There’s a certain kind of woman who can be brought to the edge of tears while sitting on hold with a benefits administrator — not because it’s hard, but because the sheer normalcy of it is staggering. When you come from a chaotic childhood, “adulting” isn’t boring. It’s reparative. This post is about why the mundane tasks most people complain about are, for those of us who didn’t have stability early on, quietly revolutionary.
Presence is the ability to fully inhabit and engage with the here-and-now experience without distraction or avoidance. It is not about zoning out, forcing positivity, or escaping hard feelings; presence means sitting with whatever is happening in the moment, even the uncomfortable stuff, with openness. For you, presence is more than mindfulness jargon—it’s a milestone in trauma recovery that rewires your nervous system to trust safety in the ordinary. This skill transforms everyday tasks from meaningless chores into moments where you can rebuild stability, notice growth, and quietly reclaim your life from the long shadow of past pain.
You carry the quiet weight of relational trauma when everyday tasks—like managing benefits or enrolling a child in preschool—feel overwhelming, because those ordinary moments were once unstable or unsafe for you.
Presence and authentic gratitude aren’t just feel-good ideas; they are trauma recovery milestones that rewire your brain’s reward and connection systems, helping you reclaim safety in the mundane rhythms of daily life.
When you stop dismissing the mundane as boring and instead recognize it as a reparative, grounding experience, you create stability that nurtures healing and transforms ordinary moments into acts of resilience and growth.
Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.
Definition
Gratitude & Presence: Gratitude, when practiced authentically rather than performatively, has been shown to shift neural activity in regions associated with reward, moral cognition, and interpersonal bonding. Presence — the capacity to inhabit ordinary moments fully — is both a mindfulness skill and a trauma recovery milestone.
A week ago was the open enrollment period for benefits at the therapy center I own here in Berkeley.
SUMMARY
The mundane, ordinary texture of daily life — the smell of coffee, a morning walk, a quiet evening — is something that people who have survived significant pain often learn to receive with particular appreciation. This post is a reflection on why the unremarkable is often the most remarkable thing of all.
I sent an email out to my staff letting them know about the week-long enrollment window and also about how I’d expanded benefits this year to include coverage for dependents on our medical, vision, and dental plans.
That same week I spent my lunch break gathering documents for my financial planner to help assess how much long-term disability insurance coverage I need to apply for and how much more per month I can now allocate to my daughter’s 529 plan and to our retirement accounts.
I completed the intake paperwork for my daughter’s new preschool, found new dentists for all of us, and confirmed our benefits with customer service.
It was a week of full-on adulting and, if I’m being honest, there were a few moments when I felt overwhelmed by it all.
Negotiating with benefits brokers, gathering medical and tax records, trying to decipher insurance paperwork legalese…
But even in the midst of the overwhelm, I felt proud of myself and, actually, so grateful for the mundanity of it all.
For me, what might be viewed as mundane is actually a powerful reparative experience given my personal relationaltrauma background.
In today’s essay, I explain what made this reparative and more about why I’ll never take the mundane for granted.
Why I’ll never take the mundane for granted.
TAKE THE QUIZ
What’s driving your relational patterns?
A 3-minute assessment to identify the core wound beneath your relationship struggles.
Free Relational Trauma Quiz
Do you come from a relational trauma background?
Most people don't recognize the signs -- they just know something feels off beneath the surface. Take Annie's free 30-question assessment and receive your personalized Relational Trauma Profile.
5 minutes -- Instant results -- 23,000+ have taken it
There was nothing “special,” flashy, or exciting about any of the tasks I completed the other week.
There’s also not anything particularly “special,” exciting, or flashy about the sum of my tasks and to-dos on any given day or week.
Load and unload the dishwasher.
Gather the laundry, wash the laundry, fold the laundry.
Batch cook meals in the Instapot and meal prep for the week.
Book medical appointments, refill the vitamin containers, pay the bills, set up socially distanced playdates.
Go to work (which I love), save money to support our long-term planning goals.
Exercise, (mostly) eat healthy, etc.
Again, nothing flashy. Nothing extraordinary.
There are probably a few billion people on the planet who have somewhat similar daily and weekly lists.
There is nothing particularly special – as some might define it – in what I do.
But the mundane, the ordinary, is special for me given where I come from.
I come from a relational trauma background where there was psychological pain and often logistical and financial chaos while growing up.
We didn’t have health insurance (though my mom made sure we had medical care when needed).
There were homemade lunches and some saved money – but that money didn’t go to a down payment or retirement investments or 529’s.
Jobs were worked but no financial security was built.
There was employment, but no business ownership and no job creation for others.
Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
Take this 5-minute, 25-question quiz to find out — and learn what to do next if you do.
