Episode Introduction

Welcome to this heartfelt conversation on She Talks Business with Lisa Larter, where I had the opportunity to explore a topic very close to my heart: the intersection of mental wellness, relational trauma, and entrepreneurship. As a licensed psychotherapist and founder of Evergreen Counseling, I’ve witnessed how deeply our early relational experiences shape not only our personal lives but also how we show up in business. This episode dives into why understanding relational trauma is essential for high-achieving women entrepreneurs and business owners who are navigating the unique stresses of leadership, team management, and growth.

We discuss how unresolved trauma from early relationships can quietly influence your mindset, emotional regulation, and even your communication style in the workplace. I share practical insights on recognizing when mental health challenges may be signaling the need for deeper support, how to build resilience that endures—not just bounces back—and the crucial role that self-care fundamentals like exercise and healthy boundaries play in sustaining your business journey. We also unpack the complicated relationship many of us have with our phones and social media, and how that impacts mental wellness.

If you’re a business owner seeking to cultivate a thriving enterprise without sacrificing your wellbeing, this episode offers a compassionate, clear-eyed perspective on why mental health isn’t a “nice to have” but a foundation for sustainable success. I invite you to listen, reflect, and take away tools that honor your whole self—mind, body, and business.

Key Takeaways

• Relational trauma typically arises from chronic, power-imbalanced relationships, most often in childhood, and profoundly shapes how we function personally and professionally.
• Business ownership uniquely reveals unresolved personal material because it challenges our beliefs about worthiness, visibility, and control.
• Emotional dysregulation happens when we move outside our “window of tolerance,” leading to impulsive or shut-down responses that can impact leadership and team dynamics.
• Recognizing signs such as persistent anxiety, sleep disruption, or disproportionate emotional reactions can indicate when professional mental health support is needed.
• Resilience is not about instantly bouncing back but about cultivating endurance, adaptive coping tools, and a mindset that embraces growth through hardship.
• Daily practices like regular exercise, adequate sleep, and nurturing meaningful connections form the foundation of mental wellness and enhance resilience.
• Our relationship with mobile devices and social media is complex and can contribute to anxiety and distraction; mindful boundaries around technology are crucial for mental health.

Notable Quotes

“If you want to know what all of your material is, either be in a long-term romantic relationship or start your own business, because it will show up all the time the areas that you need to work on.”

“Emotional regulation is our ability to keep ourselves in what Dan Siegel calls the window of tolerance—the optimal emotional arousal zone where we can feel our feelings but still make rational, sound choices.”

“Resilience is about having adequate and appropriate mindset and adequate and appropriate tools to flex throughout the hard time—and then reflecting on what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown.”

“The more healthy and well you are from a mental health perspective, the better equipped you are to serve your customers, support your team, and take care of yourself.”

“Our phones, like a brick, are relatively neutral—it’s how we use them that can either build us up or break us down.”

Topics Covered

• Relational Trauma Defined: Understanding chronic trauma within power-imbalanced relationships, primarily in childhood, and how it impacts adult functioning.
• Business Ownership & Personal Growth: How entrepreneurship surfaces unresolved trauma and maladaptive patterns, particularly in leadership and team management.
• Emotional Regulation & Dysregulation: The importance of staying within the “window of tolerance” for optimal decision-making and interpersonal effectiveness.
• Recognizing When Therapy Is Needed: Flags such as anxiety, sleep issues, and disproportionate emotional responses that signal the need for professional support.
• Resilience as Endurance: Building mindset and coping skills that allow you to withstand and grow through life’s inevitable hardships.
• Foundations of Mental Wellness: The role of sleep, exercise, nutrition, and social connection in maintaining emotional health for entrepreneurs.
• Technology & Mental Health: Exploring the impact of mobile devices and social media on anxiety, distraction, and emotional wellbeing, with strategies for healthier use.
• Workplace Mental Health Culture: Creating emotionally safe environments that support staff mental health and the complex challenges small business owners face managing this.

