Inner Child Work Exercises: An Evidence-Based Therapist’s Guide
Seven sequenced inner child exercises grounded in IFS, Schema Therapy, and implicit-memory research, written for the driven woman who intellectualizes everything else.
Quick Answer
Inner child work is a therapeutic approach that engages the younger, vulnerable parts of the self that hold unprocessed pain, shame, or trauma from childhood, with the goal of reparenting those parts from a place of adult compassion and safety. In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, these parts are called Exiled Parts: aspects of the self that were pushed underground because their feelings were too much for the original environment. The work isn’t regression or wallowing; it’s completing emotional processing that was genuinely impossible at the time. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually convincing the analytical adult self that it’s worth slowing down to hear the younger part.
Inner child work has a pop-psychology reputation that doesn’t do justice to the rigorous clinical mechanisms behind it. For driven women who’ve intellectualized everything else, accessing the younger parts of themselves that still carry unresolved pain can feel awkward, abstract. And then unexpectedly profound. This guide explains what inner child work actually is, what the evidence says, and how to begin doing it in a way that takes your analytical mind seriously.
In short: Inner child work engages the younger, hurt parts of the self that carry unprocessed childhood pain, using structured therapeutic techniques to offer reparenting, safety, and emotional completion.
I’ve facilitated inner child work and parts-aware sessions across more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the results consistently surprise even the most skeptical clients. The implicit memory architecture that makes this work necessary is well documented by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk 2014).
The tightness across the sternum at 7:54 p.m.
It’s 7:54 p.m. and you’re sitting in your car in the parking garage. The engine is off, but you haven’t moved. Your phone, clutched in your hand, shows three unread texts from your mother. You don’t open them. You know exactly what they’ll say. The same familiar loop of expectation, subtle guilt, and unspoken demand you’ve been managing since childhood.
What you don’t yet know is that the persistent tightness across your sternum, the dull ache you’ve attributed to the stress of your annual review last week, is your body reliving something that happened when you were nine. It’s a somatic echo, a younger part of you responding to an old, familiar pressure. You don’t have language for that yet. For the way your nervous system is still holding the imprint of a childhood where your own needs were often secondary to the emotional landscape of others.
This article offers that language. And a path to understanding what inner child work actually is, why it matters for driven women specifically, and how to begin engaging with it in a way that doesn’t require you to abandon your analytical mind. Just to let it share the room.
What is inner child work?
The concept of the “inner child” has unfortunately been co-opted by pop psychology, often reduced to simplistic journaling prompts that fail to capture its clinical significance. In a therapeutic context, inner child work is far from superficial. It’s a depth-psychology technique with neurobiological underpinnings, designed to address the enduring impact of early life experiences on our adult selves. At its core, it involves connecting with and healing the younger, vulnerable parts of our psyche that carry emotional pain, unmet needs, and unresolved trauma from childhood.
One of the steadiest frameworks I use for understanding younger parts comes from Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, systemic family therapist, creator of Internal Family Systems, and teaching associate in psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance. In IFS, younger parts are often referred to as “Exiles”. Parts that have been pushed away from conscious awareness due to the pain or shame they carry. Other parts, known as “Managers” and “Firefighters,” then develop protective strategies to keep these Exiles suppressed. These protective strategies often manifest as the very traits that define driven women: perfectionism, intellectualization, over-functioning, hypercompetence.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, an Exiled Part refers to a younger, vulnerable aspect of the self that holds the pain, shame, fear, or trauma from past experiences, often suppressed by protective parts to maintain daily functioning. Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, developed this model through his work as a systemic family therapist and later founded the IFS Institute.
In plain terms, for driven women who pride themselves on their rationality, think of your inner child as the part of you that still carries the emotional echoes of your past. The younger self who experienced something difficult and whose feelings were perhaps too overwhelming to process at the time. It’s not about being childish. It’s about acknowledging and tending to a real, wounded aspect of your psyche. On a Tuesday, it’s the reason a two-line email from your director can leave you unable to eat lunch, when the adult in you knows perfectly well the email was fine.
IFS offers one clinical framework for approaching younger, burdened parts of the self. The research base is still developing, so I don’t present inner child work as a proven cure or as one standardized treatment. I use parts language when it helps a client notice an old response with more compassion and less shame, and I set it aside when a different frame fits her experience better.
