The Arrival Fallacy for Driven Women: Why Hitting Every Goal Still Doesn’t Fill the Void
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
In my practice, I sit across from women who’ve hit every mark they set for themselves and still feel hollow underneath it. They’ve climbed the ladder, built the company, earned the degree, and the feeling they were promised never shows up, or it shows up for about ten minutes and then leaves.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- What Is the Arrival Fallacy?
- The Neurobiology of the Achievement Drive: When Success Becomes a Survival Strategy
- The Relentless Pursuit: How the Arrival Fallacy Manifests in Driven Women
- The Neuroscience of Unfulfillment: Hedonic Adaptation and the Achievement Treadmill
- Both/And: Holding the Tension of Ambition and Wholeness
- The Systemic Lens: Beyond Individual Psychology
- Building a Fullness That Doesn’t Empty Out Again
- Frequently Asked Questions
The arrival fallacy is the belief that reaching a specific goal, milestone, or acquisition will finally produce lasting happiness and a sense of being done. Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, the positive psychologist and former Harvard lecturer who coined the term, found it to be a near-universal feature of achievement-driven cultures. Once you reach the milestone, the relief you were counting on either never shows up or burns off within days, replaced by a new target or a flat, hollow feeling. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually naming that void out loud without it feeling like ingratitude.
In short: The arrival fallacy is the false belief that hitting a goal will finally produce lasting fulfillment, when in practice the relief disappears and the drive simply resets to the next target.
If your nervous system learned the safest way to exist was to manage everyone else's world, my self-paced course Enough Without the Effort is the recovery map.
I’ve logged more than 15,000 clinical hours with women who reach the exact outcome they believed would fix everything, and feel worse, not better, in the weeks that follow. Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, positive psychologist and author of Happier, documented this pattern as a central obstacle to sustainable wellbeing in achievement-focused people (Ben-Shahar 2007).
What Is the Arrival Fallacy?
In my practice, I sit across from clients who are grappling with a pervasive sense of emptiness even after achieving what most people would call extraordinary success. They’ve climbed the corporate ladder, launched companies that actually work, earned the degree that was supposed to prove something. And the promised land of lasting happiness still isn’t there. This has a name, coined by positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, of Harvard University: the arrival fallacy.
Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, the positive psychologist and former Harvard lecturer who coined the term, defines the arrival fallacy as the illusion that once we reach a certain goal, hit a milestone, or acquire something we’ve been chasing, we’ll finally feel lasting happiness. In reality, the satisfaction fades fast and the goalpost moves again. Driven people end up in a loop of striving without ever landing anywhere.
In plain terms: You’ve spent your whole life believing that the next achievement, the promotion, the salary number, the relationship, the house, would finally make you feel whole. And then you got there. And the emptiness didn’t leave. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a well-documented psychological pattern.
It’s a striking idea once you sit with it, isn’t it? It knocks the legs out from under everything most of us were taught about success and happiness. We’re raised to believe that if we just work harder, achieve more, and hit that next mark, then, finally, we’ll be content. But Dr. Ben-Shahar’s research and what I see in my own clients say otherwise. That’s simply not how our brains work. The emotional high of achievement is real, but it’s brief, a spike that fades fast as your nervous system settles back down to wherever it started. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a well-studied feature of human psychology called hedonic adaptation. We adjust to new circumstances, good and bad alike, and what once felt like pure joy becomes, within weeks, just the new normal. That means chasing external wins as your main source of lasting happiness is, by design, a treadmill. You’re running hard. You’re not actually getting anywhere in terms of how full you feel.
The Neurobiology of the Achievement Drive: When Success Becomes a Survival Strategy
To really get why the arrival fallacy hits driven women so hard, we have to look past the surface-level goal-chasing and get into what’s actually happening underneath it, neurobiologically and psychologically. What if your relentless drive isn’t just ambition, but a survival strategy your body built a long time ago, back when you were small and the stakes felt enormous? I keep seeing, again and again, how early experience shapes the actual wiring of motivation, turning the pursuit of success into something closer to a compulsion than a choice.
Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The How of Happiness, describes hedonic adaptation as the well-documented tendency for humans to return quickly to a baseline level of happiness despite major positive or negative life changes. For driven people, this shows up as the achievement treadmill, a pattern in which each accomplishment produces less satisfaction than the last one, which pushes you toward an ever-bigger goal just to feel something.
In plain terms: Your brain is wired to get used to good things. Fast. The corner office thrills you for a week, then it’s just the room where you answer email. The raise feels like it means something until you do the math and realize it’s not enough. This isn’t ingratitude. It’s neuroscience. And knowing that changes how you relate to your own ambition.
Dr. Gabor Maté, the physician and author, names this connection with real precision. He argues that for many people who lived through hard childhoods, the drive to achieve isn’t really about growth or external reward. It’s an unconscious bid to secure a safety and worth that felt shaky or conditional early on. He puts it plainly in his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: the attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain, a line that lands hard against the experience of the arrival fallacy. The brain learns to link performance with survival. If love or basic security depended on being good, being smart, or being successful, the nervous system wires itself to keep striving no matter what. That’s not a conscious decision. It’s closer to a biological order. Bessel van der Kolk is the researcher I keep coming back to on this point, the psychiatrist whose book The Body Keeps the Score reshaped how an entire field understands trauma, and his central finding is worth sitting with here: trauma reorganizes the way mind and brain manage perception itself, changing not just what we think about but our actual capacity to think (PMID: 9384857). When achievement gets fused with survival, the very ability to imagine a life outside that frame gets compromised. And the body keeps a record of all of it, showing up later as chronic exhaustion, adrenal fatigue, and the kind of fraying we’ll get into shortly.
Stephen Porges, the researcher behind Polyvagal Theory, gives us another crucial way to understand this. He describes a nervous system that’s constantly scanning for cues of safety and danger, underneath conscious awareness (PMID: 7652107). His more recent survey of where Polyvagal Theory stands today gathers decades of that work into one place, and it’s the piece I keep returning to when a client asks me why her body won’t settle even after she’s built a life that looks safe on paper (PMID: 40735382). For people with trauma histories, that scanning system can get stuck in a hyper-vigilant setting, sensing threat even when nothing dangerous is actually happening. The relentless push toward the next achievement becomes a way of managing that dysregulated system, an attempt to manufacture the safety that wasn’t reliably there earlier in life. It’s a form of self-soothing, just not a sustainable one. The hollow ping Lakshita feels isn’t only disappointment. It’s her nervous system’s alarm going off, telling her that the safety net she built out of achievement has failed, again, to produce the security she was actually after.
The Relentless Pursuit: How the Arrival Fallacy Manifests in Driven Women
For driven women, the arrival fallacy isn’t an abstract idea. It’s a lived reality that shapes their days, their relationships, and their sense of who they are. It’s the quiet flatness that follows a real win, the immediate itch to set a bigger goal, or the low-grade dread that shows up the second things go still. I’ve seen several consistent shapes this takes, most of them rooted in the wiring we just walked through.
Lakshita, 46, a composite drawn from many years of this work, walked into my office on a gray Tuesday in February still wearing her conference badge from a keynote three days earlier, the lanyard frayed at the edges from being pulled on and off through airport security more times than she could count. She’d published 47 peer-reviewed papers by then. She’d keynoted on three continents in under two years. She led a department of sixty people who, by every account, adored her. And she couldn’t sit still in her own living room on a Sunday afternoon without her chest going tight and her mind reaching for the next task, any task, just to make the feeling stop. “I gave the closing keynote in Singapore on Thursday,” she told me, turning her conference lanyard over and over in her hands like a worry stone, “and I was already drafting my next grant proposal on the flight home. Not because I wanted to. Because if I stopped moving, I didn’t know what would happen.” I asked her what she thought would happen. She went quiet for a long moment, then said, “I think I’d just feel how empty it all is.” Sitting with her, I felt the thing I’ve come to recognize in so many driven women in that chair: a woman whose CV reads like a triumph and whose nervous system reads like an emergency. Her achievement treadmill wasn’t running toward anything. It was running from the quiet, and the quiet was the one thing her 47 papers and three continents of keynotes could never actually reach.
