Annie Wright, LMFT
Relational Trauma Specialist & Executive Coach
You caught yourself sounding exactly like your mother. And it scared you more than anything else that week.
You're not repeating the pattern because you're broken. You're repairing it, and this course is where that work becomes concrete.
What's happening inside you at 6 PM has a clinical name. And your recovery deserves a map that matches that specific terrain.
In my work with driven, ambitious parents doing serious inner work, I've watched something painful and particular happen: the moment the old patterns return, not in memory, but in their own mouth, their own hands, their own voice, and the terror that follows.
You didn't come this far in your healing to become them. But intergenerational trauma doesn't care about your intentions. It lives in your nervous system, your attachment patterns, the way your body floods with adrenaline when your child cries too long. The research is clear: without a clinical map, the patterns pass. With one, they don't have to.
This course exists because the distinction between repeating a pattern and repairing one is specific, learnable, and available to you, without needing to be finished healing first.
Does any of this sound like you?
These aren't failures. They're the evidence that you already know what's at stake.
The parents who damage their children don't take courses about it. You do.
- Catching yourself and feeling shame without a framework for what just happened
- Parenting from a nervous system still wired for the household you grew up in
- Loving your children and losing it in ways that frighten you
- Replaying ruptures at 3 AM with no repair script to reach for
- Wondering if you're already too late to change the legacy
- Understanding why your body reacts before your values can
- Using age-adapted repair scripts in real parenting moments
- Parenting from reflection instead of inherited reaction
- Building narrative coherence around your own childhood
- Changing the legacy without needing to be perfectly healed first
Not another gentle parenting guide. This is the clinical map.
Built on the actual research of how trauma transmits
Most parenting content focuses on strategies. This course focuses on the mechanism, the four pathways through which relational trauma moves from one generation to the next, documented by Dan Siegel, MD, neuroscientist and author of Parenting from the Inside Out, and Mary Main, PhD, attachment researcher at UC Berkeley and creator of the Adult Attachment Interview. Understanding the pathway is what makes the interruption possible.
Repair is the point, not perfection
Ed Tronick, PhD, developmental psychologist at UMass Boston, demonstrated in the landmark Still Face Experiment that the thing that actually builds secure attachment isn't the absence of misattunement, it's the repair. You're going to get it wrong sometimes. The course gives you what your parents couldn't: a framework for what to do next. Rupture-and-repair is the clinical engine of healthy attachment.
You work through it privately, at your own pace
There's no cohort, no group call where you have to narrate your worst parenting moments to strangers. You move through 10 lessons and a 78-page companion workbook on exactly the schedule your life allows. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, established that trauma recovery requires safety, and that includes the safety to go at your own pace. Lifetime access means you can return as many times as you need.
A smaller sibling to Fixing the Foundations: fewer phases, still a complete arc.
4 modules · 10 lessons · 78-page companion workbook
The 3 AM guilt, the four pathways of intergenerational trauma transmission, narrative coherence, and the childhood role still casting a shadow across your parenting. Drawing on the research of Dan Siegel, MD, co-author of Parenting from the Inside Out, and Mary Main, PhD, UC Berkeley attachment researcher whose Adult Attachment Interview demonstrated that a parent's coherent story of their own childhood is the strongest predictor of their child's secure attachment.
Polyvagal theory and the parenting body, evening danger zones, the Parent Pause practice, and dual awareness, the capacity to feel the old activation while staying in the room with your child. Grounded in the somatic trauma work of Bessel van der Kolk, MD, and the nervous system frameworks developed by Stephen Porges, PhD, originator of Polyvagal Theory.
Good-enough parenting, rupture-and-repair as the engine of secure attachment, age-adapted repair scripts for toddlers through teenagers, and Siegel's Four S's, seen, soothed, safe, and secure, in concrete daily parenting moments. Drawing extensively on Ed Tronick, PhD's Still Face research and Donald Winnicott's good-enough mother framework.
Parenting while healing, the epigenetic research on how trauma transmits and how it stops, post-traumatic growth in the parent-child relationship, and what comes next. This module integrates the clinical and the personal, holding your childhood with compassion while choosing something different for your children, not because you're finished healing but because you're willing to try.
Imagine this.
Three months from now, your child melts down before dinner. The old activation starts, that tightening you recognize from childhood, the one that arrived before your values could. And then something different happens. You feel it coming. You name it. You pause long enough for your prefrontal cortex to come back online. Not because you're perfect. Because you've practiced.
Later that night, after things have settled, you sit with your child and you say the thing your parents never said to you. Not because you found the perfect script on Instagram. Because you spent time learning what repair actually does in a child's nervous system, and you chose it deliberately, from knowledge, not from instinct.
You don't need to be finished healing to parent differently. You need a map. And you're building one.
This is what it looks like from the inside.
All vignettes are composite characters. No real client is identified.
The moment she heard her mother's voice come out of her mouth.
Maya is thirty-four. She's been in therapy for three years. She knows the language, nervous system, attachment patterns, intergenerational transmission. She can explain all of it at a dinner party. And then her five-year-old won't put on his shoes, and the clock is running, and something shifts in her chest. The voice that comes out is her mother's. Tight. Impatient. With an edge in it she swore she'd never use.
