There are numerous books and online resources to help you on your inner child journey. As mentioned above, “ Homecoming” by John Bradshaw is a classic on healing your inner child. 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." Toxic shame makes you not love yourself the way you are, so you need something outside yourself to feel whole. You obsess on this thing outside yourself. Instead of just being yourself, you need to constantly do things. You become a “human doing” instead of a “human being.” When you have toxic shame, you are unable to be yourself; instead, you keep your true self a secret and present a different self to the world (persona). Shame-based distorted thinking: catastrophizing, mind reading, personalization, overgeneralization, either/or thinking, being right, “should” thinking, control thinking fallacies, cognitive deficiency or filtering, blaming and global labeling

The automatic defences, if continually denied expression, relevance or the validity they deserve, are repressed and contorted further by society's blind-shaming of the reality and truth of these feelings, expressions and symbolic truths. A felt-sense of shame, is then further aggravated by these strangled truths. One way adult children avoid their legitimate suering is by staying in their heads. This involves obsessing about things, analyzing, discussing, reading, and spending lots of energy in trying to gure things out. There is a story about a room with two doors. Each door has a sign on it. One says HEAVEN; the other says Little girls are taught fairy tales that are filled with magic. Cinderella is taught to wait in the kitchen for a guy with the right shoe! Snow White is given the message that if she waits long enough, her prince will come. On a literal level, that story tells women that their destiny depends on waiting for a necrophile (someone who likes to kiss dead people) to stumble through the woods at the right time. Not a pretty picture!”He presented lectures and workshops for educational, professional and social organizations starting in 1964. He served in various organizations, such as: member of the board of directors and president of the Palmer Drug Abuse Program (1981–88); national director of Life-Plus Co-Dependency Treatment Center (1987–1990); founder and national director of the John Bradshaw Center at Ingleside Hospital in Los Angeles (1991–1997); and member, national board of directors, of The International Montessori Society (1990–2016). He was an honorary lifetime board member of the Council on Alcohol and Drugs in Houston. But the healing part is just some home remedy and cult-like level stuff. I simply don't think imagining yourself as a child, and talking to him, actually does you any good except making you feel like you are going crazy. I didn't even want to read the spirituality part. I think the author should go and write his stories about a higher being elsewhere. When you learn how to re-parent yourself, you will stop attempting to complete the past by setting up others to be your parents.” 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 response

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation” by Janina Fisher, PhD, offers insights into how trauma affects the child and adult self, plus ways to heal the wounded inner parts of yourself. My guess is that the emotional and intuitive process of connecting to the inner child came to him first. Maybe he saw great success in telling clients to write letters to their wounded inner child, or he saw traction talking with clients about how their parents might not have been abusive in the legal sense but still might have caused harm. Then when he had to explain this process to colleagues and therapists he tried to attach some theories almost as an after-thought. During his years of study, John developed a drinking problem, and on December 11, 1965, took a drastic step—he committed himself to Austin State Hospital for the treatment of his dependency to alcohol. John continues to celebrate that day; because that was the day he took his last drink. John signed himself out of the hospital after six days and entered an alcohol recovery program. Soon afterward he began to lecture at a local church, and before long, was in high demand as a counselor, teacher, public speaker, and corporate consultant.It took me nearly five years to read this book...to do the hard work. It takes time and patience with yourself to really heal, to not set time limits or unreasonable expectations...to do the grief work and to rebuild...I am worth the effort it took to face the truth and to find ways to heal.

Don’t delay what you need any longer,” says Godfrey. “State the words in your journal and read them out loud. Read the words you wished you would have heard with love, kindness, and compassion.” John Bradshaw talks about how when people cannot speak, or are subjected to denial and abuse the p112, 'Confused feeling' is then 'converted into a thought pattern.'

Control madness causes severe relationship problems. There is no way to be intimate with a partner who distrusts you. Intimacy demands that each partner accept the other just the way he or she is.” John's HOMECOMING WORKSHOPSand inner child therapies are used all over the World and have been attended by millions of people. I used to drink,” writes John Bradshaw, “to solve the problems caused by drinking. The more I drank to relieve my shame-based loneliness and hurt, the more I felt ashamed.” In 1999, John was honored by a group of his peers and elected ‘One Of The 100 Most Influential Writers On Emotional Health in the 20th Century,’along with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Erich Fromm.

One of those self-help books held in high esteem, I've seen. There's a lot of useful information and things that speak to my experiences and feelings, but throughout I was made uncomfortable by the overt religiosity/spirituality of the language. He's also a proponent of the 12 Step program; I'd rather not get into the specifics about why exactly it's so terrible, but that's already something that is a huge turn off. He relies way too much on religious, specifically Christian, references to make this truly universally accessible. Maybe I don't have a Higher Power, and you might as well go right ahead and say "God" because that's what is obviously being suggested.When caretakers are untrustworthy, children develop a deep sense of distrust. The world seems a dangerous, hostile, unpredictable place." I have to warn that the first part delineates the problem, and the second half delineates the solution. The first part can be very tough to get through. But it is necessary to understand the extent of toxic shame. And once you get to the solution part, there are some great things & it's worth it. This books is something which benefits from reading in a group, with a reading partner, or under the guidance of a therapist. In my case a combo of the above.