This shows up in a handful of recognizable ways. First, there’s the hollow ping, that predictable flash of emptiness that follows a real win. It’s what Lakshita described feeling in the elevator after her keynote, a half-second of pride swallowed almost instantly by a flat, gray “is that all there is.” That’s not ingratitude. That’s a nervous system responding to how fast external validation actually fades.
Second, there’s compulsive goal-setting, an almost desperate need for the next target before the current one’s even been celebrated. This isn’t healthy ambition. It’s a forward lurch, a way of outrunning the void rather than moving toward something you actually want.
Third, there’s a real inability to rest or sit in unstructured time without anxiety or self-attack showing up. For a lot of driven women, stillness is genuinely frightening. It’s in those quiet stretches that the unprocessed feelings and old anxieties that achievement was built to cover start surfacing, and the inner critic wakes up fast, punishing any minute not spent producing something. The body and mind got so used to vigilance that rest itself starts to register as danger.
Fourth, there’s diminishing returns. Each win delivers less than the last, so you need a bigger goal just to feel anything at all. That’s hedonic adaptation running at full tilt, the cycle escalating until it’s neither sustainable nor satisfying.
Fifth, there’s what I think of as identity fusion with output, where the operating belief becomes: I achieve, therefore I am. Worth gets measured in output, in what got produced this quarter, which makes rest feel like a threat to existing at all. It usually traces back to an early home where love and approval showed up only when you performed.
And finally, there are physical symptoms. The nonstop pressure of the achievement treadmill takes a real toll on the body. Chronic exhaustion, adrenal fatigue, insomnia despite bone-deep tiredness, even autoimmune flare-ups, show up often. Bessel van der Kolk’s line holds here too: the body keeps the score, and a nervous system stuck in fight, flight, or the shut-down of a dorsal vagal freeze simply cannot sustain that pace forever.
If you’ve arrived at everything you worked for and the void is still there, executive coaching can help you stop running and start building a life that actually matches the one you’ve earned. This isn’t about giving up your ambition. It’s about changing your relationship to it, moving from compulsive striving toward action that’s actually aligned with what you value. It means learning to tell the difference between a goal that comes from something you genuinely want and one that’s really just trying to plug a hole. Good executive coaching can help you find your footing in that messy, unfamiliar territory, helping you build an identity that doesn’t live or die with your job title, and a life that actually feels full instead of just impressive.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- 64% of feeling words express pleasure, 34% displeasure (PMID: 31071361)
- Lottery winners not happier than controls (PMID: 690806)
The Neuroscience of Unfulfillment: Hedonic Adaptation and the Achievement Treadmill
To get underneath the persistent emptiness that can follow even huge achievements, it helps to look more closely at the neuroscience of hedonic adaptation and what I’ve been calling the achievement treadmill. This isn’t a moral failing or a sign of ingratitude. It’s a basic feature of human neurobiology, and it explains why the emotional lift from outside success is, by nature, temporary.
Philip Brickman is the researcher who gave us the clearest early evidence for this, and it’s a study I return to often with clients. In 1978, Brickman and his colleagues studied lottery winners and found something that still surprises people when I say it out loud: within a fairly short window, big lottery winners weren’t any happier than people who’d never won anything (PMID: 690806). Their nervous systems had already reset the baseline back to wherever it started. That’s hedonic adaptation: our capacity to adjust to new circumstances, good or bad, until they simply become the backdrop of an ordinary day. Something good happens, a promotion, a milestone you worked toward for years, and you feel a real surge of positive emotion. But the brain is efficient about normalizing new states fast. The novelty wears off, the dopamine settles, and your emotional thermostat resets, usually close to where you started within weeks or months. That’s why the hollow ping of arrival is so common, and it makes lasting fulfillment from an outside achievement close to neurobiologically impossible on its own.
