The Emptiness of Arrival: Why Reaching the Goal Feels Like Nothing
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
You spent years working toward a massive goal, convinced that achieving it would finally make you feel safe, worthy, and happy. But when you arrived, you felt nothing but a hollow emptiness. This guide explores the “arrival fallacy,” the neurobiology of dopamine dysregulation, and why achievement can’t heal a relational wound.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- The Day After the Promotion
- What Is the Arrival Fallacy?
- The Neurobiology of the Letdown
- How the Emptiness Shows Up in Driven Women
- The Childhood Root: When Achievement Was the Only Currency
- Both/And: You Can Be Proud of the Goal AND Devastated by the Emptiness
- The Systemic Lens: A Culture That Sells the Horizon
- How to Heal the Void
- Frequently Asked Questions
The arrival fallacy is the mistaken belief that achieving a goal will produce lasting happiness or a sense of safety, only for that fulfillment to evaporate almost as soon as the goal is reached. The term was coined by positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who observed that the hedonic adaptation following success often leaves high performers feeling hollow rather than satisfied. The emptiness isn’t a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that was wired to treat achievement as survival, not joy. In my work with driven women, the hardest part is usually admitting that the thing they sacrificed everything to reach simply didn’t deliver what it promised.
In short: The arrival fallacy is the collapse of expected fulfillment after reaching a major goal, leaving driven women feeling empty rather than satisfied because the nervous system was chasing safety, not joy.
I’ve worked with driven women in more than 15,000 clinical hours, and the arrival fallacy shows up in nearly every high performer who reaches out, often disguised as confusion or numbness rather than named grief. Edward Deci, PhD, and Richard Ryan, PhD, psychologists and researchers at the University of Rochester, found through self-determination theory that intrinsic motivation and genuine need-fulfillment, not goal attainment alone, are what produce lasting psychological well-being (Deci and Ryan 2000).
The Day After the Promotion
Mina is a 38-year-old director at a global consulting firm, a composite drawn from many years of this work. For five years she’s sacrificed her weekends, her sleep, and her relationships to make partner. She told herself that once she got the title, she’d finally be able to relax. She’d finally feel like she’d “made it.”
Yesterday the firm announced her promotion. Her inbox flooded with congratulations. Her parents called, beaming with pride. But this morning, as Mina sits in her kitchen holding a mug of coffee she hasn’t touched, she feels absolutely nothing. There’s no joy, no relief, no sense of profound safety. There’s only a terrifying, hollow emptiness, followed immediately by the thought: What’s next?
“I kept waiting for it to land,” she told me a few days later, still turning that same mug in her hands like it might warm back up if she held it long enough. “Everyone kept congratulating me and I just kept nodding, because I didn’t know how to tell them the number was right there and I still couldn’t find where the feeling was supposed to be.”
What I notice, sitting with a woman like Mina, isn’t a deficiency in her. It’s a nervous system that got so good at delivering the result that it never learned how to register the reward. The achievement lands in the inbox and the parents’ voicemail. It never quite lands in the body.
If you’re a driven woman, you likely recognize Mina’s morning-after emptiness. It’s one of the most painful and isolating experiences of relentless striving: realizing that the destination you sacrificed everything for doesn’t contain the feelings you were promised.
In my work with clients, I see this pattern constantly. The driven woman who built her career as a fortress. Not because she loved the work, though she often does, but because achievement was the one domain where the rules were clear and the rewards were predictable. Unlike her childhood home, where love was conditional and the ground kept shifting, the professional world offered a transactional clarity that felt, at least for a while, like safety.
What makes this particularly painful for driven women is the isolation. She can’t talk about it at work; vulnerability there is a liability. She can’t talk about it at home; her partner sees the successful version of her and doesn’t understand why she’s struggling underneath it. She often can’t talk about it with friends either, if she even has close friends, because genuine intimacy requires the kind of emotional availability her nervous system has been rationing since childhood.