The neurobiology of inner child work.
To understand why inner child work is so potent, we need to look at the neurobiology of memory and trauma. Our early life experiences, particularly those that are overwhelming or neglectful, aren’t always stored as coherent narratives in conscious minds. Instead, they’re often encoded as implicit memories, residing in subcortical brain regions like the amygdala and hippocampus, rather than in the language-rich prefrontal cortex.
I go back to Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind, more than almost any other writer on this. His account of implicit memory is the one I hand to clients who want the mechanism before they’ll try the exercise. He explains that these non-declarative memories include procedural memory (how to do things), perceptual memory (how things look, sound, feel), and emotional memory (the feelings associated with experiences). These implicit encodings shape the growing architecture of the self, influencing our emotional responses, relational patterns, and physiological states, often outside of conscious awareness. The inner child’s pain isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a real, neurologically encoded imprint of past experiences.
Implicit memory is a type of long-term memory that doesn’t require conscious thought to recall. It includes procedural memory, classical conditioning, and priming. In the context of trauma, implicit memories store the emotional and somatic imprints of experiences, particularly those from early childhood before language development. In plain terms, think of implicit memory as your body’s way of remembering. It’s the gut feeling, the sudden tension, the inexplicable anxiety that arises in certain situations, even if you can’t consciously recall a specific event. Think of it like the way your hands know a childhood piano piece your mind has entirely forgotten. It’s the residue of past experiences, especially from childhood, that continues to influence your present reactions without you even realizing it.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, further emphasizes that developmental trauma, particularly when experienced before the development of language, is stored in these implicit systems. The body remembers what the conscious mind can’t articulate. This leads to dysregulation of the nervous system, often manifesting as a constricted window of tolerance, the optimal zone of arousal in which an individual can function most effectively.
Driven women, often operating in high-stress environments, tend to live in chronic sympathetic arousal, constantly pushing through discomfort and overriding their body’s signals. This sustained state means their exiled younger parts, which hold vulnerable emotions, can’t be safely accessed. The nervous system must first be regulated, brought back into a more balanced state, before deeply buried implicit memories can be gently approached and integrated. Which is why the first of the seven exercises above isn’t an inner child exercise at all. It’s the thing that makes the other six possible.
How inner child work shows up in driven women.
In my work with clients, I consistently observe a pattern among driven women: a profound capacity for intellectualization. When these women first come to therapy, they can articulate their histories with clinical precision, citing attachment theory, family systems dynamics, and neurobiological concepts with impressive accuracy. Yet beneath this sophisticated understanding, a younger, more vulnerable self often remains untouched.
Consider Alexandra. Alexandra is a composite of several clients I’ve worked with; her name and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. She’s 44, an epidemiologist who runs surveillance modeling for a state health department, and her initial sessions with me were a masterclass in intellectual analysis. She came in with a color-coded timeline of her childhood printed on legal paper. She meticulously detailed her parents’ emotional unavailability and her early experiences of parentification. She could accurately diagnose her own avoidant attachment style. For the first six sessions, she presented her life as a well-researched case study, devoid of overt emotion.
Then, one gray March afternoon, I asked: “Alexandra, you’re describing your history with incredible clarity. But what does your body feel when you say your father never came to a single recital?” The question hung in the air. She visibly stiffened. Her breath hitched. Before she could formulate an answer, tears welled in her eyes, silent at first, then flowing freely. “I don’t do this,” she said, and kept doing it.
Sitting with her, I felt the room change the way it does when the armor comes off for the first time. Not relief exactly. Something closer to reverence. That was the moment. The crack in the intellectual armor, the gateway to the younger self who still carried the sting of that childhood neglect. That’s often where inner child work truly begins for driven women: not with an exercise, but with a willingness to feel the younger self that has been so carefully protected.
These women develop powerful “Protector” parts, in IFS terms, that shield the vulnerable Exiles. These Protectors manifest as intellectualization, perfectionism, and relentless drive for competence, the very qualities that make them successful. Their analytical minds, their ability to compartmentalize, can become barriers to accessing and healing the younger parts that still yearn for attention and care. The inner child isn’t merely forgotten; she’s actively, albeit unconsciously, kept at bay by the very mechanisms that ensure the adult woman’s survival and success. You’re not broken for having built that armor. You built it because it worked.