Full Transcript

Lisa Larter: Welcome to She Talks Business. If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or aspiring mogul, chances are you want to learn more about marketing and mastering and monetizing your business. She Talks Business is where you’ll learn all of that and more. My name is Lisa Larter and I’m an entrepreneur, high school dropout, wiener dog enthusiast, and your host. Let’s get started.

Lisa Larter: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of She Talks Business. Today we are speaking to Annie Wright, LMFT, who is a licensed psychotherapist and a relational trauma recovery specialist. She’s deeply committed to supporting ambitious, upwardly mobile women who come from backgrounds of relational trauma. She founded and runs Evergreen Counseling, a boutique trauma-informed therapy center in Berkeley, California, where she practices therapy and also oversees her staff of 20 trauma therapists who collectively see and serve about 450 clients a week. In addition to her direct clinical work, she runs an online course called Hard Families, Good Boundaries, a transformative video-based program that helps folks deal more effectively with the difficult family members who may be in their lives. I’m sure we all have some of those. Finally, she is a published mental health author with her opinions appearing in Business Insider, Forbes, NBC, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and more. Every bit of Annie’s work in the world—her clinical work, the center she founded, the courses she runs, and every article she writes—is designed to support ambitious, upwardly mobile women who come from relational trauma backgrounds. It’s her own story, and now it is her life’s work.

Lisa Larter: So during this conversation, we talk a lot about mental health and the importance of it in the workplace. We talk about mental health and the importance of business owners having a healthy mental perspective and being able to recognize when you might actually need a little bit of additional support. She also does a great job of explaining what is relational trauma and how does relational trauma affect people. We have a great conversation about how relational trauma—two people can experience the same relational trauma and have two very different experiences and outcomes. We have a good conversation about resilience and what you can do to create more resilience in your life and what that looks like from her perspective. And we finally wrap up a little bit talking about the impact of mobile devices on your mental health. And we both talked about how we have this love-hate relationship with our phones right now and how anxiety often drives, not necessarily anxiety, maybe anxiety, maybe boredom, discomfort, avoidance is often what drives our habitual connection to social media.

Lisa Larter: So I think this is a great conversation for a couple of reasons. One, Annie does a really thoughtful job of explaining what things mean. And she also does a really great job of talking about the ways that we can recognize when we need help and some of the things that we can do to help ourselves. So I hope you enjoy this episode. I think it’s really important. And I think it’s really important because I think one of the best things that you can do for yourself as a business owner is really understand your own mental health and do things so that you are healthy and well, because the more healthy and well you are from a mental health perspective, the better equipped you are to serve your customers and support your team and take care of yourself. So enjoy this episode with Annie. Let’s get to the show.

Lisa Larter: All right. So I’m here with like one of my favorite psychotherapists. How fun is that? Annie, welcome to the show.

Annie Wright: Thank you, Lisa. I’m thrilled to know that you do have a favorite psychotherapist. So I’m happy to be one of them.

Lisa Larter: I’ve never had psychotherapy, but maybe I need some, who knows? And I don’t know how to turn that zoom thing off. Every time I move my hands, I get the thumbs up on zoom, which is kind of funny.

Annie Wright: It’s kind of funny. It’s very encouraging for me. So thank you.

Lisa Larter: There you go. All the way. Thumbs up.

Annie Wright: Well, thank you for saying yes to having a conversation with me today. I think that in today’s day and age, mental health is such an important conversation. And I think that especially for business owners, there’s often not a lot, there’s not a lot of people talking about business owners and their mental health. And so, you know, I’d really love to just kind of dive into a few things with you and maybe my starting question for you is really when, because you’re a business owner, you know, you are a psychotherapist and you have all kinds of expertise in different areas of mental health practice and you own a practice with other clinicians, but you’re a business owner as well. And so when you think about owning a business, what are some of the things that you think business owners should really be mindful of when it comes to, I don’t want to use the word managing. I think when I want to use the word, I want to use like understanding when maybe there’s a little something, something going on that they don’t recognize as potentially being a mental health challenge. So what are some of the flags that business owners should be looking for that might indicate that maybe they need some extra support?

