COMMUNITY LEADER

Founder, Healing & CPTSD Community

Creator, Complex Dani

Founder + President, The Healing and CPTSD Foundation

IMPACT AT A GLANCE

364K+

Healing & CPTSD Community

523

Live Virtual Events · 2024–2026

17K+

Petition Signatures

Danielle Carpio is a survivor, community builder, writer, and advocate who has spent the past six years building one of the largest survivor-led communities dedicated to Complex PTSD and complex trauma.

In December 2020, Danielle anonymously founded Healing & CPTSD, initially sharing relatable trauma experiences, education, and language for feelings and experiences many survivors struggled to explain. What began as a social media page quickly became something larger as survivors from around the world began sharing their own experiences, recognizing themselves in one another, and realizing they were not alone.

In 2023, Danielle stepped out from behind the anonymous platform and introduced herself publicly as Complex Dani, bringing her own lived experience into the community she had spent years building. Her leadership has since expanded across Healing & CPTSD, its private Community Hub, survivor storytelling and awareness initiatives, and The Healing and CPTSD Foundation, which she founded to carry survivor voices into research, education, advocacy, and systems change.

Today, Danielle's work remains rooted in the same idea that started it: people carrying complex trauma should not have to feel alone in experiences shared by so many.

COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Danielle's grassroots leadership has transformed an anonymous social media page into a multifaceted, survivor-led ecosystem connecting hundreds of thousands of people affected by Complex PTSD and complex trauma.

At the center of that work is community. Danielle expanded Healing & CPTSD beyond public social media into a private Community Hub where survivors connect through live events, workshops, peer programming, and Support Circles built around different lived experiences. and identities. Since the Hub's inception in 2024, the community has hosted more than 500 live virtual events, creating ongoing opportunities for meaningful connection beyond social media.

Healing & CPTSD is not simply a community created for survivors; it is a community led by survivors. Danielle has intentionally built a culture that recognizes the realities of living with complex trauma, including fluctuating capacity. Leadership is approached with grace rather than perfectionism, flexibility rather than rigidity, and an understanding that participation may look different at different times. Survivors are given opportunities to contribute, lead, rest, return, and still belong.

Danielle has also created platforms that ensure survivor experiences are represented rather than simply discussed. In 2024, she launched The Healing & CPTSD Chronicles, a virtual magazine centering survivor storytelling, trauma education, healing conversations, reflection, awareness, and advocacy. Its work in cause awareness went on to receive consecutive w3 Silver Awards in 2024 and 2025.

Her leadership has also brought conversations historically carried in private into the public sphere. Danielle created Estrangement Awareness Day to increase visibility around family estrangement, relational trauma, grief, and boundaries, and launched the first-ever Incest Awareness Day in collaboration with Incest AWARE, bringing greater visibility to incest, familial abuse, and the survivors whose experiences have too often been surrounded by silence.

Danielle then founded The Healing and CPTSD Foundation, extending years of grassroots community-building into a survivor-led nonprofit focused on education, research, advocacy, and systems change. Through the Foundation, she launched CPTSD Awareness Month each September and has helped build the broader CPTSD Recognition Movement, creating pathways for survivors and allies to participate in public education, survivor-led research, coalition-building, civic engagement, and advocacy for greater recognition of Complex PTSD in the United States.

Across each initiative, the format has changed, but Danielle's approach has remained consistent: listen to what survivors say they need, create spaces where they can find one another, bring experiences too often carried in silence into the light, and build pathways for a community to turn shared experience into collective action.