How to Stop People-Pleasing When It Was Literally How You Survived Your Childhood
LAST UPDATED: JULY 2026
People-pleasing sounds like a soft personality quirk. But when it took root in a childhood where keeping an adult calm was how you stayed safe, it isn’t a quirk. It’s a learned protective adaptation, built by a nervous system doing exactly what it needed to do at the time. This post walks through what it actually is, why willpower alone won’t unwind it, and what a trauma-informed path toward change looks like.
Last reviewed: July 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT. This post is educational content, not a substitute for individualized clinical care.
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- The Table Where She Kept Agreeing
- What People-Pleasing as a Survival Adaptation Actually Is
- Fawn and the Nervous System: What We Know and What We Don’t
- How Survival People-Pleasing Shows Up in Driven Women
- The Hidden Cost: What Chronic Fawning Does to Your Sense of Self
- Both/And: The Adaptation Was Smart, and It’s Also Costing You Now
- The Systemic Lens: The Household That Required Your Compliance
- A Second Systemic Layer: What the Workplace Rewards in Women Who Fawn
- How to Actually Change: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Unlearning Fawn
- Frequently Asked Questions
People-pleasing as a survival adaptation, often described as the fawn response, develops when a child learns that keeping an adult calm and satisfied is how she stays safe, avoids punishment, or keeps a fragile connection intact. It’s different from people-pleasing that comes from social anxiety or a wish to be liked. Survival-based fawning is a wired nervous-system pattern, not a personality flaw and not something you can simply decide to stop doing. In my work with driven women, the pattern rarely responds to willpower alone; it responds to work that includes the body as well as the mind.
In my work with driven women whose childhoods required constant emotional management of a parent, I’ve noticed a pattern I now ask about directly in intake: the woman who can’t tell the difference between what she wants and what the room needs from her. That’s usually where fawn is running the show. Stacy, whose story opens this post, is one version of it.
The Table Where She Kept Agreeing
In my work with driven women in leadership roles, I’ve observed a specific pattern I now recognize within minutes of a client describing a work conflict: the gap between what she knows and what she says out loud.
Stacy watched herself do it, which made it worse. She was forty-one, six years into running product strategy at a mid-size health-tech company, sitting in a Tuesday afternoon leadership meeting with her laptop open to a slide deck she’d built the week before. Her manager proposed a timeline Stacy knew was wrong. Not slightly wrong. Wrong in a way that would cost the team four months and a launch window they wouldn’t get back.
Stacy had the data open in front of her. She’d been thinking about this exact problem longer than anyone else at the table. And she said, “I think that could work.”
Stacy watched herself perform agreement she didn’t feel, in a room far less dangerous than the ones that had once taught her this fluency. Back at her office, the familiar sequence arrived in order: relief that there had been no friction, then a hot flash of anger at herself, then an exhaustion she couldn’t explain to anyone who hadn’t grown up making themselves small that way.
If you recognize this sequence, the yes when you meant no, the nod that cost you something, the specific tiredness of chronic self-subordination, this post is for you. Not to shame you about the pattern, but to help you understand what it actually is, why it’s so hard to change, and what changing it looks like when approached with the intelligence the adaptation deserves.
What People-Pleasing as a Survival Adaptation Actually Is
People-pleasing gets framed in most popular psychology as a personality trait, the way Stacy might be an introvert or a morning person. That framing is common, and it can miss developmental history in some people. It locates the behavior in character instead of history, and skips the more useful question: why did this pattern develop in the first place?
When people-pleasing developed in childhood as a way to stay safe, when keeping an adult calm was truly the best option available to a child in that home, it isn’t simply a personality trait. It’s often a trauma response. Trauma researcher and psychotherapist Pete Walker, MA, MFT, popularized a descriptive term for this pattern, the fawn response, describing it as a fourth style alongside fight, flight, and freeze. To be precise: fawn isn’t a formal clinical diagnosis, it isn’t in the DSM, and it isn’t an established, universally accepted fourth branch of the body’s threat physiology. It’s a clinically useful description that Walker and others have found helps explain a pattern. I remember reading Walker’s description for the first time and feeling something click into place about clients I’d been working with for years. Fawn, as he describes it, is the response of appeasing, accommodating, and deferring to whatever feels threatening, making yourself agreeable, invisible, or useful as a way of managing danger and buying safety.