We live in a culture that pathologizes the individual while ignoring the system around her. A woman who can’t sleep gets melatonin. A woman who can’t stop working gets a productivity app. A woman who can’t feel anything in her marriage gets told to “communicate better.” None of that touches the actual question: what happened to this woman that taught her that her worth was conditional, that rest was dangerous, and that needing anything from anyone was a form of weakness?
This is the tension I sit with alongside my clients every week. The driven woman who’s built something extraordinary, and who’s also quietly breaking under the weight of it. Both things are true. Both deserve attention. The path forward isn’t about choosing one over the other. It’s about learning to hold both with the kind of compassion she’s never been taught to direct toward herself. And it’s why the systemic piece matters here too. Without it, therapy just becomes another item on the to-do list of a woman who’s already doing too much, another form of self-improvement layered onto a life that doesn’t need more improving. It needs naming: the family system that parentified her, the educational system that rewarded her performance while ignoring her pain, the professional culture that promoted her resilience while quietly exploiting it.
What Is the Arrival Fallacy?
The experience of reaching a massive goal and feeling empty is so common that psychologists have a name for it. Here’s the three-layer version, because this concept only does its job once you actually feel it rather than just understand it. Clinically: the arrival fallacy describes the mismatch between anticipated and actual emotional reward following goal attainment, a mismatch rooted in how the brain’s motivational circuitry is wired. In kitchen-table terms: you were promised a feeling on the other side of the finish line, and the feeling never showed up. And on an ordinary Tuesday morning, it looks like Mina at her kitchen counter, coffee going cold, staring at a promotion email and feeling nothing where relief was supposed to be.
A cognitive illusion, coined by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, describing the false belief that reaching a specific destination, achieving a goal, or acquiring a certain status will result in enduring happiness and psychological fulfillment.
In plain terms: It’s the “I’ll be happy when…” trap. It’s the belief that the promotion, the marriage, the weight loss, or the bank balance will magically fix your internal world. When it doesn’t, you assume you just need a bigger goal.
For women with a history of relational trauma, the arrival fallacy isn’t just a disappointment. It’s a crisis. When you’ve used achievement as your primary coping mechanism, realizing that achievement doesn’t work leaves you entirely without a survival strategy.
The neurological and psychological process by which people rapidly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative life changes. I think about this constantly through the work of Robert Sapolsky, PhD, the Stanford neuroscientist whose book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers is one I recommend to almost every driven client who thinks her flatness means something’s wrong with her gratitude. His explanation is that the brain’s reward circuitry is calibrated for novelty and contrast, not for savoring. Once a desired outcome becomes the new baseline, dopamine release drops back to resting levels, stripping the achievement of its anticipated emotional charge.
In plain terms: Your brain is wired to want the next thing, not to savor the thing you just got. That promotion or milestone you worked years for becomes ordinary the moment it arrives. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because your nervous system has already moved the goalpost. That’s not ingratitude. That’s neurobiology.
The Neurobiology of the Letdown
To understand the emptiness of arrival, we have to look at the brain’s reward system, and it helps to hold this at three levels at once. Clinically: dopamine functions primarily as an anticipation and motivation signal rather than a pleasure signal, which means the chemical high point of any goal pursuit typically precedes, not follows, its completion. In kitchen-table terms: your brain gave you its best drugs while you were still climbing, not once you reached the top. And on an ordinary Tuesday, it looks like signing the contract you worked five years for and feeling, within minutes, a strange flatness where triumph was supposed to be.
When you’re working toward a goal, your brain releases dopamine. Dopamine isn’t the “happiness” chemical. It’s the “anticipation and motivation” chemical. It feels good to strive because dopamine is driving you forward the entire time you’re in pursuit.
But the moment you achieve the goal, the dopamine drops. The pursuit is over. If you don’t have a baseline of serotonin and oxytocin, the neurochemicals associated with contentment, safety, and connection, that drop in dopamine leaves you in a neurochemical void.
