63 pages • 2 hours read
Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery
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Part 1, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Laura”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Surrounded by Village Idiots”
Content Warning: This section and the source material deals closely with the theme of trauma. Both reference child abuse, substance misuse, verbal and physical abuse, sexual assault including rape, suicide, and suicide ideation.
The narrator introduces her first patient as she begins work as a therapist. Laura Wilkes has been referred to therapy by a general practitioner who has been treating her for recurrent herpes outbreaks. The herpes has not been successfully managed through medical help and the GP thinks that acute stress is causing the flare ups. Laura contracted the herpes from her boyfriend Ed, who did not disclose his diagnosis to Laura and lied about it. Laura is angry with Ed, but Gildiner notes that she has not dealt with the situation or her feelings. Expressing resistance to therapy, Laura does concede that her outbreaks may be triggered by stress, but she is unwilling to delve into her past history and resists sharing many personal details.
By her second session, Laura has read several books on stress and made a chart detailing the sources of stress in her life. One she terms “dealing with assholes” (9) includes her father. Gildiner asks Laura to speak of her early memories of her parents and learns that Laura’s mother passed away unexpectedly when Laura was young of a cause never revealed to Laura. Her father abandoned her and her siblings when she was nine. Gildiner decides that she must help Laura access her feelings—Laura, having been forced at a young age to focus on survival did not have the “luxury” of feelings and has suppressed these (14). When Gildiner expresses empathy, Laura is angered. In a subsequent session, Laura expresses frustration concerning both her boss and her boyfriend. Gildiner attempts to point out the similarities in the men’s behaviors, but Laura is resistant to accepting these patterns. Laura defends her father when Gildiner attempts to compare the boss and boyfriend to him. Gildiner, looking back on the sessions, notes the importance of letting Laura come to understand the reasons for her behaviors on her own, rather than have Gildiner point them out, something that Laura finds challenging and reacts to with hostility.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Into the Woods”
Laura recounts a dream she has had about a character from the television show M*A*S*H—Gildiner points out that Laura admires the character—Colonel Potter—because he is “honorable and dependable” (22). She asks Laura to recount what happened after her father left; Laura details how she became skilled at stealing food and clothing for herself and her siblings. She chastises herself for not being a “good mother” (27) when her siblings cried or complained. She came to emulate Colonel Potter after admiring his fatherly interactions with a younger character. After six months of living alone with her siblings, Laura is caught stealing and their situation is discovered by police. The children are placed in the care of the owners of their home—Ron and Glenda—who then foster the children for the next four years.
Laura describes the difficulty she had accepting kind actions from adults; as a child, she resists any mothering by Glenda believing that she herself had become an adult. When Gildiner takes Laura to observe a group of nine-year-olds at an elementary school, Laura is shocked by how “immature” they are. Gildiner notes that the task she faces as a therapist is to help Laura see that as a child, she took on a “savior” role—a role she continues to fulfill with both her boyfriend and her boss.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “What the Cat Dragged In”
In Laura’s second year of therapy, it becomes clear to Gildiner that, although Laura’s boyfriend Ed continues to violate the boundaries that Laura professes to want, she repeatedly forgives and excuses him. Gildiner decides to help Laura focus on establishing boundaries with her boss. After Laura learns of another woman who contracted herpes from Ed, she finally breaks up with him.
Dr. Gildiner then focuses on helping Laura heal from the damage caused by her father, asking her to record her dreams in a journal. Laura recounts one dream that affected her deeply in which she is immediately able to connect to an incident when she, at age 14, visited her father in prison. Her father is demeaning to her and Laura admits to Dr. Gildiner that she now sees her father was not as “right” (38) as she believed him to be at the time. For the first time, Laura begins to view her father in a new light.
