Were You an Overachiever Because You Were Thriving, or Because You Were Surviving?
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
For many driven women, a childhood defined by exceptional achievement gets misread as evidence of a healthy, thriving environment. But when achievement is a strategy to secure conditional love, manage an unpredictable household, or avoid criticism, it’s not a sign of thriving. It’s a trauma response. This post explores the link between overachiever childhood trauma, the neuroscience of the fawn response, and how to untangle your worth from your performance.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Were You Thriving, or Just Very Good at Surviving?
- What Is Overachievement as a Trauma Response?
- Why Does Approval Feel Like Oxygen?
- What Is Happening in the Nervous System of the Performing Self?
- How Does This Show Up in Driven Women’s Actual Lives?
- What Does It Cost to Be the “Easy” Child?
- Both/And: Can You Be Brilliant and Still Be Surviving?
- The Systemic Lens: Why Does the Culture Miss the Wound?
- What Does the Path Forward Actually Look Like?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Overachievement can be a trauma response when performance was the price of safety or love in childhood, not an expression of genuine ambition.
- The “fawn” response, named by psychotherapist Pete Walker, MA, MFT, often shows up in driven families as relentless achievement rather than obvious people-pleasing.
- A nervous system that learned to earn love through performance runs on adrenaline and cortisol, not the dopamine of authentic interest, which is why success can feel exhausting instead of satisfying.
- Being the “easy” child who never needed help is not the same as being an emotionally seen child. Competence can become a barrier to receiving care.
- Healing requires holding a Both/And: you can be genuinely capable and still be running a survival strategy. Neither fact cancels the other out.
- Recovery is nervous system work, not mindset work. Somatic therapies and parts-based approaches like Internal Family Systems tend to outperform pure cognitive strategies here.
- This article is psychoeducational. It describes a pattern. It does not diagnose you or anyone else.
This content is psychoeducational in nature and is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you’re in crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Overachievement as a trauma response is the pattern in which exceptional performance is driven not by genuine ambition but by a nervous system trying to create safety in an environment that felt unpredictable or threatening in childhood. The child who became exceptional learned that being extraordinary was the surest way to be loved, seen, or to avoid punishment. In adulthood, that drive persists even when the original danger is long gone, because the body doesn’t update its threat equation through logic alone.
In short: Overachievement as a trauma response means that drive and performance were originally safety strategies, not authentic ambition, and they continue running on that neurological script in adulthood.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
In more than 15,000 clinical hours, I’ve worked with women who can’t rest, can’t celebrate, and can’t stop, because their nervous system learned that performance was protection. I keep returning to Alice Miller, PhD, psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, who described how children in emotionally unsafe homes develop a performing self that earns love by being impressive rather than by simply being (Miller 1979). I read her work early in my training, and I’ve never stopped seeing her case histories walk into my office wearing new faces.
Were You Thriving, or Just Very Good at Surviving?
It’s 8:45 p.m. on a Sunday, and Luisa is sitting at her dining room table, surrounded by her daughter’s science fair project materials. Her daughter went to bed an hour ago, satisfied with the slightly lopsided volcano they built together. Luisa is still awake, repainting the lava flow. She knows she shouldn’t be doing this. But her chest feels tight, and she can’t stop until it looks perfect.
She sets the brush down. Her hands are shaking slightly.
“I remember being eight,” she told me, months into our work together, “re-writing a book report three times because my father circled a slightly messy letter g in red pen. I remember the cold quiet of bringing home a test with a 92 on it. Not a bad grade. Just not good enough. I learned early the only way to keep the peace in that house was to be flawless.”
Luisa has spent her adult life being the smartest, most capable person in the room. Two advanced degrees. A corner office. Everyone who looks at her sees a woman who has always thrived.
Hearing her describe that night in session, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to recognize after fifteen years of this work: not surprise, but recognition. The volcano was never about the volcano.
Sitting in the quiet of her own kitchen, unable to leave a third-grade volcano alone, she named the truth out loud for the first time: she wasn’t thriving. She was surviving. And some nights, she was still doing it.
If you’ve ever looked at your own résumé and wondered why it feels like a shield rather than a celebration, this post is for you. If you’ve wondered whether what you’ve always called being an overachiever is something deeper, this is where we untangle it.
Luisa and Maira are composite characters, built from patterns I’ve observed across many clients, not real individuals.
As defined by Pete Walker, MA, MFT, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, the fawn response is a trauma adaptation where a person seeks safety by merging with the wishes, needs, and demands of others. They learn that the only way to avoid conflict or secure attachment is to become entirely accommodating, abandoning their own needs in the process. In driven families, fawning often takes the form of relentless overachievement to secure parental approval.
