The Power of Relationship to Wound and to Heal, Healers on Healing Podcast | Transcript

Episode Introduction

I join host Josh Stern on Healers on Healing, a podcast dedicated to demystifying what health and healing truly mean, for an intimate conversation about the extraordinary power of relationship. In this episode, Josh and I explore how relationships are the very medium in which our deepest wounds are formed, and yet, remarkably, they are also the primary vehicle through which we heal. I share my own personal journey: growing up with a complex trauma background, arriving at a corporate job in Washington, D.C. feeling utterly lost, and finding a watershed moment of transformation through the healing community at Esalen, an experience that ultimately led me to found Evergreen Counseling and dedicate my career to helping others heal through reparative relational experiences.

For driven women, and anyone, who has struggled to feel safe in relationships, who has felt alone in their pain, or who has wondered whether real change is possible after a painful start in life, this conversation offers both hope and grounding. We discuss what it actually means to build an internal sense of safety, why therapy functions as a laboratory for healthy relating, how mirror neurons make emotional connection a biological reality, and why the American myth of rugged individualism runs counter to how we are wired to heal. I also reflect on how becoming a mother has deepened my sensitivity to the power of early relationships to wound, and my intention to offer repair when I inevitably fall short.

Key Takeaways

• Healing is not about eliminating life’s pain but about helping people face that pain with greater strength, capability, and resilience, developing real ground under their feet.
• An internal sense of safety, built through self-compassion, self-knowledge, and the experience of safe relationships, is the most fundamental foundation for weathering life’s difficulties.
• Therapy functions as a laboratory: a real relationship where clients can practice being themselves, experience healthy relating, and develop skills they then carry into the wider world.
• Relationship can wound, and relationship can heal. Even one genuinely safe, attuned, and boundaried relationship can begin to reverse the damage of a lifetime of relational trauma.
• The goal is not independence or dependence, but interdependence, the capacity to safely lean on others and allow others to lean on you.
• Mirror neurons make emotional connection neurologically real: we literally influence the development of one another’s brains and nervous systems through relationship.
• Healing the deepest wounds takes time. Lasting change happens at the quiet, everyday, foundational level, in how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, not in weekend workshops alone.
• There is a part in each of us that knows suffering and disconnection are not how things have to be, and that part, however quietly, keeps pointing us toward healing.

Notable Quotes

“Relationship can wound, but gosh, it can also heal. It says to me, we are so growth-oriented. We are so resilient.”

“Think of therapy much like a laboratory. We’re experimenting, and we’re gathering information, and we’re practicing different things in here so that you can learn them and then go off and practice them in the outside world.”

“My clients pay me for my time and my expertise, but they don’t pay me for my love and my affection. That’s real. That’s the relationship part.”

“I don’t think the goal is to be fully independent, and I don’t think the goal is to be fully dependent. I think the goal is to be interdependent, to let it be safe and possible to lean on and rely on certain others at certain times.”

“The arc of life is, can be long for some, but it does bend towards healing. There’s something inside of us that is so healing and growth oriented, a part of us that knows that suffering and disconnection, that that’s not normal, and that there’s something else.”

Topics Covered

• What Health and Healing Actually Mean: Moving beyond the elimination of pain toward helping people develop the strength, resilience, and capability to face life’s difficulties, and feel less alone in doing so.
• Building Internal Ground: The three layers of safety, external environment, relational support, and internal sense of self, and why the deepest internal ground is the most transformative.
• Complex PTSD and Relational Trauma: How childhood experiences of neglect, abuse, or dysregulated caregiving disorganize the self, disrupt emotional regulation, and shape the nervous system in lasting ways.
• Therapy as a Reparative Relationship: Why the therapeutic relationship is itself the core healing agent, a real, boundaried, attuned relationship that offers clients an experience they may never have had before.
• Interdependence vs. Rugged Individualism: Challenging the American mythology of going it alone, and making the case that our wiring for connection and mutual reliance is not a weakness but the very architecture of health.
• Mirror Neurons and Relational Neuroscience: How we literally form in relationship to one another at a neurological level, and why mood, and health, are contagious.
• Motherhood and the Deepening of Relational Awareness: How becoming a parent heightened Annie’s sensitivity to the power of early relationships to wound and her commitment to repair when ruptures inevitably occur.
• The Long Arc of Healing: Why lasting transformation in our deepest relational patterns takes time, and why that truth, while not always popular, is essential to honor.