This is a reasonable, effective strategy in specific circumstances. In a household with a parent whose drinking made moods unpredictable, learning to read and manage that mood may have measurably reduced how much harm came your way. In a family with a narcissistically organized parent, going quiet about your own needs may have been the difference between staying connected and getting shut out. Understanding how this took shape in your home, maybe through the lens of emotionally immature parenting dynamics, is where the work starts.
Fawn is a descriptive term popularized by Pete Walker, MA, MFT, psychotherapist specializing in complex PTSD and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, for a survival-oriented pattern of appeasement, accommodation, and self-subordination in the face of perceived threat. It’s not a formal clinical diagnosis or a DSM category, and it isn’t an established, universally accepted fourth branch of the body’s threat physiology. It’s a widely used clinical description for a pattern that works by actively managing the threat itself, making the threatening person calm, satisfied, or pleased, rather than by fighting, fleeing, or shutting down. In people with complex trauma histories, particularly those raised by unstable or emotionally immature caregivers, this pattern can become an automatic default, showing up in relational situations carrying even a faint cue of possible conflict or disapproval.
In plain terms: When you were small, keeping the people around you happy was how you stayed safe. Your nervous system learned that lesson extremely well. Now it runs the same strategy automatically, in situations that don’t actually call for it. Meetings, relationships, ordinary conversations where you could say exactly what you think and nothing bad would happen.
This isn’t about labeling every accommodating gesture as trauma. Plenty of kindness is simply kindness. What separates survival fawning from ordinary consideration is the mechanism underneath it: fear driving the behavior rather than actual choice. That distinction matters, and we’ll come back to it later in this post.
Fawn and the Nervous System: What We Know and What We Don’t
Understanding fawn as a nervous-system pattern rather than a character trait means looking briefly at how the body processes threat, though I want to be careful about what the research establishes versus what clinicians have layered on top of it. I recently returned to the work of Stephen Porges, PhD, the psychophysiologist behind polyvagal theory, currently a distinguished university scientist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University with an additional appointment in psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the time of his 1995 paper, he was in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland. The piece of his work I keep returning to is the distinction he proposed among autonomic pathways: a social engagement system tied to ordinary connection, a sympathetic system tied to fight and flight, and a dorsal vagal system tied to freeze and shutdown. That 1995 paper introduces polyvagal theory itself. It doesn’t mention fawn or people-pleasing, and it didn’t test either one (Porges, 1995, PMID: 7652107). What later clinicians, including Walker, have done is borrow that broader social-engagement framework to think about appeasement, an extension of the theory rather than a finding the original paper reports. Worth naming: polyvagal theory has drawn methodological critiques over the past three decades, particularly around anatomical specificity and how respiratory sinus arrhythmia is measured, and Porges’s own 2025 review addresses those critiques directly rather than treating the theory as settled (Porges, 2025, PMID: 40735382). I still find the framework clinically useful. I just don’t want to overstate its certainty.
It’s tempting to say fawning recruits a specific autonomic branch in some clean, mapped way, but that claim hasn’t been established by the sources cited here. What clinicians observe, and what I see often in my own office, is that appeasement can feel automatic, arriving before a person has had the chance to consciously choose it. The person fawning often doesn’t show the obvious arousal of fight-or-flight. She may look calm, even warm, while something underneath her works hard to secure safety through agreement. That observation is clinically real. The precise mechanism behind it’s still being worked out, not settled fact.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, wrote one of the earliest papers making a related, broader point, years before his book became a household name. His 1994 paper is about how trauma reshapes memory and the body generally, arguing trauma-related responses can live in the body’s learned patterns, not only in conscious belief (van der Kolk, 1994, PMID: 9384857). That paper isn’t about fawning specifically, but the broader point holds with clients frustrated that they can’t think their way out of a pattern like this: some trauma-related bodily responses appear to operate below the level of a single conscious thought. What’s happening neurobiologically in any one person’s fawning is something this research doesn’t pin down. What I can say with more confidence, from years of clinical observation, is that the behavior often doesn’t feel maintained by a conscious decision in the moment.
