Intermittent Reinforcement in Relationships: The Hidden Engine of Addiction to a Person
Intermittent reinforcement in relationships is the mechanism that makes you more attached to a partner after he hurts you than before. Rooted in B.F. Skinner’s variable-ratio reinforcement research, it’s the same neurological process that creates the most extinction-proof behavior known to behavioral science. This article explains exactly how it gets embedded in intimate relationships, why it produces stronger attachment than consistent love ever could, and what it actually takes to rewire a nervous system that has been trained on unpredictability.
- Romi Is More Attached After the Cancellation Than She Was Before the Plans
- What Intermittent Reinforcement Actually Is — Skinner’s Pigeons and Your Nervous System
- How Intermittent Reinforcement Gets Embedded in an Intimate Relationship
- The Four Ways It Shows Up: Hot and Cold, Cruelty and Tenderness, Withdrawal and Return, Punishment and Reward
- Why Intermittent Reinforcement Creates Stronger Attachment Than Consistent Love Does
- Both/And: The Craving Is Real AND It Is Not Evidence That This Relationship Is Worth Staying In
- The Systemic Lens: Why We Confuse Unpredictability with Intensity and Call It Chemistry
- What Recovery from Intermittent Reinforcement Looks Like — Rewiring the Attachment System
- Frequently Asked Questions
Romi Is More Attached After the Cancellation Than She Was Before the Plans
It’s Sunday, 7:47pm, and Romi is sitting on her couch in the specific silence that follows cancelled plans: not the peaceful silence of a free evening, but the loud, charged silence of an evening that was supposed to be something else. Her phone is on the cushion beside her, face up, volume on, the way she keeps it when she is waiting. She is not waiting. She keeps telling herself she is not waiting. The bottle of wine she opened at 5pm, in the small optimistic ritual of believing this time would go differently, is now two glasses down on the coffee table, and the plans it was meant to accompany have been cancelled by text, the fourth time in a row. She drafted a response and deleted it twice in the last hour, not an angry text, a perfectly reasonable one — and she deleted it because somewhere in her body she knew exactly what a “reasonable” response from her would cost her with him. And then the thought arrives, clean and horrible: I am more attached to him after the cancellation than I was before the plans. That is insane. That is the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. She doesn’t send the text. She opens her laptop instead.
What Romi has just described is not a flaw in her character. It is not evidence that she is too sensitive or too needy. What she has stumbled into, in the terrible clarity of a Sunday evening, is a precise description of one of the most well-documented phenomena in behavioral science: intermittent reinforcement. The fact that she can diagnose it in herself and still can’t stop it is, as you’re about to see, exactly the point.
In my work with clients, the women who are most convinced they are “crazy” for staying in relationships like Romi’s are often the most self-aware women in the room. They’ve read the articles, talked to their therapists, and know, intellectually, that this man is not good for them. And they still reach for their phones. That’s not stupidity. That’s behavioral conditioning. There is a meaningful difference, and understanding it is the first thing that actually helps.
What Intermittent Reinforcement Actually Is — Skinner’s Pigeons and Your Nervous System
In the 1950s, the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner ran a series of experiments that would turn out to be more relevant to your dating life than most people realize. Skinner was studying reinforcement schedules, the patterns by which rewards are delivered in response to behavior, and he discovered something that has never been overturned in the seventy-plus years since: unpredictable rewards are exponentially more powerful than predictable ones.
His pigeons were placed in boxes and trained to peck a lever. Some received a food pellet every time they pecked: a fixed schedule. Others received pellets on a random, unpredictable schedule: sometimes on the third peck, sometimes on the forty-seventh, sometimes not at all for a long stretch and then twice in quick succession. When Skinner stopped delivering rewards entirely, the pigeons on the fixed schedule stopped pecking relatively quickly. They’d learned a rule; the rule had changed; they adapted. The pigeons on the variable schedule? They kept pecking. And pecking. And pecking. The behavior was, in Skinner’s term, extinction-resistant: the most durable behavioral pattern he could produce with any schedule he tested.
