A memoir · 2026
Addicted to Trauma.
A memoir of CPTSD, addiction, and the long quiet way home.
Releasing Summer 2026
Addicted to Trauma: A Memoir
10 years ago, she woke up in a psychiatric hospital in California not knowing her own name.
The woman who signed the paperwork called herself Grace. She was not lying. She genuinely did not know her own name. It would take days, two friends walking through the door, and a phone call from her mother before the name she had lived inside for thirty years began to feel like hers again.
Addicted to Trauma is the story of how a woman loses herself one small leaving at a time, and what it costs, and what it takes, to find her way back.
Beginning on a staircase in Durham, North Carolina, where a six-year-old girl decided it was her job to hold everything together, Carrie Davidson traces the invisible architecture of Complex PTSD through thirty years of relationships, substances, geographic escapes, and the relentless loop of a nervous system that never learned how to feel safe. She writes about the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being exceptional at performing fine. About the way trauma doesn't announce itself. It just quietly rewrites your definition of normal until you can no longer remember what you were before.
As a registered nurse, Davidson brings a rare clinical precision to deeply personal territory. As a survivor, she brings something rarer still. The willingness to tell the truth about how complicated healing actually is, how nonlinear, how unglamorous, how worth it.
This is not a memoir about rock bottom. It is a memoir about all the floors beneath the floor you thought was the bottom, and the work of building something that holds.
For anyone who has ever mistaken chaos for love, busyness for healing, or someone else's needs for their own, this book was written for you.
"I had been not-quite-Carrie for a very long time before I became Grace. This is the story of how that happened."
A Journey of Reclamation
Understanding Addicted to Trauma
At its core, Addicted to Trauma is a profound, educational memoir exploring the lifelong impact of complex trauma and the often-misunderstood connection between unresolved pain and patterns of addiction. Author Carrie Davidson chronicles her personal descent into the depths of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), offering a roadmap for others who have survived childhood neglect and subsequent cycles of self-destruction. The book serves as both a vulnerable firsthand account and a resource for understanding how the human nervous system adapts to survive early adversity, often inadvertently creating a cycle of dysfunction in adulthood. By sharing her own story, Davidson seeks to provide a language for those who have spent their lives "holding it together in the dark," emphasizing that the behaviors typically labeled as failures are often sophisticated, albeit outdated, survival strategies.
The Foundation of Survival
The narrative begins with a harrowing account of dissociation, highlighting how early experiences—such as parental alcoholism and emotional neglect—force a child to "leave" their own body to maintain a sense of safety. Davidson describes the "first small leaving" as a formative moment on a staircase during a childhood storm, where she realized no adult was coming to help. This early adaptation, or the "fawn" response, involves managing the emotions of others to ensure one's own safety. The memoir effectively illustrates how these survival mechanisms do not simply vanish upon reaching adulthood; instead, they become the operating system for adult relationships, professional life, and personal decision-making, often leading individuals to repeat cycles of volatility and abandonment.
The Architecture of Addiction
A central theme of the work is the reframing of addiction, moving away from moral judgment toward an understanding of neurological regulation. Davidson describes her early encounters with substances not as a search for a "high," but as a search for the "off switch." For a nervous system constantly scanning for threats, the numbness provided by alcohol or drugs functioned as a form of medicine—a way to finally, temporarily, stand down. The memoir argues that individuals struggling with addiction are often not seeking the substance itself, but rather the dopamine-driven relief of being in a body that does not feel like an emergency. This insight serves as an educational bridge, helping readers distinguish between recreational use and the biological attempt to find salvation from the "noise" of unresolved trauma.
The Dynamics of Relational Trauma
The book offers a critical look at the "loop" of relational trauma, where survivors repeatedly seek out people who mirror their initial wounds. Davidson details her history with partners who were emotionally unavailable, noting that she often confused intensity with intimacy and drama with love. Through the lens of her own experiences and clinical frameworks like Internal Family Systems (IFS), she explains how the "firefighter" parts of our psyche—those parts responsible for putting out emotional fires—often drive us toward destructive relationships to keep old, exiled wounds protected. By examining her own life through this lens, the memoir provides a practical, if difficult, guide for identifying how we might be unconsciously participating in the very patterns we are trying to escape.
Pathways to Healing
The latter portion of the book focuses on the "Way Out," stressing that there is no singular cure, but rather a series of tools and modalities that can facilitate nervous system regulation. Davidson discusses several therapeutic approaches with transparency:
- IFS and Ego Parts: Learning to communicate with the protective parts of the self to reach the "exiled" inner child who carries the original pain.
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): Utilizing bilateral stimulation to process frozen trauma memories, moving them from the present-tense emergency storage to past-tense experience.
- Somatic Work and Mindfulness: Developing the capacity to stay present in one's body and read internal signals rather than fleeing them.
- Community and The Rooms: Emphasizing that healing is fundamentally a social process, as isolation is the primary environment in which shame and trauma thrive.
The Role of Compassion and Truth
A vital takeaway from Addicted to Trauma is the necessity of compassion—not just for others, but for the version of oneself that survived. Davidson reflects on her father's own traumatic history, viewing him not as a failure, but as a link in a generational chain of unprocessed pain. By viewing the self as a "common denominator" rather than a victim or a villain, the author highlights that real change begins when we stop managing our narratives and start telling the truth about our history. The book concludes with the assertion that while we cannot change our childhoods, we can take back the "pen" to author a future defined by choice rather than compulsion.
Conclusion
Addicted to Trauma is a vital resource for those seeking to bridge the gap between their lived experiences and clinical understanding. Carrie Davidson successfully weaves together scientific insight, personal narrative, and practical wisdom, ultimately arguing that the capacity for healing is an inherent inheritance rather than a skill to be learned. By emphasizing that we are not "broken" but rather adapted, she provides a necessary, compassionate perspective on recovery. The book serves as a powerful reminder that while the journey through the dark is personal, the light found in the truth of one's own story can serve as a guiding beacon for others still navigating their own process of reclamation.
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