How to Spot an Emotional Vampire: A Therapist’s Complete Guide
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
You leave every interaction with certain people feeling hollowed out, confused, and vaguely guilty. You offered advice they dismissed. You listened to a crisis that turned out to be a Tuesday. You canceled something that mattered to you so you could be available to someone whose availability to you is, somehow, never quite there. Psychiatrist Judith Orloff, MD, coined the term “emotional vampire” for exactly this dynamic: a relational pattern in which one person consistently drains another’s emotional resources, attention, and psychological capacity without reciprocity. This guide names what is happening clinically, explains why certain women are disproportionately targeted, and maps a clear path toward protecting yourself without abandoning everyone you love.
- The call you’re dreading before it happens
- What is an emotional vampire? Clinical definition
- The neuroscience: emotional contagion, compassion fatigue, and narcissistic supply
- Eight clinical signs you’re in a draining relationship
- Vignette: Priya and the colleague who made her his anchor
- Personality structures associated with emotional vampirism
- Both/And: this relationship has real value AND it may be costing you too much
- The systemic lens: why women are disproportionately targeted
- Vignette: Camille and her mother’s perpetual emergency
- The path forward: naming the pattern, setting limits, deciding what you can sustain
- Frequently asked questions
Psychoeducational note: This post is educational and clinical in nature. It is not a substitute for therapy or a formal diagnostic assessment. If what you read here brings up significant distress, please consider reaching out to a licensed mental health professional. If you are in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
If you've been managing a narcissistic parent's reality your whole life, my self-paced course Normalcy After the Narcissist is where yours begins.
The call you’re dreading before it happens
In fifteen years of clinical work with driven women, I’ve seen one relational pattern come up with a consistency that stopped surprising me long ago. The container changes every time. Sometimes it’s a friend. Sometimes a family member, a sibling, a parent who never quite finished needing to be parented themselves. Sometimes it’s a colleague. But the structure is always the same: the woman sitting across from me has been someone else’s emotional infrastructure for so long that she can no longer tell where the obligation ends and her own life begins.
She describes bracing herself before a call she hasn’t even placed yet. The slight tightening in her shoulders when a particular name appears on her phone. The forty-five-minute conversations she survives rather than has. The careful pre-editing she does on anything real in her own life before she shares it with this person, because sharing good news in this relationship has a way of going wrong. She’s been doing this for years, sometimes decades, and she’s only now beginning to wonder whether it counts as a problem.
It counts. What she’s describing has a clinical name, and understanding that name clearly is the first step toward doing something about it.
What is an emotional vampire? Clinical definition
The term “emotional vampire” was popularized in clinical circles through two distinct frameworks that are worth knowing separately. Albert J. Bernstein, PhD, psychologist and author of Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry (McGraw-Hill, 2001), used the phrase to describe people who lack sufficient internal emotional resources and consequently use other people to fill that gap. In Bernstein’s framework, the draining is rarely conscious and rarely malicious. It is structural: the person has not developed the internal capacity to regulate their own emotional needs, so they outsource that regulation to the people around them.
Judith Orloff, MD, psychiatrist and author of Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life (Harmony Books, 2009), approached the phenomenon through the lens of empathy and energy exchange. Dr. Orloff identified that highly empathic people are disproportionately affected by emotionally dysregulated others. In her clinical framing, without awareness and deliberate self-protective skills, empathic people become the unwitting emotional support systems for people who never develop their own. Dr. Orloff’s work was significant in establishing that this pattern is not simply about one person’s deficits but about the particular vulnerability of certain relational types to being pulled into a caretaking role they did not consciously choose.
Emotional vampirism, a term established in clinical psychology literature by Albert J. Bernstein, PhD, and extended by Judith Orloff, MD, describes a relational dynamic in which one person consistently depletes the emotional energy, attention, and psychological resources of another without adequate reciprocity. Emotional vampirism is not a DSM-5 diagnosis. It is a descriptive pattern observed across several personality structures and attachment styles, including narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline traits, as well as significant emotional immaturity and insecure attachment.
In plain terms: The term names a dynamic, not a diagnosis. It describes what happens to the person on the receiving end: a consistent, pattern-level depletion that can’t be explained by any single difficult conversation, but only by the accumulated weight of many of them.
