Episode Introduction

Welcome to a deeply honest and illuminating conversation on 20 Minutes with Bronwyn, where I join host Bronwyn Sullivan-Bennie to explore a paradox that many high-achieving women live daily: their resumes say they’re thriving, but their nervous systems tell a different story. If you’ve ever felt like your accomplishments and hard work mask an inner unrest or exhaustion, this episode is for you.

We dive into the intricacies of nervous system dysregulation, relational trauma, and how early life experiences shape the way ambitious women show up in the world. You’ll hear about the difference between “little t” and “big T” trauma, the invisible cracks trauma can leave in your foundational sense of self, and why burnout often feels inevitable despite outward success.

More importantly, I share practical, science-backed tools — like the “90 Second Wave” and the “Values Anchor Statement” — to help you regulate your nervous system in moments of stress, reclaim your power, and build a life that feels good, not just looks good on paper. This episode is a warm invitation to pause, reflect, and start rewriting the story of your relationship with achievement, identity, and healing.

Key Takeaways

• High-achieving women often carry nervous system dysregulation rooted in relational trauma, which can make success feel hollow or exhausting.
• Relational trauma includes both “big T” traumas (acute, overwhelming events) and “little t” traumas (chronic neglect or emotional unavailability) that shape our nervous system and identity over time.
• Healing trauma is rarely a linear or one-size-fits-all process; therapy, especially trauma-informed approaches like EMDR, combined with body-based practices, can help repair foundational nervous system cracks.
• The “90 Second Wave” technique is a simple, actionable tool to regulate anxiety in high-pressure moments by recognizing that intense feelings pass quickly if not fueled by catastrophic thinking.
• Using a “Values Anchor Statement” helps ground difficult conversations in your core values, empowering you to speak your truth with courage and integrity despite fear or pushback.
• Women are often judged more harshly than men for emotional expression or leadership styles, making nervous system regulation and self-compassion even more vital.
• Understanding the multi-layered influences of family, community, and societal structures (patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism) is essential to contextualizing and healing trauma.

Notable Quotes

“This is a woman who learned very early on that achievement, drive, and accomplishment equaled safety, or it equaled validation, or it equaled love, or it was her form of control in an uncontrollable environment, and she latched onto it.”

“Our body’s stress response is designed to be brief. Harvard researchers found that if you don’t fight it or fuel it with catastrophic thinking, the physical sensation genuinely passes in about 90 seconds or so.”

“Women are graded on a curve. We are judged more harshly when we dysregulate, when we get loud, when we take up space. Women of color are graded on an even worse curve.”

“When we can make choices and say things because we know what’s best and true for us, and tolerate the judgment or social reaction, boy, that’s a powerful place to stand.”

“There may be an epigenetic factor here too — an experience that lives in our bones and our DNA of it being dangerous to take up space as a woman, as a powerful woman throughout millennia.”

Topics Covered

• High-Achieving Women and Nervous System Dysregulation: How success, perfectionism, and overfunctioning are often coping mechanisms rooted in trauma and lead to burnout and anxiety.
• Relational Trauma: Little T vs. Big T: Defining trauma beyond dramatic events to include chronic neglect and emotional invalidation in early relationships and its long-term impact on the nervous system.
• The House of Life Metaphor: Using the metaphor of a house’s foundation to understand how childhood experiences create “cracks” that affect adult functioning and emotional regulation.
• Healing Trauma Through Multiple Pathways: The role of trauma-informed therapy (like EMDR), breathwork, body-based practices, and spiritual tools in stabilizing and repairing trauma’s effects.
• Safety and Stabilization as the First Phase of Healing: The importance of building safety in therapeutic relationships and in daily life before processing painful memories.
• Practical Nervous System Regulation Tools: Introducing the “90 Second Wave” technique and “Values Anchor Statement” for managing anxiety and difficult conversations in real-time.
• Gendered and Structural Dimensions of Trauma: Discussing how patriarchy, colonialism, and societal expectations compound the challenges women face in leadership and emotional expression.
• Upcoming Book – Decade of Decisions: Preview of Annie’s forthcoming book exploring the developmental tasks of adulthood with new metaphors and healing tools.

Full Transcript

Bronwyn Sullivan-Bennie: She has perfectionistic tendencies. She has an inability to slow down vacations and Sundays make her anxious. She can’t stop moving. Her way of being in the world is so deeply embedded in productivity and accomplishments that she has a hard time separating her identity from it. And at a certain point, her life begins to feel pretty poor on the inside, even though her resume glitters. Welcome to 20 Minutes with Bronwyn. I’m Bronwyn Sullivan-Bennie, a communication coach, keynote speaker, and writer. And I help visionary leaders become spellbinding communicators. On this show, I sit down with brilliant humans and creative thinkers to explore how we lead and how we live with more clarity, courage, and heart. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s dive in.