This is the mechanism underneath your relationship. Not a metaphor — the actual mechanism. Your nervous system runs on the same operant conditioning principles as Skinner’s birds, and when a relationship delivers warmth, attention, affection, and validation on an unpredictable schedule, your brain encodes the pursuit of that reward as one of the highest-priority tasks in your entire behavioral repertoire. You don’t choose this. It happens at a level of neural processing that runs well below conscious awareness or rational analysis.
A reinforcement schedule, first systematically studied by behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, in which a reward or positive response is delivered unpredictably — sometimes following a behavior, sometimes not, on a variable-ratio schedule. In Skinner’s research, variable-ratio reinforcement produced the highest response rates and the most extinction-resistant behavior of any reinforcement pattern tested. In intimate relationships, intermittent reinforcement occurs when one partner delivers affection, validation, attention, or warmth inconsistently and unpredictably (sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes cruel, sometimes tender), creating a neurological reward loop that becomes more compulsive, not less, when the rewards are withheld.
In plain terms: Your nervous system was built to become most fixated on rewards that arrive unpredictably. When a partner is sometimes wonderful and sometimes cruel or withdrawn, with no way to predict which version you’ll get, your brain treats getting his attention as the highest-stakes game you’re playing. The less often you win, the more urgently you keep trying. That’s not love. That’s conditioning.
What makes this particularly relevant to the women I work with is that the reinforcement schedule doesn’t have to be extreme to be effective. A partner doesn’t have to be consistently abusive for intermittent reinforcement to take hold. Sometimes it’s a man who is genuinely wonderful 40 percent of the time: warm, funny, present, perceptive; and then inexplicably cold or dismissive the other 60 percent. The inconsistency itself is the mechanism. The nervous system isn’t measuring how good the good times are; it’s responding to the unpredictability of when they’ll arrive.
How Intermittent Reinforcement Gets Embedded in an Intimate Relationship
Understanding the laboratory version of intermittent reinforcement is one thing. Understanding how it gets woven into the specific texture of a long-term intimate relationship, gradually and often without either party fully recognizing it, is another. This is where the work of Ramani Durvasula, PhD, clinical psychologist, YouTube educator, and author of Should I Stay or Should I Go, becomes essential.
Durvasula describes a pattern she sees consistently in relationships where one partner has narcissistic traits: the early phase is characterized by what she calls “love bombing” — an overwhelming period of attention and validation that sets the neurological baseline for what this person can provide. Your nervous system encodes it as what this relationship is; it becomes the reference point against which every subsequent interaction gets measured.
Then the withdrawal begins. It’s rarely dramatic at first — a cancelled plan here, a colder response there. And because your nervous system has encoded the love-bombing baseline as this relationship’s true potential, the withdrawal doesn’t read as “this person is inconsistent.” It reads as “something I’m doing is causing him to withhold.” You begin to work harder. The reward, when it does come back, feels like relief, like reunion, like proof that your effort was worth it. The cycle is now running.
Patrick Carnes, PhD, addiction psychologist and author of The Betrayal Bond, describes the neurochemical dimension of this cycle in terms that map almost exactly onto what Skinner observed in the laboratory. Carnes’s research identifies the biochemical highs that accompany reunion after withdrawal: the dopamine and oxytocin flooding that follows a period of cortisol-mediated anxiety, which Carnes sees as functionally equivalent to the reward response in addiction cycles. The craving is not metaphorical. The relief is not metaphorical. The compulsive return, even in the face of clear evidence that the relationship is harmful, is not a character failing. It’s neurochemistry that has been systematically shaped by a specific pattern of reinforcement.
An attachment style first theorized by John Bowlby, MD, psychiatrist and founder of attachment theory, and empirically mapped by Mary Ainsworth, PhD, developmental psychologist at the University of Virginia, whose Strange Situation experiments in the 1970s identified the anxious-ambivalent attachment pattern in children who had experienced inconsistent caregiving. Adults with anxious attachment are hypervigilant to signs of rejection or withdrawal from attachment figures, have a heightened stress response to relational uncertainty, and tend to experience the highest levels of preoccupation and distress in relationships where their partner is unpredictable or inconsistent. Anxious attachment is not a pathology — it is an adaptive response to early relational environments. But it is the attachment pattern most vulnerable to intermittent reinforcement dynamics in adult romantic relationships.
