In this blog I will review John Bradshaw's 'Home Coming: Reclaiming & Championing Your Inner Child'.

In context, this book was recommended by a friend who is a counsellor who works in the field of addiction. She had found it to be extremely potent and useful way of helping her clients heal past wounds. Perhaps a not untypical way in which therapists pass on knowledge, based on first hand experience with clients, absent of broader clinical research?

I can relate to my 'inner child', particularly at the time that I write this blog at Christmas. I can notice the 'playful child' who enjoys sledging and snow fights and the 'sulky child' who doesn't get exactly what he wanted. A book that could help me understand my own inner child and the inner children of my clients appealed on a number of levels.

John Bradshaw

John Bradshaw was born in 1933 in Texas and was abandoned by his alcoholic father at an early age. After a troubled teenage period he studied to become a Roman Catholic priest, leaving after nine years, just prior to becoming ordained. He left to continue his studies into psychology, philosophy and theology and at this time he developed a drinking problem. In 1965 he committed himself into hospital for the treatment of his dependency.

Bradshaw's Inner Child Model

During the 1980s Bradshaw developed a workshop to help people find and embrace their inner child. This concept seems to resonate for me when working with clients when their past is colouring their 'now'.

He draws on Jungian theory and claims that once people have reclaimed and nurtured their wounded inner child the creative energy of their natural child begins to emerge. This is why all children are artists actors and showmen and why most of us experience nostalgia for this period of our lives from time to time. Given a supportive environment the wonder child has great potentiality.

Bradshaw offers a four stage linear process to identify, reclaim and champion the inner child.

1. The first stage "looks at how your wonder child (taken from Jung's description) lost his wonder and how wounds sustained in childhood continue to contaminate your life." (p.xv). Here Bradshaw refers to co-dependence, which he describes as "to be out of touch with one's feelings, needs, and desires" (p.8) and other evidence of inner child contamination such as offender behaviours, narcissistic disorders, trust issues, intimacy dysfunction, acting out and magical thinking. He explains the possible causes as being a lack of love and affection, spiritual wounds, physical/sexual/emotional abuse, cultural shame – described as - "our culture has its own system of perfection that spiritually wounds us. We have perfect 10's. We have men with big penises and women with big breasts and firm buttocks. If your genitals are not big, you're considered inferior" (p.46), and toxic shame "with toxic shame there's something wrong with you and there is nothing that you can do about it; you are inadequate and defective. Toxic shame is at the core of the wounded child" (p.47). Shame in the appropriate context is a useful feeling, but when the shame is inauthentic and as a result of culture or upbringing it can create a low sense of self, lack of confidence and co-dependence.
   
   In the second part of the process Bradshaw builds on Berne's Transactional Analysis. Bradshaw (1990, p.xiii-xv) states "I now believe that a lack of developmental detail is a shortcoming in most TA work". The purpose of the book is to help to reclaim the wounded inner child at each stage of development, which he describes as infant (0-9 months), toddler (9-18 months), preschool (3-6 years), school age (6 years to puberty), and adolescence (13-26 years). For each developmental stage he encourages what he calls original pain work, a grieving process of losses in childhood. He describes original pain as "actually experiencing the original repressed feelings…the good news is that original pain work involves nature's own healing process. Grief is the healing feeling. We will heal naturally if we are just allowed to grieve" (Bradshaw 1990, p.75-76). The abuse is validated by a group or therapist and then a process of completing questionnaires (or 'index of suspicion') for each developmental stage to ascertain at which stage or stages your child was wounded. A number of answers in the positive is enough to trigger the next process, which is a debrief of that stage to the group or therapist followed by an exchange of letters between your adult and child selves. The purpose of the letter writing is to provide positive affirmations to the child. In Bradshaw (1990, p.93) he explains that "positive affirmations reinforce our being-ness and can heal the spiritual wound". Affirmations such as 'welcome to the world' and 'I'm so glad that you are here' give the client the chance to 're-parent' the wounded child. The final aspect of this phase is a meditation done in a group or with a partner, where the original pain work and affirmations are reinforced using age regression techniques originally adopted from the work of the renowned hypnotherapist Milton Erickson.
2. In the third part of the process Bradshaw draws on a number of exercises to help your child flourish through a re-parenting process and developing new relationships in order that "you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents". (Bradshaw 1990 p.xv.) Although he later encourages the reader to seek out additional 'good parents'.
3. The final stage involves working with your 'wonder child'. How to access your wonder child and how to release their potential for creative and transformative energy.

This is a linear model similar in its process to Egan's Skilled Helper, Brief Solution Focussed Therapy and many other models. The inclusion of Bradshaw's personal and appropriate phenomenology adds to the potency of his argument, although the spiritual aspect may be off-putting to some.

If you want to find and heal your inner-child with counselling and hypnosis, please call us at Calm Minds – 0161 439 7773.

References

Bradshaw, J. (1990). Homecoming. New York: Bantam.