[CONTENT WARNING]

This episode includes sensitive topic matter, so before we begin, I want to let you know that there will be discussions about sexual assault and physical trauma. Some of what we share may be hard to hear, so please take care while listening. If you've experienced sexual assault or trauma and need support, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. And if you are outside the US, please reach out to local resources in your area. You are not alone. Support is available.

 

NATALIE:

Hey there everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Motivation N'at — my name is Natalie. I am your host, and I am so thrilled today for a fantastic, I think profound, conversation to be had with someone who was honestly on my shortlist of dream people to have on a podcast when I started this about six or seven months ago. I'm so grateful to have this time today to talk about a book that changed my life in a lot of ways, to hear about what else you have coming down the pike, and to give listeners a chance to learn a little more about the different roads to healing and the power within healing — which I think is just an incredibly important message these days.

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NATALIE:

I'm not going to beat around the bush too much. A quick introduction: Dr. Catherine Gildner was a clinical psychologist in private practice for 25 years, and also a New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Too Close to the Falls. And another of her books — Good Morning, Monster — which I have here, flagged and tagged, read far too many times. It's about some of her most memorable patients and is the primary focus of our discussion today. Dr. Gildner, I'd love to hear a little about you, from you. What are you up to right now? Are you building on this idea of how you shared these stories?

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DR. GILDNER:

Well, Good Morning, Monster has been very successful — translated into 37 languages. And the publisher wants another one, of course. They said they thought it was too traumatic. I said, if it's too traumatic, why is it in 37 languages? I don't understand the problem. They said they wanted something a little lighter, so I gave them a sample — ten pages of something lighter — and they said there was no conflict. I said, I know. Nobody wants to read about everyday neurosis. We all have everyday neurosis. People want to read about somebody who lived through hell and got out of it. So they said, do whatever you want. I decided to do a book on bonding.

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DR. GILDNER:

I'm in Toronto, which is one of the most cosmopolitan cities in terms of immigrants. I have patients from India, Vietnam, Somalia, all over the world. So I decided to look at bonding among Canadians and Americans and see how it usually goes — and what happens with bonding mistakes, bonding errors. And then I wanted to look at people from other countries and how their bonding, say from Somalia to Canada, is altered. What do you do when you get here? We have different customs, different bonding rituals.

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NATALIE:

That's a great setup for everything we're going to get into — the whole conversation about bonding versus love, and all those components. I never realized the power of the bond.

 

DR. GILDNER:

The bond is incredible. This latest book is really about the defense mechanisms — the elaborate gerrymandering that people will do to make the bond work. The child is like a prisoner of war. If the parent is disturbed or even just neurotic, you have to absorb all of that. You have to maintain that bond and absorb their neuroses and reflect them back in a way the parent can accept. It's very complicated. And then as you age, the question is: how do you unlearn it? How do you then avoid mimicking those same things?

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DR. GILDNER:

Also — and maybe this should be the title — people don't know the difference between bonding and love. Bonding is a totally biological evolutionary system that we all inherit. It's like when ducks are all in a row and one gets out — the mother goes and gets them. If you don't bond, you won't live. As humans, we have these huge brains, so we're born too early and need to be cared for over years. The mother has to learn to let go very gradually. Some people don't let go at all. And it's all because of human anatomy.

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NATALIE:

And I always think back to my own life, other people's lives — the moms who say, "But look how good you turned out" or "I took care of you." But what does that really mean?

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DR. GILDNER:

Right. Or: "I adjusted to your neurosis fairly well because everybody has neurosis." Winnicott — one of the big founders of all this bonding theory — said the majority of mothers are good enough. If you're a good enough mother, you're not going to freak out reading all this because most people are good enough. Everybody's got stuff. But it's when the stuff is overwhelming the bonding that it becomes an issue.

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NATALIE:

In the book, all the cases had different parental relationships — it wasn't cookie cutter. They all had their own threads: narcissism, codependency, different things. Are there some that tend to result in more toxic bonding relationships than others?