In plain terms: If you grew up with a caregiver who was sometimes wonderful and sometimes cold, your nervous system learned to stay on high alert — monitoring for signs of withdrawal, working harder when warmth disappeared. That same nervous system is operating in your adult relationships. You’re not “too sensitive.” You’re using a survival strategy that made complete sense when you were small.
This is why the women I work with who struggle most with intermittent reinforcement patterns often have a particular history: a parent who was unpredictable — brilliant and warm one evening, cold and withholding the next. The nervous system learns its first relationship template in that early environment, and it carries that template forward. The adult woman who can’t stop pursuing a man who cancels plans isn’t irrational; she is operating on deeply embedded programming that was written long before she ever met him. Understanding this connection to early experience is part of the deeper work available in Fixing the Foundations, Annie’s signature course on relational trauma recovery.
The Four Ways It Shows Up: Hot and Cold, Cruelty and Tenderness, Withdrawal and Return, Punishment and Reward
Intermittent reinforcement doesn’t wear one face in relationships. In my clinical work, I see it operating along four distinct axes, and understanding which axis (or combination of axes) is active in a specific relationship is often what allows a woman to finally name what’s been happening to her.
Hot and Cold. This is the most recognizable version: a partner who is intensely present and then inexplicably distant, on a schedule that has nothing to do with what you’ve done. Monday he’s texting throughout his workday, making plans. Thursday he responds in monosyllables and doesn’t explain why. The hot-and-cold cycle creates an ongoing state of low-grade anxious vigilance — your nervous system perpetually scanning for signals, perpetually trying to predict what version of him is coming. The scanning itself is exhausting, and it’s part of what makes the relationship feel so consuming.
Cruelty and Tenderness. This axis is the one that leaves women most confused about their own perceptions. A partner who is sometimes genuinely cruel, dismissive of your feelings, contemptuous of your opinions, sharp in ways that register as humiliation — and then, in the aftermath, extraordinarily tender. Apologetic. Seeing you. The tenderness after cruelty hits the nervous system with particular force precisely because it arrives in the context of relief. You weren’t just getting warmth; you were getting rescue from pain. The warmth and the pain become neurologically entangled.
Withdrawal and Return. This is Romi’s pattern: the man who disappears (cancels, goes quiet, becomes unavailable) and then returns as if nothing happened, sometimes with an explanation that makes just enough sense to be plausible. The withdrawal activates the attachment system’s alarm response; the return quiets it. Over time, the return itself becomes the reward the nervous system is working toward. You don’t realize you’ve organized your entire emotional life around the moment of his return until you notice that the return is the only time you feel okay. This is also at the heart of what we explore in our full breakdown of the narcissistic abuse cycle — the return-and-pursuit phase is where the reinforcement schedule runs at its most powerful.
Punishment and Reward. A partner whose behavior is explicitly contingent on your compliance or performance: when you challenge him, there is coldness, anger, withdrawal of affection; when you accommodate him, there is reward. You begin to edit yourself because your nervous system has learned which behaviors are safe. The woman on the other end often doesn’t recognize it as control — she experiences it as learning his preferences.
Nadia, a 41-year-old physician I worked with, described her marriage in exactly these terms. “I thought I was just getting better at reading him,” she told me in our early sessions. “I thought I’d learned what he needed. It took me a long time to understand that what I’d actually done was train myself to minimize anything in me that upset him — I’d become an expert in making myself small enough to stay safe.” Nadia’s self-editing had begun so gradually, one small accommodation at a time, that it hadn’t felt like a pattern until she couldn’t find herself underneath it anymore. This is the slow architecture of how punishment-and-reward dynamics change identity over years, not weeks. For more on the underpinning of this, our complete guide to trauma bonding walks through how these patterns calcify into something that feels like love.
Why Intermittent Reinforcement Creates Stronger Attachment Than Consistent Love Does
This is the part that stops most women cold when they encounter it for the first time, because it sounds backwards: a relationship that is sometimes painful, sometimes absent, sometimes unpredictably warm produces stronger neurological attachment than a relationship that is consistently loving. And understanding why is what allows you to stop interpreting your own longing as evidence of the relationship’s value.
