Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

334 Pages·1990·2.77 MB·English

by  John Bradshaw

John Bradshaw
2476 Bolsover, Suite 435
Houston, Texas 77005
email address: [email protected]
[email protected]
For information on lecture series or inquiries, contact:
Barbara Bradshaw, Personal Assistant
8383 Commerce Park, Suite 600
Houston, Texas 77036
Voice: [phone]
Facsimile: [phone]
To order audio and video tapes, or to receive a free brochure:
Bradshaw Cassettes
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following previously
published material:
“A Dream of My Brother” from Selected Poems by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1973 by Robert Bly. Reprinted
by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
“Night Frogs” from Loving a Woman in Two Worlds by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1985 by Robert Bly.
Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
“For the Time Being” from Collected Longer Poems by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1969 by W. H. Auden.
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
“Four Quartets” from The Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1943 by T. S. Eliot and
renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. and
Faber and Faber Ltd.
HOMECOMING
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published August 1990
Bantam trade paperback edition / March 1992
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1990 by John Bradshaw.
Book design by Barbara Cohen Aronica.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-33688.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5038-5
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark,
consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada Bantam Books, New York, New York.
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
PROLOGUE
Parable: The Double Tragedy of Rudy Revolvin
PART 1 THE PROBLEM OF THE WOUNDED INNER CHILD
Introduction
1 How Your Wounded Inner Child Contaminates Your Life
Wounded Child Questionnaire
2 How Your Wonderful Inner Child Got Wounded
Parable: The Almost Tragic Story of a Tender Elf
PART 2 RECLAIMING YOUR WOUNDED INNER CHILD
Introduction
3 Original Pain Work
4 Reclaiming Your Infant Self
5 Reclaiming Your Toddler Self
6 Reclaiming Your Preschool Self
7 Reclaiming Your School-Age Self
8 Pulling Yourself Together—A New Adolescence
PART 3 CHAMPIONING YOUR WOUNDED INNER CHILD
Introduction
9 Using Your Adult as a New Source of Potency
10 Giving Your Inner Child New Permissions
11 Protecting Your Wounded Inner Child
12 Putting Corrective Exercises into Practice
PART 4 REGENERATION
Introduction
13 The Child as a Universal Symbol of Regeneration and Transformation
14 The Wonder Child as Imago Dei
EPILOGUE “HOME, ELLIOTT, HOME!”
REFERENCES
Dedication
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
I know what I really want for Christmas. I want my childhood back.
Nobody is going to give me that.… I know it doesn’t make sense, but
since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about a child of
long ago and far away, and it is about the child of now. In you and me.
Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to
happen.
—R F
OBERT ULGHUM
As I walked among the participants in my workshop, I was struck by their
intensity. One hundred people, in groups of six or eight, filled the room. Each
group was self-contained, its members sitting close together and whispering to
one another. This was the second day of the workshop, so a good deal of
interaction and sharing had already occurred. Still, these people had been total
strangers when they began.
I moved nearer to one group. They were listening with rapt attention to a gray-
haired man. He was reading the letter his inner child had written to his father.
Dear Dad,
I want you to know how you hurt me. You punished me more than you
spent time with me. I could have endured the welts and cuts, if only you
would have spent time with me. I wanted your love more than I could ever
tell you. If only you would have played with me or taken me to a ball game.
If only you could have told me you loved me. I wanted you to care about
me.…
He put his hands over his eyes. The middle-aged woman beside him began
tenderly stroking his hair; a younger man reached out to take his hand. Another
man asked if he wanted to be held; the gray-haired man nodded.
Another group was sitting on the floor with their arms around one another. An
elegant woman in her seventies was reading her letter:
Mother, you were too busy with your charity work. You never had time to
tell me you loved me. You paid attention to me only when I was sick or
when I was playing the piano and making you proud. You only let me have
the feelings that pleased you. I only mattered when I pleased you. You
never loved me for myself. I was so alone.…
Her voice cracked and she began to cry. The wall of control that she had
carefully maintained for seventy years began to fall with her tears. A teenage girl
embraced her. A young man told her it was okay to cry. He praised her for her
courage.
I moved to another group. A blind man in his mid-thirties was reading a letter
he had written in braille:
I hated you because you were ashamed of me. You locked me in the garage
apartment when you entertained your friends. I never got enough to eat. I
was so hungry. I knew you hated me because I was a burden to you. You
laughed and ridiculed me when I fell down.…
Now I had to move on. I was feeling the residual anger in my own wounded
inner child, and I wanted to cry out in rage and indignation. The sadness and
loneliness of childhood felt overwhelming. How could we ever recover from so
much grief?
Yet, by the end of the day, the mood had changed to one of peace and joy.
People sat together; some held hands; most were smiling as we did the closing
exercise. One after another they thanked me for helping them find their wounded
inner child. A bank president who had been openly resistant at the start of the
workshop told me that he had cried for the first time in forty years. As a child, he
had been cruelly beaten by his father, and had vowed never to be vulnerable or to
show his feelings. Now he talked about learning to take care of the lonely boy
