How to Heal from Childhood Trauma: What the Research Says and What a Therapist Actually Recommends
Healing from childhood trauma isn’t about quick fixes or tidy insight. It’s a nonlinear, body-based process grounded in real research and clinical practice. This post walks through what childhood trauma actually is, what it does to the developing brain and nervous system, and the evidence-based path a therapist actually recommends, for anyone quietly asking, “Can this really change?”
- The Question That Deserves a Real Answer
- What Is Childhood Trauma: A Framework That Actually Fits
- What Childhood Trauma Does: The Neuroscience
- How Childhood Trauma Shows Up in Adult Life
- What Actually Works: The Evidence Base for Healing
- Both/And: Healing Is Real, and It Takes the Time It Takes
- The Systemic Lens: Why Healing Isn’t Equally Available to Everyone
- A Therapist’s Actual Recommendations: Where to Start
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Question That Deserves a Real Answer
It’s just past six in the evening. You’re standing in your softly lit kitchen, chopping vegetables for dinner. The knife against the cutting board is almost meditative. Garlic and rosemary warm on the stove, and the refrigerator hums its steady backdrop. The day’s stress still clings to your shoulders, but for a moment you’re present with this small, domestic ritual.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
Then, unexpectedly, a memory slips in. It’s not a dramatic flashback. No yelling, no traumatic event bursting forth. Just a quiet fragment: you’re around seven, sitting at the kitchen table while your parents talk in low voices nearby. You remember how they never asked how you felt inside, how your questions about your own feelings met silence or a quick change of subject. You recall the emptiness in that absence, the way your inner world was carefully avoided.
This small memory feels like a weight now. It’s one piece in a puzzle you’ve carried for years. The past isn’t past. It’s woven into your daily life, in the tightness in your chest when someone gives you critical feedback, the exhaustion of pretending everything’s fine, the inner voice telling you you’re not enough. You wonder: can this actually change?
That question, the one you might never have voiced aloud, is the real starting point. It’s one I hear from so many driven women who navigated complicated childhoods without clear scars, who’ve tried therapy before but still feel stuck, or who are just beginning to explore what healing might mean. It’s honest and raw, and it deserves a real answer.
In my work with clients, I notice this question tends to arrive dressed up in more practical language. Women ask me about their trouble delegating, their difficulty resting, their pattern of choosing partners who echo something unresolved from their family of origin, sometimes wondering aloud whether their marriage has simply been outgrown rather than shaped by an old wound. Underneath nearly all of it is some version of the same question: can I actually change, or is this just who I am now.
Healing from childhood trauma isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about learning to live differently with it: rewiring your brain, calming your nervous system, and reclaiming parts of yourself that were lost or hidden. It’s about discovering you don’t have to carry the weight alone, and that your story doesn’t have to define your future.
In the sections ahead, I’ll walk through the research, the neuroscience beneath the surface, and practical guidance for healing at your own pace. This isn’t a quick fix. It takes time and the right support. But it’s real, and it’s possible.
What Is Childhood Trauma: A Framework That Actually Fits
A framework established through the landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences research, large CDC-Kaiser studies that examined childhood adversity across ten categories, including abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, and their relationship to adult health and functioning across thousands of participants. Higher ACE scores are associated with significantly elevated rates of physical illness, mental health conditions, substance use, and relational difficulty, establishing that childhood adversity is a major determinant of adult wellbeing. (PMID: 40456965)
In plain terms: The ACE research is scientific proof that what happens to us in childhood shapes our adult health, relationships, and functioning in measurable, documented ways. It’s also proof that “nothing was wrong with my family” can coexist with a genuinely high burden of adversity, because emotional neglect, household dysfunction, and a parent’s untreated mental illness all count.
For many people, the word “trauma” conjures dramatic, catastrophic events: physical abuse, violence, neglect so severe it’s impossible to ignore. Those experiences absolutely qualify. But the reality is broader and more complex. Childhood trauma exists on a spectrum, and the most common form isn’t always what’s obvious or visible.
