By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Clinically reviewed May 2026The 4 Trauma Responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn — A Complete Guide
LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026
You’ve heard of fight or flight, but modern trauma psychology recognizes four primary survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. For driven, ambitious women, these responses rarely look like running from a predator — they look like workaholism, perfectionism, chronic people-pleasing, and emotional shutdown. This comprehensive guide explains the neurobiology behind each response, how they show up in women who seem to have it all together, and what the path to healing actually looks like.
- When Survival Looks Like Success
- What Are the 4 Trauma Responses?
- The Neurobiology of Survival Responses
- How the 4Fs Show Up in Driven Women
- Can You Have More Than One Trauma Response?
- Both/And: Your Trauma Responses Are Brilliant and Costly
- The Systemic Lens: Trauma Responses Don’t Form in a Vacuum
- How to Begin Healing Your Trauma Responses
- Frequently Asked Questions
When Survival Looks Like Success
Shalini is forty-one years old. She’s a pediatric surgeon at a top-ranked research hospital, and she functions at the absolute top of her field. Her colleagues describe her as “precise,” “formidable,” and “laser-focused.” Her partners describe her as “unreachable.” She schedules her life in fifteen-minute increments. She hasn’t taken a real vacation in four years. When her last relationship ended, her primary feeling was relief — not because she didn’t care about him, but because the relationship had been one more thing demanding her presence, and she’d already given all of her presence to her work.
Shalini doesn’t think of herself as traumatized. She thinks of herself as efficient. What I see consistently in my clinical work is that these two things are not mutually exclusive. The efficiency is real. And it’s also a highly sophisticated, socially rewarded manifestation of the flight trauma response — a nervous system strategy she built long before she ever set foot in an operating room.
When most people think of trauma responses, they picture something dramatic: a soldier ducking behind cover, a child running from a threat, someone frozen with fear. But for the driven, ambitious women I work with, trauma responses look nothing like that. They look like a perfectly curated calendar. They look like never crying at work. They look like saying yes to every request before the asker has even finished their sentence. They look, from the outside, like success.
Understanding the four trauma responses — fight, flight, freeze, and fawn — is one of the most illuminating frameworks I offer clients. It’s the moment when a woman’s entire life suddenly makes sense. Not because she’s broken, but because she survived. This is a guide to understanding those responses, recognizing them in yourself, and beginning to build more choices.
What Are the 4 Trauma Responses?
The classic model of threat response was simple: fight or flight. Your nervous system detects danger, floods your body with adrenaline, and you either attack the threat or run from it. It’s a model that works well for explaining acute physical danger. It falls short when we try to understand what happens in chronic relational trauma — the kind that unfolds not in a single moment of crisis, but over years of living in an environment that wasn’t safe enough.
Over the past several decades, trauma researchers and clinicians expanded the framework to include two additional survival strategies: freeze and fawn. This “4F” framework, popularized by Pete Walker, MA, LMFT, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, gives us a much fuller picture of how the nervous system protects itself when the threat is relational, developmental, and ongoing.
The 4F framework, developed by Pete Walker, MA, categorizes the four primary defensive strategies the autonomic nervous system employs when faced with perceived threat: Fight (active aggression or dominance to neutralize the threat), Flight (escape or avoidance behavior), Freeze (immobilization and dissociation), and Fawn (appeasement and self-erasure to prevent conflict or abandonment). In complex developmental trauma, these strategies become chronic operating modes rather than acute situational responses.
In plain terms: When you feel unsafe, your body automatically selects one of four protective strategies: attack the threat, run from it, go numb and disappear inside yourself, or become whatever the threat needs you to be so it leaves you alone. None of these are choices you make consciously — they’re survival software your nervous system wrote when you needed it most.
Each of the four responses corresponds to a specific state of the autonomic nervous system, and each one was adaptive — meaning it was the right response for the environment in which it developed. The problem isn’t that you developed these responses. The problem is that your nervous system never got the signal that the original danger had passed, and it’s still running the same protective programs in contexts that no longer require them.
Let’s look at each response individually.
A sympathetic nervous system state characterized by hyperarousal, aggression, and the mobilization of energy to neutralize a perceived threat. In complex relational trauma, the fight response frequently manifests as explosive reactivity, an intense need for control, weaponized perfectionism, and the use of dominance to manage an environment that feels fundamentally unsafe. For a deeper look, read our full guide to the fight response in trauma.
In plain terms: The belief that if you’re big enough, exacting enough, or in control enough, nothing can touch you. It’s the armor of perfectionism and the exhaustion of constant vigilance.
