He Was the Safe One: When You Married Stability and Called It Love
Many driven and ambitious women chose their partners not despite their steadiness but because of it — because after years of chaos at home, a calm man felt like oxygen. This post explores what happens when the stability that once saved you starts to feel like a ceiling, why that shift is a nervous system story as much as a marital one, and what it means to want something more without betraying the person who helped you survive.
- The Night She Realized Safety Wasn’t Enough
- What Does It Mean to Marry “The Safe One”?
- The Neurobiology Behind Choosing Calm
- How This Tension Shows Up in Driven Women
- When the Cage Is Made of Good Intentions
- Both/And: Grateful and Hungry at the Same Time
- The Systemic Lens: When Culture Tells You Safety Is the Ceiling
- How to Move Forward Without Burning It Down
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Night She Realized Safety Wasn’t Enough
It’s a Wednesday in February. Niamh is sitting at the kitchen table at 9:47 p.m., long after the dinner dishes have been cleared, her laptop open to a brief she’s been trying to finish for two hours. The house is quiet — her husband went to bed at nine, the way he always does. The refrigerator hums. The radiator ticks. She can hear her own breathing.
She’s not unhappy, exactly. That’s the part she keeps circling back to. He remembered her coffee order when she was stuck in back-to-back depositions last week. He never yells. He’s never once stormed out or made her feel afraid. He’s predictable in every way she once desperately needed a person to be predictable. And still, something in her chest contracts a little every night when she realizes the conversation ended at dinner and neither of them reached for another one.
Niamh thinks, not for the first time: I chose him because he wasn’t my father. Her father’s rages were the weather of her childhood — sudden, violent, impossible to predict. She’d spent her twenties scanning every man she dated for signs of it. And when she found someone who had none of those signs, who was steady and soft-spoken and showed up when he said he would — she’d called that love. Maybe it was. But twenty-one years later, she’s no longer sure that love and safety are the same thing. She’s no longer sure that survival-shaped choosing looks anything like desire.
In my work with driven and ambitious women, this is one of the most tender and least-spoken griefs I encounter: the woman who realizes, in the middle of an ordinary evening, that she may have married relief. That what she called love might have been, at its root, the first deep exhale of a nervous system that had never once felt safe before.
This post is for her. It’s also for you, if you recognize that kitchen table.
What Does It Mean to Marry “The Safe One”?
Let’s start by defining what we actually mean — because “the safe one” gets used casually in ways that flatten something genuinely complex. It’s not an insult. It’s not a small thing. And it doesn’t automatically mean the marriage is wrong. What it means is worth understanding precisely.
A pattern in which early adverse relational experiences — chronic unpredictability, parental volatility, emotional neglect, or chaos in the family of origin — shape an individual’s nervous system to treat the absence of threat as the primary criterion for partner selection. Rather than choosing a partner based on compatibility, shared vitality, or mutual desire, the person’s threat-detection system prioritizes partners who do not trigger fear, hypervigilance, or activation. Stability, predictability, and emotional flatness are experienced as safety, and safety is experienced as love.
In plain terms: When you grew up in a home where you never knew what was coming, your nervous system became a highly tuned alarm system. When you finally met someone who didn’t set it off, your body interpreted that as the deepest kind of relief — and your mind translated that relief into love. Both things can be true at once: that he’s a genuinely good person, and that you chose him because he didn’t scare you, not because he lit you up.
“Marrying the safe one” is almost never a conscious strategy. The women I work with don’t sit down with a spreadsheet and reason their way to a calm partner. What happens instead is more primal than that: they feel, for the first time, a quieting. The hypervigilance drops. The body uncoils. There’s a specific quality of relief that people who grew up in safe homes have never needed to feel — and it can be intoxicating precisely because it’s so unfamiliar.
The problem isn’t that they chose safety. Safety is not a small gift. The problem is that safety, alone, is not a complete architecture for intimacy. It’s necessary. It’s not sufficient. And for women who spent their formative years in survival mode, it can take a decade — sometimes two — before the nervous system is regulated enough to even notice what else is missing.
If you want to understand the broader landscape of how driven and ambitious women arrive at this kind of marriage, I’d encourage you to read more about the outgrown marriage — because what starts as trauma-informed partner selection often evolves, over time, into exactly that.