The landmark ACE research was a groundbreaking investigation revealing how a wide range of adverse experiences in childhood, not just abuse or assault but also emotional neglect, household dysfunction, and chronic stress, correlate strongly with adult health outcomes. It helped shift the conversation from trauma as “what happened to you” to trauma as “what happened, and what was missing.”
Emotional neglect, in particular, is one of the most overlooked forms of childhood trauma. It’s the absence of emotional attunement, the lack of curiosity about a child’s inner life, the silence around feelings and needs. For a driven woman now navigating adulthood, this neglect can feel like a wound that’s hard to name but impossible to ignore. You might have been told your childhood was “normal” or “fine,” but that silence itself often held a heavy cost.
This framework helps explain why therapy can feel confusing or incomplete if it focuses only on overt abuse. Healing requires acknowledgment of what was missing as much as what went wrong. Trauma isn’t always the big, dramatic event. It’s also the quiet, persistent absence of safety and connection.
Understanding this spectrum is a first step toward understanding your own experience. It’s why “Can I heal?” is such an important question. It acknowledges that what you’re carrying is real, even if it doesn’t look like a textbook trauma story.
What Childhood Trauma Does: The Neuroscience
A term used by developmental researchers to describe activation of the body’s stress response system in the absence of adequate buffering from a supportive caregiver relationship. Distinguished from positive stress (brief, mild, normal) and tolerable stress (serious but time-limited with support), toxic stress involves prolonged or frequently repeated activation of the stress response without the relational buffer needed to return the system to regulation. During critical developmental windows, this measurably affects neurological architecture.
In plain terms: Toxic stress is what happens to a child’s developing brain and nervous system when the stress response keeps firing and there’s no safe adult consistently available to help bring it back down. It isn’t one big event. It’s the chronic, daily experience of not having enough safety and support, and it changes the brain in ways that persist into adulthood.
Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, psychiatrist and child-trauma neuroscientist, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, has profoundly shaped our understanding of how childhood adversity impacts brain development. His clinical research shows that trauma isn’t just a psychological experience. It’s a neurological one, with measurable, sequential effects on how a developing brain organizes itself around threat and safety.
When a child experiences repeated or chronic adversity without consistent support, their stress response system becomes overactive. This is what developmental researchers call “toxic stress.” Unlike ordinary stress everyone experiences, like a hard exam or a brief scare, toxic stress is prolonged and severe, without the buffer of a safe, attuned caregiver to help the child return to calm.
This chronic activation affects key brain regions, including:
- The prefrontal cortex: Responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and emotional regulation. Trauma can stunt its development, making emotions and responses harder to manage.
- The hippocampus: Involved in memory and learning. Trauma can shrink this region, contributing to difficulties with memory consolidation and heightened stress sensitivity.
- The amygdala: The brain’s alarm system, detecting threat and triggering fear responses. Trauma can leave it overactive, making a person hypervigilant or easily startled.
Because childhood trauma interferes with brain architecture during critical developmental windows, its effects are enduring. This isn’t simply “bad memories” or “feeling sad.” The brain itself becomes wired to expect danger and respond accordingly, which shapes how you experience the world as an adult.
This neurological imprint is why healing can’t just be about talking through the past or changing thoughts. Healing has to engage the brain and nervous system directly. That’s why body-based therapies, nervous system regulation, and relational safety are essential components of recovery, not optional add-ons.
Understanding the neuroscience behind trauma isn’t just academic. It’s clarifying. When you realize your struggles with emotional regulation, memory, or anxiety have a biological basis, it takes some of the blame and shame off your shoulders. Healing isn’t about willpower or moral failing. It’s about helping your brain learn new ways to be safe and calm.