There’s a reason this mechanism exists, even though it feels cruel here. It keeps us from getting complacent, which served our ancestors well. But layer a trauma-shaped drive for achievement on top of it, and you get a genuinely brutal cycle. You chase the next goal, telling yourself this time the feeling will stick. But the brain makes sure it never does. That’s the achievement treadmill: a nonstop cycle of setting and reaching goals, discovering the reward fades fast, and needing something bigger just to register anything at all.
This kind of striving, fueled by an unconscious attempt to outrun old pain or prove your own worth, is exactly what Dr. Gabor Maté means when he writes about escape and pain. In the context of the arrival fallacy, the pain underneath isn’t just disappointment that the goal didn’t deliver. It’s older, unresolved pain that the achievement was supposed to soothe in the first place. The treadmill keeps spinning because the actual wound never got touched. It’s a closed loop where the very strategy meant to bring relief ends up keeping the suffering alive.
“The attempt to escape from pain is what creates more pain.”
Gabor Maté, MD, physician and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal
Here’s the three-layer version of all this, because I think it matters to hear it from more than one angle. Clinically: the arrival fallacy is a predictable outcome of hedonic adaptation interacting with a trauma-shaped reward system, where achievement briefly elevates dopaminergic reward signaling before the nervous system re-regulates back to its set point, a set point that, for many driven women, was calibrated early by conditional safety rather than by rest. In kitchen-table terms: your brain treats every win like a new couch. Thrilling for about two weeks, then just furniture you sit on without noticing. And if you grew up needing to earn your place at the table, your particular couch was never going to feel like enough no matter how nice it was, because the couch was never actually the problem. And on an actual Tuesday afternoon, this is what it looks like: you close a deal you worked eight months for, you feel something for maybe forty minutes, maybe less, and by dinner you’re already scrolling for the next thing, already half-annoyed at yourself for not feeling more, already reaching for your laptop instead of sitting with whatever that flatness actually is. None of that is a personality problem. It’s a nervous system doing precisely what nervous systems do, on a loop that was set a long time before you had any say in it.
Both/And: Holding the Tension of Ambition and Wholeness
In my work, I run into the idea a lot that naming the arrival fallacy, or naming the trauma-shaped roots of ambition, means you have to give up ambition altogether. That’s not it at all. The goal isn’t to stop striving. It’s to change how you strive. This is what I call a Both/And way of thinking: holding the pull between your genuine desire to grow and achieve, and your equally real need for peace, self-acceptance, and feeling whole. It means recognizing you can be ambitious and at peace, driven and actually fulfilled, both at once, not on a rotation.
Meilin, 39, a composite drawn from many years of this work, arrived at our first session on a rainy Thursday in March straight from a board meeting, still in the blazer she’d worn to present her Series C numbers that morning, her phone buzzing against the arm of the chair with a rhythm she’d clearly trained herself to ignore. She’d built a tech company from nothing into something worth eight figures. For years she’d operated on a single unspoken rule: her worth was exactly as large as her company’s valuation and exactly as stable as her work ethic. She kept pushing, kept winning, and underneath all of it sat a constant hum of anxiety she couldn’t name until we started naming it together. “I signed the term sheet on Monday,” she told me, still turning her phone face-down on her knee without looking at it, “and by Tuesday morning I was already annoyed that the number wasn’t bigger. I heard myself think that and felt sick.” Through our work, Meilin came to understand that her drive, however powerful, was also a part of her that had built itself in childhood to make sure she got seen and valued in a house that felt chaotic and unpredictable. That part meant well. It had also been quietly working her into the ground for over a decade.
