Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

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Even if the conscious mind doesn’t have the words to talk about it, the body remembers trauma. Supportive physical touch can help you soothe your inner child. There's also this extremely prudish view of sex and sexuality at the very end, but I guess that's to be expected of a theologian. Can't expect someone like that to have a radical or simply neutral concept of sex. Healthy shame is the psychoilogical foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality. - p. vii I got a lot out of this book. Made me think of how when an abuse, such as psychiatric abuse is dismissed as 'nothing' or 'lying' or 'exaggerating', the mind of the psychiatric survivor tries to come up with ways of communicating to the abuse to a society in denial, a society that strangles the truth.

My only problem with this book is the psychological argument that the people you dislike are your teachers and each person you dislike can help you look at the part of you that you overly identified with. He presented lectures and workshops for educational, professional and social organizations starting in 1964. He served in various organizations, such as: member of the board of directors and president of the Palmer Drug Abuse Program (1981–88); national director of Life-Plus Co-Dependency Treatment Center (1987–1990); founder and national director of the John Bradshaw Center at Ingleside Hospital in Los Angeles (1991–1997); and member, national board of directors, of The International Montessori Society (1990–2016). He was an honorary lifetime board member of the Council on Alcohol and Drugs in Houston. He also speaks as if everything he says is a fact. The reality though is that much of what he writes is based on anecdotes, his own personal experiences, and outdated psychology (like Freud's defunct psycho-sexual stages). The way I put it to a friend is that the work this book is asking you to do is really valid and useful, but the theories underlining it make no sense at all. He spends an uncomfortable amount of time in this book talking about how if you like people's butts (in a sexual way) that this has deep psychological significance and meaning when it comes to connecting to your wounded inner child. He doesn't talk about the fetishization of any other body part this way though (such as the fetishization of women's breasts), which just makes that part of the book feel even more out of place, and more about him than the reader. You can be addicted to constant activity: shopping, reading, exercising, watching sports, watching TV, taking care of pets or being a workaholic. TLDR version: Everything is shame! If you died of cancer, it's toxic shame that killed you! (In the book it was not cancer, but the rest is literal.) Not to kink-shame, but the bro gets way overexcited about shame.

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But the healing part is just some home remedy and cult-like level stuff. I simply don't think imagining yourself as a child, and talking to him, actually does you any good except making you feel like you are going crazy. I didn't even want to read the spirituality part. I think the author should go and write his stories about a higher being elsewhere. The healed inner child becomes a source of vitality and creativity, enabling us to find new joy and energy in living’ John Bradshaw Reclaiming our childhood is painful because we must grieve our wounds. The good news is that we can do this. Grief work is the legitimate suffering we've been avoiding with our neuroses. Jung said it well: "All our neuroses are substitutes for legitimate suffering."

Besides, too much religious interpretations - for me, at least. And the need to "redeem" what he calls "healthy shame"... something that smells like Church, and I don't really think it's as healthy as he says it is. 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. 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. Then, says Bradshaw, the healed inner child becomes a source of vitality, enabling us to find new joy and energy in living.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2009-08-21 01:37:15 Boxid IA100803 Boxid_2 CH100401 Camera Canon 5D City New York Containerid_2 X0001 Donor Throughout the 1970’s, John served as a management consultant at Drillco Manufacturing Company and as a leadership trainer at Denka Chemical Company. He was also Director of Human Resources and served on the Board of Directors of Texas General Oil Company. John is the developer and presenter of workshops for over forty Fortune 500 companies and thousands of evolved for-profit institutions, including Conoco, Inc., ExxonMobil, Phillips Petroleum, R & G Stone Manufacturing Company, American Automobile Association, Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation, The Trane Company, Texas Association Of Realtors, Ogilvy and Mather, Inc., Harrah’s, Fails Management Corporation (John was considered one of the three best speakers for the industry), and Deliotte Haskins and Sells.