Addicted to Trauma.

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."