Annie Wright - Relational Trauma Specialist
For ambitious women whose lives look good but don't feel that good
Relational Trauma Recovery Therapy with Annie
Helping ambitious women heal relational trauma and create thriving lives on solid foundations.
When your professional life thrives but your personal life struggles...
For women in California and Florida, I offer weekly relational trauma recovery therapy for ambitious women whose lives look impressive from the outside but feel exhausting to live inside.
Maybe you can handle a crisis at work without breaking a sweat, but your teenager’s eye roll sends you into a spiral. Maybe you’ve built financial security but still check your bank account obsessively. Maybe you’re the person everyone relies on, but you lie awake at 3 AM wondering if you’re failing at the things that actually matter.
If your personal relationships feel harder than your professional ones, if success feels necessary for safety rather than just satisfying, we should talk.
When achievement becomes both armor and prison...
These patterns aren’t character flaws—they’re brilliant adaptations to growing up where love felt conditional, criticism was constant, or chaos was normal.
When home doesn’t feel safe, children learn to survive by being useful, perfect, or invisible. You discovered that achieving got you attention, managing everyone’s emotions kept you safe, and anticipating problems prevented disasters. These strategies worked beautifully—until they became the only way you knew how to exist in the world.
Now the very drive that saved you keeps you performing your life instead of living it. You’ve built something remarkable, but it’s exhausting to maintain because it requires constant vigilance, endless productivity, and flawless execution just to feel okay.
What this actually looks like
Perfectionism that exhausts
You excel professionally but can never quite relax or feel satisfied with your accomplishments. Every success comes with the immediate thought “what’s next?” because pause feels dangerous, like you might lose momentum and everything could unravel.
Trust that wavers
Despite external validation, you doubt yourself and struggle to believe in your inherent worthiness. You read texts five times before sending, analyze conversations for hidden criticism, and feel like you’re one mistake away from being found out as a fraud.
Relationships that strain
Your professional life thrives while personal connections feel complicated, draining, or one-sided. You’re excellent at managing up and leading teams, but intimate relationships require a vulnerability that feels too risky after years of emotional self-protection.
A body that signals
Anxiety, insomnia, tension headaches, or digestive issues persist despite your best efforts at self-care. Your nervous system is stuck in overdrive, constantly scanning for threats and treating normal life stress like emergencies.
A pace that never slows
You can’t seem to downshift without feeling guilty, restless, or fearful that something will fall apart. Rest feels risky rather than restorative because your nervous system has learned that productivity equals safety.
Emotions that overwhelm
You can stay calm during work crises but lose it when your child won’t put on their shoes. Family conflicts trigger reactions that seem disproportionate to the situation, leaving you feeling out of control and wondering why you can’t manage your own household with the same skill you bring to managing teams.
How We’ll Work Together – Healing From the Inside Out
I understand these patterns because I’ve lived them—from using achievement to numb difficult emotions and prove my worth, to learning how to feel genuinely strong and stable from the inside out. Your drive and ambition aren’t the problem. The exhausting, compulsive relationship to achievement that keeps you performing your life instead of living it? That’s what we’ll heal.
In our work together, we’ll:
Heal your nervous system
We’ll address the hypervigilance and chronic activation that keeps you scanning for threats even when you’re safe. You’ll learn to regulate your nervous system so difficult conversations don’t feel like emergencies and family conflicts don’t send you into fight-or-flight.
Feel genuinely safe in your body
Through somatic work (helping your body learn new patterns of safety), we’ll help your body learn that safety isn’t dependent on perfect performance or constant vigilance. Those tension headaches, digestive issues, and sleep problems often resolve when your nervous system finally gets the message that you’re not in danger.
Move through life from strength, not survival
You’ll develop the internal capacity to respond rather than react, to make decisions from wisdom rather than anxiety, and to show up as yourself rather than who you think others need you to be.
Transform your closest relationships
As you heal, your capacity for genuine intimacy expands. You’ll be able to receive love without suspicion, have conflict without catastrophizing, and be present with your children without constantly worrying you’re damaging them.
Actually enjoy what you’ve built
Perhaps most importantly, you’ll develop the ability to feel satisfied with your accomplishments, to be present for spontaneous moments, and to experience genuine joy rather than just relief when something goes well.
Feel solid from the inside out
The goal is psychological empowerment that doesn’t depend on external validation—where your worth feels inherent rather than earned, and success becomes expression rather than survival.