A sympathetic nervous system state that mobilizes the body to escape a threat. In developmental trauma, physical escape often isn’t possible, so the flight response adapts into psychological flight: chronic busyness, workaholism, overachievement, and an inability to be still or present. The motion itself becomes the safety mechanism. For a fuller exploration, read our guide to the flight response in trauma.
In plain terms: The belief that if you just keep moving — keep achieving, keep producing, keep filling your calendar — the pain won’t catch you. It’s the exhaustion of never being able to stop.
A dorsal vagal parasympathetic state of immobilization, involving dissociation, emotional numbing, and a global shutdown of biological systems. The freeze response is activated when the nervous system determines that neither fighting nor fleeing will resolve the threat. It is the body’s most ancient and primitive survival circuit. Read our complete guide to the freeze response in trauma.
In plain terms: The belief that if you disappear inside yourself — go blank, go still, go numb — the threat will pass over you. It’s the safety of becoming invisible, even to yourself.
A complex trauma response involving the appeasement of a threat through people-pleasing, self-erasure, and the preemptive anticipation of others’ needs. First named by Pete Walker, MA, fawning involves abandoning one’s own needs, preferences, and boundaries in service of managing the emotional state of another person to avoid conflict, rejection, or abandonment. For the full picture, read our guide to the fawn response in trauma.
In plain terms: The belief that if you become exactly what everyone else needs — agreeable, accommodating, always available — you’ll be safe. It’s the profound exhaustion of sacrificing your self for connection.
The Neurobiology of Survival Responses
These responses aren’t personality traits. They aren’t character flaws. They are physiological imperatives, orchestrated by your autonomic nervous system, that operate faster than conscious thought. Understanding the biology behind them is one of the most powerful tools for releasing shame.
When your nervous system detects danger — whether that’s a physical threat, a raised voice, a critical email, or the particular look on your mother’s face — your amygdala (the brain’s threat-detection center) initiates a survival cascade. The amygdala sends an alarm signal to the hypothalamus, which triggers the release of adrenaline and cortisol. Your prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain responsible for language, logic, empathy, and decision-making — goes partially offline. Your body is now in survival mode, and survival mode doesn’t need nuance. It needs speed.
Stephen Porges, PhD, Distinguished University Scientist at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, developed what is now a cornerstone framework in trauma treatment: Polyvagal Theory. His research maps three distinct neural circuits that govern how we respond to safety and threat.
The first and most sophisticated circuit is the ventral vagal system, which supports social engagement — connection, conversation, co-regulation, play. When we feel safe, this system is online. We’re present, relational, and regulated.
When we detect threat, we drop into the second circuit: the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilizes fight or flight. Heart rate accelerates, breathing quickens, muscles flood with blood. The body is ready to act.
If the threat is overwhelming and neither fighting nor fleeing will work, we drop into the third and most ancient circuit: the dorsal vagal system, which produces the freeze or collapse response. Metabolic activity slows dramatically. Endogenous opioids are released (which is why freeze often feels numb rather than painful). The body plays possum.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has documented extensively how trauma keeps the nervous system locked in these survival states long after the original danger has passed. The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between a threat that happened thirty years ago and one happening now — if the cue is familiar enough, it will activate the same survival response.
“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Psychiatrist and Trauma Researcher, Author of The Body Keeps the Score
Peter Levine, PhD, somatic psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, adds an important dimension: the survival response is not just psychological, but biological. When a deer survives a predator encounter, it literally shakes and trembles, discharging the survival energy from its body. Humans, socialized to control their physical responses, often can’t do this — and so the survival energy gets trapped in the body, keeping the nervous system in a state of chronic threat activation.
What this means in practical terms: your trauma responses aren’t just patterns of thinking. They’re patterns held in your body, in your nervous system, in the specific way you breathe and brace and go still. Healing them requires working at that same embodied level — not just understanding them intellectually, but helping your nervous system find its way back to safety.
RESEARCH EVIDENCE
Peer-reviewed findings that inform this clinical framework:
- 13% of sample reported freeze response (modest or greater immobility) to 20% CO2 threat stressor (PMID: 17880916)
- PTSD patients showed no significant valence effect on body sway freezing measure F(2,26)=0.756 p=0.480 while controls did F(2,26)=5.308 p=0.012 (PMID: 28352237)
- Peritraumatic dissociation associated with PTSD symptoms r=0.17 (95% CI 0.03-0.29) k=5 studies in youth meta-analysis (PMID: 33601676)
How the 4Fs Show Up in Driven Women
In the women I work with — surgeons, entrepreneurs, executives, founders — trauma responses are almost always disguised as culturally celebrated traits. This is one of the reasons they’re so difficult to identify and so painful to acknowledge. Your trauma response is probably something you’ve been praised for your entire life.
