Madeline would try to sneak potato chips into her room between restaurant meals; every morning when she'd round the back servant stairs to the kitchen, hoping for some breakfast before school, her mother would greet her by saying, “Good morning, monster.” Then she would accuse her of skulking for food. Yet the restaurant meals were never sufficient, since Charlotte would force Madeline to say she wasn't hungry. Her mother would say, “One day when you're not a fat pig, you'll thank me.”
Catherine Gildiner practised psychotherapy for twenty-five years (before retiring to concentrate on creative writing, which led to her three well-received memoirs and one novel), and in her latest nonfiction effort, Good Morning, Monster, Gildiner describes the therapeutic histories of five patients whose journeys to recovery she describes as “heroic”. Each of these five people first presented themselves as extremely psychologically damaged, but through the processes described by Gildiner, each eventually unpacked and confronted the childhood abuses that had formed them; each eventually leaving therapy after attaining a kind of wellness. There's a sameness to each of the five sections – presentation, therapy, wellness, followed by a revisitation by Gildiner as she wrote this book – and although each of the five patients came from very different backgrounds, and although each of them suffered very different types of childhood abuse (from neglect to sexual abuse to a residential school survivor), there's a sameness to their therapeutic journeys as well. As interesting and informative as this material inherently is, it felt like there was a lack of depth or insight in the recounting of it that left me a bit nonplussed. I'm rounding down to three stars to reflect this lack in the writing style. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Almost all abusive parenting is based on generations of the same; those who are abusive were likely themselves abused. That's why there are no enemies in these cases, but rather layers of dysfunction to unravel.Something that I found very interesting in these narratives were the eventual revelations that the most abusive parents had been abused themselves – also interesting to see how the patients would finally be able to let go of anger over their upbringings once they recognised that their own parents had once been lonely, frightened, and powerless children themselves. And it was very surprising to read how many of the patients positively credited their miserable childhoods for making them the type of adults they had become. When she revisited them while writing this book, Gildiner would ask her former patients what they would have done differently if they could go back in time. A woman who had been abandoned in the woods at eight years old to take care of her younger siblings replied: If she had her life to live over, she said, she probably wouldn't have wanted it to be be any different. Of the man whose mother locked him in an attic for his entire preschool years in order to keep him out from under her feet: One of the most surprising things Peter said was that if he had to live his life over again, he wouldn't change one thing....His piano playing had given him the greatest joy in his life, he continued, and if he'd had friends and a normal upbringing he might not have needed it. Perhaps less surprising is the answer of a woman who had been horrifically sexually abused by her father: “I'd have killed (him).” Very interesting to see how Gildiner's therapeutic methods are able to stop these cycles of abuse (and in the case of the residential school survivor, interesting to see how Gildiner advocated for her patient to explore traditional Indigenous healing methods in order to achieve a more culturally sensitive and holistic form of wellness, long before we in Canada were acknowledging the damage done by the residential school system.)
Arnold Toynbee, a philosopher of history, informs us that 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. And so this book is my way of hailing these five conquering heroes, of having them tell their terrifying but rewarding tales. Each had to slay a different Minotaur, each used a different weapon, and each employed different battle strategies. These five people may at first have seemed vastly different, yet when the economic and cultural layers were peeled away, their unconscious needs were strikingly similar. They all needed to feel loved in order to live better lives.From explaining Freudian and Gestalt therapeutic techniques to outlining the ways in which she had made mistakes with these patients, Good Morning, Monster is as much Gildiner's professional memoir as it is a grouping of case studies meant to demonstrate what she means by “the hero's journey”. And again, it's all potentially very interesting, just a tad underdelivered.
