He soon began teaching adult Sunday school classes at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church and working with addicts in the church’s drug-abuse program. Thomas in Houston, he left to enter a seminary in Toronto run by the Basilian Fathers, a Roman Catholic order, hoping that religious discipline would straighten him out. His father, John McCollough Bradshaw, was a clerk for the Southern Pacific railroad and an abusive alcoholic who left his wife, the former Norma Elliot, when his son was 10.īy the time he entered St. John Elliot Bradshaw was born on June 29, 1933, in Houston. “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. 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.

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