How to Deal With a Narcissistic Mother: A Therapist’s Practical Guide for Adult Daughters
Dealing with a narcissistic mother isn’t primarily a management problem. It’s a nervous system problem and a self-development problem. This guide walks driven adult daughters through the three main strategies (no-contact, limits, grey rock), the internal reparenting work that makes those strategies actually stick, and what healthy ongoing contact can look like once the real work has begun. Rooted in current clinical research and grounded in real client experience.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Renée Couldn’t Make Herself Go Inside After the Sunday Call
- Why “Just Setting Limits” With a Narcissistic Mother Doesn’t Work the Way It Should
- The Three Main Strategies (and What Each One Actually Costs)
- The Internal Work Underneath the External Strategy: Reparenting the Self Your Mother Couldn’t See
- The Pattern You Learned That You’re Still Carrying Into Other Relationships
- Both/And: You Can Love Your Mother AND Build a Life She Doesn’t Have Unlimited Access To
- The Systemic Lens: Narcissistic Mothering Is Not a Personal Failure. It Is a Wound Passed Down a Line
- What Ongoing Contact Looks Like When You’ve Done the Work
- Frequently Asked Questions
Dealing with a narcissistic mother requires understanding that the challenge isn’t primarily a management problem; it’s a nervous system problem and a self-development problem. Standard advice to ‘just set limits’ fails repeatedly because the adult daughter’s nervous system is still organized around the childhood imperative to maintain her mother’s approval, which means the limits don’t hold at the biological level even when they’re intellectually established. Real progress requires both an external strategy (ranging from no contact to structured limited engagement to grey rock) and an internal reparenting process that addresses the wounds beneath the behavior. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually the grief of finally accepting that the mother they needed is not the mother they have.
In short: Dealing with a narcissistic mother requires both an external contact strategy and internal reparenting work, because the adult daughter’s nervous system is still biologically organized around maintaining her mother’s conditional approval.
If you're the person in your family line who decided to stop the pattern, my self-paced course Parenting Past the Pattern is the practical work of doing it.
I’ve worked with adult daughters of narcissistic mothers across more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the limits advice almost always fails without the underlying internal work. Karyl McBride, PhD, provides the foundational clinical framework for understanding how maternal narcissism specifically shapes daughters’ self-concept and relational architecture (McBride 2008).
Renée Couldn’t Make Herself Go Inside After the Sunday Call
It’s 3:47 on a Sunday afternoon in late September, and Renée is sitting in her car in her own driveway with the engine still running. The maple tree she planted six years ago, when it was barely a sapling she’d chosen specifically because it turns red before everything else. Is blazing against the gold light. She doesn’t remember, now, why that mattered to her. That it turns early. She’s just noticing it.
Her phone is face-up on the passenger seat. The call timer still shows: 44:12. She doesn’t turn the screen over.
In those 44 minutes, her mother mentioned her own achievements eleven times. She mentioned Renée’s daughter Sophie exactly once. To note that Sophie seemed shy, in a way that made shyness sound like a failing Renée had probably caused. Renée’s hands are still gripping the steering wheel at the two o’clock position. The car is parked. She hasn’t noticed her hands yet.
She thinks: She asked about Sophie once. Once in 44 minutes. She exhales slowly. Something in her chest is waiting to settle before she goes inside, before she walks through the door where her daughter is, where the rest of her actual life is. She needs a moment first. She needs to find herself again before she can be anybody’s mother, anybody’s partner, anybody’s person.
If you know this feeling, the particular exhaustion of a phone call that takes something from you without ever asking. You already understand more than any diagnostic checklist can tell you about what it means to have a narcissistic mother. You don’t need me to prove your experience is real. You need something more useful: a way forward.
This guide is for adult daughters who are done asking whether their mother is a narcissist and ready to work on what to do next.
Why “Just Setting Limits” With a Narcissistic Mother Doesn’t Work the Way It Should
Most advice about dealing with a narcissistic mother starts and ends with limits. Set them. Hold them. Enforce them. And if you’ve tried this, you know that the advice is not wrong exactly. It’s just incomplete in a way that leaves you feeling worse about yourself when you inevitably falter.
