Meet the founder of Returning Home Collective

 

S.D. Caldwell is the author of Awakening from the Spell: Healing the Attachment Wound—a memoir that blends lived experience with psychological insight to explore the attachment wounds, trauma bonds, and patterns of love addiction that keep so many of us returning to relationships we know are hurting us.

She is not a therapist or clinician. She is a woman who walked all the way into the labyrinth and came back with language for what she found there.

Her path was anything but straight. It has taken her through courtroom victories, the unraveling of a multi-million-dollar business venture, becoming a top-producing sales professional, abusive relationships, addiction, devastating personal losses, recovery, and ultimately, a spiritual awakening that challenged everything she believed about love, identity, and healing.

While achieving success professionally, she was privately carrying attachment wounds that shaped nearly every relationship in her life. Those unseen patterns followed her through success and failure alike, and at times, they nearly cost her life.

Looking back, her life doesn’t feel like a timeline—it feels like a labyrinth.

For years, she believed she was searching for love. What she eventually discovered was far more unsettling.

She wasn’t seeing people as they were. She was attaching to the possibility of who they could become, building a future around that possibility, and mistaking hope for reality. When relationships ended, she wasn’t grieving the person she had actually known—she was grieving the future she had imagined and the fantasy she had built around them.

Sobriety became the beginning—not the end—of her healing. Recovery gave her the space to trace these patterns back to their roots, confront the stories she had unknowingly been living, and begin rebuilding a life based on reality instead of fantasy.

Awakening from the Spell is the story of that awakening.

It is a journey through courtroom battles and hard-won victories, professional success and devastating loss, heartbreak, resilience, recovery, and transformation. It asks difficult questions about attachment, identity, family systems, and the stories we inherit about love. More importantly, it offers hope that healing is possible—not by finding the right person, but by returning to the self we abandoned while searching for them.

Through her writing and The Returning Home Collective, Stacie hopes to help others recognize these patterns sooner, reclaim their voice, rebuild self-trust, and discover that the home they’ve been searching for has been within them all along.

“The spell was never another person. The spell was believing someone else could become my home.”
— S.D. Caldwell