In plain terms: It’s people-pleasing as a survival tactic. You learned that being “good,” “impressive,” and “convenient” was the only way to stay safe. So you became an expert at being exactly what everyone else needed you to be.
In my clinical practice, women often begin our first session by apologizing. Their childhood was fine, they insist. A roof over their heads, piano lessons, SAT tutors. Straight A’s, team captain, valedictorian. “I don’t have trauma,” they say. “I was just an overachiever.”
This is one of the most pervasive myths about childhood emotional neglect: the belief that if you were successful, you couldn’t possibly have been traumatized. The culture teaches us that trauma looks like failure. It doesn’t look like getting into Stanford.
But trauma isn’t defined by the external outcome. It’s defined by the internal experience. For many driven women, the relentless pursuit of achievement wasn’t an expression of a healthy, thriving self. It was a survival strategy.
When a child grows up where love is conditional, or the household is emotionally unpredictable, she has to figure out how to stay safe. Some children rebel. Some withdraw. And some, often the women in my practice, learn that the surest way to secure attention or stabilize a volatile parent is to be flawless.
They weren’t overachievers because they were thriving. They were overachievers because they were surviving. That distinction changes everything about how we understand their exhaustion and their path forward, and it’s a core feature of what clinicians now recognize as complex PTSD in driven women.
What Is Overachievement as a Trauma Response?
To understand the difference between healthy ambition and overachievement as a trauma response, we have to look at the function of the behavior, not just its appearance.
Healthy ambition is expansive, fueled by curiosity and a desire for mastery. When a child with healthy ambition fails a test, she might feel disappointed, but her fundamental sense of worth stays intact. She knows she’s still loved and safe.
Overachievement as a trauma response is contractive, fueled by fear and the desperate need to secure attachment. When a child using achievement as a survival strategy fails a test, it isn’t a disappointment. It’s an existential threat. Failure means exposure, criticism, the withdrawal of love.
Pete Walker describes this dynamic as a variation of the fawn response. While fawning is typically associated with people-pleasing, in driven families it often takes the shape of relentless performance instead. The child learns to merge with her parents’ demands for excellence, abandoning her own authentic interests to become the “trophy child” the household requires.
This isn’t a conscious choice. It’s an adaptive response by a developing nervous system trying to secure the most fundamental human need: connection with a caregiver. If the only way to get your father to look up from his phone is to bring home a gold medal, you learn to win gold medals.
The tragedy isn’t that the strategy failed. The tragedy is that it worked, and it cost the child her authentic self. I’ve come to think of this as the credential treadmill: a nervous system that keeps demanding one more degree, one more promotion, one more gold star, because the treadmill was never built to deliver safety. It was built to delay the withdrawal of love, one achievement at a time. This connects directly to perfectionism and childhood trauma: control becomes a lifelong operating system.
As described by Mary Ainsworth, PhD, developmental psychologist known for her foundational contributions to attachment theory, secure attachment requires a child to feel loved and accepted regardless of performance. Conditional attachment occurs when a caregiver’s warmth is contingent on the child meeting specific expectations, often related to achievement or emotional suppression. (PMID: 517843)
In plain terms: It’s the unspoken rule that you’re only loved when you’re winning. If you fail, you don’t just lose the game. You lose the connection.
Why Does Approval Feel Like Oxygen?
Ask a driven woman with this history what happens in her body when someone is disappointed in her, and she rarely says “annoyed” or “embarrassed.” She says something closer to: can’t breathe.
That’s a nervous system responding to a threat cue exactly as it was trained to. A raised eyebrow from a boss. A slow reply to a text. A performance review with one line of feedback buried inside four paragraphs of praise. Each registers, somatically, less like information and more like the ground shifting.
This is why so many driven women feel disproportionately undone by small critiques while barely registering large wins. The wins were expected. The critique is the data point the nervous system scans for. Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist and author of Running on Empty, is a researcher I return to constantly here. She spent decades documenting how competent-looking children can still be starved of attunement.
What Is Happening in the Nervous System of the Performing Self?
The distinction between thriving and surviving isn’t only psychological. It’s neurobiological.
When a child is thriving, feeling securely attached and safe to explore the world, her nervous system operates primarily in what Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of Polyvagal Theory, calls the ventral vagal state: the state of social engagement, safety, and calm. The prefrontal cortex is fully online, allowing for creativity and joyful learning.
When a child is using achievement to survive an emotionally unsafe environment, her nervous system instead operates in chronic sympathetic activation. Fight-or-flight, running quietly, all day, every day.