The reason limits are harder with a narcissistic mother than with almost any other relationship isn’t a character flaw on your part. It’s a nervous system issue rooted in your developmental history.
In clinical literature, a narcissistic mother is a parent whose primary relational orientation is organized around her own need for admiration, validation, and emotional supply. To such a degree that her child’s independent emotional reality becomes a secondary or even inconvenient concern. Karyl McBride, PhD, licensed marriage and family therapist and author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers, describes this as a parent who is emotionally unavailable, self-focused, and incapable of truly seeing or celebrating her child as a separate person with distinct needs and worth.
In plain terms: Your mother’s relationship with you was always, at some level, about her. Her moods, her reputation, her needs, her story. Your needs were managed around hers. When they were managed at all. You learned early that the safest way to be loved was to make yourself useful to her emotional world, not to have one of your own.
When you try to set a limit with this mother as an adult, you’re not just asserting a preference in a relationship between two equals. You’re doing something your entire nervous system was trained to understand as dangerous: you’re making yourself inconvenient to the person whose approval was, for a very long time, the thing your survival felt like it depended on.
That’s not a motivation problem. That’s not weakness. That’s the completely logical output of a childhood relational system that required you to abandon yourself in order to stay in connection with your primary caregiver. You can read more about how this plays out in the narcissistic mother guide on this site.
Until you understand that limits with a narcissistic mother require internal work, not just external technique. The limits will keep collapsing. Not because you don’t want them badly enough. Because the child part of you is still more frightened of her disapproval than the adult part of you is committed to your own wellbeing. That gap is where the real therapeutic work lives.
The Three Main Strategies (and What Each One Actually Costs)
There are three main approaches adult daughters use when navigating a relationship with a narcissistic mother. Each is valid. Each has real costs. None of them works without the internal work described in the next section.
These are the most clinically and culturally recognized approaches to managing a relationship with a narcissistic parent. No-contact means ending or severely restricting all communication. Limits (sometimes called boundaries) means maintaining contact while clearly defining what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. And following through with consequences when those definitions are crossed. Grey rock, a term that has moved from online support communities into clinical language, means making yourself as emotionally uninteresting as possible during interactions: neutral, flat, unrewarding for the person seeking emotional supply.
In plain terms: You’re choosing how much access your mother gets. To your time, your emotional world, and your reactions. No-contact takes away all access. Limits define the terms of access. Grey rock makes access feel unrewarding so she’s less motivated to seek it. What matters is which one you can actually sustain given your nervous system, your history, and your life.
No-contact is the most decisive option and, for some women, the only one that allows genuine healing to begin. It’s not a punishment. It’s a recognition that the relationship, as it currently exists, is extracting more than you can afford to give. It often involves grief that gets underestimated: grief not just for the mother you have, but for the mother you needed and never got.
The costs of no-contact are real. There may be family ruptures, pressure from siblings or extended family, and the particular loneliness of being estranged from someone who is technically still alive. If your mother has access to your children, no-contact becomes significantly more complicated. No-contact is a valid choice. It is also not the only healing path.
Limits with ongoing contact are what most adult daughters actually want: not to lose their mother entirely, but to stop losing themselves every time they interact with her. Wendy Behary, LCSW, founder of The Cognitive Therapy Center of New Jersey and author of Disarming the Narcissist, writes that effective limit-setting with a narcissistic person requires what she calls “empathic confrontation”. A way of staying connected to the relationship while refusing to participate in dynamics that harm you. This isn’t passive; it requires active, regulated engagement rather than reactive compliance or explosive conflict.
The cost of this approach is sustained effort. Limits with a narcissistic mother aren’t set once. They’re maintained in every call, every visit, every interaction. That maintenance requires a stable internal foundation that many daughters of narcissistic mothers are still building. If you’re exploring what this looks like in practice, working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands narcissistic family systems can make an enormous difference.
