Post-Divorce Identity Reconstruction for the Woman Who Was Always “the Successful One”
In my work with driven women over fifteen-plus years, I’ve watched a specific pattern show up after divorce from a narcissistic marriage: the achievements stay fully intact while the self underneath them goes missing. This piece names that pattern, walks through what’s happening in the nervous system, and lays out a real path back to a self that isn’t organized around anyone else’s needs.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
This article is psychoeducational and does not replace individualized clinical care. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. See our Editorial Policy for how we research, write, and review clinical content.
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- What Happens the Morning After You’re Finally Free?
- What Is Identity Reconstruction After Narcissistic Abuse?
- Why Does Identity Feel So Hard to Locate After Narcissistic Abuse?
- How Does Identity Reconstruction Actually Show Up for Driven Women?
- Both/And: Can She Be Accomplished and Still Be Beginning Again?
- The Systemic Lens: Why Was Achievement Never Going to Be Enough?
- How Do You Actually Heal From This?
- Who I Am and Why I Know This
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Happens the Morning After You’re Finally Free?
In my work with driven women over the past fifteen-plus years, specifically those rebuilding after divorce from a narcissistic marriage, I’ve watched the same disorienting moment happen again and again: the marriage ends, the settlement is fair, and she stands in her own kitchen unable to name what she wants for breakfast.
Marissa is standing in her kitchen at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. It’s the first Saturday in four years that she doesn’t have to be anywhere, doesn’t have to manage anyone, doesn’t have to perform anything. The divorce was final eleven days ago. The settlement was fair. Her attorney called it a good outcome. Her friends have been texting to say they’re proud of her, that she’s so strong, that she’s going to be amazing.
She’s standing in her kitchen, and she doesn’t know what she wants for breakfast.
This isn’t a small thing. She’s forty-six. She holds a PhD in molecular biology. She runs a research division with forty-seven people. She’s made decisions that have shaped the trajectory of treatments that will eventually reach patients who will never know her name. She’s, by any external measure, a person who knows what she wants and how to get it.
She doesn’t know what she wants for breakfast.
She opens the refrigerator. She looks at it for a long time. She closes it. She makes coffee, not because she wants coffee, but because making coffee is a thing she knows how to do, a thing that doesn’t require her to know what she wants. She sits at the kitchen table with the coffee she didn’t want, and she looks out the window at the garden she planted three years ago, the one her ex-husband called “your little hobby,” and she thinks: Who am I now?
Not in the dramatic, crisis-of-faith way. In the quiet, specific, genuinely disorienting way of a woman who’s spent twenty years building an identity around achievement and just discovered that the achievement, which she thought was entirely hers, was also partly armor. Armor against a marriage that was slowly, systematically, taking her apart.
What Is Identity Reconstruction After Narcissistic Abuse?
Identity reconstruction after narcissistic abuse isn’t the same as the ordinary process of rebuilding after divorce. Ordinary divorce involves grief, adjustment, and the gradual reorganization of a life that was shared into a life that’s singular. It’s painful, but it has a recognizable shape. A beginning, a middle, and an eventual end.
Identity reconstruction after narcissistic abuse involves something more fundamental: the recovery of a self that was systematically eroded. Not all at once, not dramatically, but through the slow, consistent, deniable process of having your preferences overridden, your perceptions questioned, your values gradually replaced with his, your sense of who you are gradually colonized by who he needed you to be.
I recently went back to reread Jennifer Freyd, PhD, the psychologist and researcher who coined the term betrayal trauma, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how precisely her framework names what I see across hundreds of driven women’s post-divorce sessions. Identity erosion is the gradual loss of a coherent sense of self that occurs in the context of chronic relational trauma. Identity erosion isn’t a single event. Identity erosion is a process, occurring over months and years, in which a woman’s preferences, values, perceptions, and sense of agency are progressively undermined through the mechanisms of narcissistic abuse: gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement, the systematic invalidation of her experience, and the gradual replacement of her authentic self with a self organized around managing the narcissist’s needs.
In plain terms: Identity erosion isn’t a character flaw. Identity erosion is a survival adaptation that can be understood, worked with, and changed over time.
In plain terms: You didn’t lose yourself all at once. You lost yourself slowly, in small increments, in moments so ordinary they didn’t seem significant. The moment you stopped ordering what you actually wanted at restaurants because his reaction to your choices wasn’t worth it. The moment you stopped mentioning your professional accomplishments at home because his response was never what you hoped for. The moment you started organizing your weekends around his preferences without noticing you’d stopped having your own. Identity erosion is the accumulation of those moments over years.