The Neurobiology Behind Choosing Calm
To understand why so many women from chaotic backgrounds end up married to stable, predictable partners, you have to understand what chronic early-life stress does to the developing nervous system — and what it’s still doing to you in adulthood.
Allan Schore, PhD, neuropsychologist and clinical faculty member at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, has spent decades mapping the neuroscience of affect regulation and relational trauma. His research establishes that early caregiver relationships are the primary architects of right-brain development — specifically, the circuits responsible for emotional regulation, threat detection, and the capacity for intimate connection. When those early relationships are characterized by chronic unpredictability or parental dysregulation, the developing nervous system doesn’t learn to self-regulate. Instead, it learns to survive: to scan constantly, to expect the worst, to brace.
The neurological and psychological processes by which an individual modulates the intensity, duration, and expression of emotional states. In healthy early development, affect regulation is co-regulated between caregiver and infant — the attuned caregiver helps the child’s nervous system return to baseline after activation. When early caregivers are themselves dysregulated, the child must develop compensatory regulatory strategies that often persist into adult relational patterns. As described by Allan Schore, PhD, this right-brain-to-right-brain system forms the foundation of all later attachment relationships.
In plain terms: Your nervous system learned how to handle emotion in relationship with your earliest caregivers. If those caregivers were volatile or unpredictable, your system learned to stay braced rather than relaxed. A partner who is consistently calm, even emotionally flat, can feel like the nervous system regulation you never got — which is why it reads as love, safety, and home all at once.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how traumatic stress reorganizes the brain’s threat-detection system in ways that persist long after the original threat is gone. The body keeps score — not just of injury, but of the absence of safety. For women who grew up in chaos, the absence of chaos in a partner doesn’t read as neutral. It reads as extraordinary. Their bodies are, literally, experiencing something they’ve never felt before.
Harville Hendrix, PhD, couples therapist and originator of Imago Relationship Therapy, adds another dimension. His Imago framework proposes that we’re unconsciously drawn to partners who carry both the positive and negative traits of our primary caregivers — that we’re seeking, through intimate relationship, to complete unfinished developmental business from childhood. For a woman raised by a volatile or addicted parent, the partner who lacks that volatility initially seems like the opposite of her wounding. But she may also, over time, find herself frustrated by his emotional flatness — because his limits mirror, in a different register, the emotional unavailability she always knew.
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, developer of the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT), offers a particularly useful framework here. He describes three attachment styles in couples: the island (avoidant, self-reliant, emotionally contained), the wave (anxious, intensely relational, needy of reassurance), and the anchor (securely attached, available, comfortable with both closeness and distance). Many women from chaotic backgrounds are natural waves who marry islands — men whose emotional containment initially feels like steadiness rather than distance. The relief lasts until the wave needs more depth, more responsiveness, more aliveness — and the island’s containment starts to feel like a wall.
A framework developed by Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, proposing that adult romantic partner selection is unconsciously guided by an internalized composite image — the “imago” — formed from the positive and negative traits of early caregivers. Individuals are drawn to partners who match this composite image because the relationship recreates the conditions for completing unresolved childhood developmental tasks. The initial attraction typically reflects the positive aspects of the imago; the later conflicts typically reflect the unresolved wounds it contains.
In plain terms: You didn’t consciously pick someone who reminded you of your parents. But somewhere in your nervous system, there’s a template built from your earliest relationships — what love feels like, what safety feels like, where the exits are. That template shapes who you notice, who you stay with, and what starts to chafe fifteen years in.
Understanding this neurobiological architecture doesn’t mean the marriage is wrong or that leaving is inevitable. It means that what you’re experiencing — the growing gap between gratitude and aliveness — has roots that go deeper than personality incompatibility. It’s a story your nervous system is telling you, and it deserves to be read carefully.
How This Tension Shows Up in Driven Women
In my clinical work, I see a particular shape to this experience in women who are ambitious, accomplished, and used to solving hard problems. The frustration doesn’t arrive loudly. It tends to arrive as a low-grade hum, a background noise they keep trying to explain away — and the explaining keeps failing.