I read Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, years ago, and his explanation of the hyper-reactive amygdala has stayed with me: when a child’s environment requires constant vigilance, she’s scanning for danger, a shift in tone, a sigh, a micro-expression of disapproval.
“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist and Trauma Researcher, Author of The Body Keeps the Score
For the overachieving child, the danger isn’t necessarily physical violence. The danger is the loss of connection. The defense mechanism is perfection.
Think of the nervous system like a smoke detector installed too close to the stove. It was placed there for a real reason once, but now it goes off during ordinary cooking. It can’t tell a grease fire from dinner. That’s what a threat-detection system trained on conditional love does to an adult inbox: an unanswered Slack message at 9 p.m. can trip the same alarm as a real emergency, because the alarm was never recalibrated for a life that’s actually safe now.
The neurochemical reality is exhausting. The child fuels her achievements not with the dopamine of genuine curiosity, but with the adrenaline and cortisol of stress. This becomes her default operating system: feel anxious, achieve something, feel temporary relief, feel anxious again. A promotion doesn’t land as satisfaction. It lands as a twelve-hour reprieve before the next threat scan begins.
As described by Judith Herman, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry and author of Trauma and Recovery, many survivors of relational trauma develop a performing self: a highly competent, socially functional persona built to secure safety in an environment where authentic emotional expression was unsafe. The performing self isn’t a lie. It’s a genuine adaptation. But it isn’t the whole self. (PMID: 22729977)
In plain terms: You built a version of yourself that could survive your childhood and thrive in your career. She’s impressive. But she’s not all of you. And the part of you she’s been standing in for has been quietly starving.
This performing self also drives the imposter syndrome so many driven women describe, that nagging sense that success is a facade someone will eventually see through. It isn’t a cognitive distortion. It’s the nervous system’s accurate memory of a self that learned to perform to survive.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- 52% of female academic physicians reported burnout versus 24% of males (2017) (PMID: 33105003)
- 75.4% high burnout prevalence among mental health professionals, a field with a majority-female workforce (Ahmead et al., Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health)
- More than 50% of Ontario midwives reported depression, anxiety, stress, or burnout (Cates et al., Women Birth)
How Does This Show Up in Driven Women’s Actual Lives?
In adulthood, this survival strategy translates into a life that looks successful but feels precarious. The driven woman keeps using her competence to manage her terror, mostly unaware she’s still running from a threat that isn’t there anymore.
Maira is thirty-four, a tenure-track professor. It’s 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday in March, rain streaking her office window, and she’s staring at an email from a peer reviewer. The review is glowing, calling her research “groundbreaking.” There’s one minor suggestion, buried in the third paragraph.
“I read it four times,” she told me. “Every time, my brain deleted the praise and blew up that one sentence into proof I don’t know what I’m doing. I canceled office hours, locked my door, and spent six hours rewriting a section that didn’t need rewriting, because I could not sit with the idea that someone might think I was anything less than exceptional.”
Sitting with Maira that afternoon, I felt something I’ve felt with hundreds of driven women. Not pity. Not quite concern. A kind of recognition. The six hours weren’t the problem. They were the part of her that had learned this was the only way to stay safe.
For women like Maira, achievement isn’t a source of joy. It’s anxiety management. You over-prepare for every meeting. You treat a B+ as a profound personal failure. The burnout that accumulates from this constant vigilance isn’t weakness. It’s the outcome of running an emergency nervous system response every day, with no off switch installed.
You’re surviving your adult life using strategies you used to survive childhood. The stakes have changed, it’s your boss now, not your parents, but the nervous system response is identical.
What I see consistently in my practice is that driven women often have little connection to what they actually enjoy. They know what earns praise. But when I ask what feels genuinely nourishing, there’s often a long, uncomfortable silence. That silence is diagnostic. Luisa sat with that exact question for almost a full minute before she said, quietly, “I actually don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that.”
What Does It Cost to Be the “Easy” Child?
One of the most insidious parts of this trauma response is how thoroughly it masks the child’s actual needs.
In many families, the overachieving child is the “easy” child, the one parents don’t worry about. While their attention gets consumed by a sibling acting out, marital conflict, or financial stress, she quietly manages herself. She’s never a burden.
Jonice Webb notes that these “easy” children often suffer from profound childhood emotional neglect precisely because they’re so competent. Parents assume the child performing well externally means she’s doing well internally. Her competence becomes a barrier to care rather than a reason to offer more of it.
