Trauma and Addiction: From Victim to Survivor (Jess's Story)

On June 2, 2016, Jessica woke up, sent her kids off to school, and swallowed every pill in her medicine cabinet. She thought it would look like it does in the movies, a quiet drift into peaceful sleep. Instead, her body paralyzed, she choked on her own vomit, and she lost consciousness. The only reason she is alive today is because her 10-year-old daughter came home from school with a stomach ache.

Jess's story is one of the clearest illustrations of how trauma and addiction actually interact in a person's life. Trauma is the lasting psychological injury left behind by overwhelming experiences, and addiction is often the body and brain's attempt to silence what that injury keeps shouting. For Jess, that meant Ambien, opiates, and a stack of prescriptions that hid her struggle in plain sight. What follows is the story she shared on the Sober Motivation Podcast, the slow road that took her from a 36-year-old mom on the verge of dying, to nearly nine years sober, three rebuilt relationships with her children, and a PhD in psychology almost finished.

A Childhood Built on Trauma She Could Not Yet Name

Jess grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Her parents, in her own words, did the best they could. But the events that shaped her arrived early and arrived hard.

At four years old, she was molested by a Daisies leader, a precursor to Brownies and Girl Scouts. Her mind blocked the memory entirely until she was 15, when a first sexual experience triggered the buried images. When she asked her parents about a man with red hair, they pulled out photos and confirmed what her body had been carrying for over a decade.

When she was 10, her mom and dad separated. Her uncle, a heroin addict, came to stay and brought physical violence into the house. During this same period, her mother attempted suicide. Jess was the only one home. She did not know what was happening; she just thought her mom was sick. Her father came to check on her mom and found her in the bathroom.

At 15, a man climbed through Jess's bedroom window and sexually assaulted her. When the police arrived, they did not take fingerprints. They asked her if she was sure she had not just been caught making out with her boyfriend.

This is the soil where addiction grows. Jess explained on the podcast that this is when something quietly cemented in her mind: maybe this is just what is supposed to happen to me. That single belief, formed before she could name it, would steer the next 20 years.

"I wasn't born this way. I was made this way. I was forged in the fire. But if I'm made to be a certain way, then I can also unmake those things about myself."

How Trauma Becomes Addiction in Plain Sight

After high school, Jess enlisted in the Air Force. She thrived there. Structure, she said, was something she could thrive in. She did not touch a drug the entire time she was enlisted. She drank, but in the early 2000s military culture, that was less a red flag and more a Tuesday.

Then, while stationed in England with her husband deployed, a man followed her home from a club, beat her, and raped her. She was a sergeant. She did not report it. She did not tell her husband. She did not tell her parents. She did not tell anyone for nearly two decades.

"It just cemented that this is something that's supposed to happen to me. So nobody cares. Nobody cares that it happens. So why am I gonna tell anybody?"

Years later, endometriosis ended her career. The military medically retired her, and with it went her sense of identity and purpose. A pain management doctor prescribed her 120 ten-milligram Percocets a month, 40 milligrams of methadone a day, and eight tablets of fentanyl. She had also been on Ambien for years following an earlier psychiatric hospitalization.

This is where the story shifts from prescription compliance to something else. Jess's pattern echoes what we heard from Christine, a nurse who described her own slow slide from prescription pill use into full addiction. As soon as her kids left for school, Jess took an Ambien. She would lose entire days. She drove on it. She cooked bacon on it. She woke up with ice cream cake smeared on her face and no memory of how it got there. When she ran out of pills, she drank NyQuil straight from the bottle.

But she did not see herself as an addict. She told the podcast that addicts on TV were people shooting up on a corner, not stay-at-home moms refilling legal scripts. Hidden addiction wears a wedding ring and packs school lunches. It is one of the most dangerous forms of substance use disorder precisely because it does not match the stereotype.

The practical takeaway here is one therapists have started to repeat. If you are wondering whether your prescription use has crossed a line, the question is not whether the pills are legal. The question is whether you can stop without getting sick, and whether your day is structured around the next dose. The trauma-as-fuel pattern Jess describes also shows up in Johnny's story of drinking to cope with trauma, and it is one of the most common throughlines we hear on the podcast.

The Day Her Daughter Came Home Sick

By 2016, Jess was in unbearable emotional, spiritual, and physical pain. Filling out the standard therapy intake forms, she would mark her desire to die at 50 on a scale of 1 to 10. Her husband would ask what she had to be sad about. They had a house, kids, a marriage. She had no answer.

On June 1, 2016, Jess took her kids out for what she planned as their last good day with her. They did the slip and slide. She bought their favorite desserts. She made it the best day she could.

The next morning she put them on the school bus and swallowed every pill in the medicine cabinet. Effexor. Reglan. NyQuil. Benadryl. She believed her family would be better off without her. That belief was so total she could not see around it.

There is a generational layer to this moment that Jess does not skip past. Her own mother had attempted suicide when Jess was 10. Jess attempted suicide the day before her own daughter's 10th birthday. She did not realize the parallel until much later. Generational trauma rebuilds itself without permission.

When Jess woke up in the hospital after her coma, she was not relieved. She was angry that she had failed at this too. The psych ward discharge paperwork stated that she had only been drinking and abusing medications to get up the nerve to kill herself. So no recovery program. No 12-step suggestion. No inpatient treatment. They sent her home. (For another story of someone who survived not wanting to be alive and built a life on the other side of it, see Brittany's story.)