Niamh, whom I introduced at the opening of this post, is a senior litigation attorney who runs her office with a kind of disciplined intensity that earns her both respect and a wide berth. She’s been in a leadership role since her late thirties. She thinks in arguments and counterarguments. She’s not, in any ordinary sense, afraid of conflict. And yet for years she couldn’t bring herself to name what she wanted from her marriage that she wasn’t getting — because naming it felt like ingratitude. Like betrayal. Like the worst kind of selfishness in a woman who, by every measure, had more than enough.
What I see consistently in women like Niamh is this: the same drive and discernment they bring to their professional lives goes underground in their marriages. They become deliberately incurious about what they feel, because what they feel seems too large and too ungrateful to examine. They file it under “just stress” or “maybe it’s hormones” or “I need more sleep.” They work harder, travel more, pour themselves into causes and projects and children — anything that generates the aliveness their home life no longer provides.
The problem is that this strategy works, for a while. It can work for years. Until one evening, in a quiet kitchen, it doesn’t.
What also shows up consistently is a specific kind of shame. These women often feel profound gratitude for their partners — genuinely. He’s a good father. He’s loyal. He’s never once scared her. And she believes, in some deep place, that wanting more than that makes her a bad person. That the women she grew up watching — women who were actually hurt — deserve help. That she doesn’t, because she’s not being harmed. She’s just not fully alive.
The clinical reality I want to offer here is this: the absence of aliveness is a legitimate clinical concern. It’s not a character flaw, not ingratitude, not midlife restlessness dressed up in therapy language. When a woman’s nervous system spent twenty years learning to measure love by the absence of threat, the moment it becomes regulated enough to want more than safety, that wanting is a developmental milestone. It’s her nervous system finally safe enough to ask a new question.
When the Cage Is Made of Good Intentions
There’s a particular cruelty to the cage that’s built from goodness. If your partner were dismissive or cruel, you’d have a frame for it. The grief would have edges. But when the man who can’t quite reach you is also the man who drives your mother to her appointments and remembers every single one of your work anniversaries and genuinely means well in every direction — the pain becomes almost impossible to locate, let alone name.
Sunita is a physician and mother of three who came into executive coaching looking, she said, for “help with time management.” That’s usually what I hear first. Within four sessions we were somewhere else entirely. Sunita had married a man her parents approved of, a man who was stable and kind and utterly without volatility — a direct contrast to her own father, whose emotional intensity had defined her childhood home. She’d called him “safe” on their second date. She said it like a compliment. He took it like one.
Twenty years later, Sunita describes their evenings like this: “We’re both there. We’re both tired. He asks how my day was and I tell him, and then he tells me, and then we watch something, and then we go to sleep. It’s fine. It’s always fine.” She pauses, then says something that has stayed with me: “I can’t remember the last time I felt surprised by him. Not even in a small way.”
The longing Sunita is describing isn’t for drama or conflict or danger. It’s for vitality. For the experience of being in a relationship with someone who still has the capacity to see her freshly, to be curious about who she’s becoming, to be moved by her. That need isn’t excessive. It’s a basic feature of intimate attachment. And it goes unmet not because her husband is unkind, but because the emotional range they’ve built together was calibrated, from the very beginning, for safety rather than depth.
Stan Tatkin’s PACT framework is useful here: when an island marries a wave, the island’s natural emotional containment can feel, to a trauma-formed nervous system, like the ultimate regulation. But the wave eventually needs a partner who can go deep with her. When the island stays in shallow water, the wave doesn’t stop needing depth. She just starts looking for it elsewhere — in her work, her friendships, her inner life — and the marriage becomes the stable backdrop rather than the living center.
For more on what this kind of relational drift looks like in practice, the post on contemplating divorce when the marriage isn’t working explores the full arc of this recognizing.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
MARY OLIVER, Poet, from “The Summer Day”
That question is not rhetorical. It’s clinical. What do you plan to do with a life that has been organized, for decades, around the imperative of not being hurt? What becomes possible when the nervous system finally asks not just “am I safe?” but “am I alive?”
Both/And: Grateful and Hungry at the Same Time
Here is the reframe I come back to again and again with women in this situation, because I’ve seen how much it matters to name it plainly: you can be profoundly grateful to the man who gave you stability and honestly say the stability isn’t enough anymore. These are not contradictory positions. They are both true at once, and the work is learning to hold them without collapsing into either one.