Using Parts Work (Internal Family Systems therapy), Meilin learned to separate from that achieving part and get in touch with something steadier underneath it, what IFS calls the Self. She didn’t walk away from her company or her ambition. She learned to lead from a place of wholeness and self-compassion instead of from compulsion. She started setting boundaries. She delegated more. She started treating her own wellbeing as a requirement for sustainable success, not a reward she’d get around to eventually. Her drive stayed fully intact. It just stopped running the show alone. She still runs her company. She also, now, can sit on her own couch on a Saturday without her chest tightening, and that shift, small as it sounds from the outside, is the whole point.
The Systemic Lens: Beyond Individual Psychology
We’ve spent time on the individual psychological and neurobiological pieces of the arrival fallacy, and it matters to also name the bigger forces at work here, especially for driven women. None of us exists in a vacuum. Our individual experience gets shaped by the cultural stories and systems we’re embedded in. The relentless chase after external achievement isn’t only an individual pattern. A lot of it is a deeply built-in social expectation.
Our capitalist, patriarchal culture tends to prize constant output, outside validation, and an endless upward line of success. For women specifically, that pressure gets stacked with more: be a nurturing caregiver, be a supportive partner, keep up an idealized appearance, all while excelling in a demanding career. The message lands clearly: your worth is tied to your output and your willingness to keep striving, indefinitely. That’s fertile ground for the arrival fallacy, because women absorb these messages and chase outside markers of success, often at real cost to their own wellbeing.
On top of that, the systemic support that would make this sustainable, affordable childcare, equal pay, real access to leadership, is thin or missing for a lot of women. Many driven women are operating from a baseline of chronic stress before they’ve even started their day. The achievement treadmill isn’t only happening inside someone’s head. It’s an outside reality, built by systems that demand constant output without giving back adequate resources. Healing the arrival fallacy takes individual work, yes, but it also takes real engagement with the systemic change that would make a more humane world possible.
Building a Fullness That Doesn’t Empty Out Again
So if the arrival fallacy is this common, and the achievement treadmill this well-worn, how do we actually find a different way through? Getting to something more lasting isn’t about giving up ambition. It’s about changing your relationship to it. It means building a deeper connection to yourself, doing the work to heal what’s underneath, and defining success on terms that are actually yours. In my practice, I walk driven women through a handful of approaches that tend to matter most.
One foundational piece is values clarification: really sitting with and naming your core values, what actually matters to you, separate from outside expectations. Once your values are clear, you can start telling the difference between a goal that comes from real desire and one that’s trying to fill a void or earn love that should never have been conditional. This work lines your actions up with your actual self instead of chasing markers that end up feeling hollow anyway. If you’ve arrived at everything you worked for and the void is still there, executive coaching can help you stop running and start building a life that matches the one you’ve earned.
Next, somatic practices for tolerating stillness and unstructured time matter enormously. For a lot of driven women, the body has learned to link stillness with danger or worthlessness. Somatic work, practices centered on bodily sensation and nervous system regulation, is essential here. That might mean gentle movement, breathwork, or simply practicing sitting with discomfort without rushing to fix it. The goal is to slowly build your capacity to tolerate rest without the anxiety or self-attack that used to come with it automatically, retraining your nervous system to trust that stillness is safe.
Parts Work (Internal Family Systems, or IFS), which you saw in Meilin’s story, gives us a strong framework for understanding the different pieces of the psyche. In IFS, we learn to recognize and connect with the achieving part that got built in childhood to earn love, secure safety, or win acceptance. That part meant well, but it can end up overburdened, driving you relentlessly long after the original threat is gone. Through slow, compassionate attention, we can help that part put down its load, letting your actual Self step forward and lead. This process tends to feel genuinely freeing, letting you reclaim a sense of worth that doesn’t depend on your résumé. If you want to go further into understanding and repairing these internal dynamics, my program, I Am Enough (ENOUGH), gives you a clear, guided way to build self-compassion and a steadier sense of wholeness.
Grief work turns out to be a surprisingly powerful part of healing. It means mourning the fact that achievement was never going to provide what was actually missing back in childhood: unconditional love, acceptance, a sense of security that may have been absent or inconsistent. It’s acknowledging how much those unmet needs hurt, and letting yourself grieve the idea that outside success could ever fill that particular gap. This isn’t staying stuck in victimhood. It’s honoring what actually happened and putting down the exhausting job of trying to earn something that was always supposed to be yours by right.
