Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery

Content Warning: This guide references child abuse, substance misuse, verbal and physical abuse, and sexual assault.

Depersonalization is experienced as a loss of identity, when the patient feels estranged from themselves. Gildiner explores this phenomenon through the experience of Danny. Because the residential school taught Danny that his Cree identity was “wrong,” he gradually lost the aspects of this identity—such as language, dress, and cultural rituals—that defined him as Cree. The residential school sought to replace his Indigenous identity with a white one. However, because Danny is not white—and because of a myriad of pressures, including those from his family—he cannot truly identify as white. This means that he finds himself with no identity at all. Gildiner further explains that part of the depersonalization process can involve “shutting off” one’s feelings, which is a coping mechanism that Danny developed as a young child. Part of the healing work Danny takes on involves reestablishing an authentic sense of identity for himself.

Gildiner applies this term to Danny’s circumstances. Intergenerational trauma occurs when the traumatic experience of an individual causes their descendants to show “adverse emotional and behavioral reactions […] similar to those of the person” who experienced the trauma (“