Two mythic figures forever identified with the American landscape are the itinerant evangelist and the salesman on the road. Right now, John Bradshaw, 58, is both. It is a Sunday afternoon, and for the second day he stands before an enthralled crowd at Manhattan's main convention center. All of us, he tells them, had traumatic childhoods and from them spring the unresolved anxieties of adulthood. He plays the theme in masterly fashion: the faithful are spellbound.
Bradshaw is the biggest draw and most revered name on America's insatiable pop-psychology circuit. For millions of people who are recovering from every imaginable -- and sometimes unimaginable -- addiction, he is the guru of the moment, the supersalesman of self-help. His name is invoked in meetings of 12- step groups that range from Molesters Anonymous to Overachievers Anonymous. His three books -- including the 1990 Homecoming -- have sold 2.5 million copies since 1988, and audiotape versions consistently top best-selling advice-cassette lists. A new book, tentatively titled Creating Love, is due in the fall of 1992. This year he has scheduled more than 30 weekend workshops; some have drawn as many as 7,000 people paying up to $180 apiece. Homecoming, a 10-hour 1990-91 PBS series drawn from material in his book, brought in $4 million during pledge drives.
In a resonant Texas twang, Bradshaw drawls out the conditions that cause anguish in thousands of people. "Isolation. Aloneness. Abandonment. Skin hunger." Each, he says, is a feeling of deprivation derived from our childhood that was never resolved and sets us up to become addicts -- just as he was. And though we are grownups, we are still walking around with that wounded little kid hiding inside, wailing its needs. But wait, he adds, there's hope. By focusing personal consciousness on the frightened inner child -- as infant, toddler and adolescent -- we can all begin the process of recovery. "The goal of this work is to get you to come to peace with the past and finish it," he tells the crowd in Manhattan's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Dr. Freud meets the New Age.
Bradshaw's message is plumbed from the depths of his own troubled and lonely childhood, which was spent being shuttled between relatives in Houston. During his lectures, he spins out his story -- always with a smile -- recounting Southern-gothic tales of abuse, alcoholism and incest as examples of dysfunctional family behavior. There is Bradshaw's mother Norma, now 77, "a really good woman," he says, who became pregnant at 17 and married an alcoholic who abandoned her and their three children when Bradshaw, the middle child, was 10. She revered her own workaholic father as a saint, though Bradshaw is convinced that his grandfather violated his mother. Then there is his maternal grandmother, who Bradshaw believes was "seriously incested" and who stayed in bed for 50 years. Her contempt for men was overpowering to young John. "Men think with their penises," he heard her say when he was six -- contempt that he now says was a form of sexual abuse.