Quotes from Catherine Gildiner

Our unconscious needs are strong—so strong that they can overwhelm us. We all desperately want to be loved.

Get off my turf; you're stomping on my sense of self. Stop crossing into my backyard.

Finally, chocking with sobs, she said, "I was nice every time because I thought maybe this time she'll love me. I thought I just hadn't found the right combination of things to do. There was always the next time. Just one morning I wanted to come down the stairs and have her not say 'Good morning, monster.' If I worked hard enough, I'd find how to make her love me.

Love means vulnerability; people who love you can also hurt you. Making oneself vulnerable is the ultimate in bravery.

Shame is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by behaviour that is somehow taboo in our society. 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.

she had her own boundaries, she'd no longer need the alternate personalities.

Psychopaths lack empathy, have a superficial charm and a grandiose sense of self-worth, and are pathological liars. As

Psychopaths lack empathy, have a superficial charm and a grandiose sense of self-worth, and are pathological liars. As well, they are cunning and manipulative, lack remorse, are emotionally shallow, refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, and indulge in a parasitic lifestyle.

Peter hadn't been treated as a person, and so, eventually, he didn't experience himself as one.

He pointed out that the unconscious never cares for the facts. "It only knows what abandonment feels like." He emphasized that the unconscious doesn't acknowledge the reality (the fact that my father had an inoperable cancer and died), but it does acknowledge the emotional impact (I was abandoned). My unconscious had registered the fear of having to take over a fractured, poor family.

Is it better to feel or to maintain your sanity?

Madeline could still regress. When she's tired, stressed, has a trigger, or is facing some adversity, her symptoms, mostly workaholism, can resurface.

One of the ways unconscious drives sneak into the conscious mind is through dreams, with the unconscious material camouflaged by symbols. But Freud argues that if you interpret and free-associate to these symbols, it's possible to figure out what the unconscious is trying to impart. If the dream is too well camouflaged, the meaning may be lost; if it's not camouflaged enough, it will be a nightmare.

as adults they have trouble setting boundaries. Their parents didn't listen to their needs, so they have no idea that the rest of the world would allow them to set some rules of social engagement. They have to learn that they don't have to perform every task for every person.

the main causes of stress or anxiety. Making psychological changes also provokes anxiety. It's very hard to break a habit, especially when you've adapted yourself to a particular pattern that, however maladaptive, has kept you alive. The unconscious is powerful, and it will fight to the death to keep an old pattern in place.

A tiny shred of empathy from me was too much for her—it terrified her. And it was a deal breaker.

People who are wealthy are assumed to have it all, and so are often misread or misjudged. A magazine journalist once described Madeline as "haughty" because she didn't smile or make eye contact. If she'd been poor, she might have been described as "shy.

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 villains in these cases, but rather layers of dysfunction to unravel.

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils. CHARLOTTE BRONTË, Jane Eyre

therapy wasn't about truth; as Jack Nicholson famously shouted in A Few Good Men, sometimes people "can't handle the truth." Rather, it's a matter of getting your unconscious to stop controlling your conscious mind. Effective therapy is about lowering your defences so that you can deal with the issues that arise in your life.

They all needed to feel loved in order to live better lives.

Nothing concentrates the mind like the need for survival.

In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. ERIK ERIKSON

Thomas Hardy's words in his poem "In Tenebris II": "If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.