Good Morning, Monster by Catherine Gildiner

Author:Catherine Gildiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

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Danny and I were well past the midpoint in what would eventually be our five-year sojourn. We’d logged a lot of time together. Danny acknowledged that he’d talked to me more than he’d ever talked to anyone in his life.

I think I was helping him, but I know for certain that he was helping me with a very particular problem.

In the first chapter, on Laura, I described my count­ertra­nsfer­ence: the therapist’s feelings about the patient. And initially, Danny’s appearance, with his Indigenous face and braids, had actually been a trigger for me—because I’d once been hospitalized after a Cree patient with braids physically assaulted me when I worked in a psychiatric hospital. After that, whenever I encountered someone who looked like my attacker, I would feel afraid, experiencing a racing pulse and shortness of breath.

One dark, sleeting winter night, four years into my therapy with Danny, I was coming home from work when I turned up the walkway of my downtown Toronto house. An Indigenous man in braids was sitting on my dimly lit porch steps. (We lived a few blocks from the Native Canadian Centre.) He asked to borrow our snow shovel. “I want to earn some money shovelling snow, but I don’t have a shovel,” he said. “I saw this one on your porch, but no one was home when I rang the bell. I’ll return it in the morning.” I agreed and didn’t think any more of it, and the shovel was indeed returned to our porch in the morning.

When I got inside the house, I realized that I’d experienced no physiological or psychological reaction of fear. An Indigenous man with braids was no longer a trigger for me. My growing positive transference for Danny had ended any PTSD I’d had.

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