A Clearing: Transcending Trauma
About this audiobook
When Dawn drives away from her marriage in the middle of the night — her dog Loki riding shotgun, her cat Zena in the back seat — she has no map for the life she is about to build. Only the keys to a run-down cabin in the woods, a fierce, fragile hope, and two animals who never stopped believing in her even when she could not believe in herself.
A Clearing is the story of a woman who had been slowly erased — by fear, by control, by a decade of learning to make herself small — and the hard, quiet, luminous work of finding herself again. In the solitude of a forest clearing, Dawn rediscovers painting, planting, laughter, and trust. She builds friendships and a home, and slowly begins to excavate the woman she had been before and imagine the woman she might yet become.
But healing is not a destination. It is a garden. You tend it, season after season, until one day you realize you are rooted — and blooming.
Tender, honest, and ultimately radiant with hope, A Clearing is for every survivor who has ever wondered: Is there life on the other side? Dawn's answer is yes. Beautiful, hard-won, and completely your own.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7: 1-800-799-7233
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About the author
Tiffany Solter, PhD is a mental health professional, educator, advocate, and lifelong seeker of magic whose writing explores the boundaries between life, death, justice, and the profound connections that define us. Born into a family of mountain people spanning Wyoming and Colorado, she grew up shaped, largely, by two grandmothers who taught her, one through train journeys across the West, the other chasing shooting stars across the plains, that anything is possible.
A survivor of a near-death experience in 1996, Solter spent decades integrating what she encountered in that "warm place where light is everything" into a life of healing work, academic achievement, and fierce advocacy. She holds a doctorate with a dissertation on grace and recovery, and has worked alongside peer counselors, nurses, and mental health teams she considers among the most transformative teachers of her life.
Her advocacy voice is unflinching and deeply personal. In "Be a Man": The Violence Society Ignores, Solter turns her clinical expertise and lived experience toward a crisis our culture has long refused to see: domestic violence against men. Drawing on research, survivor accounts, and her own family history, she challenges the archetypal and institutional blind spots that leave male victims invisible, unbelieved, and without adequate resources. The book is equal parts gripping fiction, Jungian psychological analysis, and practical call to action. It is complete with resource guides for survivors, supporters, military families, and children. It is the work of someone who has sat in clinical rooms with these men, loved them as family, and refused to stay silent.
She lives in what she calls Camelot, a home she and her husband Jeff manifested in childhood whispers, surrounded by family, familiars, motorcycles, and what she simply calls the magic.
“Between Worlds” is her memoir. "Be a Man" is her battle cry.
