Annie Wright - Your Guide To Relational Trauma Recovery
I help adult children of mood- and personality-disordered parents overcome the impacts of their past so they can have the best adulthood possible.
Therapy with Annie
Let's work together
For a very small number of clients residing in California or Florida, I offer weekly therapy.
In our sessions together, I work with my clients to overcome the impacts of their adverse early beginnings so that they can have the best adulthood possible.
What does this mean?
Well, when we grow up with a mood- or personality-disordered parent, we inevitably experience “cracks” in our proverbial psychological foundation during our critical formative years. Cracks like an inability to trust others, maintain healthy boundaries, regulate emotions, develop a stable sense of self, navigate intimate relationships, feel secure in our own worth, and effectively cope with stress (among many, many examples).
As we age, we begin to feel these cracks more severely.
For example, we might struggle intensely to form and maintain healthy romantic relationships, finding ourselves repeatedly drawn to toxic partners. In the workplace, we may have difficulty asserting ourselves or dealing with criticism, leading to stalled career progression. Socially, we might feel constantly misunderstood, terrified of conflict, prone to isolating, and unable to build genuine connections with others.
As we get older and take on more responsibilities, the pressure on these “cracks” can intensify. Leading to more mental and emotional pain and strain on us…
So, with me by your side as a relational trauma recovery specialist, in our weekly therapy sessions, you and I will work together to go back to the foundation and fix these cracks by confronting your painful past and grieving and mourning the losses that have impacted your life. We’ll help you rebuild the foundation by supporting you in developing healthier coping mechanisms, building more self-awareness and self-compassion, and foster that oh-so-critical psychological skill: resilience. We’ll work on cultivating trust, setting and maintaining boundaries, enhancing emotional regulation, and strengthening your sense of self so you can feel solid and secure moving through your days. Through our collaborative efforts, all this work will add up and you’ll learn to navigate relationships more effectively and healthily, move through the world with more self-esteem, and manage stress as it comes up, all while having a much more expanded capacity to tolerate stress.
The goal here is to fix the proverbial foundation of your “house of life” so you can build upon it and have the most beautiful adulthood you envision for yourself, no matter where you started out in life.
My work is grounded in four fundamental principles, which, after 13 years of doing this work, I believe are critical to relational trauma recovery. These four principles include:
Research-Backed Psychoeducation
Psychoeducation in the relational trauma recovery sense means helping you understand that you do indeed come from a trauma history, what the multitudinous impacts of this were and are, and what else you can expect instead for yourself, from others, and from life. In seeing ourselves and our realities more clearly, we can better understand the healing work in front of us.
Evidence-Based Skills-Building
When we come from relational trauma histories, we may waste our precious life energy just trying to survive, to cope and get through. Often we miss the opportunity to address the age-appropriate developmental tasks of a child and adolescent and we fail to learn the bedrock psychological skills that can add up to a whole, healthy, rooted-in-reality life. Relational trauma recovery work puts a large emphasis on helping you learn and relearn the skills you may have missed out on. Catching up on being an adult, as it were.
Trauma-Informed Processing
Trauma-informed processing is, at its core, grief work and sense-making. And we do this work progressively so as to not overwhelm you. First, we ensure you are stabilized enough to turn back and recall your memories, then we help you process them both cognitively and somatically, making sense of your personal history, yes, but also helping your brain and body (which are both hardwired for healing) metabolize (aka: grieve and integrate) your experiences fully so the past is no longer ruling you.
Reparative Relational Experiences
I firmly believe that, when our early wounds take place in the context of relationship, it’s through relationship – a certain kind of healthy, attuned, deeply caring relationship – that the biggest healing happens. That’s why I place a large emphasis on building this kind of relationship with my clients, using appropriate self-disclosure, and sharing stories, fables, myths, and anecdotes of others to help you feel less alone. I’m not the “blank screen,” Freudian-era clinician. I’m a therapist in the trenches with you, laughing, crying, being curious, being human with you. And hopefully our relationship will be part of your healing process, too.
So how do you know if you may benefit from weekly therapy with me?
You may already see yourself clearly from what I’ve already shared on this page. Or maybe you saw yourself clearly when you took my signature quiz. Or maybe, still, you can see aspects of your lived experience in the 200+ essays on my blog.
But here are some other signs you may benefit from weekly therapy with me:
You deal with estrangements, disownment, brittle, broken and fractured relationships in your family of origin.
You live with a chronic sense of anxiety and depression that peaks with acute triggers from time to time.
You struggle with finding and keeping good, healthy relationships. With romantic partners, with friends, and more.
You can’t remember large chunks of your childhood, nor do you necessarily want to.
You feel like you “pass” in life – you’ve got a great job, good degrees, and most people would look at you and assume you’re high-functioning. But you feel like a train wreck on the inside, barely holding it all together and thinking it’s all going to fall apart any second.
Your inside experience doesn’t line up with your resume or LinkedIn profile. Things look good on the outside, but inside you feel terrible. You don’t feel up for the level of responsibilities you hold now, and you feel like you’re “faking” being a grownup.
You have a hard time – a really hard time – staying present with your feelings and your life without using food, cannabis, wine, work, serial dating, binging TV, or other escapes. You don’t feel like you have a choice around this.
You struggle with an eating disorder and have since you were young.
“Little things” – like getting an email from your boss or seeing a certain person’s number show up on your phone makes you feel panicky.
You have low self-esteem, relentless inner critics, and would even go so far as to say you hate yourself and your life at times.
You’ve previously been diagnosed with C-PTSD, General Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, or you’ve experienced major depressive episodes in your past.
Or, conversely, your mother or father may have been diagnosed with a mood- or personality-disorder.
You grew up in a home where addictions – to substances or behaviors – were present.
You can clearly remember verbal, emotional or physical abuse from childhood.
You grew up in a fundamentalist church, spiritual community or cult, and felt gaslit, disempowered, and shamed by not only your parents but from the other adults in power around you.
And so much more.
This is the tip of the iceberg. This list is not exhaustive.
There are so many more examples I could list that would indicate that good, regular relational trauma recovery therapy work is what you need.
So, most importantly, if some small part of you, any part of you believes that this – relational trauma recovery therapy – is what you need – trust that part of you. You already know the answer.
So, if you live in California or Florida, please feel free to reach out to my offices to explore what it might be like to work together. A member of my team will get back to you right away.
Don’t live in California or Florida? That’s okay! You can still enroll in my signature online course, designed to offer comprehensive and transformative support on your relational trauma recovery journey no matter where you live in the world.
And no matter what, whether you choose to work with me as your therapist or not, I want to leave you with these words which have guided my work, buoyed my soul, and given me hope for my own relational trauma recovery journey since I first read them:
“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful.”
TERRI ST. CLOUD
Wherever you are in the world as you read these words right now, I wish you well.
Warmly,