Six months later, mid-detox from opiates, her brain snapped. She grabbed a knife over her youngest son's head and said she was going to kill herself again. That was the moment her family told her: treatment, or you are homeless.

From Victim to Survivor: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

In the second psych ward, before she ever made it to rehab, Jess met a therapist who identified as an alcoholic in long-term recovery. He had eight years sober. He was happy. That detail, that he was actually happy, stopped her cold. She had never seen it before.

He had her share her story in group. She started crying, the kind of crying with snot bubbles and hyperventilation. He handed her a piece of paper that read: Resilience. Empowerment. Strength. That's what recovery is, and that's what you are. Almost a decade later, she still credits that moment as the first crack in her armor.

She went from there to a treatment center, where three more strangers became important. One taught her the third step prayer. One gave her the courage to move to York, Pennsylvania, two hours from her hometown. One introduced her to her sponsor.

When her ex-husband told her that going to a recovery house would end their marriage, she went anyway. She lost her marriage of 12 years. She lost custody of her children for a time. Her parents told her she was being a piece of crap mom. Nobody supported the move.

She was also certain about one thing. If she went home, she would die. Not 98 percent certain. 100 percent certain. Some people do not need a geographical change to get sober. She did.

"I haven't used in York and I haven't drank in York. So I built whatever type of life I wanted for myself. It was a fresh start."

The deeper shift came months later, in conversation with her sponsor about a guy she was dating. Jess was bending herself into whatever shape he seemed to want. Her sponsor asked the question that changed her relationship with herself.

"When are you gonna stop being what you think everybody else wants you to be and just be the woman you're meant to be?"

That single question put her on a different track. The chameleon habit, the people pleasing, the willingness to disappear into whoever was in the room, started losing its grip. As Jess put it, she could not love herself yet, but she could begin to like herself. The love part would come.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Jess lived in a recovery house for several months and a sober house for about a year. She had weekly drug tests, structure, and accountability. She got sober at 36 but had to learn how to be a functional adult on top of getting sober. The two are not the same skill.

She started working in treatment at one year sober, beginning as a detox technician searching bags and checking that people were breathing. She got her bachelor's degree four years to the day after her suicide attempt. She finished her master's. She is five months from completing her PhD in psychology with a specialization in substance use and addictive behaviors. She has been a counselor, a case manager, and a therapist along the way.

Her relationships with her three children, now 26, 20, and 18, have rebuilt. Her daughter came to live with her in high school. Her youngest now lives with her too. This year is the first time her youngest will attend her sobriety celebration. Her children are proud of her recovery. They are open about it.

The principle Jess shares most often when she speaks at treatment centers comes in two parts. The first is about identity.

"When I stopped looking at myself as a victim and started looking at myself as a survivor, that's where the shift happens. If I'm a victim, somebody else has my power. If I'm a survivor, then I'm powerful and I have my power back."

The second is about responsibility.

"The fact that I was messed up was not my fault. But the fact that I stayed messed up is."

That distinction is doing a lot of work. It honors that the assaults, the violence, and the prescriptions were not her doing. It also refuses to let those facts decide her future. Forgiveness, in her telling, is not for the person who hurt her. It is the only way she gets to put down the weight.

The Bigger Picture

Jess's daughter saved her life by coming home sick from school. But Jess saved her own life every day after that, in choices most people will never see. The recovery house. The geographical move. The willingness to let her sponsor say hard things. The decision to write a chapter in her mentor's book years after he handed her a piece of paper that said resilience, empowerment, strength.

The story matters because it breaks the picture most people carry of what an addict looks like. Drug addicts and alcoholics, as Jess says, are judges, lawyers, doctors, nurses, therapists, and stay-at-home moms. The face of addiction is mostly the face of someone you would never suspect.

If any part of this story sounds like yours, or like someone you love, you are not alone, and the path Jess walked is walkable. Listen to the full episode of the Sober Motivation Podcast to hear Jess share more in her own voice, and consider sharing this article with someone who might need to hear that survival is possible.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the connection between trauma and addiction?

Trauma is a deep psychological injury caused by overwhelming events such as abuse, violence, or loss. Many people who experience untreated trauma turn to substances to numb emotional pain, quiet intrusive memories, or sleep through symptoms. Research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse confirms that childhood trauma significantly raises the risk of developing a substance use disorder later in life.

What does hidden or "high-functioning" addiction look like?

Hidden addiction often involves prescription medications such as opiates, benzodiazepines, or sleep aids like Ambien. The person may hold a job, raise children, and appear stable from the outside. Common signs include scheduling life around the next dose, using more than prescribed, mixing pills with alcohol, and feeling sick when supply runs low.

How do you shift from a victim mindset to a survivor mindset in recovery?

The shift usually happens through therapy, peer support, and time. It involves accepting that what happened was not your fault, while also recognizing that healing is now your responsibility. Many people in recovery, including Jess, point to a single moment or sentence that reframed how they saw themselves. The work of forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness, is often central to that shift.

Can you recover after a suicide attempt and active addiction?

Yes. Recovery after a suicide attempt is possible and happens every day, though it usually requires a combination of mental health treatment, addiction treatment, and ongoing peer support. Jess survived a serious attempt in 2016 and is approaching nine years of sobriety while completing a doctoral degree. If you are in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Why is a geographical change sometimes necessary in recovery?

Not everyone needs to move to get sober, but for some people the cues, relationships, and routines tied to active addiction make local recovery extremely difficult. A geographical change can break the daily association between people, places, and substance use, and create space to build a new identity. Jess moved two hours from her hometown to York, Pennsylvania, and credits that move with saving her life.