Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Journeys to Recovery

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G's therapy and how she evolved as a psychologist, but her patients' incredible recoveries instilled my faith in the human spirit; its resilience, its desire to survive, and its wondrous ability to overcome unspeakable acts only prove good can triumph over evil.

This book is full of triggers - psychological and sexual abuse, cruelty, abandonment - yet it is ultimately extremely uplifting and deeply moving. This style is so inconsistent with that of her memoirs that it makes me wonder if her publisher demanded that she add squeamish details in an effort to satisfy an audience already jaded by the modern media’s daily bombardment of objectionable material on our senses. When you go from fearing your mother to feeling sorry for her, it usually means you’ve travelled a long way toward recovery. Koenig, MEd, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, psychology of eating expert, and eight-book international, award-winning author.For each patient, she establishes the inciting reason that brings them to therapy and then proceeds to present the patient’s family history. If you're going to choose to read this book, realize that it has many things discussed in detail that could be triggering and traumatic. Intimacy is when you’re familiar with your emotions, then share your feelings, your fears, your shame, your hopes and joys with another person. To survive his childhood, he used the psychological defense of depersonalization, which numbed him from emotional pain but also made it impossible to healthily attach to others. Good Morning, Monster is at heart an optimistic book, showing the ways in which people can overcome traumatic experiences and achieve happier lives.

Psychotherapists will recognize the narratives as teaching stories, the kind they heard and read in graduate school, and find valuable insights for treating their own patients—and, if they are reflective, to learning about themselves. First of all, Good Morning, Monster is heart-breaking, because the book tells the stories of real people and the horrors they had to endure over long periods of time. At the end of each section, Gildiner describes why she deems this patient heroic and, in some instances, meets with the patient years after his or her therapy has concluded to gather their own assessment of their heroic qualities. It was not framed as merely a psychologist learning on the job in practice out in the real world after the textbook cases in school, because she was describing similar mistakes all the way up to her last client. But sooner or later you might be able to see that there is a way of healing for you, and this is where I see a book like Good Morning, Monster can be extremely valuable.There is Peter, the son of immigrants, who was consigned nearly from birth to years spent alone in a room above the family restaurant; years that left him with developmental deficits harsh enough to deny him the intimacy he so required as an adult. At times, I had to swallow my gorge (with immense difficulty) and struggle not to vomit during Alana's tale of survival and the near incomprehensible suffering she triumphed over.