The Difference Between Loneliness and Being Alone (And Why Driven Women Confuse Them)
| Dimension | Loneliness | Solitude / Being Alone |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A painful discrepancy between the social connection you have and the connection you want or need. Loneliness isn’t about being alone but about feeling disconnected, seen, or understood. | The physical experience of being without others. Which may be sought, chosen, restorative, and entirely separate from the felt sense of disconnection. |
| Its relationship to others’ presence | Loneliness can be most acute in a room full of people. At a party, in a marriage, in a career. When presence doesn’t produce felt connection. | Solitude by definition involves being alone. But many people experience profound peace, creativity, and fullness when alone, which has nothing to do with loneliness. |
| What causes it | Lack of intimacy, feeling unseen, not having relationships that hold your full complexity. Loneliness is often about quality and depth more than quantity of contact. | Not a painful experience when it’s chosen. Solitude becomes problematic only when it’s imposed, when the person doesn’t have the option of connection, or when it’s used to avoid needed contact. |
| How driven women experience it | Often embedded in a life that looks fully populated. Colleagues, partners, children. While the interior experience is profound aloneness, because the relationships don’t hold their full complexity. | Many driven women genuinely need and value solitude. Time away from demand, quiet, and the particular restoration that only comes from being alone with oneself. |
| What heals loneliness | Not more contact, but deeper contact. Relationships in which you can be genuinely known, including the parts that feel too complex, too needy, or too much. | Solitude doesn’t need healing. What may need attention is building the capacity to be comfortably alone if aloneness triggers anxiety, or learning to distinguish the peace of solitude from the avoidance of connection. |
| In therapy, what I’m tracking | Whether the loneliness has a relational root. Often it does. And what has made genuine intimacy unavailable, whether through past harm or current choices. | Whether the solitude is genuinely restorative or is serving an avoidant function. And whether the person has adequate connection available when they choose to reach for it. |
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
Roshni was at her own birthday party when it happened. Forty people in her apartment, people she had known for years, people who genuinely loved her. The music was right, the food was good, someone had made a speech that made everyone laugh. And Roshni was standing in the middle of it, holding a gl…
Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Crowded Room Where You’re Still Alone
- What Loneliness Actually Is
- What Solitude Actually Is
- Why Driven Women Confuse the Two
- A Second Portrait: When the Loneliness Has No Name
- The Systemic Lens: The Loneliness Epidemic and Who It Hits Hardest
- The Neuroscience of Loneliness: Why It Hurts So Much
- The Both/And of Connection and Aloneness
- What Healing Loneliness Actually Requires
- The Digital Illusion: Why Online Connection Doesn’t Cure Loneliness
- Learning to Be With Yourself
- Frequently Asked Questions
Loneliness and being alone are clinically distinct experiences: loneliness is the subjective pain of feeling disconnected, invisible, or unseen, and can occur in a crowded room or a long-term relationship, while being alone is the neutral or restorative state of physical solitude. Driven women frequently confuse the two because their schedules leave little room for genuine solitude, making loneliness harder to locate and name. In my work with driven women, the loneliness often surfaces when external achievement no longer drowns it out.
In short: Loneliness is the pain of feeling unseen or disconnected and can happen anywhere, including in full rooms and long marriages, while solitude is the neutral or restorative experience of being physically alone.
If you haven't lost your mind but you've lost your way, my self-paced course Direction Through the Dark is the map for the post-recognition phase.
With more than 15,000 clinical hours supporting women who describe feeling alone in their own lives despite full schedules and loving relationships, I’ve seen how often loneliness hides in plain sight. Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist, explains through polyvagal theory how the nervous system’s co-regulation needs make the felt sense of connection a biological requirement distinct from mere physical proximity (Porges 2011).
The Crowded Room Where You’re Still Alone
Roshni was at her own birthday party when it happened. Forty people in her apartment, people she had known for years, people who genuinely loved her. The music was right, the food was good, someone had made a speech that made everyone laugh. And Roshni was standing in the middle of it, holding a glass of wine, feeling completely and utterly alone.