START THE QUIZ
(function() { var qs,js,q,s,d=document, gi=d.getElementById, ce=d.createElement, gt=d.getElementsByTagName, id=”typef_orm_share”, b=”https://embed.typeform.com/”; if(!gi.call(d,id)){ js=ce.call(d,”script”); js.id=id; js.src=b+”embed.js”; q=gt.call(d,”script”)[0]; q.parentNode.insertBefore(js,q) } })()
There was no working with a financial planner, accountant, and attorneys to lay good, sound legal, and financial futures.
One parent was doing their best, and one parent creating a tornado of psychological, financial, and logistical chaos in their wake no matter who and what they encountered.
In my first eighteen years, the things many of us gripe about as the mundanity of adulting didn’t exist or existed in some tumultuous, porous way.
“aw-pull-quote”
Now, as a 38-year-old woman who runs her own company that employs 12 W-2 employees, who creates jobs and offers benefits to others, as someone who doesn’t often buy new clothes so I can hit our family’s savings goals, to an outsider, my life might look like a big slog of drudgery and routine.
But for me the mundane is reparative.
The regular routines of life and the ordinary of adulting are reparative because I’m doing for myself and my little family what was not done (or done well) for me.
Each month when the money flows to my 401K and gets debited from my paycheck to build my daughter’s 529, a small part of me wishes there were more sushi dinners in my life.
But a greater part of me deeply respects my discipline, ability to account for, and responsibly take care of my future and my family’s future.
Being a mostly good, responsible, and reliable adult – after the chaos, tumult, insecurity, and abuse of my childhood – is a profoundly reparative experience for my adult self and my child self.
Obviously, I’m not a financial planner and I’d never dare to tell others what to do with their money and household logistics – that’s not the point of this essay.
The point of this essay is, rather, to offer up a reframe.
On what can so often feel like the ordinary drudgery, the everyday mundanity of life.
I want to suggest that – far from being ordinary and mundane – that every day, every week choices are particularly important if you – like me – come from a relational trauma background where adult responsibilities (be it emotional, logistical, or financial) were sorely, detrimentally, lacking.
If you, like I, come from a relational trauma background, I want to invite you to consider that part of your healing, part of overcoming your painful past may not just happen in the therapy room.
It may also happen every time you meal prep nutritious food for you and your family.
It may also happen each time you brown-bag your lunch and sock that money saved into an IRA.
Or it may happen on your lunch break while you nibble your sandwich while on hold with your benefits administrator to get an accurate snapshot of the copay for your child’s upcoming procedure.
It may also happen when you build your earthquake kit, stock the cars with first aid kits, book and attend your regular medical and dental appointments.
In the dozens, hundreds, and thousands of adulting moments where you work to create security, responsibility, stability, and safety for you and those you love, I want to suggest that these moments are anything but mundane.
These moments are reparative and potentially transformational, especially when you come from a background of chaos, neglect, or abuse.
What does a therapist actually do with the story of you crying on hold with your benefits administrator?
When you tell your therapist you felt unexpectedly emotional setting up your first employee benefits plan, describing how this “boring” administrative task felt like a miracle given your chaotic childhood, you’re recognizing how creating a beautiful adulthood for yourself isn’t just about big achievements but about the profound healing found in ordinary stability.
Your trauma-informed therapist understands that for those raised in chaos—financial instability, emotional volatility, logistical dysfunction—the mundane tasks of responsible adulthood aren’t mundane at all but radical acts of cycle-breaking. They recognize that your pride in maintaining health insurance when your family never had coverage, your discipline in retirement savings when money always disappeared into crisis, your consistency in meal planning when food was scarce or chaotic represents massive therapeutic victories.
The therapeutic work involves reframing these “ordinary” achievements as the extraordinary accomplishments they are. Together, you explore how each mundane task challenges a trauma-based belief: paying bills on time proves the world isn’t always chaotic, maintaining insurance shows you deserve security, saving money demonstrates you can plan for a future. Your therapist helps you recognize that the emotional weight of these tasks—the overwhelm, pride, sometimes grief—reflects their significance in your healing journey.
Through this lens, therapy helps you understand that building external stability is internal work. Every routine you establish sends a message to your nervous system that predictability is possible. Every responsible choice you make reparents the child who learned to expect chaos. The “boring” work of adulting becomes a living meditation on safety, teaching your body what your childhood couldn’t: that stability exists and you’re capable of creating it.
Most importantly, therapy validates that finding the sacred in the mundane isn’t settling for less but recognizing that for trauma survivors, a stable, predictable life isn’t a consolation prize—it’s the ultimate victory over chaos, proof that you’ve become the reliable adult your inner child always needed.
Wrapping up.
Sit with this reframe and try it on the next time you feel overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or bored by the adulting in front of you.