Six weeks into our work together, I asked Stacy what her body had been doing during that Tuesday meeting. She had to think about it. Her shoulders had been up near her ears the entire time, her jaw clenched tight enough to leave an ache by evening, and under the table, her hand gripping her own knee. “I didn’t even notice I was doing it,” she told me, “until you asked.” That’s what fawn sounds like from the inside: invisible to the person running it, and running the whole time.
How Survival People-Pleasing Shows Up in Driven Women
Caitlin arrived to our second session eleven minutes late, apologizing before she’d even sat down on the small grey couch in my office, a half-finished oat milk latte still sweating in her hand. It was a rainy Tuesday in March, the kind of Portland afternoon where the light never really arrives. She was thirty-nine, a VP of marketing at a logistics company, with an advanced degree in organizational psychology, and she’d taught a seminar the year before on the clinical difference between healthy collaboration and toxic conflict avoidance.
“I can explain exactly what I’m doing while I’m doing it,” she said, setting the latte down without drinking from it. “That’s the part that makes me feel insane. I know the theory. I wrote part of the theory. And I still watched myself nod along with a plan I knew was going to fail, in a meeting, forty minutes ago, and I couldn’t stop it.” She laughed, but there wasn’t much air behind it. “It’s like knowing exactly how a magic trick works and still flinching when the knife comes down.”
Sitting across from Caitlin that afternoon, I felt the particular recognition I’ve come to expect with driven women who’ve spent years professionally studying the dynamics running their own nervous systems. Not surprise, something closer to familiarity. The credential hadn’t protected her, because it lives in the prefrontal cortex, and fawn doesn’t ask permission.
In driven women like Stacy and Caitlin, survival people-pleasing often creates a specific dissonance. The woman is plainly capable across many domains, yet in interpersonal conflict or the possibility of someone’s disapproval, she loses access to her own competence with startling speed. That’s not inconsistency of character. It’s a learned response outrunning actual capability, the part of her that learned in childhood that conflict meant danger firing faster than the part that knows, as an adult, that conflict is survivable.
In my clinical experience, this shows up in driven women in fairly consistent ways: saying yes to work requests that exceed any reasonable bandwidth, then quietly resenting the imposition; avoiding performance conversations where honest feedback might create discomfort; monitoring a partner’s emotional state with the hypervigilance once aimed at a parent’s mood; and the specific misery of conflict avoidance, the endless math of getting a need met without naming it, because naming it risks someone’s displeasure.
There’s also a version specific to women in leadership. Fawn in a professional setting can look, for a while, like leadership strengths: collegiality, flexibility, consensus-building. Until the leader can’t make an unpopular call, or the team quietly runs the manager instead of the reverse. Naming this as a nervous-system pattern with a developmental origin, not a leadership deficiency, opens options that shame never will.
Complex PTSD describes the psychological effects of prolonged, repeated, and often inescapable trauma, particularly the kind that unfolds inside a childhood relational environment. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, argued in a 2012 commentary defending C-PTSD as its own distinct diagnostic category that this presentation differs substantially from single-incident PTSD (Herman, 2012, PMID: 22729977).
In plain terms: If you grew up somewhere chronically difficult or unsafe, your nervous system may carry the effects of that in ways that go well beyond specific memories, shaping how you relate to conflict, authority, your own needs, and other people’s approval in ways you might not even recognize as trauma responses.
What I see in my office most often is that the fawning traces back to a specific caregiver, though sometimes it develops later, inside an abusive adult relationship that retrains a nervous system that hadn’t needed this strategy before. Marylene Cloitre, PhD, and colleagues, in a 2009 paper on cumulative trauma, found that trauma exposure across developmental stages, not a single incident, tends to track with more complicated adult presentations (Cloitre et al., 2009, PMID: 19795402). That maps onto what I see often: rarely one bad year, usually years of accumulated exposure.
