Judy Crane is co-founder and CEO of The Guest House Ocala, a trauma-informed addiction and recovery treatment facility she built with John West. Her own path into the field began later in life: she started working through traumatic memories at 42, later trained as an addictions counselor, earned a master's degree in mental health counseling, and became a licensed therapist at 52.
Crane opened her first recovery program in the Ocala Forest at 57 and sold it a decade later, before co-founding The Guest House Ocala at 70, the same year she published her first book, The Trauma Heart. She was among the first women in the United States to own a trauma recovery center when she entered the field in 2003, and has kept a majority-women leadership team throughout her career.
Her guiding idea is that addiction functions as a coping mechanism rooted in trauma, which has led her to push treatment beyond talk therapy toward modalities she describes as healing viscerally. She also focuses on supporting first responders and helping professionals recognize secondary trauma and compassion fatigue, alongside broader work on how trauma passes down through families across generations.
