Gildiner’s book is written in the first person, framing the case studies inside her personal experience as a therapist. She had the luxury of being able to see her clients for years, something that’s sometimes prohibitive in America due to insurance and HMO restrictions.

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.She is angry at her boyfriend, Ed, who did not disclose his diagnosis to Laura and who passed it to her. Catherine Gildiner is a best-selling memoirist, a novelist, and a psychologist in private practice for 25 years. 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. There's a sameness to each of the five sections – presentation, therapy, wellness, followed by a revisitation by Gildiner as she wrote this book – and although each of the five patients came from very different backgrounds, and although each of them suffered very different types of childhood abuse (from neglect to sexual abuse to a residential school survivor), there's a sameness to their therapeutic journeys as well.

In each case study, Gildiner traces the impact trauma has had on the patient to illustrate how the patient embodies the qualities of a hero. In her epilogue Gildiner owns up to choosing patients for whom the process worked and was miraculously transformative (to the extent once can refer changes wrought through years of hard work as "miraculous. If you plan on having a life partner, it’s emotional intimacy that will be the glue that holds you together long after the physical intimacy fades. The book also addresses and handles physical appearance, weight, homosexuality, gender transition, and even race in an extremely indelicate way.To be fair, she eventually recognized this and describes how she came to her senses, but not until I’d spent most of the chapter feeling infuriated with her. An eclectic therapist, she uses sociological, Freudian, Gestalt, Rogerian, and Cognitive Behavioral approaches—whatever works—to help her patients heal. With a novelist's storytelling gift, Gildiner recounts the details of their struggles, their paths to recovery, and her own tale of growth as a therapist.

In therapy, when pathological defenses start to crumble, the patient lets in more material from their background that they've been defending against. But sooner or later you might be able to see that there is a way of healing for you, and this is where I see a book like Good Morning, Monster can be extremely valuable.I have been listening to this book and was loving it until I got to the part about Danny and how Gildiner spoke of him, what felt like low key fetishizing him and then validating his abuser. It is a compelling read and I would highly recommend it for those who are interested in mental health or social issues.

In every case, the patient who was abused as a child could have been saved a world of hurt had other adults stepped in and said, "no, something isn't right here. Gildiner has worked with each patient as their therapist, seeing each one for a period of four to five years, and uses their cases as studies for her book’s exploration of the human capacity for resilience and survival.Through his therapy, Peter and Gildiner explore both the cultural forces that shaped his mother’s notion of a good mother as well as the trauma she herself experienced that manifested itself in poor parenting. She goes on to become a successful entrepreneur but her anxiety, panic attacks, obsessions, anorexia, and multiple cancers finally bring her to the edge of sanity and the need for treatment, which allows her to learn to love and be loved.