Full Transcript

Josh Stern (Host): Hey, this is Josh. Thanks for tuning into the show, Healers on Healing. I wanted to make this show because we can get caught in the trappings of life, responsibilities, bills to pay, kids to feed, just all these things that take our attention, and to me, healing and being our healthiest self gets neglected. I thought it’d be interesting to ask my colleagues and other professionals what the heck this thing, health and healing, is. I hope these conversations inspire you, demystify the process, maybe reinforce what you already know, and give you new ideas on how to be the healthiest you. In today’s episode, my guest, Annie Wright, talks about the power of relationships. Annie is a therapist and head of a clinic in Berkeley, California. [Editor’s note: this episode was recorded while Annie owned Evergreen Counseling. She has since sold the practice and no longer owns or operates it.] Tune in as Annie talks about her personal journey through relationships and speaks to the power to wound or to heal us.

Annie Wright: My name’s Annie Wright. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I run a therapy center in downtown Berkeley called Evergreen Counseling, where I see clients, but I also work with an incredibly talented team of clinicians who also see clients from Berkeley, the Bay Area, and beyond.

Josh Stern (Host): This is my first time here, and it’s beautiful, so, yeah, good job.

Annie Wright: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. I love the space.

Josh Stern (Host): Totally. So I start with a very easy question, and I say that jokingly, because it’s a huge question. And it is, so here you are helping people do something, achieve something, feel something. What is that something? What is health? What is healing?

Annie Wright: Well, I’ve been thinking about how to answer your question, but also I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to explain to my baby what mommy does for work. I’m trying to think, “Well, what’s the way a child could understand it?” And I think at the end of the day probably what I’ll say is, “Mommy helps people who are hurting and helps them feel better.”

Josh Stern (Host): I’m gonna dive more into that. Feeling better, what does feeling better look like, feel like, taste like?

Annie Wright: Such a great question. Yeah, hadn’t thought this part about what my daughter might ask. It can look so many different ways. I think feeling better means feeling less alone, feeling more connected, feeling more hopeful, feeling more capable, feeling more able. It doesn’t mean taking away all the hurt. It doesn’t mean making the hurt never have existed in the first place. It means helping the person face the hurt in a way where they feel like they have more strength and capability and resilience.

Josh Stern (Host): I get the sense of, like, having ground under my feet. And what a difference having ground under my feet makes for the process of anything.

Annie Wright: Definitely, because in this work, it’s not about eliminating life’s problems and pains. That’s impossible. We can’t do that, but what we can do is help someone feel more equipped to face the pains and to face the difficulties.

Josh Stern (Host): What do you feel builds that? What gives us ground under our feet?

Annie Wright: Well, I think at the very foundational level, it’s making sure that the literal physical ground under one’s feet, the external environment, is safe, and maybe that’s a little more social work-y. But sometimes that comes up in the course of therapy as well: making sure somebody is living in a safe space, that they aren’t around people who are hurting them, that they have some financial stability, they have a job to go to, a routine. And so we take care of the external supports, and that, I think, is a certain kind of ground. I think, too, there is relational ground. Are there safe people in one’s life that you can turn to when you’re hurting or when you’re really in need? So that, to me, is another piece of ground. But I think the most fundamental piece of ground, and what helps somebody weather the storms of life the most, is an internal sense of ground, a deep sense of self-compassion, an integrated sense of self, a knowing of oneself, a certain amount of mastery over oneself in order to make choices that are more healthful and helpful and congruent with what someone wants out of life.