For driven women, identity erosion has a specific texture. The professional identity, the competence, the achievement, the external validation of excellence, often remains fully intact even as the personal identity erodes underneath it. This is part of what makes the erosion so difficult to recognize: she’s still succeeding professionally, still receiving external confirmation of her value, still performing at the level she’s always performed. The erosion is happening in the private spaces. In her preferences, her desires, her sense of what she wants and who she is outside of the professional role.
The false self is a concept developed by D.W. Winnicott, MD, pediatrician and psychoanalyst, and elaborated in the context of narcissistic family systems by Alice Miller, PhD, psychoanalyst and author of The Drama of the Gifted Child. The false self is the identity structure that develops when a child, or an adult in a narcissistic relationship, learns to suppress her authentic self to meet the needs and expectations of the people she depends on. The false self isn’t entirely false. The false self contains real capacities, real achievements, real competencies. But the false self is organized around others’ needs rather than her own authentic experience, and the false self is sustained by the exhausting work of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression.
In plain terms: The false self isn’t a character flaw. The false self is a survival adaptation that can be understood, worked with, and changed over time.
In plain terms: The false self is the version of you that learned to be what he needed you to be. It’s not entirely fake. Your achievements are real, your competence is real. But the self that organized itself around managing his emotional state, around anticipating his reactions, around being the version of you that didn’t threaten him, that self isn’t entirely yours. And the work of identity reconstruction is the work of finding out what’s underneath it.
Why Does Identity Feel So Hard to Locate After Narcissistic Abuse?
Here’s what I keep coming back to when clients ask me why this feels so much harder than it should. Part of the answer is neurobiological. The self, the coherent sense of who we are, what we want, and what we value, isn’t a static entity. It’s a dynamic process, constructed and maintained through the ongoing interaction between the nervous system, the social environment, and the narrative structures of memory and meaning-making.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist, trauma researcher, and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades documenting how chronic relational trauma disrupts the neural systems that support self-awareness and self-regulation (van der Kolk et al., 2024). Specifically, the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for the kind of self-reflective awareness that lets us know what we’re feeling, what we want, and who we are. When the nervous system is chronically activated by threat, that region’s function gets systematically impaired. And with it, the capacity for the self-awareness that identity requires.
Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and developer of the Polyvagal Theory, has demonstrated something I now explain to nearly every client in this population (Porges, 2025): the social engagement system, the neural circuit that allows us to be fully present with ourselves and with others, is available only when the nervous system registers felt safety. In narcissistic relationships, felt safety is systematically undermined. And with it, the neural state that genuine self-knowledge requires. The woman who’s spent years in a narcissistic relationship has been living, neurobiologically, in a state of chronic threat. In that state, the self she knows isn’t the full self. It’s the self that’s been shaped by the threat.
Interoception, as described by A.D. Craig, PhD, neuroscientist and researcher at the Barrow Neurological Institute, is the brain’s process of sensing the internal state of the body: the feelings, sensations, and physiological signals that make up the body’s experience of itself. Interoception is the neurobiological foundation of self-awareness. We know what we want, what we feel, and who we are, in part, through the body’s signals. In the context of narcissistic abuse, interoception is systematically suppressed. A woman learns to override her body’s signals to manage the narcissist’s emotional state, and over time, she loses access to those signals as a source of self-knowledge.
In plain terms: Interoception loss isn’t a character flaw. Interoception loss is a survival adaptation that can be understood, worked with, and changed over time.
In plain terms: Your body knows things your mind doesn’t. It knows what you want, what you feel, what you need. But years of overriding those signals in service of managing his emotional state have made it harder to hear them. The work of identity reconstruction is, in part, the work of learning to listen to your body again. Which means in practice: noticing the small clench in your stomach when a friend suggests a restaurant you don’t actually want to go to, and, for the first time in years, saying so.
How Does Identity Reconstruction Actually Show Up for Driven Women?
Composite vignette. Kelsey:
Kelsey is a biglaw partner. She’s forty-eight, and her divorce was final seven months ago. She’s sitting in her office at 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, the overhead lights humming, a half-empty bottle of sparkling water sweating a ring onto a stack of briefs. Not because she has to be there, but because she doesn’t know what else to do with herself. Her apartment is clean. Her children are at their father’s for the week. She has no obligations tonight. She has, for the first time in years, an entire evening that belongs entirely to her.
She doesn’t know what to do with it.
