Home Is Within You

Book excerpt: In this deeply personal memoir, Nadia Davis addresses her three sons with brutal honesty, hope, and strength, revealing both her childhood and adult traumas that led to issues with addiction and dysfunctional relationships, as well as to discuss transformational healing, spirituality, intensive trauma therapy, chronic pain management, healthy co-parenting and intimacy, preventing learned toxic masculinity, and more. As a young high-profile lawyer, school board member in Southern California, county supervisor in the Bay Area, recipient of state and national public service awards, and former wife of California's attorney general and treasurer, Nadia Davis has been a public figure in California for over two decades. Her experience with addiction in the trenches of a non-marital highly publicized and abusive relationship led Davis through the challenges of public shaming, injustice, arrests, mandated treatment, and a total lack of privacy for personal issues. Home Is Within You details her courageous journey towards wholeness and health as a woman, mother, and former spouse/co-parent in a powerful homage to finding one's truth and worth. It is also a defense of privacy and motherhood, as well as a call to action against shaming of women and ineffective, often damaging policies towards families struggling with mental health and addiction, with suggestions for more compassionate methods of treatment and restorative justice enabling those struggling to ultimately find their personal truth and strength within.