Laura recounts how, four years into living with Ron and Glenda, her father suddenly returns, announcing he has remarried and insisting the children have a new mother. The children move with him to Toronto, although both of Laura’s siblings were flourishing under the care of Ron and Glenda. Laura’s father has married Linda who is 10 or 15 years younger than him. Both Laura’s father and Linda have alcohol addictions and their relationship is violent and volatile. Laura recounts how, after a fight with her father, Linda dies of a broken neck after falling down a flight of stairs while drunk. Laura was never sure whether this fall was truly accidental or if her father had intentionally pushed Linda. Laura talks about how she could have prevented Linda’s death, and Dr. Gildiner tries to point out the ways that Laura is protecting her father by blaming herself for his actions.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Revelations”
Gildiner explains that although in the early part of her career, she relied on Freudian theories of treatment, she went on to adopt a blend of several approaches, based on the patient’s needs. She gives Laura a book that explains the behaviors of the adult children of people with alcohol addictions. Laura is surprised when she fits all of the descriptions. She comes to view herself as a product of an “alcoholic” home. Laura describes to Gildiner how, soon after Linda’s death, her father was sent to prison and she went to live with her grandparents who proved to be physically and verbally abusive.
In her third year of therapy, Laura’s sister, Tracy, asks for Laura’s help—Tracy’s husband has just died by suicide, and she has twin infants to care for. Gildiner uses this as an opportunity to discuss intimacy, which is foreign to Laura. Having been taught to be strong and never have feelings, Laura does not know how to develop an intimate connection with a loved one.
Laura returns from Tracy’s house, reporting that she shared much of what she has learned in therapy with her, and then invited Tracy to share her feelings. In response, Tracy revealed that she was sexually abused by their father. Laura is angered and shocked; their father had not abused Laura in this way and she had not known about this form of his abuse. She travels to her father’s home and confronts him; he denies the allegations and Laura begins to agree with his insistence that Tracy is playing the role of “victim,” as they feel she has done throughout her life. In the session, Gildiner encourages Laura to recognize that Tracy may be telling the truth about the abuse.
Gildiner notes that, despite how upsetting it may be for both a therapist and a patient to not know the truth of past events, the aim of therapy is not to uncover the truth. Gildiner connects Tracy with therapy and support groups in her area, but Tracy does not commit to them. Gildiner eventually conceded to herself that Tracy is not her patient and that she must resist putting so much energy into Tracy.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Out of a Job”
Laura arrives at a session outraged—she had invited her foster sister and her boyfriend to dinner and they brought along a male friend. Laura is certain they meant for this to be an introduction to someone Laura might date. As she lists the reasons she has no interest in dating the man, Steve, Gildiner points out the ways that Laura’s reason shows she always casts herself as the “savior” in a relationship. She asks Laura to consider entering into a relationship for love, not for the opportunity to save someone. Laura begins dating Steve and the relationship goes well. Eventually, Laura reveals her herpes infection to Steve, who says he needs time to think about this information. Laura, certain that Steve has broken up with her, tells Gildiner she is relieved because Steve was “cheap” and didn’t take risks. Gildiner coaxes Laura to explore her feelings further, and Laura admits that she is hurt.
After several weeks, Steve returns, having met with his doctor to learn how they might engage in safe sex to prevent the infection from passing to Steve. The relationship goes well for several months until Steve suddenly leaves again. Laura explains to Gildiner that she had lashed out in anger over a Tupperware of leftover dinner. Gildiner is surprised to learn that Laura is still prone to such outbreaks of anger and emphasizes that this is a behavior that results from growing up in a dysfunctional household. Steve agrees to return if Laura can control her outbursts.
Laura successfully corrects her angry outbursts over time and she and Steve eventually go on to marry. Laura agrees with Gildiner that it is time to end the therapy sessions, but the two keep in touch. Years later, Laura sends Gildiner a news article detailing assault charges brought against the actor of M*A*S*H’s Colonel Potter. Decades later, Gildiner meets Laura for lunch to tell her that she will be featured in Gildiner’s book about heroes. Laura explains that were she able to change her childhood and past, she would not. She has acquired survival skills and honed her ability to persevere because of it. She still feels a deep love for her father, who has since passed away, and, although she admits that the situation was problematic, believes he showed love for her as best he could.