Annie Wright: Oh, sure. Gosh, I mean, I could talk about this all day long. So just to set the sort of stage for what I’m going to share, yes, in addition to being a licensed psychotherapist and a trauma clinician, very specifically, I am also the founder and owner of a fairly large small business, Evergreen Counseling, which is a therapy center located in Berkeley, California, but serving clients all over California and Florida actually. And I have 24 W-2 employees. We have corporate compliance laws. We have to be compliant with financial compliance, economic nexus, licensing laws. So it is a complex, small, big business. And so what I’m going to say stems from both my content expertise as a mental health clinician, as well as somebody who has grown this business in the last five years. I think that there is nothing on the planet apart from trying to run your own business or being in a long-term romantic relationship that will reflect your personal growth material to you so vividly. If you want to know what all of your material is, either be in a long-term romantic relationship or start your own business, because it will show up all the time the areas that you need to work on. And so to answer your question, well, okay, how do people know what is the material coming up that they need to work on? My goodness, where do we even begin? I think it starts from the fact that when we grow businesses, we start to take up space. We either raise our fees or we get out there in the market and stories start to come up for us. Like, I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve to earn this much. Is there some sort of danger I might feel if I get a little bit more visible, if I start getting more press? And then goodness knows a lot of your material can show up too when you start to hire people for the first time. Oh goodness, I can’t press back on her because I’m afraid she’ll leave. Maybe you have a childhood history of, if you show your anger or your displeasure, the relationship was cut off. This material is gonna be reflected back as you start to hire and manage your staff. As you start to build a bigger business and you have to juggle compliance and financial issues, you may get a sense of what your own stories are about financial scarcity or danger in general. So there’s endless grist for the mill, I think, when it comes to business ownership in terms of getting to know what our maladaptive stories are, our maladaptive patterns and behaviors are. I mean, I could go on and on about this, but does this make sense? Does this kind of answer your question?

Lisa Larter: Yeah, I mean, when I hear you say those things, I think of that as more maybe leadership and communication skills opportunities. I think what I really am wondering is how do business owners know if they need therapy? What are some of the flags that, because you can have a bad day. You and I, we were actually talking about our businesses before we started to record. And you can have a bad day, a bad month, a bad week, a bad year. And there are times when it can weigh on you a lot more heavily than other times. So the more resilient you are, obviously the more you can cope with the peaks and valleys in your business. But what are some signs that an actual individual who owns a business might need some help?

Annie Wright: So back to all of what I just mentioned and how you said, well, that sounds kind of like leadership or mindset work. Yeah, it could be. And we have to look at this as existing on a spectrum. If for whatever reason, your emotional response to taking up space is maybe more at the mild end of the spectrum, perhaps that is mindset work. And maybe that’s work that you work on with a business coach or in a peer group of other business owners. But when the spectrum of severity leans more towards, again, the more severe side of the spectrum, if you are starting to lose sleep, if you are starting to have ruminating thoughts, if you’re starting to feel high degrees of anxiety, depression. Or a reaction to the content that is disproportionate to what the content is. It’s a signal that the past might be present. And this isn’t just a normative, typical, uh, you know, upper limit issue that can be worked on with mindset work and, and, um, a few more business skills or mentoring, et cetera, this may signal. There is something developmentally in your past that needs to be addressed and worked through in order to help you have a more appropriate response in the present. So to summarize what I’m saying, the severity of the response is usually a signal of whether or not it’s historical material, or if it’s normative, appropriate discomfort to growing a business.

Listen to the full episode here: Wellness for Mind, Body, and Business — She Talks Business with Lisa Larter