“The goal of this work,” he often said, “is to get you to come to peace with the past and finish it.”

Bradshaw pushed them to recall their childhood traumas, burst into tears, a first step toward reconciliation. His public appearances had the fevered atmosphere of a religious revival, and, lest he be trampled by adoring fans, he had to be ushered away from his performances by side doors.Īttendees often turned up holding stuffed animals for comfort and, when Mr. Bradshaw, a charismatic, theatrical speaker, held his audiences in thrall. In lectures attended by up to 7,000 people, and in smaller workshops, he led audiences through “grief work” - exercises intended to make them travel back in time and face themselves as they once were: small, frightened and alone. Until they learned to seek out and heal the hurt child within, he said, most adults stumbled through life, expressing their pain through self-destructive behavior and entering into unhappy love relationships with similarly damaged partners, each hoping to find in the other a loving, approving parent. In his television shows on PBS and in books like “Bradshaw On: The Family” (1986) and “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child” (1990), he argued that millions of adults fail to achieve healthy relationships because they have never come to terms with the shame, self-blame and “toxic guilt” caused by parental abuse, physical or emotional. Bradshaw drew on his unhappy childhood as the son of an alcoholic father, his own drinking problems and his work as a counselor to develop a set of explanations for myriad psychological ills. The cause was heart failure, his son, John Jr., said. Then, says Bradshaw, the healed inner child becomes a source of vitality, enabling us to find new joy and energy in living.John Bradshaw, whose ideas about family dysfunction and the damaged “inner child” concealed within most adults made him one of the most popular and influential self-help evangelists of the 1990s, died on Sunday in Houston. Through a step-by-step process of exploring the unfinished business of each developmental stage, we can break away from destructive family rules and roles and free ourselves to live responsibly in the present. In this powerful book, John Bradshaw shows how we can learn to nurture that inner child, in essence offering ourselves the good parenting we needed and longed for. If any of this sounds familiar, you may be experiencing the hidden but damaging effects of a painful childhood-carrying within you a “wounded inner child” that is crying out for attention and healing. █████████████████████████████████████████████████Īre you outwardly successful but inwardly do you feel like a big kid? Do you aspire to be a loving parent but all too often “lose it” in hurtful ways? Do you crave intimacy but sometimes wonder if it’s worth the struggle? Or are you plagued by constant vague feelings of anxiety or depression?

Homecoming bradshaw