The cultural story we inherit about outgrown marriages tends to demand a verdict: either the marriage was good and you should stay, or it wasn’t good enough and you should go. Either you’re grateful or you’re resentful. Either you love him or you don’t. The both/and frame refuses that binary, because the binary is where people get stuck and stay stuck for years.
Niamh, in her second year of individual therapy, arrived at a session and said something she’d never been able to say before: “I love him. I genuinely love him. And I’m also dying in this marriage.” She waited for me to tell her those two things couldn’t coexist. When I didn’t, when I said instead that both things could be completely true and that holding that truth was the beginning of real clarity, she cried for about fifteen minutes. Not because the both/and made anything easier. Because someone had finally stopped asking her to pick a side.
The both/and framework is also essential when it comes to the question of desire. Many women in stability-rooted marriages eventually have to reckon with the fact that their partners are good people they’re no longer sexually or emotionally drawn to — and the shame around this can be paralyzing. The both/and says: your partner’s goodness is real, and your hunger is also real. One doesn’t cancel the other. Both require honest attention.
Harville Hendrix’s Imago framework offers couples a concrete pathway through this: the “intentional dialogue,” a structured process for creating emotional safety around vulnerability, allows partners to share and hear the parts of themselves that have gone underground in the marriage. For some couples, this reopens something that was always there but had been sealed off by routine. For others, it provides the clarity to recognize — with compassion, not contempt — that the gap is real and is not going to close.
What I’d offer is this: the hunger you’re feeling is not a symptom of ingratitude. It’s a sign that your nervous system has done the work of healing enough to want something it didn’t used to know it was allowed to want. That’s not a crisis. That’s growth. It deserves to be treated as such — in therapy, in honest conversation with your partner, in the quiet of your own developing clarity about what a fully alive life looks like for you.
The Systemic Lens: When Culture Tells You Safety Is the Ceiling
The experience Niamh and Sunita are navigating doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped — quietly, insistently — by cultural messages about what women are supposed to want from marriage, what’s supposed to be enough, and what desire beyond security means about a woman’s character.
A culture that tells trauma survivors safety is the ceiling, when actually it’s the floor, is doing profound harm. And that is exactly what we do when we congratulate women from difficult backgrounds for “choosing well” — meaning, choosing without chaos — without ever acknowledging that choosing without chaos is a baseline, not a destination. Safety is where healing begins. It’s not where intimacy lives.
There’s a deeper layer here too. Women are still, in most of our mainstream cultural frameworks, supposed to be grateful for a good man. Full stop. The script goes: he’s kind, he’s faithful, he provides, he doesn’t hurt you — what more could you possibly want? The very existence of “more” as a category has been historically pathologized in women: hysteria, ingratitude, restlessness, the famous feminine failure to be satisfied. These narratives are not neutral. They are structural pressures that keep women from naming their own hunger, even to themselves.
The women I work with who come from chaotic backgrounds have often internalized this doubly. They already know they “shouldn’t complain” because they’ve seen real hardship — their mother’s addiction, their father’s rage, their own early years trying to make themselves small enough to be safe. And then they landed in a marriage that isn’t chaotic, and the cultural story said: you made it. You’re done. Be grateful. The restlessness you feel is either ingratitude or a problem with you.
Allan Schore’s neuroscience, Bessel van der Kolk’s trauma framework, and Stan Tatkin’s relational model all converge on the same clinical truth: that healing from early relational trauma isn’t a destination you reach when you find a non-chaotic partner. It’s a continuing developmental process that requires — among other things — an intimate relationship with enough emotional depth, reciprocity, and mutual aliveness to support ongoing growth. Marrying the safe one can be the beginning of that healing. It is rarely the end.
If you’re in this place and wondering what your options actually look like, I’d encourage you to explore the outgrown marriage resource cluster and consider, too, what structured support looks like in the context of Fixing the Foundations — because what you need isn’t necessarily to leave. It’s to understand, at depth, what you’re working with and what’s possible.
