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Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

What Strong Reactions Are Telling You

In my work with clients, I’ve learned to pay close attention to strong reactions — not as problems to be managed, but as dispatches from the interior. When someone’s behavior triggers an outsized response in you, the question I always want to ask is: what does this remind you of? And beneath that: what part of yourself does this touch?

The jealousy you feel toward the colleague who speaks up easily in meetings. The contempt you have for someone who seems to need a lot of reassurance. The inexplicable pull you feel toward people who are chaotic and unreliable, even as you tell yourself you want stability. These aren’t just reactions to other people. They’re windows.

Jordan — a client of mine, a senior partner at a law firm — came to me initially because she kept “overreacting” to her assistant. Small delays, minor miscommunications, and she’d feel a flush of rage that was completely disproportionate to the situation. She was humiliated by it. “I don’t understand why I can’t just be a normal person about this,” she said.

What we discovered, over time, was that her assistant’s nonchalant attitude toward deadlines touched a deep, disowned part of Jordan herself — the part of her that had been taught from earliest childhood that slowing down was dangerous, that needing more time was a character flaw, that her worth was contingent on perfect execution. She didn’t just resent her assistant. She envied her — and hated herself for it.

The rage was information. It was the sound of the disowned part knocking on the door.

The Process of Coming Back to Yourself

Re-integration isn’t a one-time event. It’s a practice — and one that unfolds slowly, with curiosity rather than force. Here’s what it tends to look like in the clinical work I do:

First: notice the reaction without immediately explaining it away. When you feel an outsized response to something, resist the urge to immediately justify, rationalize, or dismiss it. Just notice: this is strong. This is interesting. What is this about?

Second: ask what the reaction might be protecting. Strong emotions — especially sudden, seemingly irrational ones — are often protective. They keep us from feeling something more vulnerable underneath. Jordan’s rage protected her from feeling the grief of having had to be perfect her entire life. What’s the reaction protecting you from feeling?

Third: get curious about what you might be projecting or envying. What quality in the person who triggered you do you secretly want? What do they have or embody that you’ve told yourself isn’t available to you?

Fourth: bring the disowned quality home. Not by suddenly becoming a different person, but by experimenting. Can you let yourself want what you want, even a little? Can you claim the quality in yourself — playfulness, ease, anger, neediness — just for a moment?

This work takes time. It happens in therapy, in journaling, in the quiet moments when you finally stop performing long enough to notice what’s underneath. And it is, in my clinical experience, some of the most enlivening work there is.

Working with a Therapist on This

A skilled therapist — particularly one trained in depth psychology, IFS, or psychodynamic approaches — can be an invaluable guide for this process. They can help you see patterns you can’t see from inside them, hold the disowned material with you without judgment, and gradually help you expand your sense of who you are allowed to be.

The therapeutic relationship itself often becomes a place where disowned material surfaces and gets worked with in real time. The reactions you have to your therapist — what irritates you, what you idealize, what you want from them — are often some of the richest material in the work. If you’re considering therapy, finding someone comfortable with depth work and who won’t pathologize your strong reactions can make all the difference.

What becomes possible, over time, is a self that feels larger. More whole. More capable of containing complexity without it spilling out as reaction. That wholeness — that’s the fruit of re-integration.

How Re-Integration Actually Happens

Integration of disowned parts isn’t a single breakthrough moment. It’s a slow process of repeated recognition and gradual welcome. Here’s what the clinical work typically looks like in practice:

Step one: Noticing the reaction without judgment. This is harder than it sounds, because the reaction is usually accompanied by a layer of shame: “I can’t believe I’m being so ___,” “This is so embarrassing,” “I shouldn’t feel this way.” The shame closes the aperture. It makes curiosity impossible. The first step is simply observing the reaction as data — “there is a very strong response happening in my system right now” — without immediately moving to judgment, suppression, or explanation.

Step two: Getting curious about the disowned part. What is this reaction trying to say? What does the part of me that got triggered actually want — or want to protect? What would happen if I gave that part the floor for a moment, in a contained way? Internal Family Systems therapy is particularly well-suited to this step because it gives a structured language and process for this inner dialogue — for moving from identifying with the part to being curious about it.