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DR. GILDNER:

I think the worst one for bonding is overprotection. Which is now an epidemic. The helicopter parent thing. In the 1950s it hardly existed. Now people come to therapists constantly — "I'm afraid my kid's going to take the subway without me." That is very, very hard to undo because the child becomes dependent on you, but also angry. You wind up with the angry dependent child. That's a lot of young people right now. Rousseau says the best parenting is benign neglect — which is what people had in the 50s. "Go out and play, come home when the street lights are on." You learn from your mistakes. There's no way you can learn with a parent who's over-parenting. They tell you everything you should do. What happens when that person is 21? They're emotionally 14. That's why they don't want to leave home.

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NATALIE:

And even in professional careers, the idea is always that you fail to learn. It's so hard for some people to grasp — maybe because they weren't allowed to fail, or their failures were the only thing that got attention. A different kind of fear.

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DR. GILDNER:

And also: how your parents handle failure. If you fail a math test and they say, "That's what happens when you don't study — it's on you," versus calling the professor at the university to ask for fewer assignments. A friend of mine who's a math professor told me parents call him. That was unheard of in the past. And someone younger I told said, "Oh yeah, happens all the time."

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NATALIE:

When I turned 18, the conversation was done. "You're an adult, you advocate for yourself." But it was also a harsh end point — because up until that point there was still, "I take care of you." That gradual shift that you mentioned — so there can be that learning component — when does bonding become enough? Are there people satisfied just with having their basic Maslow hierarchy needs met?

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DR. GILDNER:

As one of my patients said: "I just want someone to walk around the mall with." But here's the thing — bonding is not love. Bonding is whoever you get as a mother. You have to make that work. Love is a choice. You choose someone to love. Unfortunately, people make the mistake of assuming bonding is love. If your father was a somewhat ne'er-do-well, you can't help dating that kind of person because that's what feels like home. But in fact — when it comes time to love, you don't realize: I don't have to bond. I can just love somebody because of their good qualities or how they treat me.

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DR. GILDNER:

Especially women — they'll bond to someone and think, "He doesn't talk enough, but I can get him to talk." And I say: is it your job to get him to talk? And it was her job to get her father to talk. Everyone said, "Only you can do this." So she felt loved for that — when in fact it's not love. It's getting a quiet person to talk.

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NATALIE:

And because love is a choice, sometimes it feels more fragile. I love this person, they love me, but they could choose tomorrow not to. Does that fear drive people toward people who can't not choose them — people who are dependent, inadequate, who need them?

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DR. GILDNER:

Exactly. I had a client — her boyfriend's visa was rejected at dinner. I said, red flag. She said, not really, visas get rejected. But her father always had rejected visas, always pulling out new cards. So she thought nothing of it. Whereas if you grew up with a financially responsible father, a rejected visa would seem very odd. For people who grew up with that, it's not a red flag. In fact, it's warm and toasty because it's normal.

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NATALIE:

Madeline's case in the book resonated so much for me. My mom used to call me devil's child. So when Madeline recounted that her mom's first words every morning were "Good morning, monster" — I felt that. And then Madeline's relationship with her dad — this feeling of "if dad had known about the Russia trip, he never would have let that happen." They sat in the basement eating Spaghetti-Os, commiserating. What should dad's role have been there?

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DR. GILDNER:

Her father was a very powerful businessman — multi-millionaire, old Toronto wealth. And yet he was in the basement eating Spaghetti-Os. For whatever reasons, he was totally unable to have his needs met by his wife. He regressed. They were like two little kids. And that also gave Madeline the idea that she couldn't effect any change — even her powerful father, the one with 200 employees, couldn't do anything. He gave her that message: she's all-powerful. We have nothing to do except eat Spaghetti-Os in the basement.

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NATALIE:

My dad used to say to me, "Always remember two things: I love you, and it's my fault." He took responsibility for everything. And when I finally processed that, I realized it wasn't all his fault. But that was the only way he knew how to protect around it.

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DR. GILDNER:

That's what I call cheap peace. It's a lot easier to say "it's all my fault" and absorb the guilt than to actually change. Guilt can be cheap peace too, instead of saying "this isn't working and I need to do something about it."