The evidence base: beyond pop psychology.
For the driven woman who values intellectual rigor, the term “inner child work” might initially evoke skepticism. It sounds, on the surface, like something from a self-help book rather than a serious clinical intervention. To dismiss it based on its unfortunate pop-culture branding would be to overlook a substantial and growing body of evidence.
Internal Family Systems therapy has been studied across conditions that often co-occur with developmental trauma, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Schema Therapy, developed by Jeffrey E. Young, PhD, clinical psychologist and founder of the Schema Therapy Institute, includes the concept of “Vulnerable Child” schema modes and “Limited Reparenting,” and it’s the framework I reach for most often when a client’s protective parts are organized around a personality-level pattern rather than a single wound. I read Young’s practitioner guide during my own training and his phrase “limited reparenting” has stayed with me for years, because it names the boundary as well as the gift: you give the younger part what she needed, within the limits of what an adult self can actually provide.
Van der Kolk’s larger point, across his work, is that true healing requires accessing and integrating the implicit, non-verbal memories and emotions that are often suppressed. The “inner child” isn’t a fanciful notion but a clinical construct representing these exiled parts of the self that hold vital information about past and present struggles. The name “inner child” may be soft, but the underlying therapeutic mechanism, accessing and integrating fragmented parts of the self, is anything but. It’s a rigorous, evidence-informed path toward wholeness.
Both/And: you can be intellectually rigorous AND let the younger part speak.
One of the most profound tensions for driven women engaging in inner child work lies in reconciling their intellectual prowess with the vulnerability required to connect with younger, wounded parts of themselves. Many have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that emotional work is a sign of weakness. Inner child work, however, asks them to hold both. The clinical scaffolding of understanding how trauma impacts the brain and body, alongside the willingness to feel the raw, often illogical emotions of a younger self.
This Both/And is illustrated by Lauren, who wrote to me after reading an earlier essay on this site. Lauren is a composite drawn from readers who’ve written to me about this pattern. She isn’t a client; her name and identifying details have been changed. Lauren is 44 and works as a barista at an independent coffee shop after leaving a decade in nonprofit finance, and she wrote that she’d spent four years in cognitive behavioral therapy, which she described as “highly effective for managing my anxiety and improving my communication skills.” She felt better managed, more in control, but not truly healed. The deep-seated sense of unease, the feeling that something fundamental was still missing, persisted. When a new therapist introduced her to IFS, she was initially skeptical. The idea of “talking to parts of herself” felt, to her analytical mind, unscientific. Yet, she wrote, the therapist guided her to notice the sensations in her body, the subtle shifts when certain topics arose. Slowly, she began to differentiate between her highly competent “Manager Part” and a quiet, often overlooked “12-Year-Old Part” that carried a deep sense of inadequacy and fear of failure, stemming from a childhood where her achievements were praised but her emotional needs were ignored.
“I kept waiting for it to feel stupid,” she wrote about the first time she made contact with that 12-year-old part. “I was bracing myself for the ridiculousness of it all. But it never did.” Instead, she described a wave of sadness and a fierce protectiveness toward this younger part. Her analytical mind, far from being a hindrance, helped her map the interplay of her parts. But it was her willingness to suspend judgment and truly feel the emotions of her 12-year-old self that allowed for genuine healing. The Both/And here is clear: her intellectual rigor provided the framework, but her emotional courage provided the pathway to integration. She still steams milk for a living, and she told me she now does it without the running commentary from the Critic she used to call “the auditor.”
The Systemic Lens: why driven women were trained out of inner child access.
The journey of a driven woman often involves high-performance environments that are built upon the suppression of vulnerability. From an early age, girls who excel in these pipelines learn a critical, albeit painful, lesson: emotional needs are often punished, while performance and competence are rewarded. The message, explicit or implicit, is that to succeed, one must be strong, self-sufficient, and emotionally contained. This systemic pressure creates a powerful incentive to disconnect from the more vulnerable aspects of the self, precisely what we refer to as the “inner child.”
The inner child, in this context, represents the part of the self that was “too much.” Too needy, too vulnerable, too emotionally expressive to survive in the environments that ultimately shaped the driven woman. Perhaps her tears were met with impatience, her fears dismissed, her natural desire for comfort overshadowed by expectations of independence. To adapt, she developed formidable armor, creating a competent, capable adult persona that could meet the demands of her world.