This is especially relevant for women who’ve spent years quietly asking themselves what’s wrong with me, cycling through self-help books and productivity systems, trying to think their way out of a felt sense of danger that was never going to respond to thinking alone. The nervous system doesn’t take instruction from willpower. It takes cues from repeated experience: enough moments of genuine safety, held consistently over time, to slowly recalibrate what it expects from the world. That’s a different kind of work than insight, and it’s often the piece that’s been missing from years of otherwise thoughtful self-examination.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- Childhood trauma predicts distinct treatment trajectories in short-term psychodynamic and cognitive therapy (PMID: 41280452)
- Long-term outcomes after trauma-focused CBT show durable gains across mixed-methods follow-up (PMID: 40045728)
- Childhood trauma is linked to measurable longitudinal clinical outcomes across adulthood (PMID: 41022658)
- Adverse childhood experiences correlate with a broad range of adult health outcomes across ten categories of adversity
How Childhood Trauma Shows Up in Adult Life
Odette is 37, a management consultant with a sharp mind and a packed calendar. She often describes her childhood as “very normal.” Both parents were present. No abuse, no disasters. But beneath that surface, Odette has carried an unrelenting sense of emptiness and exhaustion she couldn’t quite name. After three years of therapy, the picture became clearer: the emotional silence was the trauma.
Her parents never asked about her feelings or her inner experience. There was an absence of curiosity, of emotional attunement, that left Odette managing her own emotional needs alone from a young age. It wasn’t neglect in the dramatic sense, but the persistent absence of emotional connection meant her nervous system stayed on edge, her sense of safety quietly compromised. This wound shaped her adult life in profound ways, and it took years of trauma-informed therapy before Odette could name what had actually happened to her.
In adulthood, childhood trauma doesn’t always look like flashbacks or clear trauma memories. It shows up across many domains:
- Physical health: ACE research shows strong links between childhood adversity and adult health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, and autoimmune conditions. Odette noticed chronic fatigue and headaches that mystified her doctors.
- Mental health: Depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD are common outcomes. Odette struggled with persistent anxiety and a harsh inner critic that eroded her self-esteem.
- Relationships: Attachment difficulties often lead to re-enactment of childhood dynamics, sometimes showing up as fearful-avoidant attachment. Odette found herself either withdrawing or overextending emotionally in her romantic relationships, unable to fully trust.
- Work and performance: driven women like Odette often channel trauma into overperformance, perfectionism, or imposter syndrome. She could never quite rest, pushing herself to prove worthiness through achievement.
- Relationship with self: Shame, self-criticism, and perfectionism often dominate. The inner voice saying “not good enough” was relentless for Odette, echoing the unspoken messages of childhood neglect.
- Patterns with other people: Some women notice they keep landing in dynamics that feel eerily familiar, wondering why they keep attracting the same kind of partner or slipping into codependent patterns at work and at home.
Odette’s story is a reminder that childhood trauma is rarely only about dramatic, catastrophic events. Sometimes it’s what wasn’t said, what wasn’t felt safe to express, and what was missing that shapes the adult’s inner world. Recognizing this fuller picture is crucial to healing.
A trauma-related condition arising from prolonged, repeated interpersonal trauma, most often in childhood, rather than a single traumatic incident. In addition to core PTSD symptoms like intrusive memories and hypervigilance, complex PTSD includes persistent difficulties with emotional regulation, a chronically negative self-concept, and significant disruption in the capacity to form and sustain relationships. It reflects how the nervous system adapts, over years, to an environment where safety and connection were unreliable.
In plain terms: Complex PTSD is what can develop when a child grows up with prolonged relational adversity rather than one bad event. It explains why so many driven women feel like something is wrong with them at a core level, even without a single traumatic incident they can point to.
What Actually Works: The Evidence Base for Healing
What I observe most often in women who grew up with unacknowledged trauma is a kind of performance of wholeness: an external life that looks successful and put-together, while internally they feel disconnected from themselves and uncertain what they actually need.
Healing from childhood trauma is a complex process, but research in recent decades has clarified what actually works. It’s not about quick fixes or one-size-fits-all approaches. The evidence points to a combination of trauma-focused therapies, relational safety, somatic work, and self-compassion practices.
Trauma-focused therapies like EMDR, somatic experiencing, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy have strong research backing. These modalities engage the brain and nervous system directly to help process and integrate traumatic material rather than simply talk around it.
A trauma-focused therapy with extensive clinical trial evidence for both single-incident PTSD and complex relational trauma. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, typically guided eye movements, while the client holds traumatic material in awareness, facilitating adaptive processing of memories that have remained frozen in unprocessed form. Research supports EMDR as a first-line treatment for PTSD and trauma, including childhood relational trauma. (PMID: 41277877)
In plain terms: EMDR is one of the best-evidenced treatments for trauma. It works not through extensive talking or analysis, but through a specific processing protocol that helps the brain metabolize memories frozen in their original form, so they can finally become “the past” rather than perpetually present.
