when the economic and cultural layers were peeled away, their unconscious needs were strikingly similar.

Gildiner, a seasoned clinical psychologist and acclaimed author, knows how to provide readers with just enough detail to get them hooked into rooting for each patient, but not so much to make them recoil from their gut-wrenching histories.

The patients are all so different in age, circumstance, culture, everything but there ade common threads that can’t be denied (including Catherine herself having some profound revelations of her own). I also appreciated that at the end of each section, she shared how she approached the patient to discuss including their story in the book. It consists of five separate parts, each of which focuses on the details of a particularly interesting case she has dealt with in her career - and boy were they interesting.

The boss is concerned that Danny does not seem saddened by this loss and does not wish to take any time off from work to grieve. Effective therapy is about lowering your defenses so that you can deal with the issues that arise in your life. Staying with someone from the beginning of their story to the end really helped me focus on their psychological growth and understand how the therapy worked. The author, a psychologist, shares the backstories and therapeutical journey of five of her patients who had to work extremely hard over a long period of time to deal with and overcome what happened to them in their childhood. After abuse and trauma you might only feel isolated and numb, and finding people who can actually understand what you are going through is not necessarily easy then.

When I asked whether her sexual partner knew he had herpes, Laura replied that Ed, her boyfriend of two years, had said he didn’t.

I enjoyed her explanations of certain therapies and theories (which reminded me of all I had studied in college) and how she learned that each patient is different and adapts multiple therapeutic strategies for each person. When her mother abandons the family, Madeline’s father takes up with another severely disturbed woman. While growing up far too fast, scrambling to take care of herself and her siblings when her father abandoned them, her instinctual overdrive to survive provides her with the motivation and internal resources to help her achieve surprising mental health in adulthood.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. Although sad and shocking, the author manages to share the stories of Laura, Peter, Danny, Alana and Madeline, not for us to pity them but to admire and be inspired by their lives. Mostly I just felt sad at the capacity humans have for hurting other humans, for the ways that hurt can easily get passed on generations down the line, and for all the times the people who are SUPPOSED to notice and follow up on suspected neglect or abuse just .