It’s crucial to name this explicitly: the very systems that produced her success also, inadvertently, created the injury that inner child work addresses. The billable hour in law, the RVU productivity models in medicine, the relentless pace of innovation in tech. These structures demand a level of emotional detachment that leaves little room for authentic vulnerability. That’s the terrain, and it was there before she was. On a Tuesday it looks like a woman who hasn’t cried since 2011 and thinks of that as a professional accomplishment. The driven woman didn’t abandon her inner child; she protected her by creating a powerful, resilient adult self. Now, accessing that inner child requires a conscious dismantling of the very armor that once served as her survival mechanism. It demands a radical act of self-compassion. A willingness to reclaim the parts of herself that were deemed too fragile for the world she conquered. Exploring the connection between parentification and the suppression of emotional needs is often illuminating for women in this position.
What this work is for: integration, not regression.
The path forward in inner child work isn’t about indulging sentimentality. It’s about engaging in a profound process of self-reparenting, informed by clinical understanding. For driven women, this means moving beyond intellectual understanding to embodied experience. The seven exercises above are presented not as quick fixes but as integral steps in a therapeutic journey, and they’re sequenced deliberately: regulate, map, unblend, locate, listen, reparent, complete.
For those seeking deeper, guided support in this work, exploring options for therapy with Annie or engaging with structured programs like Fixing the Foundations™ can provide clinical containment and expertise. Alexandra did the first three exercises in session before she ever tried one alone, and that sequencing is what made the corrective experience possible when it finally came, eight months in, on an afternoon when she told her nine-year-old self that the recital had been good and that she’d been there for it.
Engaging with your inner child isn’t a journey into weakness. It’s a profound act of strength and self-compassion. The courageous choice to turn inward, to acknowledge the parts of yourself that have been silenced or overlooked, and to offer them the healing presence they deserve. This work, while challenging, is ultimately liberating. It allows you to integrate fragmented aspects of your being and move forward with greater wholeness and authenticity. You can also explore related dynamics, including how parentification or the father wound may have contributed to the parts that are most in need of this care, through my other writing and through therapy.
What I want to leave you with is this: inner child work isn’t about regression. It’s about integration. Bringing the younger parts of yourself into the adult life you’ve built, so that your full self can inhabit it. The driven woman who has done this work doesn’t become less capable. She becomes more whole. And from wholeness, a different kind of capability is possible. One chosen freely rather than compelled by fear, one rooted in genuine self-knowledge rather than performed confidence. That’s not a smaller life. It’s a larger one.
For deeper exploration of how these younger parts connect to patterns in your relationships and career, explore my writing on parentification, childhood emotional neglect, and attachment styles. And if you’re ready to do this work with support, reach out through my connect page.
Seven inner child work exercises, in the order they actually work.
Sequenced deliberately for the analytical mind: regulate, map, unblend, locate, listen, reparent, complete. Skip the first and the rest tend to stall.
01.Regulate first: widen the window before you knock on the door
Exiled parts can’t be safely accessed from chronic sympathetic arousal. Before any contact, bring the nervous system back toward its window of tolerance.
This one isn’t an inner child exercise, and it comes first for exactly that reason. Driven women tend to live in chronic sympathetic arousal, pushing through discomfort and overriding the body’s signals, and from that state the younger parts can’t be approached safely. So before anything else: feet on the floor, a longer exhale than inhale, eyes on something in the room that is actually here. Notice whether your jaw is clamped. Notice whether you’ve been holding your breath since you sat down. Five minutes of this is not a warm-up you can skip because you’re efficient. It’s the condition under which the next six exercises work at all.
02.Part identification and mapping (IFS step one)
Notice the distinct parts of your internal system, the Perfectionist, the Critic, the Pleaser, and ask each what it’s trying to do for you.
The first step involves simply noticing and identifying the different “parts” of yourself. This isn’t about creating multiple personalities. It’s recognizing that your internal world is made up of various sub-personalities, each with its own beliefs, feelings, and motivations. Notice the “Perfectionist Part” that drives you to work late, the “Critic Part” that constantly judges your efforts, or the “Pleaser Part” that struggles to set boundaries. Gently ask: What’s this part trying to do for me? What is it afraid will happen if it stops? This inquiry begins to build a relationship with your internal system. This initial mapping creates a foundation for deeper work, allowing you to differentiate between your core Self, inherently calm, curious, compassionate, and connected, and the parts that carry burdens.