The therapeutic relationship itself plays a vital role. Safe, consistent connection with a therapist trained in trauma creates a reparative experience that helps rewrite attachment patterns and build new neural pathways. This relational safety is often what allows clients to engage deeply with healing without retraumatization.
Somatic and body-based approaches recognize that trauma is held not just in memories or thoughts but in the body and nervous system. Techniques focused on nervous system regulation, breathwork, and physical awareness help release stuck energy and restore balance.
Self-compassion practices are essential to sustainable healing. Trauma often leaves people with harsh, critical inner voices. Building genuine kindness toward yourself interrupts that pattern, helps soothe the nervous system, and makes the rest of the work easier to sustain over time.
“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.”
Antonio Machado, Spanish poet, “Cantares,” Campos de Castilla, 1912
Community and reparative relationships are another key pillar. Healing rarely happens in isolation. Whether through peer support groups, trusted friendships, or family, reparative relationships provide safety, validation, and belonging.
This evidence base underscores that healing is multi-dimensional. It requires engagement with mind, body, and relationships together. If you’re wondering where to start, these are the pillars to look for in a therapeutic approach.
Both/And: Healing Is Real, and It Takes the Time It Takes
There’s an understandable tension at the heart of healing from childhood trauma, between hope and realism. On one hand, the research and clinical experience are clear: healing is real. People do change. People develop new capacities to regulate their nervous systems, build secure attachment, and live with greater ease and joy.
On the other hand, healing rarely looks like a linear path or a quick fix. It’s slow, sometimes frustrating, and often non-linear. There are steps forward and steps back. There’s no switch that turns off the pain or rewires the brain overnight.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
This is often where driven women get stuck, not because they lack insight, but because insight was never the missing piece. Many arrive already fluent in the language of therapy, able to narrate their own history with striking clarity, and still find themselves repeating the same patterns: still unable to set a boundary without spiraling into guilt, still bracing for rejection in relationships that have given them no real reason to. Understanding a pattern intellectually and unwinding it in your nervous system are two different processes, and conflating them is one of the most common ways healing stalls.
Some of what looks like relapse is actually the work continuing underground. A woman who has done years of work can still find herself back in an old dynamic, wondering if she has learned anything at all, when what’s actually happening is that old trauma-bonded patterns are surfacing precisely because she now has enough stability to finally look at them directly. Progress in this work is rarely a straight upward line. It often looks more like a spiral, revisiting familiar territory with a little more capacity each time.
Thea, a 43-year-old academic physician and department chair, holds this Both/And truth with remarkable clarity. Four years into what she calls the most important project of her life, not her clinical career or research portfolio, but understanding and healing her childhood, Thea reflects: “I was skeptical, honestly. I’m a scientist. I needed to know it was real before I’d invest in it.”
For Thea, the ACE research was the door opener. It gave her a framework to understand her experience scientifically. The neuroscience made it credible. But it was the therapy itself, the consistent, relational, nervous-system-level work, that made it true.
Thea’s journey shows that healing demands sustained support and patience. It’s both possible and hard. It asks you to hold two truths simultaneously:
- Healing is real, grounded in science and lived experience.
- Healing takes the time it takes, with no shortcuts or false promises.
Holding this Both/And is one of the most powerful things you can do. It frees you from the pressure of “getting better” fast, and invites you into the reality of your own unique process. You’re not failing if progress feels slow. You’re not broken because healing is complicated. You’re doing the work of change, and that itself is an act of courage worth honoring.
The Systemic Lens: Why Healing Isn’t Equally Available to Everyone
When we talk about healing from childhood trauma, it’s vital to look beyond the individual and consider the larger systems at play. Trauma disproportionately affects marginalized communities, and the resources for healing are often out of reach for those who need them most.