The Hidden Cost: What Chronic Fawning Does to Your Sense of Self
One of the least discussed costs of survival people-pleasing is what it does to identity. When you’ve spent years organizing your behavior around what other people need, what will keep them comfortable, what will head off conflict, you may find you’ve lost track of something basic: what you actually think, feel, and want.
This is the identity erosion that chronic fawning produces. It doesn’t happen in one dramatic moment. Slowly, editing your own experience builds a self that’s reactive rather than self-directed. You know exactly what you need to be for every person in your life. You may not know what you’re when nothing needs managing.
Stacy named this in session with more precision than I usually hear it. “I run three product teams,” she said, turning her coffee mug a quarter turn on the arm of the chair, the same slow half-circle she made almost every session. “I can tell you exactly what fourteen different people need from me by Thursday. And if you ask me what I want to eat for dinner tonight, I actually don’t know, because nobody’s told me yet what they want.” She laughed at that, but it wasn’t really a laugh. That identity erosion often shows up most clearly in these small, mundane preferences, the things that require nothing more than knowing what you like. That’s often exactly where recovery work most concretely begins. You might explore what’s underneath this with the quiz to identify the specific childhood wound driving the pattern.
There’s a relational cost too. Chronic fawning makes real intimacy structurally difficult, because intimacy requires two actual people showing up. Partners of chronic people-pleasers often describe feeling deeply alone despite the apparent agreement, unable to be certain the person they love is actually happy. This is covered further in codependency and the strong woman, and in loneliness inside a good marriage.
“I have everything and nothing. Everyone loves me and I have not been touched. I am adored and I have never been seen.”
Marion Woodman analysand, quoted in the study of the compulsive over-giver
Of course this is disorienting. You built a life that, from the outside, looks like the product of clear preferences and confident choices. Underneath, you may have been running a much older program, built to read a room and disappear into whatever it required. That’s not a character flaw. It’s the residue of a strategy that once kept you safer than the alternative.
Both/And: The Adaptation Was Smart, and It’s Also Costing You Now
Here’s the both/and I most want you to leave this post holding. People-pleasing as childhood survival wasn’t a flaw. It was an intelligent, adaptive response to an environment that required exactly that response. Whatever made keeping others happy into a survival strategy, a volatile parent, a family organized around someone else’s emotional needs, a household where your needs were treated as inconveniences, your nervous system made the most reasonable available choice. It learned to fawn.
That strategy served you. It may have protected you, kept a fragile connection intact with someone you needed, or helped you survive circumstances no child should’ve had to survive. Honoring that fully, not the quick “I know it served a purpose, but” version, is part of the actual healing process. The people-pleasing part of Stacy, the part of you, isn’t stupid or weak. It’s the part that kept you okay when okay was hard to come by.
What’s also true: you’re not a child anymore. The people in your adult life, your colleagues, your partner, your friends, aren’t the people who required your smallness. Your nervous system’s continued deployment of survival-mode strategy in ordinary adult friction is now costing you your own voice, your own authority, your own capacity for real relationship. Both things are true at once, and holding both is what makes change possible.
Caitlin put words to this shift near the end of a long stretch of our work together. “I keep waiting to feel like a bad person for not smoothing things over anymore,” she said. “And mostly I just feel tired in a different way. A cleaner kind of tired.” I think about that phrase often. A cleaner kind of tired isn’t the same as no longer tired. It’s the both/and made physical.
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The Systemic Lens: The Household That Required Your Compliance
The people-pleasing that developed in childhood didn’t come from nowhere. This isn’t your unique failing. It’s a pattern with a traceable structural origin inside a household whose dynamics made compliance necessary for survival or connection.
The most common household dynamics that produce survival fawning include parents whose addiction created unpredictable mood swings a child (Stacy’s included) learned to monitor, parents with a narcissistic organization who became threatening whenever their emotional supply was withheld, parents who were, in the language psychologist Lindsay Gibson, PsyD, uses in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, simply emotionally immature, and family systems organized around conditional love, where losing approval felt existential.
