Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery

by Catherine Gildiner

With each glance they cast our way, our parents tell us who we are and where we belong in the world pecking order.

Alana explained that she had a sixth sense for violent loonies. “All abused children are like bloodhounds,” she said. “They have to always be scanning the environment looking for what can go wrong. If you don’t you’re a dead duck. I’d call it the opposite of sheltered.”

“You were at war and fighting for your sanity,” I said, shaking my head. “It sure must have been a temptation.”

when a deprived person begins to improve, the stress of making life choices can be remarkably intense.

Sartre says whether to live or die is the only real choice in life.”

When I asked her to define the difference between anger and cruelty, she said she viewed them as gradations of the same thing. I told her that learning to express anger was something else she needed in her survival toolbox. As I’d once explained to Danny, anger has a bad reputation. It’s a negotiation device that helps us stand up for ourselves, to say, in effect, “Get off my turf; you’re stomping on my sense of self. Stop crossing into my backyard.” Then it’s up to the other person to deal with your anger—to decide whether it’s a legitimate problem that requires a change in his or her behaviour. “Your mother was hurt, and then she considered it, and she hasn’t mentioned her ‘mother fantasy’ since,” I said. I emphasized that anger is a signal that someone wants to be treated differently, which is healthy; cruelty is when someone deliberately wants to hurt someone else.

the first job of a hero is to be an eternal, or universal, man or woman—meaning that through a singular act of bravery, a hero is perfected and then reborn.

The second job of a hero is to return, transfigured, to teach us, the uninitiated, the lessons he’s learned.