The dopamine system does not respond most strongly to rewards that are certain. It responds most strongly to rewards that are uncertain. Neuroimaging research has shown that dopamine is released not primarily at the receipt of a reward, but at the anticipation of a possible reward — particularly when that possibility is uncertain. An unpredictable reward produces spikes. Your brain is more activated by the possibility of warmth from someone who is usually cold than by the certainty of warmth from someone who is always warm.
This is why the question “But if he’s so bad for me, why do I feel so much more attached to him?” has such a clean neurological answer. The good men, the ones who called when they said they would and who didn’t require you to guess what version of them you were getting, didn’t produce the dopamine spikes. They produced something steadier, and your nervous system, calibrated by early inconsistency or previous reinforcement cycles, registered that steadiness as less. Not better. Less.
Carnes’s framework describes the biochemical sequencing as a cycle involving cortisol, adrenaline, and oxytocin in a specific sequence. The anxiety of withdrawal activates cortisol. The return activates oxytocin and dopamine. The relief of that hit after stress is neurologically experienced as profound — deeply meaningful, deeply connecting. Over time, you don’t just crave him; you crave the specific sequence: tension, longing, return, relief. The relief is the most powerful part, and you can only get it if the tension came first.
This is the machinery that Romi is sitting with at 7:47pm on a Sunday. The cancellation didn’t decrease her attachment. It increased it — every cancellation is another activation of the anxiety-relief cycle her nervous system has learned to run on this man. The wine, the phone, the deleted text: this is what intermittent reinforcement feels like from the inside. Our guide to the four stages of narcissistic abuse connects this to the broader relational cycle.
Both/And: The Craving Is Real AND It Is Not Evidence That This Relationship Is Worth Staying In
Here is what I need you to hold at the same time, because splitting these two truths apart is where so much of the suffering lives.
The craving you feel for him, the longing that intensifies specifically when he withdraws and the way your body physically responds when he returns — is a real neurological event. It is not a character flaw. It is not proof that you’re “too emotional” or “can’t be alone” or have some fundamental deficiency that explains why you keep coming back to someone who keeps hurting you. It is what Skinner’s pigeons experienced: a response trained into the nervous system by the most powerful reinforcement schedule that exists. Your brain is doing exactly what brains do when they’ve been shaped by variable-ratio reinforcement. The craving is real.
AND: the craving is the product of a mechanism that has nothing to do with his value, his love, or your future with him. The strength of your longing is not a signal about him. It is a signal about your nervous system’s conditioning. A woman can be just as conditioned to a man who is deeply unkind as to one who is worthy of her. The longing doesn’t distinguish — it will organize your entire emotional life around someone who is actively harming you, and it will feel, from the inside, exactly like love.
This is the Both/And that matters most in this work: you can fully honor the realness and intensity of what you feel AND simultaneously recognize that the intensity of feeling is not a reliable measure of a relationship’s health or worth. Or you end up either dismissing your own experience (“I shouldn’t feel this way”) or using it as evidence the relationship is worth staying in (“I must love him this much for a reason”). Both moves keep you stuck. Holding both (it’s real, and it doesn’t mean what I’ve been telling myself it means) is where the actual work begins.
Camille, a 38-year-old executive I worked with, put it simply in a session after months of this work: “I realized I’ve been using how much I miss him as evidence. Like, this level of longing must mean something. And I finally saw that it doesn’t mean what I think it means. It means I was trained on him. That’s it.” Then she said: “That’s both devastating and the most relieving thing I’ve ever understood.” That’s exactly right. It’s both.
If you’re recognizing this pattern and want support that works at the level of the nervous system, not just the mind, individual therapy with Annie offers trauma-informed work specifically designed for relational trauma recovery. And if you’re not ready for that step, the Strong & Stable newsletter offers a weekly entry point into this material.
The Systemic Lens: Why We Confuse Unpredictability with Intensity and Call It Chemistry
There’s a word that does a lot of cultural work in this conversation, and that word is “chemistry.”
We use chemistry to describe the specific feeling of being powerfully drawn to someone. We treat it as a self-evident positive — if there’s chemistry, that’s good; if there isn’t, no amount of kindness or compatibility can compensate. We speak of it as something that either exists or doesn’t, something you can’t manufacture, something you should trust as a signal about whether a relationship is right.