Anna Lembke, MD, psychiatrist at Stanford University and author of Dopamine Nation, has spent her career studying exactly this mechanism: our brains are wired to constantly seek the next reward, and the pursuit itself is the high, not the having (Lembke 2021).[1] If your nervous system is dysregulated from early trauma, you can’t tolerate the quiet of that void. Your brain immediately demands a new goal to trigger the next dopamine hit, creating a cycle of achievement addiction.
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)
A neurobiological phenomenon in which dopamine release peaks during the pursuit of a reward rather than upon its receipt. Robert Sapolsky, PhD, the Stanford neuroscientist and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers I mentioned above, has shown that the brain’s mesolimbic reward system fires most intensely in anticipation of a goal, not in its attainment, meaning the chase is neurochemically more rewarding than the destination.
In plain terms: Your brain gives you the biggest hit of feel-good neurochemicals while you’re still striving, not after you’ve arrived. So the moment the contract is signed or the degree is conferred, the neurochemical surge disappears, and what’s left can feel like a hollow echo of what you expected. You weren’t supposed to feel this flat. But this is exactly how your brain is designed.
How the Emptiness Shows Up in Driven Women
The emptiness of arrival manifests in highly specific ways for driven women:
The Moving Goalpost: You hit the revenue target, but before you even celebrate, you decide the target wasn’t high enough. You immediately set a new, harder goal to avoid feeling the emptiness.
The Post-Achievement Crash: After a major launch or promotion, you don’t feel happy. You feel profoundly depressed, lethargic, or physically ill. Your body, no longer fueled by the adrenaline of the pursuit, collapses.
The Imposter Panic: Instead of feeling secure in your new role, you feel terrified. The arrival didn’t cure your imposter syndrome. It amplified it, because now the stakes of being “found out” are even higher.
Mina told me this last one landed the hardest for her. The promotion didn’t quiet the voice that said she didn’t belong in the room. It handed that voice a bigger room to echo in.
The Childhood Root: When Achievement Was the Only Currency
Anjali is a VP of Engineering at a Series D startup, another composite drawn from many years of this work. She’s forty-two, holds degrees from two institutions most people would recognize, and hasn’t taken a sick day in three years. Her colleagues describe her as unflappable. Her direct reports describe her as inspiring. Her therapist, when she finally found one, would describe her as a woman whose entire identity was built on proving she was enough.
“I don’t know when it started,” Anjali told me during our fourth session, her hands clasped in her lap with the kind of stillness that looks like composure but is actually a freeze response. “I just know that somewhere along the way, I stopped being a person and became a résumé. And now I don’t know how to be anything else.”
What Anjali was describing wasn’t burnout, though it can look like it. It’s the quiet cost of building a life on a childhood wound that whispered: you’re only as valuable as your last accomplishment.
In my clinical work, I frequently see how the arrival fallacy is rooted in what I call the Achievement as Sovereignty framework. If you grew up in an environment where love, attention, or safety were conditional on your performance, you learned a devastating equation: Output = Worth.
You believed that if you could just become successful enough, perfect enough, or wealthy enough, you’d finally earn the unconditional love and safety you were denied as a child. You built a magnificent penthouse on your Proverbial House of Life™, believing the view from the top would fix the cracked foundation underneath it.
In my work with clients navigating these patterns, I see consistently how the pressure to perform becomes indistinguishable from a felt sense of survival. Not a metaphor. A lived neurological reality.
The emptiness of arrival is the devastating realization that the equation is false. A promotion can’t heal a mother wound. A seven-figure salary can’t regulate a traumatized nervous system. Achievement is the wrong medicine for a relational injury. Anjali’s résumé kept growing for years after that fourth session. What changed wasn’t the résumé. It was what she started asking herself in the gap between one accomplishment and the next.