Bronwyn: My people, I have been waiting to have this conversation for, I don’t know, over a year maybe? I don’t know. But today I have the absolute delight and privilege of interviewing Annie Wright. Annie is a licensed psychotherapist, trauma recovery specialist, executive coach, and author. And Annie Wright is a successfully exited CEO of a multi-million dollar and multi-stakes company as well. But she now helps ambitious humans heal relational trauma so they can build lives that feel good on the inside, not just looking good on paper. Annie writes the premium sub-stack, Strong and Stable, with a debut book on the way. And her work has been featured everywhere from Forbes to NBC to NPR. Welcome Annie.

Annie Wright: Oh my goodness, Bronwyn, it is such a delight to be here with you. I’m equally honored and I’m very excited for our conversation. I feel like you and I were meant to be in conversation together because we serve a very, very similar population, specifically of women too. I mean, I have a ton of male clients as well, but where you and I have an overlapping Venn diagram is this very high functioning woman. And you talked to me about if you had to characterize that woman, how would you describe her?

Bronwyn: Oh my goodness. Well, this is a woman who learned very early on that achievement, drive, and accomplishment equaled safety, or it equaled validation, or it equaled love, or it was her form of control in an uncontrollable environment, and she latched onto it. And no matter what sector or space she’s in, she is a person who has big goals, goes after those goals, accomplishes them, but also usually has a dysregulated nervous system. She exists most of the time in the nervous system response. She is maybe the penultimate caregiver of her organization, the one holding everything together without any regard for her own needs. She has perfectionistic tendencies. She has an inability to slow down vacations and Sundays make her anxious. She can’t stop moving. Her way of being in the world is so deeply embedded in productivity and accomplishments that she has a hard time separating her identity from it. And at a certain point, her life begins to feel pretty poor on the inside, even though her resume glitters.

Bronwyn: Okay, that was perfectly stated. And I think what’s so interesting about that profile of woman, I get brought in at a crisis point that I think might look different, or maybe it’s similar to your crisis point. But when I get brought in, it’s because people above her or around her want to elevate her in the org, but they can’t because she seems like she’s about to blow or that she’s about to break. And so the people around her want to push her high, but they can’t because she’s running on fumes because she’s taken the skills that have gotten her so far and they can’t extend any further. And so I get brought in to bring those skills to bear sort of external facing skills, nervous system regulation skills. But I would imagine in your seat as a therapist, the crisis point that brings you in isn’t the boss that’s like, Hey, I want to promote you, but I can’t imagine you taking on more. What are the types of crisis points that have women reach out to you?

Annie: Well, it could look like that. It could absolutely look like that. It could be a desire to take up more space and an inability to get promoted for X, Y, Z reasons, having pretty blunt feedback delivered in the workplace. But very often what brings people in tends to be more in the personal sphere, right? A marriage that feels like it’s about to implode. Children who feel more attached to the nanny than to the mom, right? The other very big signals that bring somebody in are chronic insomnia, depression, relentless anxiety, and a sense of, is this all there is? Is this just it for my life? A sense of emptiness and unhappiness with her life. And usually it’s a combination of all these things when these ambitious women land in my therapy office.

Bronwyn: Yeah. I love that we’re like dancing around the understory, which is basically that we are those women. Oh, I name that every darn day. I feel like the penultimate example of what is a professional as personal or vice versa. This was one of my biggest coping mechanisms coming from an egregious relational trauma, childhood trauma background. I learned early on achievement is the thing that felt safe and it would get me out of the environment I was in. So while I’ve done a lot of work to undo my workaholism and have more choicefulness about how I accomplish things in the world. And I, I don’t do that anymore from a place of fear and anxiety and running away from, I do it from a very different kind of fuel, but still identify as one of these women. One of the things that I notice is that a lot of women say when they have these super dysregulated nervous systems, they’re running on empty. They don’t know why they’re so unhappy. They suspect it has to do with the first 18 years of their lives, but they’re not entirely sure. And they all say the same thing. But nothing really happened to me. Can you talk about the difference between little T and big T trauma and how we talk ourselves out of, I think what is the most important step in this thing, which is not to blame anyone, but to name the things that have contributed to this moment.

