"What I realized in that moment, was that no one is coming. No one was coming to save me when I was six and no one was coming to save me now."
— Addicted to Trauma
A Memoir · 2026
Addicted
to Trauma.
The story of what it took to stop running the patterns that almost killed me, and how I finally came home. By Carrie Davidson, BSN, RN.
The prologue arrives in your inbox the moment you join.
Carrie Davidson
BSN, RN · Trauma Recovery Coach
As featured in
The Reality
You are not alone. The numbers prove it.
Complex trauma and addiction are two of the most widespread, least understood health crises in the world. This is what we are actually standing inside of.
Complex Trauma · CPTSD
70%
of people globally will experience at least one potentially traumatic event in their lifetime.
World Health Organization, 2024
Complex Trauma · CPTSD
6.2%
global pooled prevalence of CPTSD, rising to 40% among survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
ScienceDirect Meta-Analysis, 2025
Complex Trauma · CPTSD
3.9%
of the entire world population has experienced PTSD at some point in their lives.
WHO, 2024
Addiction · Substance Use
296M
people globally were affected by substance use in 2021, a 45% surge over the preceding decade.
UN World Drug Report, 2023
Addiction · Substance Use
400M
people globally live with alcohol use disorders. Of those, 209 million live with alcohol dependence.
WHO Global Status Report, 2024
Addiction · Substance Use
20%
of people struggling with drug use disorders receive pharmacological intervention. Eighty percent go without treatment.
UN World Drug Report, 2023
The Overlap · Trauma + Addiction
75%
of people in substance use disorder treatment have experienced significant trauma in their lives.
National Governors Association, 2024
The Overlap · Trauma + Addiction
46%
of people who experience PTSD at any point in their lives develop a co-occurring substance use disorder.
Sanctuary Clinics, 2024
The Overlap · Trauma + Addiction
2 to 4×
more likely, people with PTSD are two to four times more likely to develop addiction than the general population.
NIDA, 2024
Trauma and addiction are not separate problems. They are the same wound, telling itself in two different languages.
Learn the Method →The Trauma Loop
This is how the pattern keeps repeating.
The loop runs underneath the surface, below conscious awareness, until something interrupts it.
01
Negative Thought
Automatic, unexamined. Feels like truth. "This always happens to me."
02
Becomes a Word
The thought becomes a story, rehearsed silently or spoken as fact.
03
Becomes an Action
A choice, not even felt as choice, that moves life toward the familiar.
04
Becomes a Pattern
Repeated enough times, the action becomes a pattern. The pattern becomes a life.
05
The Loop Repeats
Life confirms the original thought. The nervous system files it as proof.
The Interruption Point
The Method
You can exit the loop.
Creativity is the opposite of stuck trauma. When you find your creative flow, you interrupt the chain at its source, and you begin to build something new.
The loop is not a character flaw. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do, until you give it new evidence.
Free · The Sunday Letter
A quiet letter on healing,
arriving each Sunday evening.
Reflections on CPTSD, recovery, and slowly coming back to yourself. Written from lived experience, not a marketing calendar. Subscribers are also the first to hear when Addicted to Trauma is ready.
No spam. Unsubscribe whenever.
The Nurse Who Became Her Own Patient
Lived experience and clinical training: and I have never separated them.
I write about CPTSD and addiction from the inside. I am a registered nurse and a certified trauma recovery coach. I have been in the rooms of AA. I have been the patient in the white hallway who didn't know her own name.
I also spent two years reading vital signs on a cardiac floor, catching what the monitors hadn't caught yet, because I had been doing exactly that. reading the room, reading the temperature, staying ready. since I was six years old.
The clinical training is real. The lived experience is real. I do not separate them because they have never been separate inside me.
Author · Registered Nurse · Trauma Recovery Coach
My full story →To the one who waited
For most of my life, when I looked back at her, I felt grief.
There is a version of me, somewhere around six years old, who is finally allowed to look up at who I became.
She is the reason I am still here. She is the reason I write.
She is the one I am always walking home to.
Every word I write, every woman I coach, every page I turn: I do it for her.
Three ways in
Whichever door you walk through, you are walking toward yourself.
The first door · Featured
Addicted to Trauma
The memoir · Releasing 2026
Join the waitlist and the prologue arrives today. The rest of the book, the whole story of how I lost myself one small leaving at a time and how I found my way back, arrives next year.
Join the Waitlist →The deeper door
The Method Workbook
Free · 50 pages
A self-paced workbook built on the framework I developed for myself. For moving from the loop to something new. The CPTSD companion workbook lives one tab over.
Open the workbook →The held door
1:1 Coaching
By application · Conscious Coaching Collective, PLLC
Private trauma recovery coaching. For high-achieving women who are exhausted from holding it together. Limited spots. Held with the care of a nurse and the honesty of someone who has walked it.
Apply for a spot →II
You do not have to think your way out.
You have to feel your way home.
From the prologue
In their words
What readers and clients are saying.
Carrie writes with the steadiness of a nurse and the honesty of someone who has actually walked it. I felt seen on the first page.
Rare to find work on trauma that is both clinically grounded and so deeply human. This is a gift to anyone in recovery.
Working with Carrie gave me language for things I had carried silently for twenty years. Quiet, careful, life-changing.
Free · 16 questions
Where are you in the cycle?
A short, honest assessment. Not a diagnosis. Just a map of where you actually are right now, and what might be keeping the loop running.
Begin the quizTakes about 3 minutes.
From the journal
Recent writing
Begin here
You don’t have to figure it out all at once.
Take the 3-minute quiz to find where you are in the cycle. Then let the Sunday Letter walk with you the rest of the way.