From a clinical standpoint, the distinction between a difficult period in a relationship and a genuinely vampiric dynamic is one of pattern versus episode. Every person in a relationship becomes temporarily needy, dysregulated, or demanding under sufficient stress. A person who leans heavily on you during a divorce and then, six months later, asks about your life and brings a bottle of wine to dinner is going through something hard. That is not emotional vampirism. The pattern that warrants clinical attention is the one where the crisis never resolves, it only changes costumes. Where reciprocity is structurally absent rather than temporarily suspended. Where your role as the emotional container is so stable and so expected that attempting to step out of it is experienced by the other person as a betrayal.
If you’re working through the relational patterns that make you especially vulnerable to this dynamic, Fixing the Foundations™ is Annie’s signature course for understanding and repairing those early relational blueprints.
The neuroscience: emotional contagion, compassion fatigue, and narcissistic supply
The exhaustion you feel after spending time with certain people is not “in your head.” There’s a documented neurobiological mechanism underneath it, and understanding that mechanism can help you trust the evidence your own nervous system has been trying to offer you.
Emotional contagion is the well-documented phenomenon by which one person’s emotional state is transmitted to and registered by another. Research by social psychologist Elaine Hatfield, PhD, professor emerita at the University of Hawaii and co-author of Emotional Contagion (Cambridge University Press, 1994), demonstrated that emotional transmission is automatic and largely unconscious: people mimic the facial expressions, body postures, and vocal tones of those around them, and in doing so, they come to feel what those people feel. This is a feature of human social bonding, not a flaw. In close proximity to someone in chronic distress or emotional dysregulation, emotional contagion means you are absorbing that person’s emotional state repeatedly, often without awareness.
Compassion fatigue is the cumulative emotional depletion that results from sustained empathic engagement with the suffering of others without adequate reciprocity or replenishment. Charles Figley, PhD, psychologist, trauma scholar, and founding editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, first identified this phenomenon in caregiving professionals, but subsequent research confirms that the same neurobiological depletion mechanism operates in any relationship characterized by chronic emotional asymmetry. Compassion fatigue is not weakness. It is the predictable physiological result of empathy running on an empty tank.
In plain terms: There is a reason you feel hollowed out after spending time with certain people. Your empathy system has been running at full output with no return flow. When you were raised to prioritize others’ emotional states over your own, you may not register how depleted you are until you hit a wall.
Narcissistic supply is the clinical term for the attention, validation, admiration, and emotional responsiveness that individuals with narcissistic personality traits require from others to maintain psychological equilibrium. Otto Kernberg, MD, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine and one of the foremost theorists on narcissistic personality structure, described how individuals with narcissistic organization rely on external sources of validation to regulate self-esteem that cannot be maintained from within. When you are in a relationship with someone operating from this kind of internal deficit, every interaction asks something from you at the level of the nervous system, regardless of whether either of you consciously recognizes what is happening.
Sustained exposure to emotionally dysregulated people produces measurable physiological effects. Research on sensory processing sensitivity has established that roughly 15 to 20 percent of humans have nervous systems that process sensory and emotional input with significantly greater depth and intensity than average (PMID: 25161824). If you are in this group, close contact with chronically dysregulated people is not simply emotionally tiring. It is physiologically costly in ways that non-sensitive people may not experience with the same intensity.
Eight clinical signs you’re in a draining relationship
No two draining relationships look identical, but across fifteen years of clinical work with women navigating these dynamics, I’ve observed a cluster of signs that appear with striking consistency. The intensity of each sign matters more than the count. If four or five of these are stable, structural features of a relationship rather than occasional events, that’s information worth taking seriously.
1. You brace yourself before contact. Before placing the call, before walking into the room, before opening the text thread, there is a moment of internal steeling. Your nervous system has learned something about this relationship through repetition, and it is telling you what it knows before your conscious mind has caught up.
2. Conversations consistently orbit their experience. Reciprocity is a reliable marker of relational health. Each person’s inner world has weight. With emotionally draining people, your attempts to share something from your own life are deflected, minimized, or acknowledged briefly before the conversation re-centers on them. Over time, you may stop trying to share at all, which becomes its own quiet loss.