What we don’t say, what no one teaches girls in any explicit way, is that “chemistry” is often the felt experience of intermittent reinforcement. The electricity, the intensity, the inability to stop thinking about him, the way your whole nervous system lights up when he walks in the room: this is, in large part, what a conditioned anxious attachment system feels like when it’s activated. It is what your nervous system does when it’s been trained on unpredictability and is now in the presence of the stimulus that produces the most powerful reward response you know.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Jungian analyst, storyteller, and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, observed something adjacent to this in her writing on how women are trained out of their own instincts:
“We are taught to understand, correctly, that it is dangerous to get too hungry, too angry, or too tired. But we are also taught that it’s dangerous to be too satisfied, too rested, too certain — for in those states we might lose our vigilance.”
CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Jungian Analyst and Author, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Estés is writing about something broader than romantic relationships, but what she’s naming maps onto this conversation with uncomfortable precision. Women are trained, systemically, to distrust states of safety, satisfaction, and certainty: to interpret those states as either a sign that something is missing or a dangerous relaxation of the vigilance that keeps them in the good graces of the people who matter to them. A relationship that feels steady and safe, where a partner is consistently warm and reliably present, can register as somehow insufficient — not electric enough, not urgent enough, not real enough. And a relationship that keeps her in a permanent state of vigilance, scanning for the next withdrawal, working hard to secure the next warm return, can register as the most alive she’s ever felt.
This is not a personal failing. It is a learned cultural distortion reinforced from multiple directions: the romantic narratives that tell us love should feel like lightning; the attachment templates laid down by inconsistent caregivers; the specific conditioning of a relationship that ran this schedule. All of it lands in the same nervous system, producing the same felt sense that this must be love, because nothing has ever felt this real.
What the Systemic Lens requires is that we be willing to ask who benefits from women not being able to distinguish between genuine connection and neurological conditioning. The answer is uncomfortable but direct: partners who rely on intermittent reinforcement benefit enormously from a cultural context that validates intensity as evidence of love. The narcissistic abuse cycle is, at its structural core, an intermittent reinforcement schedule. The cultural framing of idealization as “chemistry” and devaluation as “him going through something” keeps her trying to get back to the good times rather than recognizing the pattern for what it is.
What Recovery from Intermittent Reinforcement Looks Like — Rewiring the Attachment System
Recovery from intermittent reinforcement is not primarily a cognitive process. You cannot think your way out of a conditioned nervous system response. Many driven, intelligent women come into this work convinced that if they can just understand it well enough, the craving will stop. Understanding helps. But it is not sufficient. What actually rewires the attachment system is somatic work, relational repair, and the slow accumulation of new experiences.
Name the cycle every time it runs. Not to stop it, but to build the observational capacity that creates a sliver of distance between you and the conditioning. When you notice yourself more anxious after he cancelled, more urgent to reach out, name it: “This is the intermittent reinforcement cycle running.” Naming it doesn’t stop the program, but it begins to separate your observing self from the program itself. That separation is where agency eventually lives.
Work at the body level, not just the mind level. The craving lives in the nervous system, not in the prefrontal cortex. Somatic approaches such as body-based therapy, EMDR, and breathwork work at the level where the conditioning actually lives. Can you be with the physical sensation of longing without immediately acting on it? Can you let the wave move through without sending the text? This kind of somatic tolerance is built slowly. It’s the work of trauma-informed individual therapy, and it’s the work that actually changes the nervous system’s response over time.
Grieve the relationship that you thought you had. The love-bombing phase was real: those early months when he was extraordinary, when you felt more seen than you’d ever felt. Leaving this dynamic means grieving not just the relationship as it is but the relationship as it briefly was — and the hope, persistent and painful, that it could be that again. This grief deserves full acknowledgment. The trauma bonding framework addresses this grief dimension directly.
Practice tolerating consistency. After a relationship built on intermittent reinforcement, consistent love can feel flat. Not because it is flat, but because your nervous system has been calibrated to respond most powerfully to unpredictability. You may find yourself manufacturing uncertainty: picking fights, testing, waiting for the withdrawal that never comes. The work is not to find someone who produces the same neurological high; it’s to let your nervous system slowly recalibrate to what consistent care actually feels like, using therapy as the proving ground.