The systemic lens also requires that we name this: men in these marriages are often in their own pain. The stable, contained partner — the island — is frequently a man whose emotional range was also shaped by early circumstances that taught him to stay regulated at all costs. His steadiness isn’t a choice he’s making to limit you. It’s often the only emotional language he was ever taught. That doesn’t mean the gap isn’t real. But it does mean that the most accurate frame isn’t “he’s withholding from me.” It’s “we were both shaped by systems that didn’t prepare us for this.”
How to Move Forward Without Burning It Down
If you’ve read this far and something in you has been nodding steadily since the first paragraph, I want to be honest with you about what I see as the path forward — because it isn’t a simple one, and I’m not going to tell you it is.
The first move is almost always the same: stop performing gratitude as a way of not feeling hunger. These two things — gratitude and hunger — can coexist, and pretending one cancels the other is how women spend another decade at a kitchen table that no longer fits them. You’re allowed to be grateful for what he gave you and honest about what’s missing. Getting comfortable with that both/and, inside yourself, is the beginning of all real clarity.
From there, the path tends to involve a few consistent elements in my clinical work. First, naming the original choice — genuinely examining, often in individual therapy, what you were looking for when you chose him and what your nervous system was solving for. This isn’t about blame or pathologizing the choice. It’s about understanding it clearly enough to know what you actually want now, rather than what you needed then.
Second, assessing the relational raw material: Is there a version of this man who has more range than the marriage has ever asked him to access? Is there emotional depth he’s never been invited to bring? Some couples in this situation discover, through work like Imago therapy or Stan Tatkin’s PACT approach, that the island has more water in him than anyone knew — that what looked like emotional flatness was actually unexpressed longing looking for a safe enough invitation. Not all of them. But some.
Third, getting honest about what you’re actually grieving. Sometimes the hunger isn’t for this man to be different. It’s grief for the self that got organized around survival for so long, she never got to find out who she was when she was finally safe. That grief is real and it belongs in the therapy room, not projected onto a marriage that can’t hold it.
Fourth, for women navigating this alongside demanding careers and leadership roles, executive coaching with a trauma-informed lens can be valuable — because the way this shows up at work and in leadership is often the clearest diagnostic. The woman who can’t stop over-functioning, who fills the emptiness with achievement, who measures her vitality in projects rather than relationships — she’s often the same woman sitting at the kitchen table at 9:47 p.m., wondering why everything is fine and nothing feels alive.
And finally: you don’t have to decide anything today. The both/and frame isn’t about postponing decision-making indefinitely. It’s about refusing to make a decision from fear or from the pressure of cultural narratives that tell you a good man is sufficient grounds for staying or a loveless marriage is sufficient grounds for leaving. Your situation is more specific than either of those scripts. It deserves more specific attention — for yourself, for your partner, and for the marriage itself.
If you’re ready to explore that, the free consultation is a good place to start. So is the Strong & Stable newsletter — which lands in your inbox on Sundays and addresses, week after week, exactly these kinds of questions for driven and ambitious women navigating complicated interior lives. And if you’re a high-capacity woman who wants a structured framework for understanding what’s happened beneath the surface of your relationships, the Fixing the Foundations course was built for this.
You are not ungrateful. You are not broken. You are not wrong for wanting something more than survival. You are a woman who is, possibly for the first time in your life, safe enough to ask a bigger question. That deserves to be honored — not shushed.
THE RESEARCH
The patterns described in this article are supported by peer-reviewed research. Below are key studies that illuminate the clinical territory we’ve been exploring.
- Salvatore Garanzini, PhD, Gottman-certified therapist and researcher at The Gottman Institute, writing in Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (2017), established that gottman Method Couples Therapy produced significant improvements in relationship satisfaction, trust, and commitment in gay and lesbian couples, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness across diverse couple populations. (PMID: 28940625) (PMID: 28940625). (PMID: 28940625)
- Bessel A van der Kolk, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and Medical Director of the Trauma Center, writing in Harvard Review of Psychiatry (1994), established that trauma is stored in somatic memory rather than explicit narrative memory, meaning the body literally keeps the score of traumatic experience through biological stress-response changes that persist long after the original event. (PMID: 9384857) (PMID: 9384857). (PMID: 9384857)
- Melissa G Platt, PhD, researcher in betrayal trauma; Jennifer J Freyd, PhD, Professor at University of Oregon and originator of Betrayal Trauma Theory, as senior author, writing in Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy (2015), established that betrayal by a trusted caregiver uniquely predicts shame and dissociation beyond the effects of fear alone, indicating that the relational violation—not just the dangerous event itself—is the primary driver of dissociative and shame-based responses in survivors. (PMID: 25793317). (PMID: 25793317)
Q: How do I know if I married someone for safety reasons versus genuine love?