Both/And: You Can Be Proud of the Goal AND Devastated by the Emptiness
When driven women experience the emptiness of arrival, they often feel profound shame. They think, “I’m so ungrateful. I have everything I ever wanted. What’s wrong with me?”
We have to practice the Both/And here. You can be genuinely proud of the incredible things you’ve built, the money you’ve earned, and the barriers you’ve broken, AND you can be devastated that none of it made you feel whole. Your grief doesn’t invalidate your success, and your success doesn’t invalidate your grief.
You don’t have to shame yourself for feeling empty. The emptiness isn’t a sign that you’re broken. It’s a sign that you’re finally ready to stop running and look at the actual wound.
Richard Schwartz, PhD, the developer of Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, gives me language I return to constantly for exactly this kind of shame. IFS holds that the mind is made up of parts, each with its own role and its own protective logic, and that none of them are the enemy, even the ones causing pain. For a driven woman, there’s almost always a hardworking manager part that took over young, learned to equate output with worth, and has been running the show ever since because it once kept her safe. Underneath that part is usually an exiled one that never got to just be a kid, that still feels the emptiness the manager part works so hard to outrun. Schwartz’s model doesn’t ask you to get rid of the manager part. It asks you to bring some compassion to the part that’s been performing since childhood, and to finally let the exiled part be heard instead of buried under the next achievement. (PMID: 23813465)
The Systemic Lens: A Culture That Sells the Horizon
We can’t discuss the arrival fallacy without acknowledging the capitalist culture that relies on it. Our entire economic system is built on the promise that the next purchase, the next promotion, or the next milestone will finally deliver happiness.
If we all realized that arrival is empty, we’d stop consuming and we’d stop overworking. The system requires you to believe in the horizon so you’ll keep running on the treadmill. When you feel empty after a major achievement, you’re not failing at capitalism. You’re seeing through its core illusion.
Anjali named this herself, months into our work, after closing the biggest deal of her career and feeling the same flat nothing she’d felt at her promotion the year before. “I keep thinking the next milestone will be the one that finally works,” she said. “And some part of me knows it never is, and I keep running toward it anyway.”
I keep coming back to Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, whose book The Body Keeps the Score is the one I hand to clients who assume their exhaustion is just a scheduling problem. His core finding, built across decades of clinical research, is that the body keeps a record of chronic stress and chronic striving long after the mind has moved on to the next task. For a woman like Anjali, that means the post-achievement crash isn’t only psychological. It’s somatic. Years of running on adrenaline get stored in the muscles, the gut, the sleep architecture, showing up as exhaustion, illness, or a body that finally shuts down the week after the deal closes, precisely when it’s supposedly safe to rest. The mind reaches the goal. The body is still running the treadmill it’s been on for decades, because that’s where the striving actually got encoded. (PMID: 9384857)
How to Heal the Void
If achievement can’t heal the emptiness, what can? Healing requires turning your attention away from the horizon and toward your internal foundation.
1. Grieving the Illusion: You have to do the painful work of grieving the belief that success will save you. You have to mourn the loss of the “I’ll be happy when…” fantasy before you can learn to be present in the reality of now.
2. Somatic Regulation: You have to learn to tolerate the quiet. When the dopamine of the pursuit drops, your nervous system will panic. Somatic therapy teaches your body how to feel safe in stillness, without needing a crisis or a goal to anchor you.
3. Relational Healing: If the root wound is relational (conditional love, emotional neglect), the healing has to be relational too. You can’t achieve your way out of a relational wound. You have to heal it through safe, attuned connection, often beginning in the therapeutic relationship.
Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist at Indiana University and the developer of Polyvagal Theory, gave the field the concept of neuroception: the nervous system’s below-conscious process of scanning for cues of safety or danger. This is the piece I keep returning to when a client asks why she can’t just relax now that she’s arrived. You can’t think your way into safety, and you definitely can’t achieve your way into it. The body has to feel it. A nervous system that’s spent years in sympathetic drive, or worse, in a dorsal-vagal shutdown that masquerades as numbness, needs repeated experiences of a ventral-vagal state, the physiological signature of genuine safety, before it can tolerate the quiet that follows a dopamine drop without treating that quiet as a threat. Achievement never gave Mina’s body that experience. Only safety, felt in real time with another regulated nervous system, can. (PMID: 7652107)
You’ve spent your life climbing mountains, hoping the view from the top would finally make you feel whole. It’s time to stop climbing and start healing. If you’re ready to begin this work, I invite you to explore therapy with me or consider my foundational course, Fixing the Foundations™.
If you recognize yourself in any of this, if you’re reading these words at midnight on your phone, or in a bathroom stall between meetings, or in your parked car with the engine off, I want you to know something no one in your life may have ever said to you directly. The fact that you’re searching for answers is itself a sign of health. It means some part of you, beneath the performing, beneath the achieving, beneath the years of proving, still knows you deserve more than survival dressed up as success.
You don’t have to earn the right to heal. You don’t have to hit rock bottom first. You don’t need a “good enough” reason. The quiet ache that brought you to this page tonight is reason enough.
What I want to name here, because so few people will, is that the struggle you’re experiencing isn’t a failure of willpower, discipline, or gratitude. It’s the predictable outcome of building a life on a foundation that was never stable to begin with. Not because your parents were monsters. Most of my clients’ parents weren’t. But because the love you received came with conditions you were too young to articulate and too dependent to refuse, and those conditions, be good, be easy, be impressive, don’t need too much, don’t feel too much, don’t be too much, became the operating system you’ve been running on ever since.
The work of trauma-informed therapy isn’t about dismantling what you’ve built. It’s about finally understanding why you built it. And gently, carefully, with someone who can hold the complexity of it, beginning to separate who you are from who you had to become to survive. This distinction, between the self you invented and the self you actually are, is the most important and most terrifying threshold in the healing process. Because on the other side of it is a version of you that doesn’t need to earn rest, or justify joy, or perform worthiness. And for a woman who’s been performing since childhood, that kind of freedom can feel more dangerous than the cage she already knows.
If you’re reading this at an hour you should be sleeping, on a device that’s usually running your calendar or your Slack or your email, I want you to know that the ache you’re feeling isn’t pathology. It’s your nervous system finally telling you the truth your performing self has been too busy to hear: something needs to change. Not your productivity. Not your morning routine. Not necessarily your marriage. Something deeper. Something foundational. The thing underneath all the things.
Healing isn’t linear, and it isn’t pretty. My clients who are furthest along in their recovery will tell you that the middle of the process, when you can see the pattern clearly but haven’t yet built new neural pathways to replace it, is the hardest part. You’re too awake to go back to sleep, and too early in the process to feel the relief you came for. This is where most people quit. It’s also where the most important work happens.
The nervous system that spent decades in survival mode doesn’t surrender its defenses easily. And it shouldn’t. Those defenses kept you alive. The work isn’t to override them. It’s to slowly, session by session, offer your nervous system the experience it never had: being fully seen, fully held, and fully safe, without having to perform a single thing to earn it. Over time, and I mean months, not weeks, the system begins to update. Not because you forced it, but because you finally gave it what it was starving for all along: the experience of mattering, exactly as you are.
This is what I mean when I say “fixing the foundations.” Not fixing you. You were never broken. Fixing the foundational beliefs about yourself that were installed by a childhood you didn’t choose, reinforced by a culture that exploited your adaptations, and maintained by a nervous system that was just trying to keep you safe. Those foundations can be rebuilt. But only if someone is willing to go down there with you. That’s what therapy is for.
What I want to be direct about, because directness is what my clients tell me they value most in our work together, is that naming this pattern isn’t the same as healing it. Awareness is the beginning, not the destination. The woman who reads this post and thinks “that’s me” has taken an important step. But the nervous system doesn’t reorganize through insight alone. It reorganizes through repeated, corrective relational experiences, the kind that can only happen in a therapeutic relationship where she’s seen without performance, held without conditions, and allowed to fall apart without anyone trying to put her back together too quickly.