3. Your good news lands badly. Genuine celebration of another person’s success requires a degree of internal security. People engaged in chronic attention-seeking patterns often lack that security, so they respond to your wins with subtle deflation: a pivot to their own struggles, an unsolicited warning about what could go wrong, or a silence that carries the weight of disapproval. You learn to celebrate your victories elsewhere, or not at all.
4. You feel responsible for their emotional state. When they are upset, it becomes your job to fix it regardless of whether you caused it. When they are in a good mood, you find yourself working to maintain it. The emotional temperature of every interaction is calibrated to them, and you have become the regulator. This kind of emotional labor is exhausting precisely because it is invisible, and it surfaces most clearly in people with anxious attachment patterns.
5. They resist your solutions. Emotionally draining people often present as needing help. But when help is offered, it is never quite adequate. The problem is always more complicated than your solution accounts for. This isn’t the productive complexity of a genuinely difficult situation. It is resistance to resolution that keeps you permanently in the role of concerned helper.
6. Setting limits triggers backlash. In healthy relationships, reasonable limits are accepted, even if they’re occasionally disappointing. In draining relationships, any attempt to reduce availability, redirect a conversation, or assert your own needs is met with hurt, anger, guilt induction, or dramatic escalation. The implicit message is: your needs are acceptable only when they don’t inconvenience mine.
7. You edit yourself constantly. With emotionally draining people, you perform a smaller, more accommodating version of yourself. You soften your opinions to avoid triggering defensiveness. You conceal your own difficult days to avoid becoming responsible for managing their distress about your distress. This self-editing is its own form of depletion, and it often intersects with relational trauma patterns first established in childhood.
8. The relationship feels like obligation rather than choice. Ask yourself, honestly: if guilt and social obligation were removed from the equation, would you choose to spend time with this person? If the answer is an immediate and unambiguous no, that is your answer. You’re continuing because leaving feels impossible, and staying feels like duty. That distinction matters.
Clinical Vignette. Composite, details changed.
Priya
It’s 8:47 on a Monday morning and Priya is standing at her kitchen counter, half-dressed for work, reading the third message that has arrived since she woke up. All three are from the same colleague. The first one is a question about the quarterly report. The second one is a worry about how their manager received the quarterly report. The third one is a longer message, and Priya can tell before she opens it that it is not actually about the quarterly report at all.
Priya is 38, a director of operations at a mid-sized company. She describes herself to me as someone who has always been “good at people.” She means this as a strength, and it is one. She is also beginning to suspect it has made her a target. She can name the exact week, eight months ago, when she first noticed that a particular colleague had moved from “occasionally needs support” to “requires daily maintenance.” She couldn’t name the moment she consented to becoming his primary emotional infrastructure. She suspects there wasn’t a moment. It happened in accumulation.
She tried, once, to suggest that he speak with their company’s employee assistance program. He responded with something that looked like hurt and functioned like a guilt trip. She found herself apologizing for suggesting he develop a support system that wasn’t her. “That’s when I knew,” she tells me, fingers wrapped around a coffee mug she hasn’t yet had the chance to drink from. “I had somehow agreed to something I never agreed to.”
She leaves for the office that morning without responding to the third message. She spends forty minutes in her first meeting thinking about whether not responding makes her a bad person. The quarterly report goes fine.
Personality structures associated with emotional vampirism
Understanding the clinical landscape of who tends to engage in these patterns can help you see what you’re working with more clearly. This is not a diagnostic exercise. It is a map.
Emotional vampirism is most commonly observed in individuals with significant traits in four personality structures. Narcissistic personality traits are perhaps the most clinically central: the need for narcissistic supply, described by Kernberg and later operationalized by Craig Malkin, PhD, clinical psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, creates a structural orientation toward others as sources of validation rather than separate people with their own inner lives. Conversations with these individuals reliably orbit their concerns, and genuine interest in your experience is conspicuously absent.
Narcissistic supply is a clinical term describing the attention, admiration, validation, or emotional responsiveness that individuals with narcissistic personality traits require from others to maintain a stable sense of self-worth. First theorized by psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel and later developed by Kernberg and others, the concept explains why individuals with narcissistic organization consistently seek out and monopolize interactions with highly responsive, empathic people: those people reliably provide what internal self-regulation cannot. When the supply is interrupted, such as when the empathic person begins to set limits, the response is often disproportionate distress, anger, or guilt induction.