Josh Stern (Host): I love all parts of that answer, and some of it feels very tangible. We have to create the sense of safety external and the sense of safety financially, and things like that, and that, to me, seems more clear-cut. So I wanna ask you about the third piece, the sense of safety internal. How do we really cultivate an internal sense of safety?

Annie Wright: After all these years, I still feel like I’m trying to answer that. What is the magic, the alchemy that creates that? I’ll speak to this a couple different ways. So my area of expertise is around complex relational trauma, you could possibly call that complex PTSD. The folks I work with have relational trauma. They were perhaps raised by personality disordered parents, parents with mood disorders. They have maybe some assault in their background, and other incidents and relational challenges that made them feel very unsafe, neglected, abandoned, or abused in the world. When that happens to a child or an adolescent, it can have a host of impacts. It can disorganize one’s self, it can prohibit emotional regulation skills, it can limit the way people can healthily attach to others. It can have profound impacts on our nervous system and our physiology. It’s a trauma disorder, but it’s a relational trauma disorder. When I’m working with those clients, there are so many different ways that I’m hoping and helping them to move towards a more safe sense of self. One thing is showing them what it is to be in a safe, consistent, and boundaried relationship, hopefully giving them a reparative experience that they’ve never had in their life, that they can begin to internalize and find some safety in. Another thing I’m teaching them is frankly how to get back in their bodies and feel their feelings, contain them, appropriately express them. I’m helping people learn how to recognize and assert their needs and wants, and also tolerate maybe the disappointment or the challenging feelings that come up when their needs and wants aren’t met. And when that happens, when they receive skills and tools to manage their feelings, when they experience safety in a relationship, when they can develop some positive regard for who they are in all of their parts, that’s where I see people becoming more whole and more grounded in themselves.

Josh Stern (Host): I’m gonna say all that you said in a very simplistic way, please excuse me because it is more complex than the simplicity I’m about to say. In all that, I hear practicing how to be in relationship in a healthy setting. Practicing how to be myself in a healthy setting. Practicing how to go through emotions. I hear this sense of practice.

Annie Wright: Exactly. And this reminds me of something I tell clients a lot, because clients will always say to me, “Well, therapy isn’t real life.” And I say, “You’re right. This isn’t real life in the sense that I’m not with you the rest of the week, and the rest of the world isn’t quite like this environment in here. But what we are doing in here, think of it much like a laboratory. We’re experimenting, and we’re gathering information, and we’re practicing different things in here so that you can learn them and then go off and practice them in the outside world with some of your other relationships and in different scenarios.” So yes, we are relearning. We are practicing. It really is a laboratory, I think, what goes on in therapy.

Josh Stern (Host): And I’d even push a little further of, like, it may be a strange relationship, but it still is a relationship.

Annie Wright: Totally. Absolutely. Oh, it’s a really important one, right? It is a real relationship, and now granted, do I know you outside of here? Do I see you all the time? No. We have boundaries around the relationship, but this is real. My clients pay me for my time and my expertise, but they don’t pay me for my love and my affection. That’s real. That’s the relationship part.

Josh Stern (Host): I used to hold the side of, like, “Oh, why are we designed this way? Why can’t we just be the healthiest self? I wanna talk to the maker.” Like, it just seems like, couldn’t we have been designed better? But I’ve been more and more, “Oh, right. How beautiful that all the ways we can get messed up can get rewired.” And I’ve been really actually more amazed in thinking about that side of the human spirit. Like, oh, you can have these horrible relationships that hurt you, left you some bad skills at navigating the world. But you can find even just one healthy relationship and reverse it all.

Annie Wright: Mm-hmm. Completely. I think that’s remarkable that that’s possible. It says to me, we are so growth-oriented. We are so resilient, and relationship can wound, but gosh, it can also heal.

