Meet the founder of Phoenix Empowered

 

About the Author

Stacie Downing-Caldwell is the author of Awakening from the Spell: Healing the Attachment Wound — a memoir that weaves lived experience with psychological insight to illuminate what recovery programs rarely address: the attachment wounds and trauma bonds that keep people returning to relationships long after they know better.

Stacie is not a therapist or clinician. She is a woman who went all the way into this and came back with language for what she found there. Growing up in an environment where love was inconsistent and safety was fragile, she spent decades navigating relationships that felt like love but functioned like survival. Even as her personal life unraveled, her professional capability held — she became a top-producing agent in the insurance industry, demonstrating what becomes possible when the bandwidth is hers.

Her awakening began with sobriety on November 11, 2012, and deepened through recovery, spiritual transformation, and the slow, honest work of tracing the pattern all the way back to its origin. What she discovered changed everything — not just about her own story, but about the multigenerational inheritance of attachment wounds that shapes so many women's lives without their knowledge.

She writes for the woman who is tired. The one who has done the work and still found herself back in the same place. The one who is finally ready to stop asking what is wrong with him and start understanding what has been driving her.

Stacie lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, grounded in her faith, her recovery, and the love of her children.

By sharing her story openly, Caldwell hopes to help others recognize these dynamics earlier, rebuild self-trust, and avoid the years of confusion that so many people quietly endure.

“Sobriety gave me my life back — but it didn’t immediately give me the understanding I needed to break the attachment patterns that kept pulling me back into relationships that slowly eroded my sense of self.” S.D. Caldwell