The mechanism matters, and so does the label. In each of these systems, the child’s fawning was a rational response to a real dynamic, not a failure of self-respect. These weren’t character defects. They were creative adaptations to environments offering no better options. The wound isn’t in the adaptation. It’s in the environment that made the adaptation necessary.
You’re not broken, and you’re not overreacting to your own history. You’re carrying a structural inheritance from a specific household, not a failing you invented. It’s the reflexive apology before you’ve finished a sentence, the way your chest tightens when a text goes unanswered, the extra warmth you add to an email the second you sense someone might be annoyed. Understanding this, whether in individual therapy, inner child work, or the relational healing Fixing the Foundations™ supports, is what makes real change possible.
The intergenerational transmission of fawning is also worth naming. The parent whose dysregulation required your management was likely responding to their own history. You may be doing the first generation of different work, for whoever comes after you.
A Second Systemic Layer: What the Workplace Rewards in Women Who Fawn
There’s a second structural force worth naming, because it sits on top of the family-of-origin story rather than replacing it. Professional culture, particularly in fast-moving industries, rewards exactly the behaviors fawn produces. Being easy to work with. Absorbing extra work without complaint. Reading the room before anyone has to ask. These are treated as strengths on a performance review. Underneath, they’re the same adaptation that once kept a child safe at a dinner table.
The mechanism of harm here’s specific: a workplace built around always-on availability and flattened hierarchy asks every employee to self-manage boundaries once enforced externally, by a manager, a union, a clock. For a woman whose nervous system already treats disapproval as dangerous, that structure removes the last guardrail that might have stopped her from overriding her own limits.
Of course you’re tired, Stacy included. You’re managing two systems at once, the one that shaped you at seven and the one that employs you now, and both are asking for the same thing: keep everyone comfortable, quietly. This isn’t a personal productivity problem. It’s a structural convergence, and naming it as structural is part of what makes it possible to stop treating your exhaustion as a personal failing.
How to Actually Change: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Unlearning Fawn
The most important thing to understand about changing survival people-pleasing is that it doesn’t respond to willpower alone. You can sincerely commit to being more direct and still find, minutes into your next hard conversation, that you’ve already said yes before your commitment had a chance to activate. This post’s research doesn’t pin down the exact neurobiology of that speed differential, but the clinical experience of it is common and real, and the work below is aimed at buying you a fraction of a second before fawn takes over.
The first piece of this work is somatic: learning to recognize, in your body, the exact moment fawn begins to activate, before you’ve said the yes you don’t mean. The chest constriction. The sudden blankness. The warm, compliant feeling that shows up right when conflict becomes possible. When you can feel those sensations before acting on them, a small window opens. It starts tiny. A pause. A breath. “Let me think about that.” It’s enough to begin.
The second piece works directly with the part of you that learned this strategy, the part that still believes someone else’s anger is as dangerous now as it was then. The inner child work that helps most here involves bringing that younger part real news: the adults in your current life aren’t the people who required your smallness. This update happens gradually, through repeated lived experience, not a single insight.
The third piece, and the one I’ve watched drive the most durable change in clients like Stacy, is practicing small, true statements in relatively safe contexts. Not the boardroom. Starting with “actually, I’d rather go somewhere else for dinner.” Each is a behavioral experiment: you say something true and wait to see what happens. When the relationship survives your honesty, your nervous system gets new evidence that fawning isn’t the only option on the table.
Caitlin came back to this idea in one of our final sessions, still holding that same brand of oat milk latte, though the rain had stopped and the light through my office window had gone gold with early evening. “I said something in a leadership meeting last week that I knew our COO wasn’t going to love,” she told me. “And I felt the whole fawn thing rise up, the urge to soften it. And I just didn’t. I let it sit there.” She paused, turning the cup once in her hands. “He didn’t love it. He didn’t have to. I walked out still knowing what I actually thought.” She hasn’t told me the ending, whether the COO came around. The work is still going. That’s the honest place to leave her.
