Family-Therapy Participants Try to Shed Childhood Anguish

Equipped with stuffed animals, shameful family secrets and the $80 admission fee, about 300 people entered the dim UC Irvine Bren Events Center on Friday in hopes of healing the hurt from childhoods long past and solving addictions of all sorts.

Under the direction of family guru John Bradshaw and over the sounds of New Age music, they huddled in groups, drew diagrams of their families and confessed such family secrets as incest, rape, alcoholism and attempted murder.

Some were asked to imagine themselves as infants and listen while others told them, “I’m really glad you’re a boy (or girl),” “I like taking care of you,” and “We’ll always be here for you.”

Several people, some with multiple addictions or histories of poor relationships, broke down in tears of bitterness or gratitude. Tissues were passed.

Participants said they were drawn to the workshop, “Discovering and Confronting Family Secrets,” by the allure of Bradshaw, the self-taught family therapist from Houston, best-selling author and host of the oft-repeated PBS television series, “Bradshaw On: The Family.”

Nearly 1,500 had turned out Thursday for his lecture on creating healthy relationships and hundreds more are expected today and Sunday for an intensive workshop on “Homecoming--Reclaiming and Championing Your Wonderful Inner Child,” also the title of his new book, released this week.

Bradshaw’s tour was sponsored, in part, by KOCE Channel 50, which has just concluded airing his series, taped in 1984, for the fifth time.

“And people are begging for more,” said staff aide Pat Petrick. Bradshaw’s new book, on sale for the past four days, is already 14th on the New York Times best-seller list.

Drawing on family systems therapy, an approach that views an individual’s unhealthy behavior as part of multigenerational family patterns, Bradshaw has popularized the notion that addictions to alcohol, drugs, work, sex or religion are the result of unhealthy family relationships. Also tapping into the “adult child” movement, in which children of unhealthy parents are seen as emotionally stunted adults, he preaches that recovery can be found in forgiving one’s parents and “healing the inner child.”

Bradshaw, 56, is a former student of the Catholic priesthood and a recovering alcoholic who says he took his last drink 25 years ago.

Looking tired, he still gripped his audience with an evangelical style, using personal confession and anecdotes sure to hit home in a soft Texas accent that rose and fell dramatically to make his points:

* “The heads of corporations have kids who are all screwed up and don’t get it’s about them--they haven’t had a feeling in 40 years.”

* “Children know you give time to what you love.”

* “I’ve been carrying my mother’s incest for years. I was her emotional husband.”

* “A person who goes to the hospital is a metaphor for the whole family.”

He is often quoted as saying that society is as sick as its families, families are as sick as their secrets, and that he believes every family is “dysfunctional,” that is, harboring unhealthy secrets, to some degree.

To critics who protest that his view is overly pessimistic, Bradshaw replies: “What’s pessimistic is acting like you don’t have any problems. You’ve got to encounter your darkness or it will rise up and bite you in the butt. The family that refuses to look at its alcoholism is getting more and more dysfunctional as they continue their denial.”

While he does not hold a license to practice therapy, he is national director of a 72-bed treatment center, LifePLUS in Panorama City, where psychiatrists and psychologists use 12-step programs to treat “co-dependents”--people who seem like saints because they take care of others with sick behaviors. A similar program is offered at Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim. “Basically, the idea is to get people off medications and into feelings,” he said. “Therapy is really an art. Not something you can learn from books.”

Credentialed psychologists are unhappy that Bradshaw’s popularity has eclipsed the original family-systems theorists such as Murray Bowen of Georgetown University, or the late Gregory Bateson and Virginia Satir. But as a synthesist and showman, Bradshaw has struck a gold mine of malaise among Americans--mostly middle and upper-class women--who, despite the self-help movements of the past two decades, continue to feel something is wrong with their lives. He said his annual salary now hovers around $750,000.

“I love him,” said an Anaheim Hills woman, 33, hugging a teddy bear. She said she was found to have a multiple personality. “I came across him on the PBS series at a time when I was getting zero validation from my family. He gave me that validation.”

Alan Entin, president of the family division of the American Psychological Assn., said psychologists and other professionals “have a great deal of difficulty with people who are unlicensed and untrained who hold themselves out to the public for a fee. . . . It is always very risky for the public. It’s like junk food. They say, ‘Oh, that looks good,’ and unfortunately for the people later on, it causes more problems.”

Bradshaw said he provides LifePLUS psychologists at his workshops in case people become overwhelmed by their childhood pain. Lists and numbers of 12-step programs flashed on an overhead screen Friday.

From Orange County, he will continue workshops in Los Angeles.

Bradshaw said his busy public appearance schedule is partly to blame for ending his 20-year marriage to his wife, Nancy. In addition, he blamed lingering fallout from both his and his wife’s “families of origin.” The divorce occurred despite his “intellectual tools,” he said, but should not be looked upon as a failure. “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot fathom. (Philosopher Blaise) Pascal said that.”

Bradshaw said he is now working on another PBS series, “Bradshaw On: Healing the Inner Child.” And he has a contract with Bantam for another book on the topic, “Why Is My Office So Crazy?”