Josh Stern (Host): I see your smile right now. And that’s part of the flavor I think, because I think sometimes we don’t realize how much that is available to us. Like, it’s so easy to just be in the hurt of it all and the despair of it all. And I think our media and a lot of our landscape just kind of amplify how negative everything is. And yet there’s this place of such beauty, repair, growth. That is amazing to me. So I do have a question there. Tell me about that side of it.

Annie Wright: Well, I’ll speak to that with a story, and I think what I’m going to speak to is the power of relationship to wound and the power of relationship to heal. I come from a very complex trauma background, and it is predominantly in relationship, though there were other variables. But yeah, I definitely come from a background of abuse and neglect. I had a lot of psychological damage because of that. But there was this thing that happened to me at age 25. I was back from the Peace Corps, and I was working in Washington, D.C. at a corporation, and I was miserable, absolutely, my soul was suffering there. But my soul was also suffering from years and years of unprocessed trauma. And someone pointed me to a website, I had California clients at the time that I was flying out to see, and they said, “Oh, there’s this place called Esalen. You should check it out next time you’re in California.” And I clicked on the homepage of the website, and it felt like coming home, just seeing the script, the homepage, and I knew that I had to go there. Just like every cell in my body knew that. So I went to a workshop called The Courage to Change Your Life. Gosh, that was back in 2007. At the end of that weekend, I had made the decision to quit my job, give up my apartment, sell all my possessions, and move out to Esalen with no clue of what would come next. But I knew it was the happiest I’d ever felt, being on that property for 48 hours, I had to go back. So I did. Because when you’re 25, you can make decisions like that. Um, so I arrived there a couple of days before Christmas in 2007, and I was a work scholar. So I was taking classes for a month and working in the Esalen kitchens, and I didn’t know what was gonna come of it. One month turned into two, turned into an extended studentship to stay for a year, and then it turned into a job offer to stay on the Esalen staff.

Josh Stern (Host): Mm-hmm.

Annie Wright: And I found my career there, too. I started graduate school while I was there because it was the thing that I was loving and wanted to move towards. So all of this to say, I have this very lived-out experience of deep relational wounding in the very early quarter of my life, but I also have this incredible experience, this watershed moment that changed me and the course of my life because of the healing power of relationship. And now I still have reparative healing experiences all the time in relationship. It’s a continuation of what I experienced in my mid to late 20s, and hopefully it’s what I’m providing others now as well.

Josh Stern (Host): And thank you for sharing that. And I want to ask you some questions in it that I find interesting. Like, here you were in a place of darkness, right? You were miserable. Was there a voice inside of you, maybe quiet, that said, “Keep going”? What led you in that moment to still go for something better? What do you think got you to look up the website, got you to go? In that place of darkness, do you remember?

Annie Wright: Well, I would just imagine that it was some unknown but still present part of me that knew that as unhappy as I was, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. It’s not a part I can easily identify, and I don’t know if we call that our soul, our intuition, spirit. Somehow that part of me, I think, was the one that knew, even though I was really, really unhappy, that wasn’t normal, that that was still not what I wanted, and it didn’t have to be that way. Otherwise, I probably would have just stayed put, to be honest, if it hadn’t been that part in me that was so hungry, even in a quiet way, for something different.

Josh Stern (Host): Or I guess I hope that part’s in all of us. But I do sort of believe it to be in all of us. It’s hard to believe in it. It’s hard to trust it. And sometimes I think it’s much more a whisper, all the pain is yelling and screaming.

Annie Wright: Yeah. Well, and to that point, when people are in my office, and they sit down on the couch, and they’re like, “I don’t think things are ever gonna be better. I feel actually pretty hopeless that things are gonna change,” I’ll say, “Huh, well, that’s interesting because here you are sitting on my couch. I believe a part of you might still have some hope or think something different is possible. Otherwise, I don’t think you’d be here.” So I think that’s really important to bear in mind. If we do show up to therapy, if we do show up to a workshop, if we do turn towards a personal development book, there is still some part of us that knows things could be better and wants something better for us.