Deb Dana, LCSW, author of Anchored and The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, is someone whose language I hand almost verbatim to clients in this exact spot. She describes healing as “building a platform of safety that the nervous system can stand on.” For the driven woman, this means creating experiences, in therapy, in her body, in her closest relationships, where safety doesn’t have to be earned through performance, where she can be confused, uncertain, messy, slow, and still be met with warmth rather than withdrawal.
In my clinical experience, the women who come to this work aren’t looking for someone to tell them what to do. They’ve been told what to do their entire lives, by parents, by institutions, by a culture that treats feminine ambition as both admirable and suspect. What they’re looking for, even when they can’t articulate it, is someone who can sit with them in the space between who they’ve been performing as and who they actually are, without rushing to fill that space with solutions, affirmations, or action plans. The willingness to simply be present with what is, without fixing it, is itself a radical act for a woman whose entire life has been organized around fixing, achieving, and producing.
Mina, close to eight months into our work now, still keeps that same mug on her kitchen counter most mornings. What’s changed is what happens while she’s holding it. She told me recently that she’d started standing at the counter for a few minutes before checking her phone, just to notice what was actually there before the day’s first ask arrived. “Some mornings it’s still nothing,” she said. “But some mornings I feel the coffee. I feel the kitchen. That’s new. I used to just feel the next thing.” She still works long hours. She still runs a demanding team. The mug still goes cold some days. What’s different is what happens in the minutes before she picks it up.
The proverbial house of life™ that a lot of driven women have built rests on a foundation poured under pressure, one that was never designed to hold rest, only output. Rebuilding it doesn’t mean walking away from the ambition. It means going back into the rooms that got skipped in the rush to finish the house, and finally furnishing them, at your own pace, with something sturdier than achievement.
This article is for educational purposes and isn’t a substitute for individual therapy, diagnosis, or treatment. If what you’ve read here resonates, therapy with Annie is available for driven women ready to do this work, and you can also explore her course, Fixing the Foundations, or a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.
Warmly,
Annie
Q: If achievement doesn’t bring happiness, should I just stop trying?
A: No. The goal of healing is not to kill your ambition; it is to change your relationship to it. When you heal the underlying wound, you can still pursue massive goals, but you pursue them out of joy, curiosity, and purpose, rather than a desperate need to prove your worth.
Q: Why do I feel depressed after a big success?
A: This is a neurobiological crash. Your brain has been flooded with dopamine and adrenaline during the pursuit. When the goal is achieved, those chemicals drop precipitously. If your baseline nervous system is dysregulated, this drop feels like profound depression.
Q: I feel so guilty complaining when I have a great life. How do I stop the guilt?
A: The guilt is a defense mechanism. It is easier to feel guilty than it is to feel the terrifying grief that your success didn’t fix your pain. Therapy helps you bypass the guilt so you can actually process the underlying grief.
Q: How do I know if my goals are healthy or trauma-driven?
A: Look at the energy behind the goal. If the thought of failing or changing your mind fills you with existential dread, panic, or a sense of worthlessness, the goal is likely trauma-driven. If the goal feels expansive, exciting, and flexible, it is likely healthy.
Q: Can therapy help me enjoy my success?
A: Yes. By regulating your nervous system and healing the childhood wounds that keep you in a state of hypervigilance, therapy allows you to actually inhabit the present moment and experience the joy of the life you have built.
Related Reading
[1] Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.
[2] Ben-Shahar, T. (2007). Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. McGraw-Hill.
[3] Schafler, K. M. (2023). The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power. Portfolio.
[4] Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery.
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References
Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)
- van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.
Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)
- Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT #95719 · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven 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 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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The Everything Years (W.W. Norton)
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Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