Annie: Absolutely. So let me just start off by saying there are a couple of discrete buckets of trauma, and it’s important to kind of understand this and to understand the kind that I specialize in. Trauma can be defined as anything that subjectively overwhelms an individual’s experience, and it can happen in sort of acute moments, like a plane crash, a car crash, a rape or an assault, right? That’s a discrete moment in time. There are also forms of chronic trauma, and this can be environmental. This can be growing up in an unsafe community. Let’s say there can be enduring medical trauma as a child again and again and again. But there is also this very important bucket, which is what I specialize in, which has many different names, childhood trauma, developmental trauma, relational trauma, as I’ve come to define it. And this usually happens over the course of time in a power imbalanced relationship, usually between a child and caregiver, though it can happen between a child and an institution like a church or a boarding school. But somewhere in that relationship, there’s a power imbalance with the person holding power. They were tasked to keep the younger one safe, and yet they don’t. There may be egregious abuse, failures, etc. And when that happens, it leaves the child or the young adult left with a host of biopsychosocial symptoms that resulted from that experience. And again, this takes place over the course of time, and it may look like little T traumas. It may look like big T traumas mixed in with a little. A little T trauma might be a father completely ignoring the child when he comes home from work again and again and again each evening, right? A big T trauma might be that father leaving this child on the side of the road on a highway because he got fed up with her. So big T is something that a little mind and body cannot metabolize. They don’t have the internal or external resources to make sense of and to metabolize this safely. That’s when trauma becomes lodged in our brain and in our body. Little T traumas, I mean, frankly, none of us get out of this human experience without having these. They’re moments of pain, disappointment, sadness, right? I feel really, really darn hard. I don’t necessarily look like the big T ones completely overwhelmed that young body and brain.

Bronwyn: Yeah. It’s so interesting. Just speaking for in my own case, the fuel of fear. And in my case, my overfunctioning was always me trying to pass as a normal person. I just wanted everybody to think it was cool over here. That’s all my goal was, as I didn’t want people to see underneath the surface, which is probably undiagnosed ADHD, many capital T traumas, many little T traumas. And I’m just trying to wrap it up in a box and leave it behind and go build a big, beautiful life and go have some fun. And you have seven over here. I got to this moment where I’m like, none of my fear fuel or trying to pass as a normal person fuel is working anymore. I’m on reserves, I’m on fumes, and I can’t get any further. And that’s what I had to stop and be like, okay, time out. We got to work on this and we got to work through this. And I’m so grateful to be alive during a time where we’re starting to understand trauma so well. But you know, how should, if someone’s listening to this and being like, oh my God, that’s me. Can you talk about, is the really the only lever for healing talk therapy?

Annie: Oh no. But let me step back and describe something that I think your listeners will really resonate with. And this is my sort of signature house of life framework that I’d like to talk about. So when we are young, if you think about your house of life, literally like a house, we’ve got the proverbial foundation, right? And our proverbial foundation is laid early in life. And it is effectively our nervous system, our emotional regulation capabilities, and the beliefs we hold about ourselves, others, and the world. That’s our psychological foundation. That’s the foundation of our house of life. If you grow up in an abusive, neglectful, dysfunctional environment, if one of your parents was personality or mood disordered, if you experienced any of these traumas that I talked about, that proverbial foundation will develop cracks. Sometimes those cracks look hairline. And I think we all have hairline cracks. We were all formed by our early experiences and there’s no such thing as a perfect parent. So let’s imagine we all have hairline cracks, but they’re really maybe negligible in some ways. And then some of us have chasms built into that foundation, right? So just imagine it that way, right? If you learn early on the world is not safe, relationships can’t be trusted, that’s a chasm in there that’s going to impact the building that gets built upon it. So we go through life, we survive childhood and adolescence, and then maybe get to our twenties and we’re building a one story house of life. Well, we still maybe aren’t feeling those chasms underneath very much, right? Maybe it’s a little wobbly, our house of life, but it’s not swaying side to side or feeling like it’s going to collapse. But then you enter your thirties, you enter your forties. And usually that period of time comes with increased relational responsibilities, professional responsibilities, financial responsibilities, promotions, right? Having to manage others, attempting to be in a romantic relationship. Goodness knows if you have children that will test the cracks in the proverbial foundation and that house of life, which may now be two or three stories, that’s when it starts to feel extremely wobbly. So I’m going to connect that back to what I said earlier, which is like, when do women come in to see me? Well, again, like when the marriage feels like it’s in crisis or their child is disconnected from them or they’re worried they’re passing on their wounds to their children, or they really want to progress in their career, but they’re getting feedback around how unkind they are to in delivering feedback, right? To their junior reports. So it’s usually at that time that people come in recognizing there’s work that needs to be done to the proverbial foundation.

Bronwyn: Let me answer the question you asked, which is, is therapy the only path?

Annie: No, it isn’t. Do I think it is an excellent path? Yes. And definitely trauma therapy specifically. I can talk more about what that means, but I always like to say this I’m path agnostic. I think many, many roads lead to Rome. I think that long-term reparative corrective relationship can help heal the foundation. I think that breath work, body work, I think that yoga, spiritual practices, I think all of those can help tend to the cracks in the proverbial foundation. I mean, we know that meditation can increase gray matter in the