Press & media

The book at a glance

About the author

Tiffany Charbonneau was born in February 1984 in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, and raised in Larder Lake.

She moved to northern Ontario to attend nursing school and joined the infantry as a Reservist at twenty. During a Military Skill competition, she fell twenty feet in full wet gear and never fully recovered. More than a dozen surgeries later, a degenerating spine and a body running on chemical fumes. Became a Registered Nurse in 2007 not because she chose it, but because her father demanded it. She spent almost two decades absorbing everyone else’s pain while having absolutely no idea what to do with her own.

Burnt out three times. Her abuser died in Nov 2025, and she almost went with him. What followed was another near-death, a flight to Costa Rica, four nights with ayahuasca doing what decades of therapy and medication couldn’t touch. She came home as someone she didn’t recognize yet.

She is a life path 33 – the Master Teacher, the wounded healer archetype. She is not a guru. She is not fully healed. But no longer a victim. She stands her ground with the Dragon heads. She is still standing and still writing anyway.

Dad’s Dead… Now What? is her first book, looking beyond the wreckage and introducing her trilogy, which goes back into the wreckage this book only points at. She now lives in Ontario, Canada, with her twin-flame – wife – her two children, and two cats.

Healing Through My Ink Inc. – the company that published this book – takes its name from something that started long before there was a book to publish. As a child, young enough, she would doodle. Lines with no rhyme or reason. Over time they got more detailed, more abstract, until she noticed that when she put pen to paper without trying to make it mean anything, her mind went quiet. No reels. Just lines. It was the first reprieve she ever found on her own, decades before anyone gave it a clinical name. The art running through this book is the same thing, still doing the same job.

Clinical background

• Infantry Soldier, Canadian Armed Forces Reserve (Mar 2004– Nov 2008)
• Registered Nurse — College of Nurses of Ontario, active and in good standing since 2007
• Worked with Veterans Affairs Canada clients from 2011 to 2025; hundreds of advanced clinical and mental health assessments for VAC, RCMP, and the Canadian Armed Forces
• RN, Psychotherapist — CBT, Seeking Safety, Motivational Interviewing, Exposure Therapy, Safe and Sound Protocol, Neurofeedback
• BScN, Université Laurentienne · fluently bilingual, English and French

What early readers said

“Sometimes what ultimately takes a person’s life began as their attempt to survive it.”

— Jehnna Morin, Associate Addictions Counsellor and Director of Supportive Housing

“This isn’t another Disney movie about a single mom who can’t cope. Reader beware, this is real.”

— Noreen Porter

“Rather than offering a sanitized narrative of recovery, she illustrates the psychological somatic toll, complicated grief, and active emotional processing that often occurs when an abuser passes away.”

— Chantale Goudreau, M.A.

All 16 reviews

Podcasts, interviews & events

• C-PTSD and complex trauma
• Addiction, relapse, and the Dragon
• Grieving a father who was my abuser
• Victim face: the trade nobody tells you about
• The wounded healer: the Hero protocol, “deep empathy as a superpower,” and what it costs
• Loving someone through it: twin flames, caregiving, and when the war ends
• Ayahuasca, before and after: the preparation, and the integration that’s the real work
• Inside the system, from both sides: veteran advocacy

Request an interview

healingthroughmyink@gmail.com

Before you book: what the book contains

This book contains unfiltered accounts of:

• Suicidal ideation and suicide attempts
• Addiction and substance use
• Childhood abuse
• Grief and the death of an abuser
• Mental health crisis, dissociation, and trauma
• Medical emergencies including seizures and near-death experiences
• Explicit language throughout

Photos & files