Father Of The Child Within: JOHN BRADSHAW

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.

Act nice, Bradshaw was always told; act nice. He excelled in school; Mama’s prized boy eventually entered a Basilian seminary in Canada and studied for degrees in theology and philosophy from the University of Toronto. For nine celibate years there, he says, “I married the Holy Mother.” He left the order a day before his class was to be ordained. By that time, he was a compulsive drinker. Back in Houston, at age 30 and ill-prepared for life — he had $400 and did not even know how to drive a car — he taught high school until he was fired. He began going to Alcoholics Anonymous and working as a pharmaceutical salesman. Soon he was swapping drug samples with guys from other drug companies and was “pilled to the gills, but going to A.A. meetings.” That job and others ended; the drinking came back and got worse. Two weeks before Christmas 1965, he landed in the Austin state hospital with the DTs. By Christmas Day he was back in A.A. “with both feet, and it saved my life.”

It also launched his career. His talks at A.A. meetings led to speaking engagements elsewhere; soon people were coming to him for advice and counseling. He got two more degrees — in psychology and religion — at Rice University, and he set up shop as a counselor on stress management and leadership training, working with individuals and corporations. Looking back now, he thinks he was ineffective because “I was too nice. To be good at it, you’ve got to be willing to confront the living hell out of people.” He began lecturing in Houston churches and synagogues, became a local celebrity and, after he was featured in a 1984 PBS series on the family, won a national reputation.

All this has given Bradshaw what he calls “a nice income that I’d never dreamed of having.” He is redoing the Georgian-style home in an elegant Houston neighborhood that he bought from his wife Nancy after their divorce 2 1/2 years ago, filling it with antiques, Indian artifacts and a collection of wizard figurines; his inner child, he says, is “fascinated by wizards.” Shopping has become something of an obsession, and his tastes run to the opulent: his bedroom has purple wallpaper and a sleigh bed draped with a purple sari. He now has a second home: a Swiss-style chalet on a private 25- acre lake in Montana.

* Prosperity has its price: Bradshaw has critics as well as devotees. Old- guard A.A. members are appalled by the way he flouts its tradition of anonymity, using his experiences as a recovering alcoholic as a launching pad for his views. Others raise questions about how lasting and effective his brand of “quick fix” self-help can be, especially for people who may be seriously troubled by long-term emotional problems. Some psychotherapists consider Bradshaw’s approach to self-improvement overly simplistic and wonder whether his emphasis on early-childhood experiences gives people a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility for their adult failures. Says Dr. Gerald Goodman, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA: “The way it sounds, if only we had got more hugs in our infancy, we’d be fine.”

None of this bothers the thousands who attend Bradshaw’s workshops. They are there, hankies in hand, for an orchestrated, emotion-laden family reunion with their inner selves. The dramatic set piece is an exercise that Bradshaw has recently started to call a collective grief ritual. “Now if any of you have a stuffed animal, you may want to hold it,” he advises listeners just before the lights in the auditorium dim and a schmaltzy recording of Sibelius’ Going Home begins its familiar strains. Many of his followers — casually dressed, of all ages — clutch teddy bears or plush puppies as Bradshaw’s hypnotic voice rises above the music, instructing them to close their eyes and return to their childhood family home. “Go back there now,” he intones, “and see yourself as the little child you once were.” Take the child in your arms, he advises, and start walking away, looking back and saying goodbye to parents or siblings. “Tell the child, I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to be your champion.” A wall of sound — of sobbing and weeping — usually rises in the auditorium.

An admitted ham, Bradshaw has a high-octane style that is too big for the TV screen. On stage he is commanding and works a room like a pro. Cordless mike in hand, he is a stand-up psychologist, slinging one-liners or deepening his voice to repeat self-pitying monologues from his drinking days: “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a philosopher. I see the woundedness of life.”

Bradshaw is a family tell-all in the public arena — you’re only as sick as your secrets is the rule — but is reticent in private. Sipping a diet soda in a hotel room a few hours after the arduous Manhattan workshop, he acknowledges that his omnipresent smile sometimes hides more desperate feelings. His father’s death at 62 haunts him (“That’s just four years from now in my own life”), and he has lingering regrets about himself as a young father. He was married in 1969; he and ex-wife Nancy had a son and he helped raise her two children by another marriage. But during those years, Bradshaw says, he was a “rage-aholic,” screaming and pounding the table over trivial matters and trying to make it up afterward. He and Nancy remain friends — she runs his tape-cassette business — but their marriage was troubled from the start. “My nonphysical incest put a distance about sexuality in my life,” he believes. “You just lose desire.” He now lives alone.

Being a father figure for millions is a lonely business. Last year all but six of Bradshaw’s weekends were spent on the road. He plays golf with Houston cronies when he can and tries to schedule some seminars in Las Vegas and Reno so he can play the slot machines: he craves the excitement, not the winnings. For nine years he has been involved with a small men’s support group in Houston, where he can unburden himself for his own sake, not that of others. “I need a place where I can be real,” he says, but adds, “Not that I’m not real. I try to be.”

At the conclusion of a workshop, when Bradshaw’s interior odyssey has come to an end, he sends the crowd back out into the world on a tide of goodwill. The audience stands and sways. Everyone sings a repeated refrain, “We’re going home — nothing can stop us now.” The cheers and applause build, and from somewhere in the crowd, a loud voice calls out, “We love you, John Bradshaw!” The preacher-salesman smiles. His blue eyes light up for a moment, his inner child stirs, and he tells them, “Little John likes that.”