The cost of being the “easy” child is the loss of the authentic self. When you spend your childhood being whatever everyone needs you to be, you never learn who you actually are. You learn what you’re good at, but not what you like.
Maira described this precisely in our third session. “I can tell you my GPA from every year of school,” she said. “I cannot tell you a single thing I wanted for myself before the age of twenty-five. I don’t think I was allowed to want things. I was allowed to achieve things.”
For many women I work with, this dynamic is entangled with the mother wound, the painful experience of a mother whose love was conditional on performance or the suppression of the child’s own needs. When a mother requires her daughter to be impressive to feel proud of her, the daughter learns to trade authenticity for approval so early she can’t remember making the choice.
This is why so many driven women hit a wall in their thirties or forties. They’ve climbed the ladder, only to realize it’s leaning against the wrong wall. The emptiness they feel is the absence of the self they had to set aside to survive.
You've been holding everything together. You're allowed to put some down.
A focused self-paced course on overfunctioning, achievement-first self-concept, and the trauma response that masquerades as a personality. Not a productivity problem. Not a boundary problem. A nervous system that learned competence was the only safety.
Relational trauma refers to psychological wounds that occur within the context of a relationship, typically between a child and a caregiver. It involves a consistent pattern of emotional neglect, unpredictability, or conditional love that disrupts a child’s ability to form a secure sense of self and secure attachment to others.
In plain terms: It’s the trauma of not being seen, valued, or loved for who you actually are, but rather for what you can do or provide for the adults around you.
Both/And: Can You Be Brilliant and Still Be Surviving?
When driven women realize their overachievement is rooted in trauma, they often feel a profound cognitive dissonance. They see the evidence of their capability, the degrees, the promotions, the beautiful home, and yet feel like terrified children waiting to be caught.
Healing requires holding the Both/And. You can be highly capable and genuinely brilliant. And you can be profoundly insecure and running on a trauma response. You can be grateful for the opportunities your career has provided. And you can grieve that you had to earn your parents’ love by being perfect. You can be proud of the life you’ve built. And you can acknowledge that the proverbial foundation it was built on, the family system you grew up inside, had real cracks in it.
When you refuse to hold the Both/And, you invalidate your own suffering, telling yourself your pain doesn’t count because you’re functioning well. None of that is true.
Functioning is not the same as thriving. Acknowledging your survival strategy doesn’t erase your competence. It honors the human cost of maintaining it. The work of trauma therapy isn’t about dismantling what you’ve built. It’s about building something steadier beneath it, a foundation that doesn’t require emergency mode to hold the upper floors up.
Luisa came back to this question of Both/And more than once in our work together. Nine months in, she described a moment at her daughter’s soccer game where another parent complimented her, unprompted, on how calm and put-together she always seemed. “I said thank you,” Luisa told me. “And then I sat in my car afterward and cried for twenty minutes, because I realized I have no idea what it would feel like to actually feel as calm as I look.” She was brilliant. And she was surviving. Both were true, and neither one got to cancel the other out.
The Systemic Lens: Why Does the Culture Miss the Wound?
We can’t discuss overachievement as a trauma response without naming the systemic forces that encourage and reward it.
Your overachievement isn’t just a personal issue. It’s an adaptive response to a culture that exploits your trauma for profit. Under the terrain of capitalism and patriarchy, women are conditioned to believe their worth is linked to their productivity and service to others.
When a child uses relentless achievement to manage her anxiety, school doesn’t intervene. It gives her awards. When a driven woman uses overwork to stave off collapse, the corporate world gives her a promotion. The culture extracts maximum value from hypervigilant nervous systems, and rarely asks what that extraction costs.
Anne Helen Petersen, journalist and author of Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, is a writer whose reporting I keep coming back to here. She argues that for driven women, the inability to stop working isn’t a personal failure. It’s a logical response to a broken economic system that requires you to be a machine, and if your childhood already taught you to act like one, you’ll be rewarded for it, right up until you can’t sustain it.
For women of color, this dynamic is more complex. The pressure to overachieve is often explicitly tied to survival in a society structured by white supremacy. The “twice as good to get half as far” reality means overachievement is a literal requirement for professional survival. Maira, daughter of immigrant parents, put words to this in a session I still think about: “Nobody in my family ever got to ask if their ambition was healthy. It was just required. So how am I supposed to know the difference now?” The culture demands the performance and largely ignores the toll it takes.
Understanding this systemic lens matters for healing. It lifts the burden of shame. Your exhaustion isn’t a sign you’re broken. It’s a sign you’re surviving a system that requires you to be flawless while carrying your childhood wounds. Healing the nervous system matters, and so does naming what benefits from keeping it dysregulated.