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NATALIE:

So once we understand what we've been carrying — whether it's 20 years or 40 years — and we see the change that needs to happen, we get into the conversation of healing. In Peter's case, you called it quiet healing. Not some big bravado moment. It was five years. Every week was a tiny change. Sometimes a setback. But over five years, more positive than negative.

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DR. GILDNER:

Right. It takes a long time, especially when the deprivation was that deep. And in the world today — more people are open to therapy — but it's not a quick fix. There are spurts, bouts, long stretches. And you don't have to justify your healing to anyone. When those stalls happened — when someone like Alana disappeared for a time or regressed — yes, patients do regress. When anyone takes a step forward, they're taking a big risk. For Alana, doing anything her father didn't like could mean he'd kill her cat, drown her, all the things he said. The idea that "I can have even a tiny bit of autonomy" was enormous. And when a risk flops, they regress.

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DR. GILDNER:

She was very bright — worked with patent law, people wanted her to testify in court. But she couldn't be sure the flashbacks — what she called "the tapes" — wouldn't overtake her. Her father had taught her to add the wrong way so she wouldn't be better than him. Even at the very last session, she wasn't going to testify in court. She said, "I don't feel like I need to be Perry Mason. It makes me too anxious." And I think part of ending therapy is realizing: I've done a lot of work, but I'm not a different person. I will have limitations. And when people get tired or stressed, they'll regress.

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NATALIE:

The tapes — that jumped off the page for me. I turned 41 tomorrow, and my husband can look at me and tell when it's "my mom in my head" because I'm answering a script, not the actual situation.

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DR. GILDNER:

Her tapes were loud. If the judge was asking her something, she'd hear: "Hey, you good for nothing." There was too much. But a lot of people have thought voices that are recessed versions of that. And recognizing them as recordings — from a past time, not the present — takes the power out of it a little. You're never going to erase them completely. By the time you're four, they're pretty well done. You have to find a way to deal with them.

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NATALIE:

One of the things that helped Alana — can you walk through what finally shifted for her?

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DR. GILDNER:

He had tried to drown her once. And on the shore, one of his friends said, "Stop it, she's going to die. We'll go to jail." And when they got on shore, Alana thought: I always believed I was always wrong, that I did terrible things that made him angry. And this man — who was himself no great person — was saying, "You can't drown somebody because you think it's funny." A little penny dropped. She said: "Oh. He's the one that screwed up. Not me." And then he became a management problem, not a parent. "I feel sorry for him" — that's not the same as taking care of him. You take away their power. They're not all-powerful anymore. You see them as pathetic. And it doesn't mean you have to take care of it.

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NATALIE:

Madeline said at the end — she uses caller ID now. She feels sorry for her mother, but not responsible for her. Because how responsible was her mother for her?

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DR. GILDNER:

Exactly. And that was very hard work to get there. Narcissists will never, ever take responsibility. If they do, they're not really a narcissist.

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NATALIE:

I think there's also the component of how many of us overextend who we feel responsible for. There's a generation of people who feel like: if my best friend isn't happy, that's my fault. Or if a trip I planned didn't go perfectly, that's on me.

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DR. GILDNER:

Eldest children and only children have an exaggerated sense of responsibility. They had to keep the game alive, keep the house from falling apart. And they had no choice — those were all the people they had. It's like having a bicycle that doesn't work very well, but you gerrymander it and try to make it work anyway. Your life becomes MacGyvering.

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NATALIE:

One of the last things I want to touch on is hyper-vigilance and rest. People who've survived trauma are just always on alert. We feel lazy and guilty for saying, "I don't want to do that" or "I need to lock down." That's the only time nothing can get to us.

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DR. GILDNER:

And it was the most healthy when you were little. That's what kept you alive. Alana had frozen shoulder — when you're on alert all the time, eventually your shoulder freezes. Very often traumatized people have frozen shoulder. She had to know where her father was every single second so she could be one step ahead. That was functional. The problem is it becomes dysfunctional as an adult. Therapy is a lot of work because you have to do it yourself. You have to keep a journal. You have to write down every little thing that happens. Because if you don't write it down, your unconscious will block it out.