She’s been here before. Not in this office, but in this particular disorientation. The first time was three months after the divorce, when she realized she didn’t know what music she liked anymore. She’d been listening to his music for so long, the jazz he preferred, the classical he insisted on in the car, the specific playlist he’d curated for dinner parties, that she’d lost track of what she actually liked. She spent an afternoon on Spotify, headphones on, legal pad open beside her out of sheer habit, trying to notice what her body responded to. “I felt ridiculous,” she told me. “I’m a partner at a Vault 10 firm. I’ve argued in front of federal appellate judges. I’ve negotiated deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And I spent an entire Sunday trying to figure out if I actually like jazz.”
She liked it. She just didn’t know if she liked it because she liked it, or because she’d been listening to it for so long that familiar had quietly become preference. She still doesn’t fully know. Sitting with her that Tuesday evening, I felt the particular weight I’ve come to recognize in this population: not pity, and not quite concern. Recognition. Kelsey wasn’t confused about torts or deal structure. She was confused about herself, and the confusion had nowhere professional to hide.
Identity reconstruction for driven women has a specific texture that’s different from the reconstruction work of women who built their identities primarily around the relationship. The driven woman has a professional identity that remains intact, and that professional identity is both a resource and a complication. It’s a resource because it provides a stable platform from which to do the reconstruction work, a place to stand while the personal identity is being rebuilt. It’s a complication because the professional identity has often been functioning as armor, a substitute for the personal identity the relationship was eroding. The reconstruction work requires examining that armor honestly.
The achievement armor
In my clinical work with driven women in the aftermath of narcissistic marriages, I see a consistent pattern, roughly four times out of five in my caseload: the professional achievement has been functioning, at least in part, as a defense against the pain of the relationship. The more the relationship eroded her sense of self, the more she invested in the professional identity. The exception is the smaller group of women whose achievement predates the marriage by decades and was never primarily organized around it; for them the reconstruction work looks different, and I say more about that distinction later in this piece. For most of the women I sit with, though, the more she worked, the more she achieved, the more she sought external validation through professional excellence. The achievement was real. The armor function was also real.
The identity reconstruction work requires examining this honestly. Not to diminish the achievement, but to understand its function. The question isn’t “was my success real?” It was. The question is “what was my success doing for me, beyond the obvious?” And the answer, for many driven women, is that it was doing something the relationship wasn’t: it was telling her she was enough. It was providing the external validation the narcissistic partner was systematically withholding. It was giving her a self when the relationship was taking one away.
Understanding this doesn’t mean the achievement loses its meaning. It means the achievement can be integrated into a more complete identity. An identity that includes the professional self and the personal self, the achiever and the woman who doesn’t know what she wants for breakfast on a Saturday morning, the partner and the person.
Both/And: Can She Be Accomplished and Still Be Beginning Again?
“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” Devotions
This poem is the Both/And in verse. She doesn’t have to be good. Doesn’t have to be the successful one, the strong one, the one who has it together. She only has to let herself love what she loves. The work of identity reconstruction is, at its core, the work of finding out what that is.
This is what I want you to leave this section holding. Your competence was brilliant, and it’s now standing in the doorway of the reconstruction work. Both are true at once. The years you spent becoming excellent at your field kept you safe in a marriage that was slowly narrowing what you were allowed to want. I won’t argue you out of any of that. AND, all of that competence, brought unmodified into this new phase of your life, is the thing that can keep you circling the same achievement-shaped hole instead of finding out what’s underneath it. Reconstruction doesn’t respond to optimization the way a legal brief does. It responds to slow, undramatic noticing, and noticing is a skill your career never asked you to build.
Composite vignette. Marissa, later:
A few months after that first Saturday morning in her kitchen, Marissa signed up for a pottery class on a whim, something she’d never have done during the marriage because her ex-husband thought pottery was “a waste of time for someone with your mind.” She’s sitting at the wheel on a rainy Thursday evening, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, her hands covered in clay, making something that looks nothing like a bowl and everything like a beginning.
She’s not good at pottery. She’s extraordinarily good at most things she does. She has the kind of mind that picks things up quickly, that finds patterns, that learns fast. She isn’t picking up pottery quickly. Her bowl keeps collapsing. Her instructor keeps coming over to help her. She keeps laughing.
She hasn’t laughed like this in years. Not the polished laugh she uses in professional settings, the one that says I’m approachable and confident and in control. This is a different laugh. Surprised. Unguarded. The laugh of someone who’s failing at something and finding it funny rather than threatening. “I don’t think I’ve been bad at anything on purpose since I was nine,” she told me the following week, still finding clay under her fingernails days later. “I didn’t know how much I needed to be bad at something that didn’t matter.”
