WE'RE sick and tired of American pop psychology gurus flying across the Atlantic and telling us how to live our lives. We've had enough of misery merchants promising to simultaneously cure our anxiety, lift our depressions, rescue our marriages, banish our addictions and potty-train our pets in 12 steps or less. Like the diet book industry, the personal growth/self-help field is losing its credibility almost as fast as it is making money, because much of this New Age advice is as substantial as salad: fulfilling spiritual hunger for the length of time it takes to read the book - and wilting in the heat of introspection.
We've seen too many spoiled pop stars discovering their "inner children", going on about their dysfunctional families and claiming to be "in recovery", when we wish they would just shut up, get a life and count their money. The new mantra is: forget your childhood, make a bowl of chicken soup, take a brisk walk in the fresh air, stay calm and think happy thoughts.
The cynical backlash against the success of the personal growth movement is both frustrating and painful for John Bradshaw, the psychologist and author who coined the term "inner child" and popularised the phrase "dysfunctional family". Beginning in the early 1980s, he toured the US conducting workshops on "the family", which led to a TV series and a string of best-selling books, such as Healing the Shame that Binds You, Homecoming, Creating Love and Family Secrets.
In the Republic last week to promote his two-day workshop in Dublin on May 29th and 30th, Bradshaw was keen to stress that he is a clinical psychologist with a solid academic background - not a pop guru. When Newsweek magazine dared to name him alongside a cast of current pop gurus, he sued them and they were forced to print an apology. Far from being a flash in the pan, Bradshaw was recently ranked by his peers in the psychology profession as one of the major contributors to psychology in the 20th century, alongside Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Alice Miller, Erich Fromm and Alice Kubler-Ross, among others. What makes Bradshaw exceptional is his ability to communicate his ideas to a vast public hungry for psychological and spiritual change. He sees his workshops as "a new form of therapy", where individuals are taught to overcome anxieties and addictions through their own psychological journey. Brian Little, the Irish psychologist behind the Oak Foundation, which is bringing Bradshaw to Dublin, London and Copenhagen, believes that in the Republic the hunger for this inner journey is stronger than ever. Little's partner, David Stuart, based in London, is confident that there are plenty of men and women who, despite the backlash against the personal growth movement, long for an opportunity to "increase the quality of their life experience".
Bradshaw's psychological premise is that by confronting the pain of your childhood, you can finally put to rest the issues that unconsciously haunt you as an adult. "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 the wounds from the past are healed," he says.
Bradshaw's firebrand evangelical style, his belief in psychological growth as a spiritual issue, and the 10 years he spent as a Catholic seminarian, make the description New Age priest appropriate. Where once there was original sin, now there is the "original pain work" of the dysfunctional family. "I don't promise salvation; there's no quick-fix," he insists.
"I have always thought that I was a priest, although I would not dare to acknowledge it publicly. If the priestly work is to bring hope and comfort to people, then in that sense I believe I am one. Everywhere I go people walk up to me and say `you changed my life'."
Bradshaw synthesises the work of hundreds of psychologists in his books and workshops, pulling together decades of sound psychological research into a user-friendly language. "For the first time in history, we understand the way the family works and that is revolutionary. In the past, this work was reserved for the exclusive world of psychologists and psychiatrists speaking to one another. I coined the term "inner child" because I wanted to simplify a complicated psychological concept so that people could work on it themselves. Lots of people have got together and done the exercises in Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing your Inner Child, with some success," he says.
"My own belief, in creating this work, was for you not to be dependent on me for self-help, but to be empowered so that you can take care of yourself. Every honest therapist will tell you that in the final analysis, people know what they need more than you do, although you can help them to clarify it."
Famously, it was Bradshaw who inspired Oprah Winfrey to talk with him in front of millions of viewers, revealing her childhood of emotional turmoil and sexual abuse. "We didn't expect that to happen on the show, the fact that it did is one of the powers of this work," says Bradshaw. Winfrey continued the process privately, organising Bradshaw workshops attended by her boyfriend, whom she calls "Steadman", and her friends. Bradshaw's talent for communicating through writing and TV - along with his therapeutic caseload of celebrities - have conferred on him a pop guru status that he abhors. "I have been accused of being a cult, which I absolutely am not," he says.
In some ways, the people who need therapy most are the gurus themselves, Bradshaw believes. He is highly suspicious of priests, doctors, nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists: "These professions attract people who are terrified of being vulnerable and who need power in order to hide their toxic shame.
Overachieving, control, perfectionism, criticism and rage are all covers for shame. Such people think if we control everybody, we are no longer vulnerable. I have had literally thousands of letters from people who have been in therapy for as long as six years with no improvement. They tell me, `I did this workshop with you and I turned around'. Some psychology is really bad. A lot of therapists are head-trippers who analyse until they are blue in the face."