Mindfulness-based practice for staying present instead of constantly reaching for the future is also genuinely effective. The achievement treadmill keeps your attention locked on what’s next. Mindfulness anchors you back in what’s actually happening right now, without piling judgment on top of it. That shift can lower anxiety, build self-compassion, and let you notice your life as it happens instead of endlessly chasing whatever comes next.
Finally, executive coaching focused on building an identity separate from professional achievement is genuinely valuable. For a lot of driven women, their professional identity has quietly become their only identity. Executive coaching that takes trauma seriously can help you build a fuller, more resilient sense of who you are, exploring who you are outside your title, your accomplishments, your output, and making room for interests that add to a sense of wholeness that doesn’t depend on your career trajectory. This isn’t just professional development. It’s redefining success on your own terms, with support built for people who’ve never had permission to slow down. Executive coaching can help you build a life that actually reflects what you value, not just what you were trained to chase.
Here’s the three-layer version of what earned, values-based fulfillment actually looks like, because this is the part that tends to land only once you hear it a few different ways. Clinically: sustainable wellbeing comes from shifting the reward system’s input, replacing externally validated achievement metrics with internally generated, values-congruent action, so that satisfaction is no longer solely dependent on a nervous system reset that was never built to hold it. In kitchen-table terms: instead of asking “did I win,” you start asking “did I do something that actually matters to me today,” and that second question, unlike the first, doesn’t reset itself to zero the moment you answer it. And on an actual Tuesday afternoon: it looks like closing your laptop at six because you told your daughter you’d be at her recital, and noticing that the good feeling from that decision is still there at nine p.m., still there the next morning, in a way the promotion never was. That’s not a smaller life. That’s a life built on a foundation instead of a leaderboard.
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The void isn’t proof that you haven’t done enough. It’s proof that achievement was never the right medicine for the wound. That’s a tender truth, and it’s also a genuinely useful one. It’s an invitation to step off the treadmill, not because you’re failing, but because you’re ready for a different kind of success, one built on wholeness, honesty, and a real connection to yourself. What I want to name directly, because my clients tell me directness is what they value most in our work together, is that this struggle isn’t a failure of willpower, discipline, or gratitude. It’s the predictable result of building a life on top of a foundation that was never quite stable to begin with, laid down room by room inside the proverbial house of life™ long before you had any say in its architecture. Not because your parents were monsters. Most of my clients’ parents weren’t. But because the love you got came with conditions you were too young to name and too dependent to refuse. It’s an invitation to build a new relationship with success, one where your worth was never actually up for negotiation, and where the fullness you’re after finally comes from somewhere that doesn’t run dry.
Warmly,
Annie
Related Reading
Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. McGraw-Hill, 2007.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery, 2022.
Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Schwartz, Richard C. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True, 2021.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
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Q: What is the arrival fallacy for driven women and how does it connect to trauma?
A: The Arrival Fallacy for Driven Women is often a survival adaptation from childhood. A way of coping with conditional love and unpredictable safety. It’s not a character flaw but a nervous system strategy that needs updating.
Q: How does this affect driven women specifically?
A: Driven women build careers on childhood adaptations. The hypervigilance that makes her exceptional at work is the same hypervigilance that keeps her from resting.
Q: Can therapy help?
A: Yes. Specifically trauma-informed therapy that works with the nervous system. IFS, EMDR, and Somatic Experiencing help the body learn that old survival strategies are no longer needed.
Q: How long does healing take?
A: Meaningful shifts typically emerge within 3-6 months. Full integration usually takes 1-2 years.
Q: I recognize this in myself. What’s the first step?
A: Find a therapist who specializes in relational trauma and understands driven women’s lives. You deserve someone who doesn’t need you to explain why you can’t “just relax.”
References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- 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)
- Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
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Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 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. 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.
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