What Does the Path Forward Actually Look Like?
If you recognize yourself in this post, you don’t have to live this way forever. You can keep your ambition without sacrificing your nervous system to maintain it.
Healing requires a fundamental shift in how you relate to your own worth. This lives in the nervous system, so affirmations alone rarely reach it. You can’t out-think a survival response.
Healing involves somatic, body-based therapies that build your capacity to tolerate the vulnerability of not performing. I’ve recommended Somatic Experiencing to countless clients, a modality developed by Peter Levine, PhD, biophysicist and psychologist, author of Waking the Tiger. It helps you track your nervous system’s responses and discharge the survival energy keeping you braced for failure.
Healing also involves parts work. I trained in Internal Family Systems therapy, developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, and it’s reshaped how I understand driven women: the overachiever isn’t the truth of who you are. She’s a protective part who stepped in to keep your vigilance sharp. Befriending her is inner child work: offering the younger you the regard she never got.
Kristin Neff, PhD, psychologist whose research on self-compassion I keep assigning to clients, found that people recover from failure faster when they treat themselves with the warmth they’d offer a friend, not self-criticism disguised as high standards.
Learning to set boundaries around work and the compulsive need to over-deliver is also crucial. It won’t feel safe at first. Every time you choose “good enough” over perfect, your nervous system will issue a threat alert. That anxiety isn’t evidence you’ve done something wrong. It’s your nervous system recalibrating, learning for the first time that you can be imperfect and still be safe.
Luisa is still in this process. The volcano got repainted that Sunday night. But six months later, when her daughter brought home a diorama with a crooked barn roof, she left it exactly as her daughter had built it. “It looked like an eight-year-old made it,” she told me, laughing. “I didn’t touch it. I don’t know if that’s healing or if I just got tired. Maybe both.” Both, I told her, is usually how it actually goes.
Of course you’re tired. You’ve been running an emergency system since you were small, and nobody ever told you it was allowed to power down.
You have spent your life proving you’re capable of handling everything, while secretly believing you’re only lovable if you do. You have nothing left to prove. The most radical thing you can do now is admit you’re human, that you’re tired, and that you belong exactly where you are, not because of what you can do, but because you exist. You don’t have to be flawless to be safe. You survived. Now it’s time to actually thrive.
Warmly, Annie.
If this resonates, individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work, along with self-paced recovery courses or a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
Q: How do I know if my ambition is healthy or a trauma response?
A: The distinction lies in how the ambition feels in your body and what happens when you fail. Healthy ambition feels expansive, driven by curiosity or a desire for mastery. When you fail, you feel disappointed, but your core sense of worth stays intact. Ambition as a trauma response feels compulsive and tight. When you fail, it feels like a threat to your identity and your right to belong.
Q: If I heal my trauma, will I lose my drive and become lazy?
A: This is the most common fear I hear from driven women. The short answer is no. Healing doesn’t destroy your capability. It changes your fuel source, from anxiety and fear of inadequacy to goals that align with your authentic values. You remain highly capable, but the work stops costing you your health and your peace.
Q: Can you have childhood trauma if your parents weren’t abusive?
A: Yes. Trauma isn’t only what was done to you. It’s also what wasn’t provided: consistent emotional attunement, repair after conflict, permission to have needs. Jonice Webb, PhD, psychologist and author of Running on Empty, spent decades documenting the wounds left by emotional absence rather than abuse. Many driven women describe childhoods that looked fine from the outside and felt hollow inside. That hollowness is data, not ingratitude.
Q: Why do I feel worse when people praise me?
A: Your nervous system interprets visibility as vulnerability. If you believe your success is built on a performing self, praise can feel like confirmation the deception is working, which increases the pressure to maintain it. This is a core feature of what many driven women call imposter syndrome, and it’s not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system response.
Q: Is it possible to heal without quitting my high-pressure job?
A: Yes. It’s entirely possible to heal while remaining in a high-pressure environment. The goal isn’t to remove stress from your life, but to change how your nervous system responds to it.
Q: I feel like an impostor because everyone thinks I have it together. Should I tell them the truth?
A: You don’t owe anyone your vulnerability, especially in professional environments. But the isolation of the performing self is profound. Finding safe, contained spaces, like therapy or a few trusted friends, where you can drop the mask is crucial for healing. You don’t have to tell everyone. But you do need to tell someone.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Ainsworth, Mary D. Salter. Patterns of attachment. Erlbaum, 1978.
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
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LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, Annie guides driven women, including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs, in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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