Grey rock is a middle-ground strategy that many women find useful for the period between “I can’t keep doing this” and “I’m ready to fully restructure the relationship.” It’s not pretending to be fine. It’s strategically offering your mother a version of you that doesn’t give her much to work with. No emotional escalation. No new personal information she can use as ammunition later. Calls kept short, with planned endpoints. Responses that are polite, brief, and affectively neutral.
The cost of grey rock is its own kind of exhaustion: the performance of blankness requires regulation, and regulation requires resources. It also doesn’t resolve anything at the level of the relationship. It reduces the damage while the real work happens elsewhere.
What all three strategies share: they are downstream of internal work. The woman who has done that internal work can move between them with some flexibility, choosing the level of contact that matches her current capacity. The woman who hasn’t done that work will find that any strategy collapses under the weight of her nervous system’s older loyalties.
The Internal Work Underneath the External Strategy: Reparenting the Self Your Mother Couldn’t See
In my work with clients who grew up with narcissistic mothers, I see a consistent pattern: they come in asking how to handle their mother, and they end up doing something much more important. They end up learning how to be on their own side.
Karyl McBride, PhD, whose foundational research on daughters of narcissistic mothers has defined much of the clinical conversation on this topic, puts it precisely:
“Daughters of narcissistic mothers do not have a mother problem. They have a self problem. Not because there is something wrong with them, but because their mother’s narcissism required them to abandon themselves in order to remain in relationship with her.”
KARYL McBRIDE, PhD, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (2008)
This is the pivot point of the article. And of the entire healing process. The work isn’t primarily about your mother. It’s about recovering the self you set aside.
Here’s what that self-abandonment looks like in practice for driven, ambitious adult women. You became very good at reading the emotional weather. You became an expert at managing other people’s feelings, at sensing what someone needed from you before they asked, at making yourself exactly the right size for whatever the room required. These are relational skills that served you in childhood. They also follow you everywhere.
The internal work of reparenting involves several intertwined threads:
Identifying your needs as separate from your mother’s narrative about your needs. A narcissistic mother often had a very specific story about who you were. Your role in her emotional ecosystem, your purpose in her narrative. Reparenting means interrogating that story. What did you actually need as a child that you didn’t get? What do you need now?
Building a relationship with your own emotional reality. Many daughters of narcissistic mothers have significant difficulty naming what they feel in the moment, because their feelings were routinely overridden, minimized, or redirected toward their mother’s feelings. Learning to name, tolerate, and respond to your own emotional experience is not selfish. It is foundational.
Learning to grieve what didn’t happen. This is where many women get stuck. The grief isn’t only for the harm that was done. It’s for the attunement that was absent. The mother who asked about your day and actually listened. The mother who celebrated your victories without making them about herself. The mother who could tolerate your bad moods without becoming destabilized by them. Grieving the absence of that mother is painful and necessary. It’s the process by which you stop waiting for her to become that person.
If you’re a driven woman who’s spent years building an impressive external life while quietly wondering why nothing feels like enough. This is often part of the answer. The work of individual trauma therapy provides a container for this grief and this rebuilding in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.
The Pattern You Learned That You’re Still Carrying Into Other Relationships
Consider Priya, 38, a surgeon in a major academic medical center. She came to therapy because she couldn’t understand why her relationships kept ending in the same way: her partners felt she was emotionally distant; she felt that no one ever truly saw her. In session, what emerged was a portrait of a childhood in which her emotional needs were consistently subordinated to her mother’s needs. A mother who, by any clinical description, had significant narcissistic traits.
Priya had become exceptionally competent. She’d also become exceptionally defended. She’d learned, early, that needing things was dangerous. That the gap between what she needed and what her mother could offer was a gap she’d better close by needing less. She’d spent three decades being extremely good at that. Now she was wondering why she felt so alone.
What Priya was carrying is what Pete Walker, MFT, author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, calls the fawn response: an adaptive survival strategy in which a child manages threat by becoming attentive, accommodating, and emotionally attuned to others. At the expense of her own needs, limits, and sense of self. Walker’s work illuminates why daughters of narcissistic mothers often become extraordinary caretakers, exceptional readers of emotional states, and deeply uncomfortable with being on the receiving end of care.