Most of our psychological problems, he believes, have quite a simple cause: families who operate on the "don't talk, don't feel" rule. Children who dare to feel anger, disappointment or even joy are stifled by being shamed in such families, while the parents "don't talk" about the real problems in the family. Children unerringly and unconsciously pick up their parents' hang-ups and may even act them out, so that - for example - a sexually repressed mother has a sexually promiscuous daughter.
It has long been Bradshaw's view that children encouraged to live by these oppressive "don't talk, don't feel" family rules may grow into adult sex addicts, alcoholics, drug addicts, anorexics, bulimics, overeaters, compulsive shoppers, perfectionists, over-achievers and, in the most extreme cases, violent offenders. Bradshaw sees all of these problems as mood-altering behaviours which adults use to mask the "toxic shame" instilled in them as children.
Toxic shame may also come from being sexually or physically abused. Or, perhaps most commonly of all, the shame may result from being turned into a "little spouse" by a parent who engulfs you in an adult emotional interaction which is satisfying to the adult, and dangerous to the child. In some mother-son and father-daughter relationships, such enmeshment may ultimately amount to covert incest.
Bradshaw has experienced much of this in his own life, and draws freely on his own childhood in explaining the psychological principles which underpin his work. After 10 years as a "sexual anorexic" in a Catholic seminary, he became a raving, barefoot alcoholic who ended up in a state hospital.
As he recovered and studied psychology, he gradually realised that his life-pattern was set when he was abused and then abandoned by his alcoholic father, who died when he was 10, leaving Bradshaw to be reared by his emotionally repressed mother, who turned him into her little spouse, and by his four aunts. Four of these five women were victims of incest. To them, "male" was a word so nasty that it made them gag.
The young Bradshaw absorbed their repulsion, internalising the women's understandable feelings that men were "disgusting". It left him with what he calls "a sexualised rage". Even now, he spits out the words "male" and "disgusting" as if they were small, feral bats leaping from his throat.
It was sexualised rage at being engulfed by his mother that turned Bradshaw into a sex addict, he believes. "Sex addiction comes from feeling inadequate as a man. It is a kind of disorder of desire," says Bradshaw. In order to love being a man and to behave responsibly towards women, Bradshaw has had to confront his own "mother rage", as he calls it.
"Mother rage", in Bradshaw's view, explains a lot: including US President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton's sexual behaviour with women is the classic behaviour of "a sex addict out of control", he believes. So is Clinton's psychological profile: like Bradshaw's father, Clinton's father was a no-good alcoholic, and Clinton took his father's place by becoming extremely close to his mother and protecting her. Bradshaw identifies with Clinton because he himself used to sit outside his mother's room while she cried for three hours at a time. "There's an anger you have about it but you cannot express it because you are a child," he says. "As you grow older, you develop an anger at being used. You start to use women in order to get back at your mother." In Bradshaw's view, Clinton married a cool, controlling mother-figure in Hillary Clinton, who he has deliberately desexualised. Every time he has an affair with another woman, Clinton is rebelling against and humiliating the mother-image in his head.
Clinton's mother-rage is expressed in his attitude to the women in his life, whom he systematically seduces and then cruelly rejects. He famously betrayed Monica Lewinsky when he referred to her as "that woman". Similarly, Clinton refused to acknowledge the existence of Gennifer Flowers, a woman who loved Clinton and remained loyal for 12 years. Bradshaw thinks that the US senate, instead of impeaching Clinton, should have sent him for residential therapy for sex addiction. Bradshaw founded the first Sex Addicts Anonymous group in the US and knows as much about the subject as anyone. He has counselled men who ran up 200,000 dollar phone bills from talking constantly on sex lines, and men who had nothing but self-sex for more of their adult lives. In relationships, sex addicts tend to fall head over heels in love, then gradually start undermining the love object with criticisms, turning to rage. "That's why I know so much about Clinton, because he's the spitting image of about seven guys in my group," he says.
Bradshaw's 20-year marriage broke up seven years ago, under the pressure of Bradshaw's sex addiction, combined with the fact that he and his ex-wife had no sex life at all because they had become just good friends. "We could have saved the marriage, but we were both therapists", he comments wryly. Slow-burning courtships are more reliable, Bradshaw has decided, since becoming engaged to 46-year-old Karen-Anne Mabray, who he plans to marry next year. He met Karen three years ago at a book-signing, having given her therapy 28 years previously. "The cure for sex addiction is intimacy," he has discovered. Despite his insights on the family, his own relationships with his original family are strained. "They hate me for breaking the no-talk rules," he says. "I bought my brother a car last year, because he needed a car, but he still barely speaks to me." The endearing quality about John Bradshaw is that, for all his intellectual power, he's still learning.
The John Bradshaw workshop will take place on May 29th and 30th at Ju- ry's Hotel, Ballsbridge. For more information contact the Oak foundation at tel (1) 2849046; fax (01) 2849490; e-mail oakfound@iol.ie
Copies of the audio tape, the Shame Based Family, are available for £10.99, incl p&p.