Therapy is expensive. Waiting lists are long. Cultural barriers and stigma around mental health persist. Research documents racial and gender disparities in both trauma exposure and access to evidence-based treatment. Black and Indigenous people frequently experience higher rates of childhood trauma but are less likely to receive trauma-informed care.
This systemic reality shapes who can access healing and who remains underserved. It also shapes the narratives around trauma recovery: who gets seen as “deserving” of healing and who gets overlooked. This isn’t only a political or academic issue. It’s a practical one that affects real lives every day.
There’s also a quieter version of this inequity that shows up specifically in driven, professional women: the assumption, from the outside and often from themselves, that their resources and achievements should have inoculated them against this kind of pain. A woman with a corner office and a good salary is rarely met with the same concern as someone in visible crisis, even when her internal experience is just as severe. This is part of why so many capable women spend years in people-pleasing patterns before anyone, including a therapist, correctly names what’s actually happening underneath the competence.
Recognizing these inequities doesn’t diminish individual healing journeys, but it does call for a broader commitment to change. That means advocating for accessible, culturally responsive care, supporting community-based healing initiatives, and confronting systemic and economic barriers directly and consistently, not just in moments of public attention.
It also means understanding that healing isn’t a solitary endeavor but a collective responsibility. When systems fail to provide equitable access, communities, peers, and alternative healing spaces often become crucial sources of support.
As you engage with your own healing, it’s worth acknowledging these systemic factors. They shape what’s possible, and what needs to change, not just for you, but for the many others walking this path alongside you.
A Therapist’s Actual Recommendations: Where to Start
Thea’s story continues here, offering a concrete example of how to begin healing from childhood trauma with intention and support. As a physician used to evidence and rigor, she approached her healing like a research project: carefully, systematically, and with an open mind.
Her first step was recognition. Naming the trauma matters deeply, even before formal treatment begins. This recognition gave her permission to stop blaming herself and start looking for answers.
Next, Thea sought a therapist with specific trauma training, not just “trauma-informed” as a buzzword on a resume, but someone trained in evidence-based trauma therapies like EMDR, somatic experiencing, or AEDP. This specificity matters because childhood trauma requires specialized approaches, not general supportive listening.
She also focused on nervous system regulation as a foundation. Jumping straight into processing traumatic memories without the capacity to regulate can backfire. Thea learned breathing techniques, grounding practices, and somatic exercises to build resilience before diving deeper.
Part of that groundwork, for Thea, was learning to trust her own perceptions again. Years of minimizing her own experience, telling herself she was overreacting, had eroded a basic internal compass. Rebuilding that compass looked a lot like the work described in a self-trust protocol: small, repeated practices of checking her own read on a situation against what actually happened, rather than immediately deferring to someone else’s version of events.
Alongside therapy, Thea enrolled in the Fixing the Foundations™ course. Built for people navigating relational trauma recovery, it provided structured guidance, psychoeducation, and community support that complemented her therapy.
Finally, Thea invested in community and reparative relationships. Healing is relational. She built friendships and support groups that offered safety and validation, helping rewrite the internalized messages from childhood. On harder weeks, she kept a small collection of grounding words nearby, not as a substitute for the deeper work, but as a way to steady herself between sessions.
Her journey offers a roadmap many find useful:
- Recognize and name your trauma. This lays the groundwork for change.
- Find a therapist with specific, evidence-based trauma training.
- Build nervous system regulation skills before deep processing.
- Engage with structured courses or resources like Fixing the Foundations.
- Invest in community and reparative relationships alongside professional support.
If you’re wondering whether your own history counts, whether it’s “enough” to warrant this kind of attention, that hesitation is itself worth noticing. So is the exhaustion of pretending things were fine when they weren’t. You don’t need a dramatic story to deserve support. You need an honest one. If part of what draws you back to your own history involves patterns with a parent or partner that felt confusing or invalidating in ways you couldn’t quite articulate at the time, it’s worth exploring what that specific kind of recovery tends to involve, since it often overlaps with, but isn’t identical to, more general childhood trauma work.
Healing from childhood trauma is a deeply personal process, but it doesn’t have to be isolated or overwhelming. With the right support and approach, it’s possible to transform your relationship with your past and build a life marked by more peace, resilience, and real authenticity, not just the appearance of having it together.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’re reading this and thinking, “that’s my life,” you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. Healing is possible, and support is available.