The fawn response was not a weakness in Priya’s childhood. It was a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. In adulthood, it shows up as difficulty asking for what she needs, a reflexive tendency to manage other people’s discomfort, and a chronic low-level anxiety that something is always about to go wrong relationally. Her nervous system learned that lesson very early.
For women like Priya, the relational patterns established with a narcissistic mother don’t stay contained in that relationship. They migrate into friendships, romantic partnerships, professional dynamics, even parenting. The work of trauma-informed individual therapy is about building enough self-awareness to catch those patterns in motion and enough internal resources to choose differently.
If you’re curious about how this shows up specifically when there’s also an enabling partner in the family system, you might find it useful to read about when a narcissistic mother has an enabling partner. The dynamic is distinct and worth understanding on its own terms. And if your mother fits a quieter, less obvious pattern, the piece on the covert narcissist mother addresses those subtleties directly.
You are not your parents. Some nights, that's the hardest thing to hold.
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Both/And: You Can Love Your Mother AND Build a Life She Doesn’t Have Unlimited Access To
One of the most painful parts of having a narcissistic mother is the false binary that shows up in most cultural narratives about this: either you accept the relationship as it is, or you’re a bad daughter who abandoned her mother.
That’s not the only frame available to you.
Here’s the Both/And that actually holds for most of the women I work with: You can maintain contact with your narcissistic mother without surrendering your interior life. And the work of protecting that interior life is not about her willingness to change. It’s about your willingness to stop waiting for her to change before you begin.
These two truths coexist. You can love her. You can also decide that love doesn’t require unlimited access. Love doesn’t require you to be emotionally available for interactions that reliably dysregulate you. Love doesn’t require you to make yourself small so that she can feel large.
What changes when you actually internalize this Both/And framing, not just intellectually but in your body and your nervous system. Is that the guilt loses some of its stranglehold. The guilt has been functioning as the enforcement mechanism of the original relationship system. It fires when you protect yourself because, in your childhood relational world, protecting yourself was a form of betrayal. The Both/And frame doesn’t eliminate the guilt immediately. But it gives you somewhere to stand while the guilt moves through.
This is also the frame that makes it possible to have a relationship with your mother that doesn’t cost you yourself. Not because she has changed. Because you have.
If you’re looking for structured, supported help with the reparenting work, the limits work, the grief work. The Fixing the Foundations™ course was built specifically for this kind of relational healing at your own pace.
The Systemic Lens: Narcissistic Mothering Is Not a Personal Failure. It Is a Wound Passed Down a Line
There’s something important that gets lost in the diagnostic conversation about narcissistic mothers, and I want to name it directly: your mother was someone’s daughter too.
Narcissistic mothering does not emerge in a vacuum. It is transmitted through unhealed generations of women who were also taught that their worth was contingent on their performance, their appearance, their compliance with other people’s emotional needs. The mother who wounds her daughter was also someone’s daughter who was wounded first. Likely in ways that were never acknowledged, never grieved, never repaired.
This is not an excuse for harm. It doesn’t make the harm smaller or mean you should accept it. But it matters for how you understand your own history, and for how you think about the transmission to the next generation.
The systemic dimension also shows up in how narcissistic mothers are made, not just born. We live in a culture that has routinely told women that their value is relational and performative: the impressive home, the accomplished children, the maintained appearance, the cheerful presence. A woman who organized her entire sense of worth around external performance, because she was never given permission to organize it around internal reality, can become without intending to. A mother who needs her daughter to perform as well.
Understanding this doesn’t mean forgiving behavior that harmed you. It means that when you do the work of breaking the cycle, you’re not just healing yourself. You’re interrupting a transmission. What you repair in yourself, you do not pass to your children. That’s not a small thing.
In my clinical work, many driven women raised by narcissistic mothers become intensely focused on not repeating the pattern with their own children. Sometimes to the point of overcorrecting, so determined not to be their mother that they lose touch with their own needs entirely. The work is finding the middle: present, regulated, clear-eyed about the history without being governed by it.