In plain terms: You feel like a gas station to certain people. They pull in, fill up, and drive away. When you close the pump, they don’t understand why you’d deny them something they need so badly. They don’t see you as a person with finite resources. They see you as a resource.
Histrionic personality traits involve a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention-seeking behavior. Individuals with these traits often create relational dynamics in which every interaction must be emotionally intense, every problem is a crisis, and every listener must perform complete absorption. The dramatic framing is not usually manipulative in any calculated sense. It reflects a genuine deficit in the capacity to tolerate ordinary, undramatic experience.
Borderline personality traits create relational dynamics characterized by intense emotional swings, fear of abandonment, and difficulty tolerating ordinary relational limits. Marsha Linehan, PhD, psychologist and developer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), described the borderline experience as living with “third-degree emotional burns over 90% of the body”: ordinary relational events, like a friend being unavailable on a Saturday, register with the intensity of genuine trauma. Relationships with people whose borderline traits are significant require a level of emotional consistency and availability that most people cannot sustainably provide.
Emotional immaturity and insecure attachment without any formal personality pathology can also produce vampiric dynamics. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (New Harbinger, 2015), writes about emotionally immature people as individuals who are reactive rather than responsive, self-absorbed rather than curious, and unable to engage with another person’s inner life on its own terms. The relational experience of being in close relationship with an emotionally immature person closely parallels what Orloff describes as emotional vampirism, even without meeting any clinical threshold for personality disorder.
“You can only protect your vulnerabilities by knowing them and getting more comfortable with them. If you don’t know what you feel, you can’t protect yourself.”HARRIET LERNER, PhD, The Dance of Intimacy
Both/And: this relationship has real value AND it may be costing you too much
The emotional vampire framework, used carelessly, can become a blunt instrument. Someone describes a draining person in their life and reaches for the label the way you’d reach for a verdict. That’s understandable. The pattern is real, and naming it cleanly is part of what helps. But the label can also obscure something important.
The person who drains you may also genuinely care about you. They may have been a real source of support at other moments in your life. They may be operating from wounds so early and so deep that they cannot see clearly what their patterns are doing. All of that can be true. The history between you is real. The care, however lopsided its expression, may be real.
AND: this relationship may be costing you more than you can sustainably spend. Both things can be true at the same time. The relationship can carry genuine meaning AND be depleting you in ways that are not sustainable. Recognizing the second does not require erasing the first. What it requires is honesty. This both/and framework is one I return to consistently in my work with women navigating complex relational limits. The capacity to hold two true things simultaneously is, in many ways, the precondition for every piece of relational work that follows.
What I’m not inviting you to do is perform gratitude for being depleted. Compassion for someone’s pain doesn’t obligate you to be its infinite container. That’s not love. That’s self-abandonment, and it teaches the other person nothing useful about their own relational patterns or their own capacity for growth.
The systemic lens: why women are disproportionately targeted
There’s a dimension of this pattern that most conversations about emotional vampirism leave out, and it deserves naming directly: the gendered structure that makes certain women disproportionately available to these dynamics.
Women are socialized, from very early in development, to prioritize the emotional needs of others. To be attuned, responsive, available, and warm. To be good at caring. To feel guilty when they aren’t. This socialization isn’t incidental or individual. It is structural and reinforced through family systems, cultural scripts, religious frameworks, and relational expectations that follow women well into adulthood. The result is that many women arrive in their adult relationships with a finely developed capacity for empathy and a significantly underdeveloped capacity for self-protective limits.
Add to this the way that childhood emotional neglect specifically conditions certain women for these dynamics. If you grew up in a home where the adults’ emotional needs reliably superseded your own, where you learned to read the room, manage moods, and keep yourself small, emotionally draining people don’t feel foreign to you. They feel familiar. They activate a template your nervous system already knows by heart. The role of emotional caretaker fits like a glove because you’ve been wearing it since before you had language for what it was.
There is also an intersectional dimension worth naming. In communities where family loyalty carries particular cultural or survival weight, where airing relational difficulties publicly carries real social risk, or where the figure of the devoted and self-sacrificing woman is central to cultural identity and pride, recognizing and naming an emotionally draining dynamic can feel like a more loaded act than it does in other contexts. The additional complexity this creates is real. Recovery in these contexts may require additional clinical support in separating genuine relational loyalty from the self-abandonment that can masquerade as it.