She’s failing at pottery, and she’s laughing, and she’s covered in clay, and she is, for the first time in a very long time, entirely herself. This is what I’ve come to think of as the both/and of reconstruction: the PhD and the collapsed bowl belong to the same woman, and neither one cancels the other out.
The Systemic Lens: Why Was Achievement Never Going to Be Enough?
The specific vulnerability of driven women to identity erosion in narcissistic relationships isn’t accidental. It’s the product of a specific intersection of forces: the cultural narrative about women and achievement, the family-of-origin dynamics that often drive a woman’s achievement in the first place, and the specific way narcissistic partners exploit the gap between external success and internal security.
We live in a culture that celebrates women’s achievement while simultaneously undermining women’s sense of inherent worth. The message, delivered through media, through institutions, through the specific ways women are evaluated and rewarded, is this: you’re valuable because of what you produce, not because of who you are. The driven woman has often internalized this message deeply, organizing her sense of self around her achievements, her competence, her usefulness. This internalization makes her particularly vulnerable to a partner who exploits the gap between external success and internal security.
Of course you built an identity this way. The terrain you were raised in told you, from childhood on, that competence was the price of belonging. That isn’t a personal failing. It’s what happens when a smart, capable girl grows up on ground that was never level to begin with.
I recently reread James Hollis, PhD, Jungian analyst and author of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, and the phrase that’s stayed with me for weeks is what he calls “the provisional life”: a life organized around external markers of success and social approval rather than the authentic self’s genuine desires and values. The provisional life isn’t a failed life. It contains real achievements, real relationships, real contributions. But it’s organized around the wrong question, “What do I need to do to be enough?” instead of “Who am I, and what does my life want to be?”
Marion Woodman, the Jungian analyst and author of Addiction to Perfection, wrote about the specific way a driven woman’s achievement can become an addiction, a compulsive reaching for external validation that’s never quite enough because the internal wound driving it never gets addressed. What Woodman’s work suggests, and what I’ve watched play out in my own office more times than I can count, is that identity reconstruction isn’t just about recovering from the narcissistic relationship. It’s about addressing the wound that made the relationship possible in the first place.
Bethany Webster, author of Discovering the Inner Mother, has articulated the connection between the mother wound, the specific wound of not having been adequately seen, valued, and nurtured by the mother, and a driven woman’s achievement. Webster’s framework suggests that for many driven women, the achievement is downstream of the wound: a lifelong attempt to earn the love and recognition that wasn’t freely given in childhood. Understanding this connection doesn’t diminish the achievement. It contextualizes it, and it opens the possibility of a different relationship to achievement, one that’s chosen rather than compelled, expressive rather than defensive.
How Do You Actually Heal From This?
Phase 1: Stabilization (months 1 to 3)
The first phase of identity reconstruction isn’t reconstruction. It’s stabilization. The nervous system needs to come out of the chronic activation of the narcissistic relationship before the deeper work of identity reconstruction can begin. Stabilization involves establishing a daily routine that provides predictability and safety, building a support network of people who know you and care about you, beginning individual therapy with a trauma-informed clinician, and addressing the most acute somatic symptoms of chronic stress: the sleep disruption, the hypervigilance, the freeze response.
This phase isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like healing. It feels like survival. That’s because it’s survival, and survival’s the necessary foundation for everything that comes after.
Phase 2: Excavation (months 3 to 12)
The second phase is the excavation of the authentic self, the gradual, often surprising process of discovering what you actually want, value, and feel underneath the layers of the narcissistic relationship’s conditioning. This phase involves specific practices:
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.
Somatic inquiry: Learning to notice and trust the body’s signals as data about your authentic preferences and responses. What does your body do when you’re genuinely interested in something? When you’re genuinely repelled? When you’re genuinely delighted? These signals are there. They’ve just been suppressed. The somatic inquiry work is the work of learning to hear them again.
Values clarification: A structured process of identifying your actual values, not the values you were trained to have, not the values that served the relationship, but the values that feel genuinely yours when you examine them honestly. This process draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy’s values clarification work, adapted for the specific context of post-narcissist recovery.
Preference mapping: A deliberate, systematic process of discovering your preferences across categories: food, music, environment, aesthetics, social interaction, physical activity, creative expression. Not through intellectual analysis, but through direct experience, trying things, noticing your body’s response, and trusting that response as data.