Note: Roshni is a composite character drawn from many driven women I’ve worked with over my 15,000+ clinical hours. Her story is shared to illustrate common patterns, not to expose any individual’s private history.
She didn’t tell anyone. She smiled and laughed and thanked people for coming. She was, as she always was, the most socially capable person in the room. And she went home afterward and sat on her kitchen floor and cried, without entirely knowing why.
The loneliness that Roshni was experiencing. The loneliness in the middle of a crowd, the loneliness in the presence of people who loved her. Is one of the most disorienting and least understood forms of human suffering. It’s not the loneliness of being physically alone. It’s the loneliness of not being truly known. And it’s extraordinarily common in driven women who have spent their lives being impressive rather than vulnerable, capable rather than real.
This post is about the difference between loneliness and being alone. Two experiences that are often conflated, but that are fundamentally different in their nature, their origins, and their needs.
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What Loneliness Actually Is
Loneliness isn’t the same as being alone. You can be alone and not lonely. You can be surrounded by people and profoundly lonely. The distinction isn’t about physical proximity. It’s about the quality of connection.
DEFINITION BOX: LONELINESS The Clinical Definition: The subjective, aversive experience of perceived social isolation. The discrepancy between the social connections one has and the social connections one desires. Loneliness is distinct from objective social isolation and isn’t determined by the number of social contacts. The Plain-Language Translation: Loneliness is the felt sense of not being truly connected. Of being seen on the surface but not known in depth, of being present in relationships but not genuinely met. It’s the gap between the connection you have and the connection you need.
The research of John Cacioppo, one of the leading scientists in the study of loneliness, demonstrates that loneliness is a genuine physiological state. Not just a feeling, but a biological condition that has measurable effects on health, cognition, and immune function. Chronic loneliness activates the same threat-response systems as physical danger. The lonely person is, at the neurological level, in a state of chronic low-grade threat.
This is important to understand because it explains why loneliness is so difficult to simply “think your way out of.” The loneliness isn’t primarily a cognitive problem. It’s a physiological one. And it requires physiological intervention: genuine connection, genuine being-known, genuine belonging.
DEFINITION BOX: EXISTENTIAL LONELINESS The Clinical Definition: The fundamental aloneness that’s intrinsic to human existence. The recognition that each person’s subjective experience is ultimately inaccessible to others, and that there are aspects of one’s inner life that can’t be fully communicated or shared. The Plain-Language Translation: The loneliness that’s not a problem to be solved, but a condition of being human. The awareness that no one can ever fully know you, that your inner life is ultimately private, that there’s a core of aloneness at the center of every self. This isn’t pathological. It’s existential. And learning to be with it, rather than running from it, is part of what it means to be fully alive.
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What Solitude Actually Is
Solitude is something entirely different from loneliness, though it’s often confused with it. Particularly by driven women who have been taught to equate being alone with being lonely.
DEFINITION BOX: SOLITUDE The Clinical Definition: The state of being alone, chosen or unchosen, that provides an opportunity for self-reflection, restoration, and the deepening of one’s relationship with oneself. Distinguished from loneliness by the absence of the aversive quality. Solitude is experienced as restorative or neutral rather than painful. The Plain-Language Translation: Being alone in a way that feels okay, or even good. The quiet of your own company. The space to think, to feel, to simply be without the demands of social performance. Solitude isn’t loneliness. It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s the experience of being genuinely with yourself.
The capacity for solitude. The ability to be alone without it becoming loneliness. Is a developmental achievement. It requires a sufficient internal sense of connection: the felt sense that you’re not fundamentally alone, that there’s a self to be with, that the inner world is a place worth inhabiting. This internal sense of connection is built, in the first instance, through early attachment relationships. The child who has experienced consistent, attuned care develops an internal representation of connection that can sustain them in the absence of the caregiver. The child who hasn’t had that experience often finds aloneness intolerable. Because the internal world isn’t a safe or comfortable place.