Address the early template. For most women working through this, the adult intermittent reinforcement cycle is running on a template established much earlier: the parent who was sometimes wonderful and sometimes frightening or absent. That early attachment environment is what made the adult nervous system so available to this pattern in the first place. This is the deeper layer of the work, and it’s what Fixing the Foundations is designed to address.
The women I work with who recover most fully from intermittent reinforcement patterns don’t do it by becoming “better at relationships” in the abstract. They do it by doing the specific, often painful work of understanding their own nervous system’s history, grieving what they lost, and slowly, with real support, learning what it feels like to be in the presence of consistent love long enough for it to register as enough. That’s possible. It takes longer than any of us would like. And it’s genuinely possible. If you’re ready to explore what that work looks like for you, reaching out to talk is a reasonable next step.
Romi closes her laptop sometime after 9pm. She didn’t text him. That’s not nothing — she knows it’s not nothing, even though it doesn’t feel like recovery. It feels like one small act of observing the mechanism rather than being run by it. That’s the beginning of what this work looks like. Not dramatic liberation. One deleted text, one Sunday at a time.
Q: What is intermittent reinforcement in a relationship?
A: Intermittent reinforcement in a relationship is when one partner delivers affection, validation, or warmth on an unpredictable schedule: sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes tender, sometimes cruel, with no consistent pattern you can read. The term comes from B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement schedules, which showed that unpredictable rewards produce the most extinction-resistant behavior of any schedule he tested. In intimate relationships, the inconsistency itself, not the love, is what creates the intensity of attachment.
Q: Why does intermittent reinforcement make me feel more attached, not less?
A: Because the dopamine system responds most powerfully to uncertain rewards. When a reward is predictable, dopamine response is moderate. When it’s uncertain, dopamine spikes in anticipation. A partner who is sometimes warm and sometimes withdrawn produces exactly this: your brain releases more dopamine in pursuit of his warmth than it would if his warmth were always available. Patrick Carnes, PhD, has also documented how the cortisol of withdrawal followed by the oxytocin-dopamine of reunion creates a biochemical cycle that registers as profoundly meaningful, more intense than consistent love tends to feel.
Q: Is intermittent reinforcement always intentional — or can someone do it unconsciously?
A: Both are possible, and the neurological effect on you is identical regardless. Some people use it deliberately, having learned that inconsistency keeps a partner engaged. Others are enacting their own attachment dysregulation: they aren’t consistent because they aren’t capable of consistency. What matters clinically isn’t the intent — it’s the pattern and its impact. A relationship that produces the hot-and-cold cycle is harmful to your nervous system whether or not he planned it that way.
Q: Can a relationship recover from intermittent reinforcement patterns?
A: In some cases, yes. But it requires the partner running the intermittent reinforcement schedule to do significant work on their own attachment history and emotional regulation capacity. Ramani Durvasula, PhD, is clear that when it’s linked to narcissistic traits, the prognosis for genuine change is poor: the traits that produce the cycle are structurally resistant to the self-examination recovery requires. If your partner is genuinely willing, demonstrated in behavior rather than promises, couples therapy with a trauma-informed clinician can help. But the decision to stay or leave has to be based on demonstrated evidence, not potential.
Q: How do I break the cycle of craving someone who treats me inconsistently?
A: By working at the level of the nervous system rather than just the intellect. Understanding the mechanism helps, but it doesn’t rewire conditioned responses. What actually works is somatic work that addresses the craving at the body level, grief work for what the relationship was, and the slow accumulation of new relational experiences that teach your nervous system that consistency is safe. This work moves at the pace of the nervous system, not the pace of insight. It goes deeper when it includes the early attachment templates that made your nervous system available to this pattern in the first place, which is what individual therapy and programs like Fixing the Foundations address most directly.
Related Reading
Carnes, Patrick. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. Health Communications, 1997.
Durvasula, Ramani. Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist. Post Hill Press, 2015.
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss, Volume 1: Attachment. Basic Books, 1969.
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1992.
Skinner, B.F. The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1938.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious 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 Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