Part 1, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
As Gildiner’s first ever patient, Laura Wilkes is a natural first patient in the book. The book opens with Gildiner’s nervous feelings as she starts her clinical practice and waits for her first patient. This frames the book as Gildiner’s narrative and as being told from her point of view. Although she tells the stories of her patients (as they tell them to her) in order to explore the themes and messages of her book, the story is really Gildiner’s. We see her patients through her eyes as a therapist and experience the decisions, lessons, and dilemmas that present themselves in her profession.
Apart from being Gildiner’s first patient, several aspects of Laura’s personality and her circumstances strike Gildiner as strange and remarkable. The reader is told that no one will accelerate Gildiner’s professional learning more than Laura and her understanding of the “messy business” of clinical psychology. One of the most immediate obstacles that Gildiner presents in her book is Laura’s evident and self-professed hostility to therapy. Although Laura is a successful, professional individual, she professes to not know what stress is (after Gildiner suggests her herpes outbreak may be stress-induced). Similarly, she has great difficulty viewing several aspects of her childhood circumstances in a realistic way, despite the benefit of time and distance. For instance, she denies that it is in any way remarkable that she was expected to (and, to a degree, succeeded in) caring for her younger siblings at age nine. Laura insists she became an adult at that juncture, though Gildiner seeks to point out that this objectively is not the case.
With time, Gildiner is able to show Laura that her strange perception of reality is the result of the neglect and other abuse she endured. In some respects, Laura has never truly grasped that her childhood was an unusual (and traumatic) one, and that no other nine-year-olds are expected to become adults. Conversely, Laura falsely believes her situation to be unique: when she learns of the traits of adult children of people with alcohol addictions, she is stunned to find that she checks each box on the list. Further, she is surprised that the dynamic she experienced living with her father (and his second wife who had an alcohol addiction) is typical of children with parents with substance use disorders. As she unfolds Laura’s story, Gildiner shows how trauma can lead to certain recognizable patterns of behavior and that patients must come to be open to this phenomenon in order to reduce their own feelings of blame, stress, and problem-solving. In this way, Laura’s story is key to Gildiner’s expression of The Power of Self-Discovery. Laura must work hard to understand herself and, over time, becomes increasingly open to the possibilities of increased self-knowledge.
In her treatment of Laura (and other patients who follow), Gildiner relies on many psychoanalytical theories. One is that dreams reveal the thoughts and feelings of the unconscious mind. Gildiner asks Laura to record her dreams so that together they can make meaning of them to get at the heart of Laura’s stress. Similarly, Gildiner’s therapy applies psychoanalytical views of the role of parents upon their children. This introduces one of the book’s key themes, Parental Influence and Generational Trauma. Although complex, these notions suggest that the relationships children develop with their parents will shape the central relationships they develop in the future (with spouses, romantic partners, and their own children). That the impact Laura’s absent-then-abusive father had on her continues to affect her is central to Gildiner’s approach.
In the end, Laura does not entirely change her view of her father, although she experiences an important shift in perspective. She is cognizant of the ways she defends her father’s neglect in a way that she was unaware of before. Gildiner implies that being made aware of this tendency to defend her father and honest about the ways this may be problematic is enough for Laura to move forward in a healthy and happy way. Gildiner presents Laura as her first “hero,” and each patient study helps build the theme of Heroism as the book progresses. Gardiner ends the section with the happy resolution of Laura still living bravely with the effects of her trauma but, through hard work, now able to do so in a sustainable way. The aim of the therapy, Gardiner suggests, is not to undo past problems, but to give Laura the tools to effectively cope in the future as she has learned more about how her past has impacted her. She is able, upon the termination of therapy, to establish boundaries in a way that makes her relationships with other men healthy and fulfilling.
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