03.Unblending from Protector parts to access the Exile
Thank the intellectualizer, the workaholic, or the people-pleaser for keeping you safe, and ask it to step back so the younger part can come forward.
Once you begin to identify your Protector parts (like the intellectualizer, the workaholic, or the people-pleaser), gently ask these parts to step aside for a moment, assuring them that you appreciate their efforts to keep you safe. This isn’t about banishing them but about creating internal spaciousness. If your “Intellectualizer Part” is dominating, you might internally say, “Thank you for trying to make sense of this, but I need you to step back so I can feel what’s happening.” As these Protectors relax, the younger, exiled parts, the inner child, can begin to emerge. This process requires patience and self-compassion, as these Exiles often carry intense emotions like shame, fear, or profound sadness that have been suppressed for years.
04.Body-based contact: where does the younger part live?
Locate the younger part somatically, the tight chest, the knotted stomach, the hollow throat, and offer it your attention and a hand.
Pat Ogden, PhD, psychologist and founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, is the clinician I credit with teaching me to ask where before I ask what, and her insistence that trauma is stored in the body is the reason this exercise sits in the middle of the sequence. For driven women who have often lived from the neck up, connecting with the somatic experience of their inner child is crucial. Gently bring your awareness to your body. Where do you feel the presence of this younger part? Is there tightness in your chest, a knot in your stomach, a hollowness in your throat? Allow yourself to simply notice these sensations without judgment. You might place a hand on the area, offering gentle, comforting touch. This body-based contact helps integrate the emotional experience, moving it from an abstract concept to a felt reality.
05.The “what does she need to hear?” inquiry
Once you’ve made contact, ask what the younger part needs to hear, and say it: I see you. It wasn’t your fault. You’re safe now.
Once you’ve made contact with a younger, vulnerable part, the inquiry shifts to what that part needs. Imagine sitting with your younger self. What’s her demeanor? What is she feeling? What words of comfort, validation, or understanding does she desperately need to hear? Often it’s a simple message: “I see you. I hear you. You’re not alone. It wasn’t your fault. You’re safe now.” This is about providing the corrective emotional experience that was missing in childhood, becoming the compassionate, attuned caregiver that your younger self always deserved. This internal dialogue is a powerful act of self-reparenting, gradually shifting deeply ingrained patterns of self-criticism and neglect.
06.The limited reparenting dialogue (Schema Therapy)
Provide, within adult limits, what the vulnerable child part needed and didn’t receive: consistent attention if she felt unseen, internal safety if she felt unsafe.
Drawing from Jeffrey Young’s Schema Therapy, the concept of “Limited Reparenting” is central to inner child work. This involves providing what the vulnerable child part needed but didn’t receive. If your inner child felt unseen, offer consistent, validating attention. If she felt unsafe, create a sense of internal security. This can involve imagining a safe internal space, visualizing yourself as a wise, compassionate adult nurturing your younger self, or engaging in internal dialogues where you provide the missing emotional resources. Over time, this consistent, compassionate presence encourages a sense of internal safety and attachment security. The word “limited” matters: you’re not promising her a different childhood. You’re promising her a different adult.
07.The corrective experience: giving her what she needed
Step in, imaginally, to protect her, validate what was dismissed, and hold her without conditions. Not to change the past, but to change its grip on the present.
The culmination of inner child work is the corrective emotional experience: actively providing your younger self with what she needed but didn’t receive. This might involve imagining yourself stepping in to protect her from a difficult situation, validating her feelings when they were dismissed, or simply holding her with unconditional love and acceptance. This isn’t about changing the past, but about changing the impact of the past on your present. In my experience this exercise rarely works on the first try, and it almost never works before the six above it. When it lands, it tends to land quietly: a client notices, a week later, that the text from her mother arrived and her sternum stayed loose.
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Frequently asked questions.
Is inner child work real therapy or pseudoscience?
