Quotes from Catherine Gildiner

When someone says they don't care if you're sexually satisfied and they don't care if you want to go to nice restaurants instead of car races, they're at least indifferent and unkind. He was nice when you were dating and until he got your dad's money.

Laura, you're demanding that I act like the parent you had, the man who was uninterested in your pain. You're used to no one responding to your sadness, but I don't want that role. Right now I feel in a bind.

As one of my sons always says, "normal" is just a setting on a washing machine.)

Laura had been victimized, but she never took on the victim role. That was what was so heroic about her. Even though she'd been fighting for many years, she got up every day determined to better herself.

I do what I can. I already told her that we'd get through this." What Laura was describing was encouragement, not intimacy.

Intimacy is when you're familiar with your emotions, then share your feelings, your fears, your shame, your hopes and joys with another person.

Effective therapy is about lowering your defences so that you can deal with the issues that arise in your life.

One of the Indigenous healers I consulted in the first year of the case had said to me, "An Indian has to be an Indian, or he's hollow." Thirty years later, in 2018, the Indigenous American writer Tommy Orange wrote in his novel There There, "It's important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian.

In the long run, shame always outlives physical pain. "Anyone who thinks of a shameful memory will experience it at least as vividly as when they had the original experience,

Okay, okay, I can see that she couldn't love me, but why did she hate me and call me a monster?" "Why did the gorilla hit the tiny baby gorilla and no other one?" Madeline was silent for a long time. "The infant wanted what she couldn't give.

You were suffering depersonalization, which is when you feel divorced from your own personal self. You don't feel your own bodily sensations or emotions. The world seems hazy, and your connection with yourself breaks down." "I have that a lot. What causes it?" "A traumatic childhood, usually in the early stages of differentiation of self, combined with high anxiety levels.

Danny used one of the most powerful defences known in psychology: depersonalization. He cut off all his feelings. It was the perfect armour. The only problem with his perfect weapon was that he could barely attach to anyone, or feel life's pleasures. As he said at the beginning of our work together, "I don't need joy." He was right, in a way. Is it better to feel or to maintain your sanity?

One was the rule of human nature: You get what you give. That phrase galvanized her. She'd had no idea that she had the right to give her mother only what she received from her—which was precious little.

Most white people enter therapy in order to gain better control of their lives, or as one healer put it, "to stickhandle through life." Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas traditional psychotherapy is based on a man-against-nature paradigm, Indigenous healing focuses on man harmonizing with nature.

The ego—one's sense of self—is an abstract concept; it's hard to define it concretely. Picture it as a house built brick by brick. It protects you from the stresses of the outside world, providing a metaphorical home to shelter in—a safe place.

to explore or deal with the world in any normal way. And attachment disorder doesn't just affect the relationship with the mother; it affects all social, emotional, and cognitive development. If the child doesn't experience attachment, that child can't move forward to step two—trusting and emotionally attaching to others and, eventually, sexually attaching to others. In other words, you can't grow emotionally if you didn't have infant attachment.

Freud says shame makes you feel you won't be loved. Shame is much more pernicious than guilt. While guilt is a painful feeling about your actions, shame is much more psychologically destructive because it's a bad feeling about yourself as a person.

Part of the Native ethos is not to compete or flaunt your success: it could make someone less able feel bad. It's fine to be on a hockey team, but it's insensitive to cheer for your own team since it could offend the other team.

the goal is to bring unconscious material forward into the conscious mind so that patients no longer act on their powerful but unconscious needs.

We could, as Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, would have suggested, deal with this in what he called "the here and now." Perls believed that the dynamic set up in the session between the therapist and patient is the same dynamic the patient sets up between herself and the rest of world.

Most white people enter therapy in order to gain better control of their lives, or as one healer put it, "to stickhandle through life." Indigenous healing is instead about connecting with the spirit world in a meaningful way and achieving harmony. Whereas

My heart is not a home for cowards. D. ANTOINETTE FOY

Why don't you picture pushing away all your defences and just sit with the question 'Why am I still nice to my mother?' And then see what floats into your mind.

I was beginning to see that it didn't matter at all if I knew what was wrong with a client. The art of therapy is getting the client to see it.