This is also where community matters. The Strong & Stable newsletter is a space where these conversations happen every week. The intergenerational dimensions of relational trauma, the work of building something different, the particular challenges facing driven women who are trying to heal while still showing up for their lives.
Research in developmental psychology and attachment theory has documented how unhealed relational trauma, including patterns of emotional unavailability, narcissistic injury, and insecure attachment. Is transmitted from parent to child through repeated interactions rather than through conscious intention. Parents do not choose to transmit their wounds; they transmit them through the only relational templates they have. Interrupting this cycle requires sufficient awareness of the original pattern, often with therapeutic support.
In plain terms: Your mother likely didn’t set out to wound you the way she did. She passed along what was passed to her. The point isn’t to excuse the harm. It’s to understand that the cycle breaks when someone does the work. You doing this work now, in your own life, matters far beyond yourself.
What Ongoing Contact Looks Like When You’ve Done the Work
When I talk with clients who’ve made significant progress in this particular kind of healing, one of the things they often describe surprises them: their relationship with their mother doesn’t necessarily look dramatically different from the outside. The calls are still weekly for some of them. They still see their mothers at holidays. What has changed is something internal. Something about how much of themselves they lose in the interaction, and how quickly they come back.
Here’s what has actually changed for the women in my practice who’ve done this work:
They’ve stopped waiting for their mother to change. This sounds simple. It’s not. For most daughters of narcissistic mothers, there’s a deep, often unconscious hope that if they can just find the right approach, the right words, the right tone. Their mother will finally see them. Letting go of that hope is its own grief process. But on the other side of it is something that functions like freedom: they’re no longer managing the relationship in service of a change that isn’t coming.
They’ve developed an internal decompression practice. What Renée was doing in her car, sitting with the engine running until something in her body settled. That’s not avoidance. That’s regulation. Knowing that contact with her mother dysregulates her nervous system, she’s built in time to return to herself before she goes inside to her daughter, her partner, her actual life. The practice isn’t pathological. It’s a reasonable accommodation for a nervous system learning new things.
They’ve built sources of mirroring outside the relationship. One of the most lasting wounds of a narcissistic mother is what it does to a woman’s ability to be seen. When the primary person who was supposed to reflect you back to yourself was too occupied with her own reflection, you internalize a doubt about whether you’re actually visible. Finding relationships (therapeutic, romantic, platonic) in which you are genuinely seen and genuinely celebrated is not a luxury. It’s part of the repair.
They’ve established clear, enforceable limits. And they feel less guilty about them. The limits often look unremarkable to an outsider. A shortened visit. A phone call that ends when a subject comes up that reliably derails the interaction. A decision not to share certain things with their mother that she will use as emotional material. What’s changed isn’t the limit itself. It’s that the woman holding the limit has enough internal support to tolerate the discomfort of the guilt when it fires.
They’ve found a way to grieve their mother while their mother is still alive. This is perhaps the most specifically painful part of having a narcissistic mother: the grief is disenfranchised. She’s not gone. She’s right there. And yet you are mourning something real. The attunement that never came, the celebrations that were redirected, the private self you learned to keep hidden. Letting yourself grieve this fully, ideally with therapeutic support, is what makes it possible to be in the relationship without being destroyed by it.
If you’re ready to do this work in a structured, supported way, a complimentary consult is a good place to start the conversation about whether individual therapy is the right fit. You can also explore what executive coaching looks like for driven women navigating professional pressure and relational healing together.
Back in Renée’s car: she sits until the engine has been idling for almost five minutes. The call timer is still there on her screen. Then she picks up the phone and turns the screen face-down. She gathers her bag. She walks up the path to her front door through the gold September light, past the red maple she planted six years ago as a sapling for reasons she’s only beginning to understand.
She doesn’t have her mother figured out. She’s not sure she ever will. But she knows, for the first time in a long time, that what happened in that 44-minute call is not the whole story of who she is. And that the maple is hers, and the house is hers, and the girl inside waiting for her is hers, and that is more than enough to go inside for.
That shift, from your mother’s story about you to your own, is the work. All of it, ultimately, points here.
