Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

Product Information

Reclaiming Virtue: How We Can Develop the Moral Intelligence to Do the Right Thing at the Right Time for the Right Reason. New York, NY: Bantam Books. 2009. ISBN 978-0-553-09592-0. Core material is the way our internal experience is organized. Composed of our earliest feelings, beliefs, and memories, our core material formed in response to the stresses of our childhood environment. This core material is nonlogical and primitive; it was the only way a magical, vulnerable, needy and boundary-less child knew how to survive." urn:lcp:homecomingreclai00brad:epub:50652707-7632-4865-b0fb-6b6611ecd916 Extramarc NYU Bobcat Foldoutcount 0 Identifier homecomingreclai00brad Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9377vp12 Isbn 0553057936

Do you aspire to be a loving parent but all too often ‘lose it’ in hurtful ways? Do you crave intimacy but wonder if it’s worth the struggle? Are you consumed at times by anxiety or depression? Coming home to your true self may help. We first see the world though the eyes of a little child, and that ‘inner child’ remains with us throughout our lives, no matter how outwardly ‘grown-up’ and powerful we become. If our vulnerable child was hurt, abandoned, shamed, or neglected, that child’s pain, grief, and anger live on within us. Very few people actually live truly authentic lives. Your inauthentic role could take many forms: being perfectionist, seeking power and control, rage, arrogance or pride, being critical, judgmental, contemptuous or patronizing. Always being a caregiver, people-pleaser or “nice guy,” being filled with envy.What I now understand is that when a child's development is arrested, when feelings are repressed, especially the feelings of anger and hurt, a person grows up to be an adult with an angry, hurt child inside of him. This child will spontaneously contaminate the person's adult behavior." It is undeniably true, however, the overarching message he has about toxic shame and how to heal from it: self-compassion. It's not something a lot of us want to accept or would rather dismiss as corny because it does take a lot of work to achieve. the pathway out of internalized shame begins with naming it (and as such, externalizing it), differentiating from it (in other words, becoming the non reactive witness of it), working through it (with another person), and becoming unburdened from it via self acceptance, self love and via meditation and prayer (that’s right, the author is Christian, but don’t hold that against him, he’s thoughtful, humble, self disclosing, self aware and deeply philosophical too). The parents in dysfunctional families are adult children themselves; their own wounded inner child is needy. Whenever their children feel needy, which they do naturally, the adult-child parent gets angry and shames them. Subsequently, anytime the child’s wounded inner child feels needy, he feels shamed. For a large part of my adult life I felt ashamed whenever I needed help. Finally, no matter how appropriate the context, the shame-based person feels shame when he is sexual.”

The person ... in the grip of an old distress says things that are not pertinent, does things that don't work, fails to cope with the situation, and endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present." Children growing up in dysfunctional families are taught to inhibit the expression of emotion in three ways: first, by not being responded to or mirrored, literally not being seen; second, by having no healthy models for naming and expressing emotion; and third, by actually being shamed and/or punished for expressing emotion." rage is pent up anger and needs to be expressed under therapeutic circumstances since it can be toxic to the self when not expressed and others when it is, on the other side is the possibility of a healthy anger responseIn this powerful life-changing book, HOMECOMING: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, John Bradshaw shows us how we can learn to nurture that sometimes needy inner child, in essence offering ourselves the good parenting we needed and longed for.

To be spiritually wounded, for your parents not to let you be who you are, is the worst thing that can happen to you." Healthy shame is the psychoilogical foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality. - p. vii John also explores The Primacy and Neuroscience of the "Affect System”. In understanding Silvan Tompkins’ Theory of the “affect system,” John explains the neuroscientific development that underlies the right/affective brain. This is the part of the brain that controls anxiety, distress, and the management of our feelings. John suggests some clinical implications for professionals dealing with mental health and/or substance abuse.The ideas are worthy, but the author repeats his concepts again and again - and again! And in doing so, he makes me wonder about his need to convince himself. 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.