This is not your fault. But it is worth understanding, because understanding it allows you to see the dynamic for what it is: a pattern that was installed in you before you had any say in the matter. The women most vulnerable to emotionally vampiric dynamics are often the most empathic, most caring, most relationally skilled women in any room. They don’t end up in these dynamics because they’re naive. They end up there because they were trained to put everyone else’s oxygen mask on first.
Clinical Vignette. Composite, details changed.
Camille
Camille is 44. She’s a pediatrician, a mother of two, and, as she puts it in our first session, “the person in my family who handles things.” She has been handling her mother’s emotional crises since she was approximately nine years old, when she noticed that her mother stabilized when Camille was emotionally steady and destabilized when Camille had needs of her own. She learned early that the way to keep the temperature down was to make herself as small and as available as possible.
By the time Camille comes to therapy, she has a specific presenting problem: she has not taken a vacation in three years, because every time she plans one, her mother develops a new health concern in the week before her departure. The concerns are never medically trivial, exactly, but they are also never quite serious enough to justify canceling. Camille has become exquisitely skilled at reading the difference between a genuine health emergency and what she privately calls “departure anxiety.” She is also increasingly aware that she has organized her professional life, her marriage, and her own health around a family system that requires her to be perpetually available to function.
“I finally told my husband,” she says in one session, turning her wedding ring around in the way she does when she’s landed somewhere uncomfortable and true. “I said: I think I’ve been trained to believe that my mother’s need for me is more real than my own need for rest. And I don’t know when that happened. But I know it happened before I was old enough to argue with it.”
She takes the vacation that December. Her mother calls twice from the airport. Camille lets both calls go to voicemail. She swims in the ocean on the first day and cries from something she can’t name, which is, I think, the particular relief of briefly not being anyone’s emergency.
The path forward: naming the pattern, setting limits, deciding what you can sustain
Once you’ve named the pattern with honesty, you have options. Those options exist on a spectrum, and the right movement depends on the specific relationship, the degree of depletion, your own history with this person, and what your values and circumstances actually allow.
Name it internally first. Before you do anything externally, get clear within yourself about what is actually happening. This means moving through the guilt narrative, they need me, it’s not their fault, I’m being selfish, and arriving at honest clarity: this relationship consistently costs me more than it replenishes me, and I’ve been absorbing that cost silently for a long time. The nervous system often knows before the mind catches up. Your body has been offering you this information for longer than you’ve been willing to hear it.
Set structural limits rather than conversational ones. Limits with chronically draining people tend to work best when they’re built into structure rather than argued for in real time. Reducing the frequency and duration of contact, without necessarily explaining why, is often more effective and less combustible than attempting a direct meta-conversation about the dynamic. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for not being available every Sunday afternoon. You can simply become unavailable on Sunday afternoons.
Decide what level of relationship you can genuinely sustain. Not every draining relationship requires full severance. Some can be managed with structural limits and clear internal clarity about your role. Some benefit from a direct conversation. Some, particularly those involving betrayal or sustained psychological harm, may need to end. The mechanism that matters is conscious choice made from clarity rather than guilt or obligation. You get to decide what you’re willing to offer, and in what container.
Examine what made you vulnerable to this dynamic in the first place. The work of understanding why certain relational patterns feel familiar, why the role of emotional caretaker fits so naturally, is often more durable than simply removing yourself from one draining relationship only to find yourself in another. Relational trauma therapy can help you trace the early relational architecture that trained you for this role and begin rebuilding the proverbial House of Life™ that was shaped, in part, by learning to prioritize everyone else’s emotional needs over your own.
Get support for the transition. Changing a long-standing relational pattern almost always stirs up grief, guilt, and confusion in roughly equal measure. A therapist can help you sort through what’s yours and what isn’t, develop language for limits, and process what comes up when you begin to change the terms of a relationship that has been organized around your unlimited availability. If you’re not yet in therapy, the resources in the Related Reading section below offer rigorous frameworks for thinking through exactly these dynamics.
“You can’t pour from an empty cup. But more importantly, you should never have been the only cup in the first place.”JUDITH ORLOFF, MD, Emotional Freedom
If none of this feels manageable yet, if even reading this list felt like too much, that is information rather than failure. Your nervous system is telling you something worth listening to. Start where you are. Start with one honest sentence to yourself about what one of these relationships has actually cost you. That’s enough for now.