If any part of this landed for you today, I want you to know that what you’re carrying is real and the work is real. The women in my practice who’ve done this work are some of the most clear-eyed, generous, genuinely grounded people I know. That can be yours too. Not because your mother will change. But because you will. And that’s entirely enough.
Q: Should I go no-contact with my narcissistic mother?
A: It depends on the severity of the harm, on whether children are involved and what your mother’s access to them looks like, and on your current capacity to maintain limits in ongoing contact. No-contact is a valid choice and it isn’t an act of cruelty. For some women, it’s the only decision that allows genuine healing to begin. It’s also not the only healing path. What the decision requires is honesty about what ongoing contact is costing you, emotionally and relationally. If every interaction leaves you dysregulated for days, that cost is worth factoring in. A trauma-informed therapist who understands narcissistic family systems can help you assess this clearly rather than from a place of guilt.
Q: My narcissistic mother says she’ll “be there” for me when I need her. Why can’t I trust it?
A: Because conditional availability is a core feature of the pattern, not a departure from it. The offer of support is often genuine in the moment. But it’s contingent on your mother’s current emotional state, on whether supporting you serves her narrative, and on whether it can be given in a way that generates the appreciation she’s seeking. It doesn’t mean the support will arrive in the form you actually need it, or that it won’t come with a cost attached. When you’ve experienced this repeatedly, your nervous system has learned that the offer isn’t safe to rely on. That’s not pessimism. That’s pattern recognition.
Q: How do I stop feeling guilty for having limits with my mother?
A: The guilt is a trained response. It was the enforcement mechanism of the original relationship system. When you were a child, needing things, asserting yourself, or pulling away from your mother likely produced enough discomfort (her withdrawal, her anger, her hurt) that your nervous system learned to fire guilt preemptively, before you could even act. Pete Walker, MFT, whose work on Complex PTSD has illuminated this pattern clearly, describes how the inner critic develops as an internalization of the original critical parent. That internal voice tells you you’re selfish, ungrateful, or a bad daughter. The guilt does not mean the limit is wrong. It means the limit is new to your nervous system, and new things feel dangerous before they feel natural. The goal isn’t to eliminate the guilt immediately; it’s to learn to act from your values even while the guilt is present.
Q: What does the grey rock method actually look like with a narcissistic mother?
A: Grey rock means making yourself emotionally unrewarding without being openly hostile. In practice this looks like: responding to provocative comments with neutral, brief acknowledgments (“Mm. Interesting.”) rather than defending yourself or engaging with the criticism. Keeping calls short and having a planned endpoint before you dial. Not volunteering new personal information that can be stored and deployed in future interactions. Not escalating when she escalates. Keeping your emotional reactions internal rather than visible. It’s not coldness. It’s a regulated nervous system choosing not to participate in the dynamic she’s inviting. It’s also not sustainable as a permanent relational posture, which is why grey rock works best as a short-term strategy while you build the internal resources for a more sustainable approach.
Q: Can I be a good mother myself when I was raised by a narcissistic mother?
A: Yes. And I want to be direct about that because this question carries so much fear. The intergenerational transmission of relational patterns is real, but it isn’t inevitable. What transmits is the unhealed wound, and wounds are healable. The fact that you’re asking this question, that you’re aware of the pattern, that you’re invested enough in your children’s wellbeing to worry about replicating harm: these are all protective factors. Awareness of a pattern is the first and most significant step in interrupting it. The work of therapy involves building your own attachment security, developing your capacity to tolerate your children’s emotional states without being destabilized by them, and repairing ruptures with your kids when they happen. That’s exactly the work that breaks the cycle. You don’t have to be a perfect mother. You have to be a mother who is honest about her history and committed to the repair. That’s enough.
Related Reading
McBride, Karyl. Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. New York: Free Press, 2008.
Behary, Wendy T. Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed. 3rd ed. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, 2021.
Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.
Freyd, Jennifer J. “Betrayal Trauma: Traumatic Amnesia as an Adaptive Response to Childhood Abuse.” Ethics & Behavior 4, no. 4 (1994): 307, 329.
Lowen, Alexander. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. New York: Touchstone, 1983.
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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. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in 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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