Step three: Connecting the reaction to the original context. Strong reactions in the present are rarely about the present. They’re about an older wound that the present situation has activated. Finding the original context — “when did I first learn that this quality was unacceptable? when did I first have to put this part of myself away?” — is often where the most meaningful healing happens. It moves the work from managing the reaction to understanding its origin.

Step four: Building tolerance for the disowned quality. This is where the integration happens: gradually increasing your capacity to be in contact with the disowned part — to feel the anger, to acknowledge the need, to express the creativity or the grief or the ambition — in progressively more contexts, with progressively less cost. This doesn’t happen through forcing. It happens through repeated, supported exposure to the experience of having the quality and not being destroyed by it.

Jordan, a client — a research scientist whose strong reactions at work had been jeopardizing her professional relationships — described the integration work this way: “I spent years trying to not be angry. What actually worked was letting myself be angry, in therapy, where it was safe, until the anger stopped feeling like something that would ruin everything if it showed up. The anger itself wasn’t the problem. It was the terror of the anger that was the problem.”

Projection, Transference, and the Social Consequences of Disowned Parts

There is a social dimension to disowned parts that is worth addressing directly: what we don’t own in ourselves, we tend to see very clearly in others. This is the mechanism Carl Jung described as projection — the unconscious attribution to other people of qualities we have split off from our own self-concept.

The person who has most thoroughly disowned their own ambition may find themselves intensely irritated by ambitious people. The person who has most thoroughly suppressed their anger may react to others’ anger with disproportionate alarm. The person who has buried their need for care may find needy people almost unbearable to be around. The intensity of the reaction is the signal: where we have the strongest response to a quality in someone else, there is often something to examine in ourselves.

Understanding this has practical implications for relationships and professional environments. If you consistently find yourself in conflict with a particular type of person, or triggered by a particular quality in others, the most generative question isn’t “why is that person so difficult?” but “what might this be showing me about myself?” That question doesn’t mean the other person isn’t genuinely difficult. It means you have more leverage over your own inner work than you do over them.

This is also why therapy for this kind of work is particularly valuable in relationship contexts — whether in the context of couples therapy, where partners’ disowned parts often hook each other with remarkable precision, or in individual therapy where the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a context for noticing and working with projective patterns. The work isn’t about becoming someone who doesn’t react. It’s about becoming someone who can use their reactions as a compass.

Both/And: Holding the Complexity of Your Experience

In my work with clients, I find that the most important breakthroughs happen not when someone chooses one truth over another, but when they learn to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time. This is the heart of what I call the Both/And frame.

You can be a driven, capable woman and still be struggling beneath the surface. You can want to heal and still find it terrifying to let your guard down. You can understand intellectually what’s happening in your nervous system and still feel completely overtaken by it. These aren’t contradictions — they’re the texture of a fully lived life.

The driven, ambitious women I work with often struggle with Both/And because they’ve been trained to solve problems, not sit with paradox. But healing isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a process to inhabit. And the both/and is always where the deepest growth lives. You don’t have to choose between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. You can be both at once.

The Systemic Lens: Seeing Beyond the Individual

When we locate suffering exclusively in the individual — “What’s wrong with me?” — we miss the larger forces at work. Culture, family systems, economic structures, and intergenerational patterns all shape the terrain on which your personal struggle plays out.

This matters because the driven women I work with almost universally blame themselves for pain that was never theirs alone to carry. The anxiety, the perfectionism, the chronic self-doubt — these aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptive responses to systems that asked too much of you while offering too little safety, attunement, and genuine support. A culture that rewards productivity over presence. Family systems that confused achievement with worthiness. Gender norms that punish women for the same traits they praise in men.

Healing begins when you stop asking “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking “What happened to me — and what systems made it possible?” That shift isn’t just linguistic. It’s liberating. It makes room for self-compassion where self-blame used to live, and it allows you to locate the wound accurately — not in your character, but in your history and the systems that shaped it.

About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  W.W. Norton Author

Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides ambitious 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, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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