Q: Is “emotional vampire” a real clinical term?
A: Emotional vampire is not a DSM-5 diagnosis. It is a colloquial clinical descriptor popularized by Albert J. Bernstein, PhD, and Judith Orloff, MD, to describe a relational pattern characterized by consistent one-sided emotional depletion. Clinicians use it because it names the dynamic accurately without requiring a formal personality disorder diagnosis for the person engaging in it.
Q: Can someone drain you emotionally without knowing it?
A: Yes, and this is the norm rather than the exception. Most people engaged in emotionally draining patterns are running habituated nervous-system responses rooted in early relational trauma, insecure attachment, or inadequate emotional modeling. The impact on you is fully real regardless of whether conscious intent is present on their side.
Q: What is the difference between a friend in crisis and an emotional vampire?
A: Duration and reciprocity. A friend in genuine crisis leans heavily for a bounded period, then stabilizes, checks in on you, and returns to give-and-take relating. An emotionally draining dynamic is structural: the crisis is always present in some form, your needs remain secondary, and the reciprocity never quite returns even when the presenting crisis resolves.
Q: Why do I feel guilty even when I know the relationship is hurting me?
A: Because guilt in these situations is a learned response, not a moral signal. Many women in emotionally draining relationships were conditioned in childhood to prioritize others’ emotional needs above their own, and guilt was the enforcement mechanism for that conditioning. When you begin to push back, the guilt system activates loudly. That does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means you’re doing something new.
Q: What personality traits are associated with emotional vampirism?
A: Emotional vampirism appears most commonly in individuals with significant narcissistic, histrionic, or borderline personality traits, and in those with significant emotional immaturity and insecure attachment. No single diagnosis defines the pattern. The defining clinical feature is a stable, structural reliance on others for emotional regulation that the person cannot sustain internally.
Q: Does recognizing this pattern mean I have to end the relationship?
A: Not necessarily. Recognizing a draining dynamic gives you options, not an obligation. Some relationships can be managed with structural limits and reduced contact. Some benefit from a direct conversation. Some, particularly those involving sustained harm, may need to end. What matters is that the decision comes from clarity and honest self-assessment rather than from guilt, obligation, or the fear of who you’ll be if you stop being everyone’s support.
Q: Can an emotionally draining person change?
A: Potentially yes, but only through their own motivated, sustained therapeutic work, not through your continued accommodation. Change requires self-awareness, accountability for the impact of one’s patterns, and genuine investment in building different relational skills. Your presence as an unlimited emotional resource does not create those conditions. It often prevents them from developing.
Q: How does Fixing the Foundations help with this kind of relational pattern?
You've been managing their reality long enough.
A focused self-paced course on the specific damage of being raised inside a narcissistic family system. The framework, the language, and the recovery sequence, without the gaslighting that named you the problem.
A: Fixing the Foundations™ addresses the early relational blueprints that make certain women disproportionately available to draining dynamics. It covers limit-setting, nervous-system regulation, and rebuilding self-trust for women who want to do this work at their own pace, with clinical depth and without having to explain themselves first.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Acevedo BP, Aron EN, Aron A, Sangster MD, Collins N, Brown LL. The highly sensitive brain: an fMRI study of sensory processing sensitivity and response to others’ emotions. Brain Behav. 2014;4(4):580-594. doi:10.1002/brb3.242. PMID: 25161824.
- Figley CR. Compassion fatigue as secondary traumatic stress disorder: an overview. In: Figley CR, ed. Compassion Fatigue: Coping With Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized. New York: Brunner/Mazel; 1995:1-20.
- Hatfield E, Cacioppo JT, Rapson RL. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1994.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Bernstein, Albert J. Emotional Vampires: Dealing with People Who Drain You Dry. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
- Orloff, Judith. Emotional Freedom: Liberate Yourself from Negative Emotions and Transform Your Life. New York: Harmony Books, 2009.
- Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, 2015.
- Linehan, Marsha M. Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: Guilford Press, 1993.
- van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
- Lerner, Harriet. The Dance of Intimacy. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
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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 and trauma-informed executive coach with over 25,000 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. She is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years, with W.W. Norton.
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