For many driven women, the capacity for solitude has been underdeveloped. Not because they’re never alone, but because when they’re alone, they fill the space with activity, productivity, or distraction. The stillness of genuine solitude. The quiet of simply being with oneself. Is something they have never learned to tolerate, because the internal world has never felt safe enough to inhabit.
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Why Driven Women Confuse the Two
The confusion between loneliness and being alone is particularly common in driven women, and it has specific roots in the patterns that produce drive itself.
Many driven women grew up in families where emotional attunement was inconsistent or absent. They learned, very early, that the inner world wasn’t a safe or comfortable place. That feelings were dangerous, that needs were burdensome, that the safest strategy was to stay oriented outward, toward achievement and performance and the management of others’ perceptions. The internal world wasn’t developed as a place of resource. It was avoided.
As a result, these women often have a very thin relationship with their own inner life. They’re extraordinarily capable in the external world. They can manage complexity, navigate relationships, achieve at the highest levels. But the internal world is largely unknown territory. And when they’re alone, without the structure and stimulation of the external world, they encounter the loneliness that has been there all along, waiting in the stillness.
This loneliness is often misidentified. The driven woman who feels terrible when she’s alone often concludes that she needs more social connection. More events, more plans, more people. But what she’s actually experiencing isn’t the loneliness of social isolation. It’s the loneliness of not being truly known. Including not being known to herself. And adding more social contact won’t fix it, because the connection she’s seeking isn’t primarily external. It’s internal.
The [childhood emotional neglect](https://anniewright.com/childhood-emotional-neglect/) that underlies much of this pattern is worth naming directly. When a child’s emotional experience is consistently not witnessed, not validated, not responded to, the child learns that their inner life doesn’t matter. Or worse, that it’s a burden. The adult who grew up with emotional neglect often has a very impoverished relationship with their own emotional experience. They don’t know what they feel. They don’t know what they need. They don’t know who they’re when they’re not performing.
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“eat rice have faith in women what I dont know now I can still learn if I am alone now I will be with them later if I am weak now I can become strong slowly slowly if I learn I can teach others if others learn first I must believe they will come back and teach me … slowly we begin giving back what was taken away our right to the control of our bodies knowledge of how to fight and build”
, Fran Winant
A Second Portrait: When the Loneliness Has No Name
Marlena was thirty-eight when she came to see me. She was a writer. Successful, critically acclaimed, genuinely talented. She was also, she told me, “chronically, mysteriously lonely.”
Note: Marlena is a composite character drawn from many driven women I’ve worked with. Her story is shared to illustrate common patterns, not to expose any individual’s private history.
She had a partner she loved. She had close friends. She had a community of fellow writers and artists who valued her work. By any external measure, she was well-connected. And she was lonely in a way that she couldn’t explain or justify.
“I feel like I’m always performing,” she told me. “Even with the people I love most. Like there’s a version of me that shows up in the world, and then there’s the real me, and they never quite meet.”
What Marlena was describing is one of the most painful forms of loneliness: the loneliness of the false self. The experience of being seen and even loved, but not for the real you. For the performance of you, the curated version, the self that has been shaped by years of learning what’s acceptable and what’s not.
This form of loneliness can’t be fixed by more social connection. It can only be fixed by the gradual, courageous work of becoming more genuinely known. Of allowing the real self to be seen, first in the safety of a therapeutic relationship, and then, slowly, in the relationships that can hold it.
The work with Marlena wasn’t about helping her be less lonely by adding more connection. It was about helping her become more real. To herself first, and then to the people she loved. It was about learning to tolerate the vulnerability of being seen, rather than managing the impression she made. And it was about learning to be with herself in solitude. To inhabit her own inner world with something approaching ease.