The fight response looks like: the startup founder who is brilliant and impossible to work for; the partner who can’t tolerate uncertainty in any form; the manager who delivers feedback like a verdict. The anger underneath the perfectionism is almost never visible as anger. It shows up as “high standards,” as “holding the line,” as “not suffering fools gladly.” Colleagues may admire it. Romantic partners may not survive it.
The flight response looks like: the woman who hasn’t taken a real vacation in years and doesn’t understand why people who take vacations don’t feel guilty; the overachiever whose schedule is a fortress designed to keep stillness — and feeling — out; the founder who doesn’t know what she wants but knows she wants more. The motion is real and often extraordinarily productive. And it’s also, at its root, running. If your sense of self-worth collapses the moment you stop producing, that’s worth looking at.
The freeze response looks like: going completely blank during a hard conversation with a partner; the chronic procrastination that plagues an otherwise brilliant woman on projects that feel too loaded; the emotional flatness that descends after years of fighting or fleeing — a kind of exhausted numbness where even things that used to bring joy feel distant. Clients often describe this as “living behind glass.” They’re watching their life rather than inhabiting it.
The fawn response looks like: the woman who has a word for everyone’s feelings except her own; the executive who gives excellent advice to colleagues and cannot take a single day off herself without guilt; the relationship where she’s become so attuned to her partner’s emotional state that she’s completely lost track of her own. Fawning is often invisible because it looks so much like virtue — kindness, generosity, selflessness. What’s harder to see is that it comes from fear, not abundance.
Christine is thirty-four years old. She’s a product manager at a Series B startup, responsible for a team of twelve and the roadmap for a product that half a million people use. She is known for her calm in a crisis. She is the one who stays late to fix the broken build, who texts her reports on Sunday with encouragement, who absorbs the CEO’s anxiety and redistributes it as actionable tasks. Last week, after her performance review — in which she was told she was “exceptional, truly exceptional” — she sat in her car in the parking garage and felt completely nothing. Not pride. Not relief. Just a flat, gray nothing. She thought there was something wrong with her. What I’d want her to know is that she’s been in a chronic fawn/flight hybrid response for so long that she’s lost access to her own interior life. The freeze came from the exhaustion of constant self-erasure.
Can You Have More Than One Trauma Response?
Yes — and this is the rule, not the exception. Pete Walker describes “hybrid” responses: fight-flight, fawn-freeze, fawn-flight. Most people have a dominant response — a default mode their nervous system reaches for first — but they also have secondary strategies that activate in specific contexts.
The same woman can be in fight at work (she has the control there, the authority, the competence) and drop into fawn the moment she walks in the door at her mother’s house. She can be in flight all week (achievement as avoidance) and crash into freeze on Sunday afternoon when the calendar is finally empty. She can fawn at the dinner table and explode in fight in the car on the way home.
This isn’t inconsistency. It’s sophisticated adaptation. Your nervous system learned which survival strategy worked best in each specific relational context, and it still deploys accordingly. The partner who triggers your fight response and the parent who triggers your fawn response may be activating different historical imprints — different wired memories of what was required to stay safe in that type of relationship.
If you want to understand your own hybrid pattern more deeply, our full guide to hybrid trauma responses explores this in detail. And for a quick read on your foundational patterns, the free quiz is a good place to start.
Both/And: Your Trauma Responses Are Brilliant and Costly
Here is where I want to be very careful with language, because this is where women I work with most often misapply what they learn.
Learning about trauma responses can trigger enormous shame. You look back at years of behavior — the way you managed by controlling, the relationships you left before they could leave you, the times you smiled when you wanted to scream — and you feel that you have been living wrong. That you have been broken in ways you didn’t know. That the achievements you’ve built are somehow tainted because they were partly driven by fear.
That is not the Both/And I’m offering you.
The Both/And is this: Your trauma responses were genuinely intelligent. They were the right tool for the environment in which they developed. The fight response that made you formidable in a household that only respected power — that was appropriate. The flight response that got you out of a bad situation, that built your career, that gave you options and resources and a life your childhood self couldn’t have imagined — that was extraordinary. The freeze that protected your psyche from shattering when the reality of your environment was unbearable — that kept you intact. The fawn that kept the volatile person in your life from escalating — that kept you safe.