Stacy, eight months into ours, still catches herself mid-nod sometimes, still turns her coffee mug that same quarter turn when a hard question lands. But last month she told me she’d said no to an extra project in a Tuesday meeting, out loud, without a single qualifier attached. “I didn’t even rehearse it first,” she said, sounding almost surprised at herself. “It just came out.” She still doesn’t always know what she wants for dinner. Some nights she does now. That’s the honest measure of this work: not a finish line, a widening window.
Of course you want a reliable formula for this. The most honest guidance I can offer, after fifteen-plus years with driven women like Stacy and Caitlin, is that you don’t need to master the somatic noticing before starting the small honesty experiments. The three pieces move together, unevenly, each making the next slightly more possible. You’re not doing it wrong if it’s slow. You’re changing something built to be automatic, and automatic things take real repetition to change.
Q: Won’t stopping people-pleasing make me a less kind or caring person?
A: No. Survival people-pleasing and real generosity are different things underneath. Real generosity comes from choice, because you value the person. Survival people-pleasing comes from fear of what happens if you don’t comply. Letting go of the fear-driven version doesn’t take away your capacity for kindness. It frees it, because you’re finally giving from something other than anxiety.
Q: I’ve tried to be more assertive before and it never works. Why?
A: Assertiveness training teaches you what to say, and for some people that’s enough. For others, especially when the pattern feels automatic and fires before there’s time to choose differently, cognitive scripts alone may not be sufficient. It can help to add somatic awareness of the activation itself, work with the younger parts that learned the strategy, and time to accumulate corrective experience. This isn’t a claim that one approach reliably outperforms another, just an observation about what tends to help when a pattern feels faster than conscious choice.
Q: How do I know if I’m a people-pleaser or just a considerate person?
A: Ask what’s actually driving the behavior. If you’re being considerate because it matters to you, and could choose otherwise without much internal distress, that’s consideration. If you’re agreeable because you can’t tolerate the anxiety of conflict, that’s fawn. A second useful question: can you hold your own perspective against someone else’s strong disagreement? People being considerate usually can.
Q: My people-pleasing shows up most at work, not in personal relationships. Does that mean it isn’t about trauma?
A: Not necessarily. Fawning is commonly triggered by authority figures and power differences, which makes the workplace a strong activation context, especially if your original fawning was aimed at a parent or caregiver with authority over you. Hierarchy and potential disapproval from someone with power are dense cues in most professional environments. It’s also possible you’ve healed enough in personal relationships that they no longer trigger the pattern as reliably.
Q: What does recovery actually look like in practice? Is there a before and after?
A: There’s a real before and after, though it looks less like transformation and more like a gradual accumulation of different moments. The fawn response still activates, and probably always will to some degree, but there’s more space between the activation and the behavior. You notice it more often before acting on it, and have more frequent access to what you actually think and want. The exhaustion of chronic self-subordination lifts in ways that can feel like waking up.
Q: My family still requires my people-pleasing to function. How do I change when the original environment is still active?
A: This is one of the hardest versions of this work, and also one of the most common. You don’t wait for the environment to change first. You begin differentiating inside it, in small, boundaried steps, ideally with therapeutic support. This creates friction. A family system organized around your compliance will resist your changes, and you may be accused of selfishness. Recognizing that resistance as the system protecting its own equilibrium matters.
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- Porges SW. Orienting in a defensive world: mammalian modifications of our evolutionary heritage. A Polyvagal Theory. Psychophysiology. 1995;32(4):301-318. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1995.tb01213.x. PMID: 7652107.
- van der Kolk BA. The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress. Harv Rev Psychiatry. 1994;1(5):253-265. doi:10.3109/10673229409017088. PMID: 9384857.
- Herman JL. CPTSD is a distinct entity: comment on Resick et al. (2012). J Trauma Stress. 2012;25(3):256-257. doi:10.1002/jts.21697. PMID: 22729977.
- Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. PMID: 40735382.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Gibson, Lindsay C. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2015.
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Lafayette, CA: Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.
- 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 Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.
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Annie Wright
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
As a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides 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 Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