See how embracing this reframe shifts your emotional experience of the task at hand.
See how this strengthens your regard for yourself and who you have become despite where you started.
And please, if you feel so inclined, please leave me a message in the comments below to let me know what “mundane” adulting task has felt reparative and healing to you lately.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
). The effects of gratitude expression on neural activity. NeuroImage.Siegel, D. J. (
). The Mindful Therapist: A Clinician&#
;s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration. W. W. Norton &#
; Company.Fredrickson, B. L., Tugade, M. M., Waugh, C. E., &#
; Larkin, G. R. (
). What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September
I have everything I’m supposed to want and I still can’t just enjoy a Tuesday. What is wrong with me?
It’s common for driven, ambitious women, especially those with past trauma or emotional neglect, to feel a constant drive that overshadows simple joys. Your system might be wired to seek external validation or achievement, making it hard to settle into the peace of the mundane. Learning to appreciate these small moments is a powerful step towards internal contentment and healing.
Why do I feel like I’m failing every time I’m not producing something? The second I sit still, the dread sets in.
Absolutely. That feeling of guilt often stems from a deep-seated belief that your worth is tied to your productivity, a common pattern for those who experienced conditional love or neglect. Giving yourself permission to simply ‘be’ and find value in the ordinary is not laziness; it’s a radical act of self-compassion and a vital part of breaking free from those old patterns.
My brain won’t stop. Even on ‘quiet’ nights I’m already three steps ahead. How do I actually land in my own life?
This is where mindfulness practices can be incredibly helpful. Start by intentionally bringing your attention to one sensory detail in an everyday activity, like the warmth of your coffee cup or the sound of birds outside. Even a few moments of focused presence can begin to retrain your brain to find grounding and peace in the present, rather than constantly dwelling on the past or future.
When things are finally calm and good I get this low-grade panic, like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is that normal?
Feeling restless in calm moments can be a sign that your nervous system is accustomed to a higher state of alert, often a legacy of past trauma or chronic stress. The ‘mundane’ might feel unfamiliar or even unsafe because it lacks the predictable intensity you’re used to. This discomfort is an invitation to gently explore what true safety and peace feel like for you.
I look good on paper. Genuinely good. And yet there’s this persistent feeling that I’m missing the actual point of my life.
Yes, often the ‘missing piece’ for driven, ambitious women isn’t another accomplishment, but a deeper connection to their inner world and the simple richness of life. When you learn to value the mundane, you shift from external validation to internal fulfillment. This can bring a profound sense of peace and completeness that external achievements alone cannot provide.
Further Reading on Relational Trauma
Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.
The Sunday conversation you wished you’d had years earlier.
Weekly essays, practice guides, and workbooks for driven women whose lives look great on paper — and feel heavy behind the scenes. Free to start. 20,000+ subscribers.
Helping ambitious 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 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.
When you grew up in chaos, stability becomes revolutionary. Every responsible adult action—paying bills on time, maintaining insurance, saving money—directly contradicts the dysfunction you witnessed, making ordinary tasks feel like profound victories over your past.
Absolutely. If these responsibilities weren't modeled in childhood, successfully managing them represents massive growth. Pride in "basic" tasks like having health insurance or emergency savings makes complete sense when these things were absent from your early life.
By providing yourself with the stability, security, and care you didn't receive, you're actively parenting your inner child. Every 401k contribution, meal prepped, or doctor's appointment scheduled gives yourself what your parents couldn't or wouldn't provide.
You're not just doing the task—you're also overcoming lack of modeling, implicit beliefs about chaos being normal, and the extra mental load of figuring it out alone. What seems simple to others requires you to work against years of programming.
Yes. Creating external stability helps regulate your nervous system, proving through lived experience that consistency is possible. These "boring" routines become evidence that contradicts trauma's lessons about life being unpredictable and unsafe.
What's Running Your Life?
The invisible patterns you can’t outwork…
Your LinkedIn profile tells one story. Your 3 AM thoughts tell another. If vacation makes you anxious, if praise feels hollow, if you’re planning your next move before finishing the current one—you’re not alone. And you’re *not* broken.
This quiz reveals the invisible patterns from childhood that keep you running. Why enough is never enough. Why success doesn’t equal satisfaction. Why rest feels like risk.
Five minutes to understand what’s really underneath that exhausting, constant drive.
“You can outrun your past with achievement for only so long before it catches up with you. Strong & Stable is the conversation that helps you stop running.”
— Annie Wright, LMFT
×
Strong & Stable — Annie Wright, LMFT
Does your resume look better than your life actually feels?
You wake at 3 a.m. You manage everyone else’s crises. You’ve built something real — and underneath, the foundation isn’t stable.
Join 20,000+ driven women reading weekly essays on why rest feels like risk — and how to finally change that.