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The Systemic Lens: The Loneliness Epidemic and Who It Hits Hardest
We’re living through what researchers and public health officials have described as a loneliness epidemic. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and isolation identified loneliness as a public health crisis, with health consequences comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Social connection has declined dramatically over the past several decades, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated trends that were already well underway.
This epidemic doesn’t affect everyone equally. It hits hardest in populations that are already marginalized. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, people in poverty. The structural conditions that produce social isolation. Economic inequality, geographic mobility, the erosion of community institutions, the replacement of genuine connection with digital simulation. Are not neutral. They reflect and reinforce existing hierarchies of belonging.
For driven women specifically, the loneliness epidemic intersects with the particular isolation that comes from being exceptional. The woman who’s the first in her family to achieve a certain level of success, the woman who has outpaced her peer group, the woman who’s operating at a level that few people around her understand. This woman is often profoundly lonely in a way that’s invisible to others. Her success looks like belonging. But belonging requires being known, and being known requires vulnerability, and vulnerability is the thing that driven women have often learned to avoid at all costs.
The cultural pressure to perform wellness and success. To curate a life that looks connected and full. Makes this loneliness even harder to acknowledge. Because acknowledging loneliness feels like admitting failure. It feels like evidence that you’re not as successful as you appear, that the life you’ve built isn’t as good as it looks, that something is fundamentally wrong with you.
Nothing is fundamentally wrong with you. You’re lonely because you’re human, and because the conditions of your life. The pace, the performance, the isolation of exceptional achievement. Have made genuine connection difficult. This is a structural problem, not a personal failure.
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The Neuroscience of Loneliness: Why It Hurts So Much
Loneliness isn’t just an emotional experience. It’s a physiological one, and understanding its neuroscience helps explain why it’s so difficult to simply “think your way out of” it.
The research of John Cacioppo and his colleagues demonstrates that loneliness activates the same neural threat-detection systems as physical danger. The brain of the lonely person is, in a very real sense, in a state of chronic low-grade threat. Scanning the social environment for danger, interpreting ambiguous social signals as hostile, and mounting a physiological stress response that, over time, has significant consequences for health.
This threat response has evolutionary logic. For our ancestors, social exclusion was genuinely life-threatening. The individual who was separated from the group was vulnerable to predation, starvation, and the thousand dangers of the pre-modern world. The neural alarm system that registers social disconnection as threat was adaptive in that context. The problem is that this system doesn’t distinguish between the genuine social isolation of the prehistoric outcast and the felt sense of not being truly known at a birthday party in a modern apartment. Both register as threat. Both activate the same physiological response.
This is why loneliness is so exhausting. The person who’s chronically lonely is chronically in a state of low-grade physiological threat. The nervous system running its threat-detection protocols continuously, consuming energy, disrupting sleep, impairing immune function, and making it harder to engage in the very behaviors that might alleviate the loneliness. Loneliness creates the conditions that make connection more difficult. The hypervigilance to social threat, the tendency to interpret ambiguous signals negatively, the withdrawal that protects against further rejection. It’s a self-perpetuating state.
The neurobiological research also illuminates why the loneliness of not being truly known is so painful. The brain’s social cognition systems aren’t just tracking whether we’re physically present with others. They’re tracking the quality of the connection. Whether we’re genuinely seen, genuinely understood, genuinely belonging. The driven woman who’s surrounded by people but not truly known isn’t registering “social connection” in the brain’s social cognition systems. She’s registering the absence of genuine connection, which the brain processes as a form of social threat. Her loneliness is neurobiologically real, regardless of how many people are in the room.
This understanding has important implications for how we approach healing loneliness. Adding more social contact won’t, by itself, resolve the loneliness of not being truly known. The brain’s social cognition systems aren’t satisfied by quantity of contact. They’re satisfied by quality of connection. By the experience of genuine attunement, genuine understanding, genuine belonging. And that quality of connection requires the vulnerability of being genuinely seen, which is the very thing that driven women have often learned to avoid.
