Quotes from Catherine Gildiner

Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts that trigger anxiety

Compulsions are behaviours a person engages in to get rid of the obsessions and reduce anxiety

You know, life is a jungle and he drove through it in the Popemobile. I walked, using a hatchet to carve my way through the heard of darkness into swamps with leeches and crocodiles ... I know a hell of a lot more about that jungle than he'll ever know. I had to go through it alone and make every wrong turn until I knew it backwards and forwards and, finally, I got out alive.

People who've suffered that degree of trauma are often irreversibly impaired ... I had to accept the fact that there'd be some residual damage. If babies are starved and fed later, their bones will always show the traces of the lack of food. The same is true of severe abuse. The brain will adapt in strange ways, but it won't ever be fully normal, whatever that means.

perfectionism didn't foster a healthy work ethic; instead, it promoted workaholic behaviour. And workaholism is another compulsion—you work because you feel anxious when you're not working.

I think Steve holds no interest for you because you have no idea what your role would be in the relationship. You might not have to rescue him." Then I paused and said with vehemence, "You'd be out of a job.

To me, bravery isn't a single act; it's facing impossible odds and getting up every day to repeat the whole ordeal.

True insights happen only when the therapist gets out of the way so that the patient is able to gain his or her own psychological knowledge.

Multiple personality disorder was redefined in 1994, when the name was changed to dissociative identity disorder (DID) so as to reflect a better understanding of the condition. Whereas the term multiple personality means that the person has developed several different personalities, dissociative identity means that a fragmentation of the main personality has occurred.

There's nothing like failure for opening your mind.

Over the next twenty years, other Indigenous patients of mine had similar animal spirit dreams—markedly different from the dreams of white people.)

Making oneself vulnerable is the ultimate in bravery.

You know, anger has a bad rap," I ventured. "Anger is the fuel you use to drive up feelings of hurt and pain from your unconscious. It's how people tell others that they're displeased with their behaviour.

excellent tracker; it was also his PTSD. People who have PTSD are hyper-alert. Their immune system never rests—it's seen so much danger that it's scanning the environment constantly. That's part of what makes PTSD so hard to live with.

Anger is a signal that someone wants to be treated differently, which is healthy; cruelty is when we deliberately want to hurt someone else.

Children who are given adult responsibilities when they're too young to handle them are forever after worried about properly fulfilling their responsibilities; they never seem to accept that they were too young to manage the task but instead internalize their failure to accomplish it.

There are times when we've had to decide to change or remain the same. Will we be slaves to safe, mundane routines or break out and remake our lives the way we imagine them to be? Real change may entail risk, pain, probably anxiety, and hard work, but it's a way "to be" versus not being. We've all been heroes or cowards in our own narratives, depending on the occasion and the choices we've made.

children are often hypervigilant, for they feel themselves to be ceaselessly in peril. And they've learned to sense threats; their life often depends on it.

She was using a psychological technique called reframing: taking a concept and relabelling it so as to alter its meaning. She reframed what I perceived as neglect and labelled my concerns "overprotective.

the unconscious never cares for the facts. "It only knows what abandonment feels like.

psychological boundaries—the limits people create to identify safe, reasonable ways for others to interact with them.

the unconscious doesn't acknowledge the reality

There is no greater generosity than sharing your life story. If sharing my story helps even one person that's suffering, it would have been worth it.

fight cancer. (Research has shown that children who suffer abuse are about 50 percent more likely to get cancer than other children.)