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NATALIE:

And then not blaming yourself when you realize how you acted in the past. "Why did it take me so long? Why couldn't I have seen this sooner?" That self-hatred cycle.

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DR. GILDNER:

Unlearning is incredibly difficult. Have you ever learned something the wrong way and then had to undo it? It takes — I think — about four times as long to unlearn something as it is to learn it. Picture an adult who was teaching you the wrong thing, every day, all day, for your entire childhood. And now you have to grow up and unlearn it. That's a lot of work.

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DR. GILDNER:

And people have the fantasy that you come to therapy once a week and in the interim you don't have to do anything. I get rid of patients like that fairly quickly because it isn't going to go anywhere. The work has to be handed over to them. I had a patient — a very successful advertising man, from a poor family, alcoholic father, whose brother drove the car over a little brother in the driveway. The mother never recovered. She told him: "Bill, I love you because you never get angry. Thank God you never get angry." First of all — he was enraged. That wasn't not-angry. That was repressed. Anger is a good thing. It keeps people from walking all over you. But he could never be angry. And he developed eczema so severe his entire face looked like a red sponge. They spent a fortune — steroids, clinics in Sweden, everything. Nothing worked. Until we realized: that's anger bubbling out of his skin, not out of his mouth. Once he started letting small things out — giving people immediate feedback when they let him down — the eczema started clearing. And when he slips, when he's tired and just wants to get through it, it all comes back.

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NATALIE:

I love the psychosomatic piece. The body keeps the record.

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DR. GILDNER:

You've got to be as hyper-vigilant about confronting every small repeat of that old pattern as you were about watching your parent as a child. Of course he thought everybody would hate him and everything would fall apart. It didn't. Nobody changed anything except he stopped accepting crap.

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NATALIE:

Five and a half years into therapy myself, and my therapist had me write down every tape I heard from my mom in my head between sessions and send it to her beforehand — so she could read it without my "it's fine, it's fine" explanation. It was pages. And I had four weeks where I didn't call my mom — and I didn't feel guilty about it. That was profound.

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DR. GILDNER:

That's exactly it. Because you're bonded to your mother and you love her in a lot of ways. So you edit the bad stuff out. You erase it. You say, "I'm going to make this work." But when you start writing it down, and then reading it — you're shocked. It's right there.

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NATALIE:

And finally — Danny's case. The silent healer. You reflected on yourself in that one — how do you adjust your therapy for the patient rather than the other way around? What were some of the biggest lessons from that?

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DR. GILDNER:

With Danny I learned a huge amount. I learned that when I was sitting across from him, I was thinking: I have to do the work here. I have to get going. And he was thinking: this is pretty good. He's getting to know me. Because he's Native, and his way of bonding is through closeness — not talk. Talk is white noise. I had to learn that somebody else gets to drive the car. I need to take my cues from them. That's true with all cultural work. You have to learn. And learning not to judge.

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DR. GILDNER:

Also — it's not just bonding. The whole world interferes with it. I had a client from Cambodia who lived through the Khmer Rouge. They said: you cannot be bonded to your parents. You must be bonded to the Communist Party. They would say, "Kneel down and shoot your father. If you cry, we'll shoot you." This woman, Shenda, watched all of that happen from within a very happy family. She had survivor guilt so severe she couldn't cope. And I have Jewish clients who survived concentration camps — now they're overprotective parents because one day, as children, they were taken away and never saw their parents again. Why wouldn't they be? That's their history.

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NATALIE:

Dr. Gildner, thank you so much for this conversation. To everyone listening — this book is hard for some people, depending on where you are in your journey. But I really encourage you to grab it and work through it as you're able. There are so many nuggets of reflection, and it's a space where you can feel seen without the comparison Olympics of trauma. The new book on bonding is coming — we'll make sure to share that when it's out. Good Morning, Monster as well as her memoirs are available on Amazon and wherever books are sold — Kindle and audiobook as well.

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DR. GILDNER:

You've been a great interviewer. Thank you so much.

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NATALIE:

Thank you. We'll talk again soon, everyone.