Good Morning, Monster: Are You Brave Enough to Remember Your Past?
Katherine Gildiner, 2019
Every morning a mother woke her little girl with the words “Good morning, monster.” Another child grew up in an attic, where only a small piano spoke to him. The psychologist Katherine Gildiner tells five stories of patients who came in with a single symptom and found their whole childhood behind it. This is a book about how the psyche protects a child, and how an adult learns to take that protection down.
Who it is for
For anyone who notices habits in themselves that get in the way of living, wants to understand where they came from, and for everyone curious about how a psychologist really works with severe childhood experience.
Whatever role we were loved for in the family, that is the role we keep playing, whatever it costs us.
Five people who survived
Imagine that every morning of your childhood began with the same sentence. Your mother looks into the room and says, “Good morning, monster.” This is how a girl whom this book calls Madeline was greeted. Thirty years later she was running a successful company in New York and could not cope with the anxiety that was destroying that company.
Katherine Gildiner worked as a clinical psychologist in Toronto for more than twenty-five years. Out of the thousands of people who sat in her office, she chose five and called them psychological heroes. Names and details have been changed, and she asked each of the five whether their story could be told. Each of them came with one trouble: herpes that would not heal, impotence, silence after the loss of a family, panic attacks. And each time, behind that trouble stood a childhood the person did not want to talk about. The author follows each story from the first meeting to the last, with years of work in between.
This book is not about how frightening life is. It is about how the psyche protects a child when there is no one left to protect them, and why, many years later, that protection begins to get in the way of the adult. Gildiner does not hide her own mistakes either: she honestly describes where she helped and where a careless word did harm.
You will meet a girl who at nine became a mother to her younger siblings, and a boy who grew up in an attic beside a small piano. You will get to know a man who said nothing in his sessions for three months, and a woman whose psyche split apart in order to survive. And you will meet Madeline again. Perhaps in one of them you will recognize a piece of yourself. Let’s begin.
The girl who saved everyone
Laura was Gildiner’s first patient in private practice. She was twenty-six, she worked for a large security firm, and she came with a single request: to get rid of a herpes that would not go away despite medication. Her doctor suspected stress. Laura expected one or two sessions, and she stayed for several years.
Laura did not want to talk about her childhood, and Gildiner went slowly. Gradually it emerged that Laura’s mother had died when the girl was eight. A year later her father left and abandoned three children alone in an isolated cabin in the middle of a Canadian winter. Nine-year-old Laura became everything to her brother and sister at once. For about six months she stole food and clothes so that the younger ones would go to school fed and neat, and so that no one from outside would guess that there were no adults in the house. Above all she feared that the family would be separated. After six months the deception came out, and the children were taken in for several years by a neighboring family.
As an adult, Laura played the same role. She carried the work on her own, while her boss took advantage of her diligence. She excused the man who had given her the infection. Gildiner noticed that Laura was always covering over other people’s failures, as she had once covered over her father’s. About her father she still said he had done everything he could. Later Laura described her life as if she were hacking a road with a small axe through dark swamps full of leeches and crocodiles.
Imagine a person who learned in childhood to hold up the ceiling on their shoulders, because otherwise the house would fall. They keep holding it up even when the house has long been standing on solid walls. Their arms are numb and their back aches, but putting them down is frightening: what if everything collapses? In this way the role for which we were loved in the family can hold on for decades.
The breakthrough did not come at once. After years of work, Laura was able to admit that her father had not done everything he could: he had abandoned the children and harmed the family. When this became true for her, the present changed too. She stood up to her boss, and later became a manager herself. She left the man who had been taking advantage of her care.
From this story you can take one question to ask yourself: what were you praised for in childhood? If the answer sounds like “you could always be relied on,” look at whether you are carrying someone else’s load now, simply because you do not know how to feel needed in any other way.
About the author
Katherine Gildiner is a Canadian clinical psychologist who ran a private practice in Toronto for more than twenty-five years. She is also the author of a memoir about her childhood, “Too Close to the Falls.”
All books by this author: Katherine Gildiner
Terms from the book
- dissociation
- Laura
- Danny
- Madeline: The last patient in the book, a successful businesswoman from New York. The author changed her name, as she did the names of all her patients.
- herpes: A viral infection that causes painful blisters on the skin or mucous membranes. Flare-ups are often linked to stress and a weakened immune system.
- impotence: An inability to have sexual intercourse because of the lack of an erection. It can be caused by physical as well as psychological factors.
- Peter: The patient in the second story, a pianist from a family of Chinese immigrants. The name has been changed.
- depersonalization: A state in which a person seems to watch themselves and their life from the outside, and hardly feels their own experiences.
- Cree: One of the largest Indigenous peoples of Canada. In the twentieth century many Cree children were sent to residential schools.
- residential school: In this book, the Canadian residential schools for Indigenous children. Children were taken from their families, forbidden to speak their native languages, and many suffered abuse there.
- Brant: Clare Brant, a Canadian psychiatrist of the Mohawk people, whom Gildiner asked for advice on how to work with Danny.
- Alana: The patient in the fourth story, who suffered severe abuse in childhood. The name has been changed.
- Gretchen: Alana’s younger sister, whom Alana protected in childhood.
- dissociative identity disorder: A rare condition in which a person seems to have several separate personalities, each with its own name and memory. It is usually linked to severe trauma in early childhood.
All terms
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