She doesn't need more information about why this happens. She has the information. She needs the pause, the practiced, embodied pause that comes between the activation and the action. That's the thing she's been missing. That's what Module Two builds.
The 3 AM loop after he yelled.
David is forty-one. He grew up in a household where anger was the primary language of distress. He vowed he wouldn't do the same. Last Tuesday, he lost it, not violently, but loudly, in a way that made his eight-year-old go very still. His daughter's stillness is what woke him up at 3 AM. He knows what that stillness means. He learned it as a child himself.
What David needs isn't self-flagellation. He needs a repair script, the specific, age-adapted language that tells a child the rupture was not her fault, that the parent is the adult, that the relationship is intact. That's what Module Three gives him. Rupture-and-repair, practiced before the next time it happens.
You can love your parents and still name what they did. You can be healing and still be repairing. Both are true.
You didn't choose the pattern. You did inherit it.
Intergenerational trauma transmission is not a moral failure, it's a neurobiological reality. The patterns of your childhood are encoded in your implicit memory, your attachment system, your nervous system's calibration. This doesn't make you helpless. It makes the work specific. And specific is workable.
Your parents likely did the best they could. And it wasn't enough.
Both can be true simultaneously. Holding compassion for the generation before you does not require minimizing the impact on you, or on your children. The Both/And framework isn't about forgiveness or fairness, it's about freeing you from a binary that keeps you stuck, so you can focus on what's actually changeable: your children's experience, starting now.
You can be triggered and you can repair. One doesn't cancel the other.
The research is unambiguous: secure attachment is not built by perfect attunement. It's built by repair. Ed Tronick's Still Face Experiment established that misattunement followed by reconnection is not a developmental injury, it's a developmental opportunity. The trigger doesn't define the relationship. What you do after does.
This isn't just your story. It's a story that's been traveling for generations.
Intergenerational trauma doesn't begin with you. It begins upstream, with the specific circumstances, losses, and relational injuries of the generations before you: the grandmother who survived scarcity and never recovered her capacity for safety, the grandfather whose emotional life was shaped by a culture that punished vulnerability, the parent who was parented without warmth and didn't know what they were missing.
Epigenetic research, including work from the labs of Rachel Yehuda, PhD, at Mount Sinai, has begun to document what clinicians have long observed: the physiological signatures of trauma are transmitted across generations, not just the behavioral ones. You are working with inherited material. That's not your fault. It's also not your destiny.
What the systemic lens offers is this: the cycle-breaker isn't a hero who arrived from nowhere. They're a person who happened to get access to a map, at exactly the right moment, and decided to use it. This course exists to give you that map. What you do with it is yours.
The work you're doing here doesn't just change your children's experience. It changes what your children carry into their own parenting, and theirs into theirs. That reach is longer than you can see from here. But it starts with the pause, the repair script, the moment you choose reflection over reaction. It starts now.
What $197 actually gets you.
78-page clinical companion workbook, repair scripts, nervous system tools, and integration practices
One way to get started.
Parenting Past the Pattern
- 10 clinically grounded lessons
- 78-page companion workbook
- 4-module clinical arc: Pattern → Nervous System → Repair → Legacy
- Age-adapted repair scripts for toddlers through teenagers
- Parent Pause nervous system practice
- Siegel's Four S's in daily parenting moments
- Lifetime access, all future updates included
- Self-paced, no cohort required
The work speaks for itself.
"My daughter is 6 weeks old. We all admit we were raised by very screwed up parents. I FINALLY understand my truth. And I can do the work WAY better because of that. There are two beautiful soul-filled miracle children who will not be subjected to generational patterns. It's a trickle-down effect."
"It's now the goal of my life to help others break cycles as I'm learning to do. I'm still unpacking what it was like to be raised by him. I love your work."
"The reflection questions are particularly powerful, especially the ones about compassion for past generations and breaking cycles for future ones. It's incredible how work like this can reveal both painful realities and hopeful possibilities."
"Thank you for illustrating this corner of mental health that is so undercovered. The inter-generational and societal dimension of this work is profound, and finally someone is naming it with precision."
"This work doesn't just reach the people who take it. It reaches the clinicians who refer it."
"Annie is an EMDR genius. She is caring and kind and brilliant. Exceptional clinician."
"I've been working on my relational trauma for a decade and recently became a therapist myself, I regularly send clients to Annie's work. The clinical framework is exactly right."
Annie Wright, LMFT
In my 15,000+ clinical hours working with driven, ambitious adults, including founders, physicians, and executives, I've worked closely with parents who are doing everything "right" and still catching themselves in patterns they swore they'd never repeat. What I see consistently is this: intention alone doesn't interrupt transmission. A clinical map does.
I'm a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach. I'm the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center I built, scaled, and successfully exited. I'm a regular contributor to Psychology Today, and my expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. I'm currently writing my first book with W.W. Norton.
The honest answers.
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You're already the cycle-breaker. This is the structured path to make that real.
The pattern didn't start with you. But it can stop with you, not through willpower, but through a clinical framework that matches the actual terrain. The waitlist is open now.
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