A: This question is almost never answered in one session, but here’s a useful starting place: think back to what you felt in your body when you first decided he was “the one.” Was it excitement, desire, the specific aliveness of being truly seen by someone — or was it, primarily, relief? A settling. A quieting of some alarm that had been running for years. Relief is not nothing, and it’s not disqualifying. But if relief was the dominant note, that’s important information. It doesn’t mean the love wasn’t real. It means the love may have been organized, at its root, around the regulation of fear rather than the pull of genuine connection. A therapist who works with attachment and relational trauma can help you sort this out with more precision than you can on your own.
Q: Is it normal to feel grateful and resentful toward the same partner?
A: Not only is it normal — it’s one of the most consistent features of this particular situation. The gratitude is real. He gave you something you’d never had. The resentment is also real. His emotional limits, however understandable their origins, are costing you something. What I see in my clinical work is that women try very hard to erase one side of this in order to maintain a clean story — either “he’s wonderful and I have no right to want more” or “he’s inadequate and I should leave.” The both/and frame, which I work with explicitly in therapy, allows you to hold both realities without one canceling the other. That’s not moral relativism. It’s accuracy.
Q: My husband is a genuinely good person. Does wanting more make me a bad person?
A: No. His goodness is real, and your hunger is also real. Neither cancels the other, and the fact that you’re asking this question tells me you’ve internalized a cultural message about women and gratitude that has no clinical basis whatsoever. The absence of aliveness in a marriage is a legitimate concern regardless of how kind the other person is. A good person can be genuinely wrong for you, or can be right for you in ways that don’t include all the dimensions you need. That’s not a moral failing on either side. It’s a relational reality that deserves honest examination.
Q: Can a marriage that started from trauma-informed partner selection become genuinely intimate?
A: Sometimes, yes — and the prerequisite is usually a mutual willingness to do the work. Harville Hendrix’s Imago therapy and Stan Tatkin’s PACT approach both have solid evidence bases for helping couples move from a safety-only foundation toward something with more emotional depth and reciprocal aliveness. What tends to be required is that both partners can acknowledge what’s been missing, both partners want something different, and both partners have enough relational resilience to tolerate the vulnerability that depth requires. When those conditions are present, the stable foundation that was already there actually becomes an asset — a real base from which to build something more complete. When one or both partners can’t or won’t go there, the prognosis is different.
Q: I came from a chaotic family, but I don’t think that’s why I married my husband. How do I know if this applies to me?
A: This is worth sitting with carefully. The mechanisms that Allan Schore and Bessel van der Kolk describe are largely unconscious — they don’t require that you consciously felt you were choosing for safety. The question to ask yourself is less about motive and more about pattern: in your earlier relationships before this one, were you drawn to people who were more volatile, more activating, more emotionally intense — and did those relationships feel more “alive” even when they were painful? If so, the shift toward a calmer partner may have been more about nervous system regulation than you realized at the time. Individual therapy is the most useful place to explore this, because what you can’t see from the inside is often visible from outside.
Q: What’s the difference between this and just being in a rut? Everyone’s marriage gets boring after twenty years, right?
A: There’s some overlap, and ordinary relational entropy is real. But the experience I’m describing here has a specific texture that’s different from general boredom. It’s less “we’ve run out of things to talk about” and more “I don’t think this person has ever really known me at the level I need to be known.” It’s less “things got routine” and more “I can feel, in my body, that something essential is missing and has been for a long time.” Routine can be disrupted by novelty — a trip, a new shared project, an honest conversation. The deeper structural issue I’m describing doesn’t resolve with novelty. It requires a fundamentally different relational architecture, which is either built together or recognized as absent.
Related Reading
- Schore, Allan N. The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2019.
- Tatkin, Stan. Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship. Oakland: New Harbinger, 2011.
- Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2008.
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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.