Josh Stern (Host): Because I don’t think it’s easy to know this until you’ve gone through the journey, but I also think that voice knows where we need to go. And was the voice of like, “Oh, Esalen. Look that up on the website”, you know? And you sort of think it’s random, but I do think that voice… And I like that you introduced soul, intuition. I think there’s a voice that kind of knows where our healing lies, too.

Annie Wright: Right. And let me be clear. For years there, I was like, “What am I doing with my life?” All my peers were off doing investment banking or going to law school, and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just sitting in the hot tubs and baking bread and studying Gestalt. Like, what am I doing?” It didn’t all come together at once. So I say, like, yes, there was probably a part of me that trusted, and it was all meant to be, but it was also terrifying, a dark night of the soul, because I was coming undone but not knowing exactly where I was heading. And I also think that is very true in the work of healing. There may be a part of us that knows the North Star is this way, but the conscious mind resists and gets confused and has no idea what’s happening. So all of that can be true, too.

Josh Stern (Host): Sometimes, right, the North Star is there, but you still don’t know what land you’re actually going to hit. And I think this work takes tremendous bravery and tremendous trust. And yes, I understand the role of suffering, “This is so horrible, I might as well try this.” But I have come to more and more believe that it’s more that whisper and that North Star leading us, even if we wanna pin it on the motivation of suffering. But it is setting sail and not fully knowing what it’s gonna look like. But in my opinion, if you trust it, it always looks beautiful.

Annie Wright: I completely agree, and I think it’s just so beautiful what you said. You can see the North Star, but you don’t know the land that you’re gonna stand on, and boy, is that the truth. And I think it was hard for me to hear at the time, when I didn’t know what the land was gonna look like, to believe that there was gonna be land at all. And that’s where I think having other people on the other side of their journeys be like, “No, there will be land. You will be okay. There will be something to stand on.” That, to me, was invaluable during those years, and hopefully it’s something I can offer to people who are not standing on their own land yet.

Josh Stern (Host): Totally. That’s actually a beautiful lead-in to a question I wanted to ask you: what are these relationships offering us? And I think you’re 100% right that we, and these people at Esalen, and other people, I don’t believe it has to be therapists, I think. But I think one level of what is being offered is, like, “Trust it. Trust it. I know you don’t feel good right now. I know you don’t know where you’re going. Keep going. Trust it.” Would you add to that? Are there other gifts that you and these relationships were giving you?

Annie Wright: Totally. Well, when I think about the guidance and the sort of cheerleading, it seems like the lesser part to me of what’s really offered. I think at the end of the day what I offer, and what I know other therapists offer, is, again, that deeply reparative relationship experience: one that is kind, and boundaried, and caring, and concerned, and attuned, and mirrored. That, to me, is the biggest gift of what we offer. Because in giving that, so many other pieces can begin to heal within the person who’s suffering. So I think we give that. We give a reparative relational experience. Then I do think, yes, there’s the modeling ourselves of what it is to have gone through a dark night of the soul and to have come out on the other side, and maybe wisdom we can impart from that, saying “Keep going.” Maybe even sharing selective and appropriate bits of our own story to make someone feel less alone. I think, too, there’s maybe a little bit more practical and tangible thing that we do. We can provide resources. We can provide ideas. We can be there to help them, you know, if not problem solve, then think through some of the issues they’re facing. There are so many things that we give, but at the end of the day I think the core of it is the reparative relationship experience.

Josh Stern (Host): What is it about us that eats up someone caring about us, someone loving us, someone seeing us? Even in this moment, we are eating that up, right?

Annie Wright: Yeah, totally. Because it feels good. It just feels good to be connected to somebody else who is being kind to you, and being present with you, and connecting with you. And I don’t know why, I don’t have all the answers to the soul, but I think this is how we come into the world, and I think we grow when we have that, and we grow in positive ways when we have that. We’re hungry for it. We love to feel connected. We love to feel seen. We love to feel acknowledged. It feels good. And when we feel good, when we have that, when it meets that need we have for connection and contact, then I think we’re back to that question you asked about the ground, like, what helps create that internal ground? Well, I think that does. I think that feeds the internal ground.