AND. These same responses are now operating in contexts that don’t require them. The fight response that protects you from a critical parent is not helping you in your marriage. The flight response that built your business is preventing you from actually enjoying it. The freeze that protected you in childhood is keeping you from intimacy now. The fawn that kept you safe is costing you your sense of self.
Both are true. The intelligence of the response AND the cost of its persistence. Honoring both is the foundation of healing work that isn’t built on shame.
Sunita is thirty-nine, a corporate attorney, and she’s been in therapy with me for eight months. Last week she said something that I think captures the Both/And as well as anything I’ve heard: “I used to think the problem was that I’d survived. Like, if I’d been more damaged, I’d have an excuse to need help. But now I’m starting to see that the way I survived is exactly why I need help. And both of those things can be true.” Yes. Exactly that.
The Systemic Lens: Trauma Responses Don’t Form in a Vacuum
I want to be explicit about something that trauma frameworks sometimes flatten: which survival strategies are available to you, which ones are rewarded, and which ones are punished — these are not just individual or familial questions. They are profoundly shaped by systems of power.
The fight response, for example, is not equally available to everyone. A white male executive’s fight response is often labeled “leadership,” “passion,” or “decisiveness.” A woman’s fight response is labeled “difficult,” “aggressive,” or “hysterical.” For Black women, expressing a fight response carries the added weight of navigating the “angry Black woman” stereotype — a racist caricature that has been used for generations to dismiss legitimate anger and punish the expression of it. This means that for many Black women, the fight response has been socialized out of the available options entirely, leaving fawn and freeze as the only safe survival strategies in many contexts.
Gender socialization shapes all of this. Girls are actively trained out of fight and flight responses from very early ages — anger is “unfeminine,” physical assertiveness is “unladylike,” and leaving or refusing is “abandonment” — while being simultaneously rewarded for fawn-coded behaviors: being helpful, accommodating, emotionally attuned, self-effacing. This doesn’t mean women can’t have fight or flight dominant responses; clearly they can. But the cultural pressure is real and it shapes the nervous system’s options.
Immigrant families carry their own layers. When survival depends on assimilation, on not drawing attention, on being invisible or perfectly compliant, freeze and fawn often become survival-level adaptations long before any individual family dynamics add to the equation. The systemic demand for invisibility gets wired into the nervous system just as powerfully as a volatile parent does.
Workplace environments do their own work. The “professionalism” standard in corporate America pathologizes many authentic nervous system expressions — crying, expressing anger, showing fear — while rewarding fawn-coded behaviors (agreeableness, self-effacement, emotional labor for others) and flight-coded behaviors (overwork, self-sacrifice, never taking sick days). Learning to see your trauma responses as partially shaped by these systems isn’t about removing personal responsibility. It’s about contextualizing your survival in a way that makes the shame lighter and the healing more complete.
Understanding complex PTSD and its relationship to systemic trauma is often an important part of this work. Similarly, if your early environment involved relational trauma, our guide to betrayal trauma may offer important context for why certain responses feel so deeply wired.
How to Begin Healing Your Trauma Responses
The path out of automatic trauma response activation is not willpower. You cannot think your way out of a nervous system state. You cannot decide to stop being triggered. What you can do — gradually, with support, in a body that is slowly learning that it’s safe — is widen your window of tolerance and build more choice into your responses.
Three directions matter most in this work:
Somatic work. Because trauma responses are stored in the body, healing them requires working with the body. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Janina Fisher, PhD’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Pat Ogden, PhD’s body-based approaches all work with the incomplete survival responses that remain trapped in the nervous system. This might look like noticing the physical sensation of a fight response (the jaw clenching, the chest puffing) before it becomes behavior. It might look like learning to complete the flight impulse (literally moving your legs) in a way that allows the survival energy to discharge. It might look like titrated, gentle contact with the freeze response — small windows of presence, slowly extended. ()
Parts work. Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, offers an extraordinarily useful lens for this: each trauma response is a “part” of you that formed to protect you. The fight part. The fawn part. The freeze that goes blank during arguments. These parts aren’t problems to be eliminated — they’re protectors carrying old burdens that no longer serve. Working with them from a place of curiosity and compassion rather than frustration or shame is often what allows them to finally relax.
Relational repair. The nervous system learned these patterns in relationship, and it heals in relationship. New, safe, consistent relational experiences — whether in therapy, in friendship, in a healthy romantic partnership — gradually teach the nervous system that the old strategies aren’t required anymore. This is slow work. It can’t be rushed. But it is the work that allows real change to take root.
If you’re ready to go deeper, trauma-informed therapy is the most direct path. My course, Fixing the Foundations, offers a structured, self-paced way to begin this work. And if you want a first step that doesn’t require a commitment, the free quiz can help you understand your foundational patterns.