Phase 3: Reconstruction (year 2 and beyond)
The third phase is the actual reconstruction: building a new identity that’s genuinely yours, one that integrates the professional self and the personal self, the achiever and the woman who likes pottery, the partner and the person. This phase involves:
Narrative reconstruction: Developing a coherent narrative of your life that integrates the narcissistic relationship without being defined by it. A narrative that acknowledges what happened, what it cost, and what it revealed, without making the relationship the central organizing event of your identity.
Relationship reconstruction: Building new relationships, romantic and otherwise, organized around genuine reciprocity rather than the dynamics of the narcissistic relationship. This requires the capacity to recognize and tolerate genuine intimacy, which the narcissistic relationship may have made feel threatening.
Achievement integration: Developing a new relationship to your professional achievement, one that’s chosen rather than compelled, expressive rather than defensive, a part of your identity rather than the whole of it.
The woman who comes out the other side of this work isn’t the woman she was before the relationship. She’s someone different. Someone who’s been through something, who’s lost something, who’s found something she didn’t know she was looking for. She’s someone who knows, in a way she didn’t before, what she actually wants, who she actually is, what she actually values. Not because the narcissistic relationship gave her these things. It didn’t. But because the work of recovering from it required her to find them.
Kelsey called me eleven months after that Tuesday evening in her office. She still works the same hours some weeks. The bottle of sparkling water is still usually on her desk. But she’d started taking Thursdays at 4pm off, every week, no exceptions, to sit in on the same beginner jazz piano class at the community center near her apartment. She’s still bad at it. “I’m never going to be good at this,” she said, and I could hear that she was smiling. “I don’t think that’s the point anymore.” The room has a door. She hasn’t decided yet what’s on the other side of it, and for the first time, that not-knowing doesn’t frighten her the way it used to.
That work is hard. It takes longer than you expect. It’s not linear. It doesn’t look like success. But in my experience, it’s some of the most meaningful work a person can do: the work of becoming, finally, genuinely yourself.
Warmly,
Annie.
Who I Am and Why I Know This
I’ve spent more than fifteen years and over 15,000 direct clinical hours sitting across from driven women, including physicians, founders, attorneys, and executives, in the specific aftermath of narcissistic marriages and partnerships. I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, credential #95719, currently licensed across 11 U.S. jurisdictions, and I built and later exited a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy practice before turning my full attention to this work. Identity reconstruction after narcissistic abuse is one of the patterns I’ve tracked most closely across that caseload, because it’s the pattern that keeps otherwise extraordinarily capable women convinced that something is wrong with them rather than with what happened to them. Everything in this piece comes from that clinical vantage point, not from theory alone.
Warmly, Annie
Q: How do I know if post-divorce identity reconstruction for the woman who was always “the successful one” is what I’m dealing with?
A: Look less at one isolated incident and more at the pattern. If you keep feeling smaller, more confused, more responsible for someone else’s reactions, or less able to trust your own perception, your nervous system may be giving you important clinical information.
Q: Why is this so hard to name when I’m competent in every other part of my life?
A: Because professional competence and relational safety use different parts of the nervous system. You can be decisive at work and still feel foggy inside an intimate pattern that uses attachment, fear, shame, or intermittent relief to keep you off balance.
Q: Is it normal to feel grief even when I know the relationship or pattern was harmful?
A: Yes. Grief doesn’t mean the harm was imaginary. It means something mattered: the dream, the role, the community, the future, or the version of yourself you hoped would be safe there.
Q: What kind of support helps most?
A: The most useful support is trauma-informed, relationally sophisticated, and practical. You need someone who can help you understand the pattern, regulate your body, protect your reality, and make choices without rushing you or minimizing the stakes.
Q: What is the first step if this article feels uncomfortably familiar?
A: Start by documenting what you notice and telling one safe, reality-based person. You don’t have to make every decision immediately. You do need to stop carrying the whole pattern alone.
Related Reading
- Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Porges, Stephen W. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
- Mellody, Pia, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller. Facing Codependence: What It Is, Where It Comes from, How It Sabotages Our Lives. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989.
- Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
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.
- Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. Penguin, 1971.
- Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2017.
- Woodman, Marion. Addiction to Perfection. Inner City Books, 1982.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven 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 direct clinical hours. She works with 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.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #95719)
15,000+ direct clinical hours
CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · TX 206391 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096
Creator of House of Life™ and Fixing the Foundations™
The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
Founder & former CEO, Evergreen Counseling
Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