inside him. His face had softened, and he looked younger.
At the beginning of the workshop I had urged the participants to put their
masks aside and come out of hiding. I had explained that when they kept their
wounded inner child in hiding, that wounded child contaminated their lives with
temper tantrums, overreactions, marital problems, addictions, toxic parenting,
and damaging and painful relationships.
I must have touched a nerve, for they had really responded. I felt both excited
and grateful as I looked at their open, smiling faces. This workshop took place in
1983. In the years since then I have become more and more fascinated with the
healing power of the inner child.
Three things are striking about inner child work: the speed with which people
change when they do this work; the depth of that change; and the power and
creativity that result when wounds from the past are healed.
I began my inner child work more than twelve years ago, using a rather
makeshift meditation with some of my therapy clients. But this meditation
achieved some very dramatic results. When people first made contact with their
inner child, the experience was often overwhelming. Sometimes they sobbed
intensely. Later, they said things like “I’ve been waiting all my life for someone
to find me”; “It feels like a homecoming”; “My life has been transformed since I
found my child.”
Because of this response, I developed an entire workshop to help people find
and embrace their inner child. The workshop has evolved over the years, due
mostly to an ongoing dialogue with those who have participated in it. This is the
most powerful work I have ever done.
The workshop focuses on helping people finish their unresolved grief from
childhood—griefs resulting from abandonment, abuse in all forms, the neglect of
childhood developmental dependency needs, and the enmeshments that result
from family-system dysfunction. (I’ll discuss each of these in detail later on.)
In the workshop we spend most of the time on grieving our neglected
childhood developmental dependency needs. That is also the major focus of this
book. In my experience, a developmental approach is the most thorough and
effective way to heal our emotional wounds. I believe that this focus on healing
each developmental stage is unique to my workshop.
During the workshop I describe the normal dependency needs of childhood. If
those needs are not met, we tend to grow into adulthood with a wounded inner
child. Had our childhood needs been met, we would not have become “adult
children.”
After I have outlined the needs of a particular stage, the participants split off
into groups. Taking turns at being the focus subject, each person listens as the
others speak the affirmative words he or she needed to hear in infancy,
toddlerhood, the preschool years, and so on.
Depending on the subject’s boundaries, members of the group stroke, nurture,
and offer validation for the person’s childhood pain. When the subject hears a
particular affirmation that he* needed to hear but was deprived of during
childhood, usually he begins to weep, mildly to intensely. Some of the old,
frozen grief begins to melt. By the end of the workshop, everyone has done at
least some grief work. The amount depends on where a person is in the healing
process. Some people have done a lot of work before coming to the workshop;
others have done none.
Toward the end of the workshop, I give a meditation for embracing the inner
child. At that time, many people feel an intense discharge of emotion. As the
participants leave the workshop, I encourage them to spend some time each day
in dialogue with their inner child.
Once people have claimed and nurtured their wounded inner child, the
creative energy of their wonderful natural child begins to emerge. Once
integrated, the inner child becomes a source of regeneration and new vitality.
Carl Jung called the natural child the “wonder child”—our innate potential for
exploration, awe and creative being.
The workshop has convinced me that the inner child work is the quickest and
most powerful way to effect therapeutic change in people. This almost-
immediate effect continues to amaze me.
Normally I’m skeptical about any type of quick fix, but this work seems to
begin a process of lasting transformation. Writing one or two years after the
experience, many participants claimed that the workshop had changed their
lives. I was gratified but somewhat confused. I really didn’t know why the work
had such an impact on some people and only minimal effect on others. As I
searched for an explanation, a picture slowly began to emerge.
I first turned to the work of Eric Berne, the creative genius behind
Transactional Analysis. TA. theory places major emphasis on the “child ego
state,” which refers to the spontaneous natural child we all once were. T.A. also
describes the ways that the natural child adapted to the pressures and stresses of
early family life.
The natural or wonder child is present when you meet an old friend; when you
belly-laugh; when you’re creative and spontaneous; when you are awed by a
wondrous sight.
The adapted or wounded child is present when you refuse to go through a red
light even though it is obviously stuck, or run a red light because there’s no one
around and you think you can get away with it. Other wounded child behaviors
include throwing temper tantrums, being overly polite and obedient, speaking in
a childlike voice, manipulating, and pouting. In chapter 1, I will outline the
many ways that the wounded child contaminates our adult life.
Although I had used T.A. as my major therapeutic model for many years, I
had never focused my work on the various developmental stages that the inner
child goes through in adapting to survive. I now believe that the lack of
developmental detail is a shortcoming in most T.A. work. Any part of our
wonder child’s early development can be arrested. As adults we can act infantile;
we can regress to the behavior of a toddler; we can continue to believe in magic
like a preschooler; and we can pout and withdraw like a first-grader who has lost
a game. All these behaviors are childish and represent various levels of arrested
childhood development. The major purpose of this book is to help you reclaim