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The Both/And of Connection and Aloneness
Here’s the Both/And: you can be genuinely connected to others and genuinely alone at the core of your experience. Both things are true simultaneously, and neither negates the other.
The existential loneliness that’s intrinsic to human experience. The fundamental aloneness of having an inner life that no one else can fully access. Is not a problem to be solved. It’s a condition to be accepted, and eventually, to be inhabited with something approaching equanimity. The acceptance of existential aloneness isn’t resignation. It’s the beginning of genuine connection. Because when you stop running from the aloneness, you become available for the kind of connection that’s real rather than defensive.
And it’s also true that the loneliness of not being truly known. The loneliness of the false self, the loneliness of performing rather than being. Is a problem that can be addressed. Not by adding more social contact, but by doing the work of becoming more genuinely present: to yourself, and then to others.
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What Healing Loneliness Actually Requires
Healing the loneliness of not being truly known requires, first and foremost, becoming more truly known to yourself. This is the work of therapy, of [inner child work](https://anniewright.com/inner-child-work-complete-guide/), of the slow, patient process of developing a relationship with your own inner life.
It requires learning to tolerate vulnerability. The experience of being seen in your imperfection, your uncertainty, your genuine need. This is genuinely terrifying for women who have built their identities around competence and capability. But it’s the only path to genuine connection. You can’t be truly known if you’re always performing. And you can’t be truly loved if you’re always managing the impression you make.
It requires finding relationships. And, critically, a therapeutic relationship. In which genuine vulnerability is safe. Not all relationships can hold this. Part of the work is developing the discernment to know which ones can.
And it requires building a relationship with solitude. Learning to be alone without it becoming loneliness, learning to inhabit your own inner world with curiosity and compassion rather than anxiety and avoidance.
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The Digital Illusion: Why Online Connection Doesn’t Cure Loneliness
One of the defining features of contemporary loneliness is its coexistence with unprecedented levels of digital connectivity. We’re more connected, in the technical sense, than any previous generation in human history. We can communicate instantly with people anywhere in the world. We have access to communities organized around every conceivable interest and identity. We can maintain relationships across geographic distances that would’ve severed them entirely in previous generations.
And we’re lonelier than ever.
The paradox isn’t difficult to explain, once you understand what the brain’s social cognition systems actually need. Digital connection. The text message, the social media post, the video call. Provides a simulation of social contact that satisfies some of the brain’s social needs some of the time. But it’s a thin simulation. It lacks the physiological co-regulation that comes from physical presence. It lacks the spontaneity and unpredictability of genuine encounter. It lacks the vulnerability of being seen in real time, without the opportunity to edit and curate. And it is, for many people, a way of performing connection rather than experiencing it. Of maintaining the appearance of social engagement while remaining fundamentally unseen.
For driven women specifically, social media can be a particularly potent form of pseudo-connection. The performance of a successful, connected life on social media provides the appearance of belonging without the vulnerability of genuine belonging. It allows the woman who’s deeply lonely to present a version of herself that’s surrounded by people, engaged in interesting activities, living a full and enviable life. And it provides a stream of validation. Likes, comments, followers. That mimics the experience of being valued, without requiring the genuine exposure of being known.
This isn’t a judgment of social media use. It’s an observation about the limits of digital connection as a remedy for genuine loneliness. The loneliness of not being truly known can’t be resolved by being seen by many people in a shallow way. It requires being seen by a few people in a deep way. And that depth of being seen requires the vulnerability that digital performance is specifically designed to avoid.
The work of healing loneliness in the digital age includes, in part, the work of distinguishing between digital connection and genuine connection. Of noticing when you’re reaching for the phone as a way of avoiding the loneliness rather than addressing it, and of investing the time and vulnerability that genuine connection requires.
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Learning to Be With Yourself
The capacity for genuine solitude. For being alone in a way that’s restorative rather than painful. Is built gradually, through the practice of turning inward with kindness.