Jamie is forty-three. She came to me after a decade of executive coaching, two failed marriages, and what she described as “running out of options for outrunning myself.” She’d been in flight so long that she’d built an extraordinary life and an empty one simultaneously. Over eighteen months of work, she began to understand the flight response not as a flaw to fix but as a strategy to update. She didn’t stop being ambitious. She stopped needing ambition to protect her from feeling. There’s a difference, and it’s everything.
These responses aren’t character flaws. They aren’t proof that something is wrong with you. They’re proof that your nervous system once needed to survive something real, and it found a way. The work isn’t about dismantling who you are. It’s about gently, carefully, with support, building more choices — so that you can eventually live in a body that doesn’t have to fight its way through an ordinary Tuesday.
If any of this resonates, I’d encourage you to explore our guide to complex PTSD, which often underlies these chronic response patterns. If you’re ready to work directly, you can connect with us here. And if you want to understand how these patterns show up specifically in ambitious women navigating burnout and leadership, executive coaching may be the right container for that work.
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: What are the four trauma responses?
A: The four trauma responses are fight (aggression, control, or perfectionism used to neutralize a threat), flight (escape through workaholism, busyness, or overachievement), freeze (shutdown, dissociation, and emotional numbing when neither fight nor flight feels viable), and fawn (people-pleasing, self-erasure, and appeasement to avoid conflict or abandonment). Together, they’re called the 4F framework, a model expanded beyond the original “fight or flight” to account for the full range of how the nervous system responds to perceived threat.
Q: How do I know which trauma response is my dominant one?
A: Notice your automatic response to stress, conflict, or perceived threat. Do you get angry, controlling, or perfectionistic (fight)? Do you bury yourself in work or fill every moment with activity to avoid stillness (flight)? Do you go blank, numb, or suddenly can’t access words (freeze)? Or do you immediately focus on managing the other person’s emotional state, agreeing with things you don’t agree with, or saying yes when you want to say no (fawn)? Most people have a dominant pattern, though context often shifts which response activates. Taking the free quiz is a useful starting point.
Q: Can you have more than one trauma response?
A: Yes, and this is extremely common. Most people have a dominant response but use hybrid combinations depending on the relationship, context, and perceived level of threat. You might be a fight type with colleagues and a fawn type with your parents, or a flight type during the week and a freeze type on weekends when the busyness stops. Our guide to hybrid trauma responses covers this in depth.
Q: Are trauma responses the same as PTSD?
A: Trauma responses are the physiological mechanisms through which the nervous system protects itself from perceived threat. When these responses become chronically activated — when the nervous system gets stuck in survival mode long after the original danger has passed — this can develop into PTSD or, more commonly in people with histories of relational and developmental trauma, Complex PTSD. Not everyone who has trauma responses has PTSD, but if the responses are significantly interfering with your relationships, work, or sense of self, it’s worth exploring with a trauma-informed clinician.
Q: Which trauma response is most common in women?
A: Due to gender socialization, women are disproportionately conditioned toward fawn and freeze responses. The fawn response — people-pleasing, self-erasure, emotional caretaking — is actively rewarded in women from very early ages. The flight response is also extremely common in driven, ambitious women, where it shows up as workaholism, overachievement, and the inability to rest. That said, fight and freeze are also present and often coexist with the more dominant response in hybrid patterns.
Q: Can trauma responses be healed?
A: Yes. The nervous system has significant capacity for change — what researchers call neuroplasticity. Through somatic therapy, internal family systems work, and relational repair (new, safe relational experiences that gradually teach the nervous system it doesn’t need the same protective strategies), it is possible to widen your window of tolerance and build real choice into your responses. Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never be triggered — it means the trigger won’t automatically run the show. Working with a trauma-informed therapist is the most direct path.
Q: How are childhood trauma responses connected to adult relationship patterns?
A: Deeply. The nervous system learns its survival strategies primarily in childhood, in the context of our earliest attachment relationships. Those same strategies then get activated in adult relationships that carry similar emotional signatures — a partner whose criticism pattern feels like a parent’s, a boss whose unpredictability echoes a volatile household. Betrayal trauma and childhood emotional neglect often wire particularly durable response patterns. The good news: the nervous system learned these patterns relationally, and it can update them relationally too.
Related Reading
Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.
van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books, 1997.
Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W.W. Norton, 2011.
Fisher, Janina. Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge, 2017.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
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.
- Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
- Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
- Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
- 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)
- Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
- Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping ambitious women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven, ambitious women — including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs — in repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