Josh Stern (Host): Each one of these episodes feels to me like a quilt patch, and everyone has a sort of different way. But there are, of course, these themes I think that run through it, of how much we are told about individualism, and yet so much of healing and health seems to be relational. You laugh. So what do you make of that dichotomy?

Annie Wright: Oh, man. The American cowboy mythology of rugged individualism, it makes me shake my head. I don’t think the goal is to be fully independent, and I don’t think the goal is to be fully dependent. I think the goal is to be interdependent, and to let it be safe and possible to lean on and rely on certain others at certain times, and to allow those certain others, at certain times, to lean and rely on you. I think the goal is interdependence.

Josh Stern (Host): Yeah. I think I’m still very struck by how powerful relationship is. It’s almost like healthiness is a virus, and if you sit in it, and you sit with someone who has it, it spreads. And maybe the other is true, too. Maybe we’re actually talking about the virus of how much we really do infect each other. And if I’m in a negative place, I can infect you pretty negatively. And if I’m in a positive place, I can infect you pretty positively.

Annie Wright: Yeah. We’re using viral language, but I’m thinking, mirror neurons. We influence each other. We influence not only each other’s moods, but we actually influence the development of one another, truly, literally down to our neurochemistry. The neurons in our brains actually respond to the neurons in another’s. So we know this: mood is contagious, and we form in relationship to other people on a neurological level.

Josh Stern (Host): It’s striking.

Annie Wright: I remember way back before I did any of my healing work, I had a terrible sense of catastrophe all the time. And so if somebody did give me a look that was askance, I went into fear. I went into panic, even if it was not somebody I knew, because that was my trauma response. But through the work of therapy, and healing, and tons of reparative relationship experiences, it doesn’t, I’ll notice it, but it doesn’t shake me to the core. My nervous system doesn’t have the same reaction. I make different meaning of it now.

Josh Stern (Host): What do you think you know about yourself now that you didn’t know then?

Annie Wright: That I have the capacity to take care of myself and move through the world, and be okay.

Josh Stern (Host): Beautiful. I mean, really, it’s a great healing message from an old message that probably was, “You’re not okay.” “And the world has a lot of force over you.”

Annie Wright: Oh, for sure. Yeah. And it’s terrifying, and it’s out to get you, and if you don’t do personality gymnastics, you won’t be safe. No, I think the way I move through the world now is with a much more stable sense of self. And yeah, my mood changes day to day. Certainly depends on how much sleep I get. But that core sense of self, that inner stability, it helps me move through the world so much more easily than 10, 15 years ago.

Josh Stern (Host): Has motherhood changed you? And changed your sense of this?

Annie Wright: Oh. Yeah, yeah. In so many ways. I mean, where do we start? It’s funny, my husband played me this song by Brandi Carlile last night, it’s called The Mother, which I highly recommend everyone listen to, and one of the lyrics said, “Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind, tethered to another, worried all the time.” And I have just been repeating that to myself ever since I heard that, because I think it is the most profound change that I’ve struggled to articulate. Not the necessarily worried-all-the-time piece, but the being alone inside my mind. She, my daughter, is always at the back of my mind, no matter where I am moving through the world now. And that doesn’t mean I can’t be fully present for clients in therapy; I just mean I’m occupied by another. It was a profound shift. It was challenging at times. And it’s also incredibly amazing. And the other thing I think of, as it relates to this conversation, especially as we’re talking about the power of relationship, I have a heightened level of sensitivity around the power of relationship to wound and to heal. And hopefully a vigilance and also an intention to give my daughter the best relationship experience I can. And when I mess up, because I know I will, to try and repair that with her. And God, do I have appreciation and compassion for parents now. Oh my gosh. In a way that I don’t think I did before, because some people can view therapy as parent bashing, like blaming everything on mom and dad. And that comes up in our work, we are obviously gonna talk about our parents, because that’s where we form so much of ourselves and our views about the world. But between the fatigue, and the student loans, and the commutes, and paying the bills, it is hard to be a parent with good, kind, appropriate responses all the time. That’s Herculean. So I have a lot of compassion for folks now.