When approached through clinically grounded frameworks like Internal Family Systems (IFS) or Schema Therapy, inner child work is real therapy. It’s rooted in established psychological principles concerning attachment, trauma, and neurobiology. While the term has been popularized in self-help circles, its clinical application involves structured therapeutic techniques aimed at healing developmental wounds and integrating fragmented parts of the self. Parts work and Schema Therapy draw on established clinical models, but the broad label “inner child work” covers many practices and doesn’t have one uniform evidence base.
Do I need a therapist to do inner child work, or can I do it myself?
For deep and lasting healing, especially if you have a history of complex trauma, working with a trained trauma therapist is highly recommended. A therapist provides a safe, contained space, helps you work through intense emotions, and guides you through accessing and reparenting your exiled younger parts. Self-directed exercises can be beneficial for mild-to-moderate developmental patterns, but if inner child work surfaces dissociation, flashbacks, or acute emotional crisis, professional containment is essential. My Fixing the Foundations course offers structured self-guided work as a complement to therapy.
What if I can’t visualize or “see” my inner child?
Many people struggle with visualization, and that’s completely normal. Inner child work isn’t solely about visual imagery. It can involve sensing emotions in your body, recalling memories, or simply having an intuitive sense of a younger part of yourself. You might connect through feelings, sensations, or even a metaphorical understanding. The goal is to connect with the essence of that younger part, not necessarily to have a clear visual image. Trust your own process and what emerges.
What if I start crying and can’t stop?
Intense emotions, including tears, are very common during inner child work and often signal that you’re connecting with deeply held pain that’s been suppressed. If you find yourself overwhelmed, practice self-regulation: focus on your breath, feel your feet on the floor, and gently remind yourself that you’re safe in the present moment. If emotions feel too intense to manage on your own, this is a clear signal to seek support from a trauma-informed therapist who can help you process these feelings in a safe and contained manner.
Can inner child work make things worse before they get better?
Yes, this is possible. As you begin to access and process old wounds, it can temporarily bring up difficult memories, feelings, and sensations that have been buried. Some people notice more distress when old memories and feelings surface. However, if this distress becomes overwhelming, leads to significant functional impairment, or triggers dissociative symptoms or flashbacks, it’s crucial to pause and seek professional guidance. A skilled therapist can help you titrate the work, ensuring you process at a pace that’s safe and manageable.
I’m a very rational person. Is this going to feel ridiculous?
It’s understandable to approach inner child work with skepticism. The language can feel abstract or “woo-woo.” But the underlying mechanisms are deeply rooted in neurobiology and clinical psychology. Many highly analytical individuals find that once they move past the initial discomfort with the terminology, they discover a coherent framework for understanding their internal world. The goal isn’t to abandon your rationality, but to integrate it with your emotional intelligence, creating a more complete way of living your life.
How long does inner child work take to have an effect?
There’s no fixed timeline. Some individuals experience shifts and insights relatively quickly, within weeks. For others, it’s a longer journey of gradual integration. The duration depends on the depth and complexity of the underlying trauma, individual resilience, and the consistency of engagement with the work. It’s not a quick fix but a commitment to ongoing self-discovery and compassionate self-care. The effects, though, are often profound, leading to greater emotional freedom, healthier relationships, and a more authentic sense of self.
Why do the exercises start with regulation instead of contact?
Because the younger parts can’t be safely reached from a body in chronic sympathetic arousal, which is where most driven women live during the workweek. Implicit memory is stored in the same systems that manage threat, so approaching it while the alarm is already sounding tends to produce flooding rather than contact. Widening the window of tolerance first, even for five minutes, is what lets the mapping, unblending, and reparenting exercises land instead of stall.
Written by
Annie Wright, LMFT
(legal name Elizabeth Anne Wright; CA LMFT95719). Annie is licensed across 15 U.S. jurisdictions, including Colorado for telehealth only, and registered to provide telehealth in Florida under Fla. Stat. 456.47, and has more than 15,000 clinical hours. Annie is an EMDRIA Certified Therapist and an EMDRIA Approved Consultant in Training. Annie is accountable to all content published under Annie Wright’s name, and content reflects Annie Wright’s clinical training and current practice.
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Annie’s writing is grounded in current professional literature and in Annie Wright’s own clinical training and experience.
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This article is educational and not a substitute for therapy, diagnosis, or a clinical relationship with a licensed mental health provider. If you’re in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, in the United States call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the US, visit findahelpline.com for local crisis resources.
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Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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