It begins with noticing what happens when you’re alone. What arises? What do you reach for? What are you trying to avoid? The driven woman who immediately fills every moment of aloneness with productivity or distraction is avoiding something. The work is to slow down enough to notice what it is.
It continues with the practice of staying. Of sitting with the discomfort of aloneness without immediately escaping it. Not for hours, initially. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to notice that the discomfort is survivable. That the inner world, however unfamiliar, isn’t dangerous.
And it deepens through the practice of self-compassion. The capacity to be with your own experience with the same warmth and acceptance that you’d offer a person you love. The inner world becomes a safer place to inhabit when you stop treating it as a problem to be managed and begin treating it as a home to be tended.
The women I’ve worked with who have developed a genuine capacity for solitude describe it as one of the most unexpected gifts of the healing process. They describe the experience of being alone and feeling, for the first time, genuinely at ease. Not bored, not anxious, not reaching for distraction, but simply present with themselves. That ease isn’t emptiness. It’s the presence of a self that has been found, and that has become, at last, a safe and interesting place to be.
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“eat rice have faith in women what I dont know now I can still learn if I am alone now I will be with them later if I am weak now I can become strong slowly slowly if I learn I can teach others if others learn first I must believe they will come back and teach me … slowly we begin giving back what was taken away our right to the control of our bodies knowledge of how to fight and build”
, Fran Winant
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If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
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Q: **1. Why do I feel lonely even when I’m surrounded by people?
A: Because loneliness isn’t about physical proximity. It’s about the quality of connection. If you’re surrounded by people but not truly known by them, you’ll feel lonely. The solution isn’t more social contact but deeper, more genuine connection. Which requires vulnerability and the willingness to be seen.
Q: Is it normal to prefer being alone to being with people?
A: Yes. Many people have a genuine preference for solitude, and this isn’t pathological. The question is whether the aloneness is restorative (solitude) or aversive (loneliness). If you prefer being alone and feel genuinely at ease in your own company, that’s healthy introversion. If you prefer being alone because social connection feels threatening or exhausting, that may be worth exploring.
Q: How do I know if my loneliness is existential or relational?
A: Existential loneliness is the background hum of human existence. The awareness of fundamental aloneness that’s present even in the midst of genuine connection. Relational loneliness is the specific pain of not being truly known by the people in your life. Both are real. Relational loneliness can be addressed through the work of becoming more genuinely present and vulnerable. Existential loneliness is addressed through acceptance and the development of a relationship with solitude.
Q: Can therapy help with loneliness?
A: Yes. The therapeutic relationship is often the first place where driven women experience genuine being-known. Where they can be seen in their full complexity, including their vulnerability and their struggle, without managing the impression they make. This experience of genuine connection in therapy is itself healing, and it creates a template for genuine connection in other relationships.
Q: What if I’ve been alone for a long time and I’ve stopped wanting connection?
A: The withdrawal from connection is often a protective response. The nervous system’s way of managing the pain of loneliness by reducing the desire for what it can’t have. This is worth exploring with a therapist. The goal isn’t to force connection, but to gently rebuild the capacity for it.
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Related Reading
1. Cacioppo, John T., and William Patrick. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
2. Winnicott, D. W. “The Capacity to Be Alone.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39 (1958): 416, 420.
3. Murthy, Vivek H. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. Harper Wave, 2020.
4. Storr, Anthony. Solitude: A Return to the Self. Free Press, 1988.
5. Yalom, Irvin D. Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books, 1980.
6. Cacioppo, John T., and Stephanie Cacioppo. “The Growing Problem of Loneliness.” The Lancet 391, no. 10119 (2018): 426.
References
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
- Winnicott, D.W.. Playing and reality. Penguin, 1971.
- Brown, Sandra L.. Women Who Love Psychopaths. Mask Publishing, 2018.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
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As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), 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 USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She’s currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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