Josh Stern (Host): Yeah. I always joke, “He’ll have a therapist like me someday, to repair what I messed up.”

Annie Wright: Totally. My husband and I are like, “Okay. Well, our goal is just to do less damage than our parents did.” Right? It’s like, we know she’ll need therapy. But hopefully she won’t spend four years at Esalen recovering.

Josh Stern (Host): Totally. I pray she has a good therapist that will fill in where I screwed up. Is there anything you would like to add to this conversation, or are there things stirring in your mind that I didn’t specifically ask about?

Annie Wright: Huh. So many things. Well, I think our conversation has really reconnected me back to why I love this work so much in a way that sometimes feels hard to articulate on the day-to-day level, but again, reminds me, I do this work because I believe in the healing power of relationship, and in the great potentiality that we all have to heal and to transform, no matter what our early life circumstances were. A thing I think I’ll say is, because I say this to quite a few folks who come through my office, it takes time to develop certain ways of being, and worldviews, and beliefs. It will take time to learn how to practice and do something different. So that is, I think, always the secret ingredient here. I think healing takes time when we’re talking about these very core, fundamental parts of how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. I think sometimes healing can get lost a little bit in the pop psychology jargon of workshop seminars and whatnot, but the kind of healing I really believe in is more of the quiet, everyday, foundational level work of how we relate to ourselves, to the world, and then to others. It takes time. It’s not always the most popular opinion, but I think it’s important to say.

Josh Stern (Host): I do think there’s a compass in us that’s pointing us to the beautiful end of the story. And if you just hang in there and keep going, even when you get lost at sea or go the wrong direction, that compass is there. And I think we even do some listening to it before we realize we’re listening to it. And then you can get into healthy environments that really help attune you more to it and make you an active participant, make you even understand you have a compass. Or what north is for you. So I think it all can speed up, but I really agree with you that at the end of the day, if you can just hang in there and keep going, the odds are in your favor.

Annie Wright: I think so. The arc of life can be long for some, but it does bend towards healing. I think there’s something inside of us that is so healing and growth oriented, a part of us that knows that suffering, and pain, and disconnection, and alienation, that that’s not normal, and that there’s something else.

Josh Stern (Host): Totally. Well, that seems like a beautiful place to end. Thank you for sharing your insights and doing this with me. I wouldn’t have a show without guests, so I really appreciate every guest that comes on, and thank you.

Annie Wright: Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s so beautiful to be asked these questions and to reconnect back to why I love this work so much and why I do what I do, so thank you for that. I feel very filled and happy after this conversation.

Josh Stern (Host): Would you like to plug anything? A website?

Annie Wright: Sure. So as I mentioned, I run a therapy center in downtown Berkeley in the Wells Fargo building. We have a beautiful suite of offices and a really talented, highly trained team of clinicians on board, and we see individuals, couples, teens, and families. And we’re Evergreen Counseling, so you can find us on the web at www.evergreencounseling.com. You can call, text, or even book online. We’d love to be a support to you.

Josh Stern (Host): Perfect. Thank you, Annie.

Annie Wright: Thank you, Josh.

Josh Stern (Host): Thank you, Annie Wright, for sharing your wisdom with us, and a shout-out to my best bud, Justin Reed, for the music you hear in each episode. If you wanna reach out to either of these individuals, there are links in the show notes, so check those out. And of course, thank you to you, the listener, for joining us. If you’re digging these conversations, please help us spread the word by telling people directly or through social media about this podcast. Tune in again for another great episode.

A note on this page

This transcript was checked against the episode audio on August 9, 2026. Every quoted passage and every line of dialogue on this page was confirmed against the recording.