine relief to find out other people’s feelings aren’t my job.”
Names and identifying details have been changed for confidentiality. Each individual gave written consent to their exact attribution.
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
WAYS TO WORK WITH ANNIE
Individual Therapy
Trauma-informed therapy for driven women healing relational trauma. Licensed in 9 states.
Learn MoreExecutive Coaching
Trauma-informed coaching for driven women navigating leadership and burnout.
Learn MoreFixing the Foundations
Annie's signature course for relational trauma recovery. Cohort 1 opens September 2026.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
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 eleven jurisdictions, 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.
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This is the structured path your relational trauma recovery has been missing.
The cohort starts September 22. Cart closes September 18 at 11:59pm ET. After that, the next live cohort isn't until 2027.
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