Carrie Patee Davidson

I am an author, a registered nurse and a trauma recovery coach. I am also a woman who spent most of her life figuring out, in increasingly destructive ways, what nobody had ever told her had a name.

What I have was complex PTSD. I did not learn that until my mid-thirties. The years between were the strategies a nervous system finds when it has not been taught a different way. The substances, the wrong people, the work of holding it all together while quietly falling apart and suffering in (not always) silence.

I came to coaching from inside the wound. Not from a textbook or from the outside looking in. From the bed I had been lying in for years before I knew what was wrong.

I write and talk about the difference between what was done to me and what was passed down to me. About what addiction was actually trying to do for me before anyone called it a problem. And about what happens when I stopped performing recovery and started actually living and doing it.

My first book, Addicted to Trauma: A Memoir of CPTSD, Addiction, and the Patterns That Almost Killed Me, comes out Summer 2026.
I live in Durham, North Carolina and part time in San Pedro, Belize, which is my soul’s happy place.

You can find me at carriepdavidson.com.