Read as much as you can, and we'll discuss Good Morning Monster, written by
" Aseasoned clinical psychologist and acclaimed author, whoknows how to provide readers with just enough detail to get them hooked into rooting for each patient, but not so much to make them recoil from their gut-wrenching histories. With gentle humor and welcome candor about her own therapeutic shortcomings, she draws us into patients’ lives, then helps us let them go, both of which she had to do as their therapist.
Good Morning, Monster functions on several levels. Readers with a general interest in psychology and human development will appreciate well-told stories of five pseudonymously named patients over the span of many years as they move from victimhood to heroes. 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.
Patients looking for hope, a path to put tragic childhoods into perspective, and find happiness and success beyond their wildest dreams, will not be disappointed. However, parts of the book are so disturbing and heart-wrenching that a trigger warning would not be inappropriate for readers who are highly sensitive to graphic descriptions of child abuse and neglect.
*A rape trigger warning comes with Alana's story.
In 1980s Canada, psychologist Catherine Gildiner meets Laura, Peter, Danny, Alana, and Madeline when she is new to private practice. She goes on, with a wing and a prayer, to use her training, grit, curiosity, compassion, self-reflection, and humility to seek help when she needs it, to take patients who are barely functional from complex PTSD to people whose post-traumatic growth is both astonishing and heart-warming. An eclectic therapist, she uses sociological, Freudian, Gestalt, Rogerian, and Cognitive Behavioral approaches—whatever works—to help her patients.
Karen R. Koenig, MEd, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, psychology of eating expert, and eight-book international, award-winning author. "