My Trauma-Informed Approach
Unlike approaches that focus on symptom management, my work addresses the underlying relational patterns that drive perfectionism, hypervigilance, and compulsive achievement in high-functioning adults. This framework is grounded in trauma recovery research and evidence-based clinical practice.
1. Psychoeducation and Pattern Recognition
We’ll map how early relational experiences shaped your current coping strategies and belief systems. Understanding the nervous system’s role in why you read texts five times before sending or why rest triggers anxiety helps you recognize these patterns as adaptive responses rather than personal failings.
2. Emotion Regulation and Interpersonal Skills Development
Relational trauma often disrupts the development of core emotional and relational capacities. We’ll focus on building skills you may have missed—distress tolerance, boundary-setting, authentic self-expression, and the ability to maintain emotional equilibrium during interpersonal conflict.
3. Trauma Processing and Integration
Using evidence-based approaches including EMDR (a research-backed method for processing trauma) and somatic interventions (helping your body learn new safety patterns), we’ll process stored trauma responses that drive current symptoms. This work proceeds at a pace that maintains your window of tolerance, ensuring integration rather than retraumatization.
4. Corrective Relational Experiencing
The therapeutic relationship provides a secure base for experiencing healthy attachment patterns. Through attuned connection and appropriate boundaries, you’ll internalize new relational templates that support authentic intimacy without loss of self.
Is This Right For You?
You may recognize yourself already in what I’ve shared, but here are additional signs that relational trauma recovery therapy might be particularly valuable:
- You’ve built impressive professional success but find yourself thinking, “Is this all there is?” despite achieving goals you once thought would bring satisfaction.
- You’ve done therapy or coaching before, but the benefits feel surface-level—you still struggle with the same patterns that exhaust you most.
- Your personal relationships require more effort than your professional ones, even though you excel at managing teams and complex projects.
- You regularly use work, achievement, or staying busy to avoid sitting with difficult emotions or uncertainty.
- Despite external validation, you struggle with perfectionism, people-pleasing, or difficulty setting boundaries without guilt.
- You grew up in a family where love felt conditional, criticism was constant, or you learned early that being useful meant being valuable.
- Some part of you recognizes that managing symptoms isn’t enough—you need to address the patterns that keep you performing your life instead of living it.
- You want to move from constantly proving your worth to feeling genuinely solid from the inside out.
- You’re ready to invest in work that addresses root causes rather than just helping you cope better with the same old patterns.
- Your relationships feel strained or disconnected despite your success in other areas, and you suspect your early experiences with caregivers still influence how you show up in love.
- You lie awake at 3 AM wondering if you’ve already damaged your relationships with your children, your partner, or yourself through years of prioritizing achievement over presence.
If reading this feels familiar, trust that recognition.
Maybe you found yourself thinking “how does she know my life?” or nodding along to patterns you’ve never quite been able to name. These responses aren’t random—they’re your system recognizing that someone understands what it’s actually like to build an impressive life while managing patterns that feel both familiar and exhausting.
Working together
The Practical Details
Availability
I work with women in California and Florida through secure video sessions. This work is designed for women who understand that healing relational patterns is a strategic investment in every area of their lives.
Frequency
Weekly 50-minute sessions provide the consistency needed for nervous system healing and sustainable change. This isn’t quick-fix work—it’s deep transformation that requires commitment and time.
Format
Individual video sessions tailored specifically to your patterns, goals, and nervous system capacity. We move at a pace that feels challenging but not overwhelming.
Waitlist
My practice often maintains a waitlist. If this is the case when you reach out, my team can connect you with other exceptional relational trauma specialists at Evergreen Counseling who share my approach and understand the unique challenges facing ambitious women.
Ready to do the deeper work?
If you’re ready to explore relational trauma recovery therapy, please fill out the contact form or email support@anniewright.com, and a member of my team will be in touch to schedule your initial consultation.
Whether through relational trauma recovery therapy, executive coaching, my writing, or my upcoming course, I’m committed to helping ambitious women understand that you don’t have to choose between the drive that makes you remarkable and the internal stability that makes life sustainable.
The truth is, you can keep everything you’ve built while healing what’s driving the exhaustion beneath it. Your achievements don’t have to come at the cost of your peace, your relationships, or your health. When you address the patterns at their root, success becomes expression rather than survival.
You can’t change what happened in your childhood, but you can transform how those experiences show up in your adult life.
“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful.”
Terri St. Cloud
These words capture the philosophy behind everything I do. This work isn’t about perfecting your past—it’s about creating a future where your impressive life finally feels as good as it looks.
Wherever you are in your journey as you read these words, I wish you well.
Warmly,