Warmly, Annie.
Q: Can you fully heal from childhood trauma?
A: The honest answer: people don’t return to a pre-trauma state, because there is no pre-trauma state. Childhood trauma occurred during development itself. But genuine, substantial healing is real and well-documented. What changes: the traumatic material becomes integrated rather than perpetually raw, the nervous system develops new regulatory capacity, attachment wiring updates, the inner critic loses its authority, and you gain genuine access to wellbeing that wasn’t available before. That isn’t “cured” in a simplistic sense. It’s profoundly changed.
Q: How do I know if I have childhood trauma?
A: Childhood trauma doesn’t always announce itself clearly. Signs worth exploring with a therapist include chronic self-criticism that feels like an internal voice rather than an accurate assessment, difficulty in close relationships that persists across different partners, somatic symptoms without a clear medical explanation, a baseline sense of inadequacy that doesn’t respond to external achievement, hypervigilance in interpersonal situations, and difficulty identifying and trusting your own emotional experience. The ACE questionnaire is a useful starting point.
Q: What type of therapy is best for childhood trauma?
A: The therapies with the strongest evidence base include EMDR (well-evidenced, particularly efficient for processing specific traumatic memories), somatic experiencing (body-based, particularly useful for developmental and relational trauma), AEDP (relational and experiential), and trauma-focused CBT. The most important factor is a therapist with genuine trauma training who creates a safe, consistent therapeutic relationship, because that relationship itself is a mechanism of healing.
Q: Can you heal from childhood trauma without therapy?
A: For significant relational trauma, therapy provides by far the most reliable and efficient path. Healing can happen through other sustained reparative relationships, but without the specific processing that happens in therapy, including somatic work, trauma-focused interventions, and deliberate use of the therapeutic relationship, the process tends to be slower and more vulnerable to derailment. Structured self-help resources, including courses like Fixing the Foundations, can be valuable complements to therapy or entry points for people not yet in it.
Q: How long does childhood trauma recovery take?
A: The range is wide. Significant functional shifts can occur within the first year of consistent therapeutic work. Deeper structural change, the kind that holds under pressure and changes automatic responses rather than just consciously managed ones, typically takes two to four years for complex relational trauma. There’s no fixed timeline. What matters more than speed is consistency: regular therapeutic contact, sustained safe relationship, and ongoing investment in the work.
Q: Do I need a diagnosis of PTSD to justify getting help for childhood trauma?
A: No. Most people affected by childhood trauma never meet full criteria for PTSD, and that doesn’t make their experience less real or less worthy of care. Developmental and relational trauma often shows up as chronic anxiety, perfectionism, difficulty trusting others, or a persistent sense that something is wrong with you, without ever producing a diagnosable disorder. A skilled trauma therapist works with the impact of what happened, not just a diagnostic label.
Related Reading
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Adverse Childhood Experiences and Health Outcomes.” Vital Signs Report, 2025. (PMID: 40456965)
Malkomsen, A., Ulberg, R., and Dammen, T. “Childhood Trauma and Treatment Outcomes in Short-Term Psychodynamic and Cognitive Therapy.” 2025. (PMID: 41280452)
Onsjo, M., Axberg, U., and Hultmann, O. “Long-Term Outcomes After Trauma-Focused CBT.” 2026. (PMID: 40045728)
Lim, K., Tsui, P., and Wong, S. “Childhood Trauma and Longitudinal Clinical Outcomes.” 2025. (PMID: 41022658)
Svircevic, C.S., and Berle, D. “Phase-Based Versus Trauma-Focused Therapy for Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma.” 2025. (PMID: 41277877)
Nadine Burke Harris, MD, pediatrician and former California Surgeon General, has helped bring ACE science into mainstream public health practice, advocating for routine trauma screening in primary care settings.
Christine Courtois, PhD, clinical psychologist specializing in complex trauma treatment, has written extensively on phase-based models for treating adults with histories of chronic childhood trauma.
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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 based in Maine and beyond, 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 Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
