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Summary
Summary
What You Don't Know Can Hurt You- But it Can Also Lead to Self-Acceptance and Healing. Family Secrets gives you the tools you need to understand your family-and yourself- in an entirely new way. In his bestselling hooks and compelling PBS specials. John Bradshaw has transformed our understanding of how we are shaped by our families. Now join him on this fascinating journey of discovery, which starts with your life today and takes you back through the conflicts, the strengths, and the weaknesses of your parents' generation- and even your grandparents'. Using a powerful technique for exploring your family tree," you'll trace the visible and invisible patterns that have influenced you. You 11 learn about family secrets that are healthy and necessary, and also about the secrets that can limit your wholeness and freedom-even if you don't know they exist. This work is sometimes painful, hut it is always enlightening-filled with the kind of "aha" moments a realizations that make everything fall into place. With John Bradshaw's guidance, you will come to a new appreciation and acceptance of yourself. You will also be able to build more open, honest, and loving relationships with the people who matter most. Book jacket.
Author Notes
John Elliot Bradshaw was born in Houston, Texas on June 29, 1933. He received a bachelor's degree in sacred theology and a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He taught at the University of St. Thomas for a year. In 1964, just days before he was to be ordained, he left the Basilian Order.
He eventually checked himself into an alcohol-treatment program at a state hospital in Austin. On being released, he returned to Houston and attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings daily for the next three years. He soon began teaching adult Sunday school classes at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church and working with addicts in the church's drug-abuse program. He also appeared on local television as the host of a talk show entitled Spotlight and found himself in demand as a lecturer on family psychology.
In the early 1980s, he did a television series on the psychologist Erik Erikson's eight stages of man, which was broadcast on PBS. He also created a 10-part series entitled Bradshaw On: The Family, which also aired on PBS. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Bradshaw On: The Family, Bradshaw On: Healing the Shame That Binds You, Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, Creating Love, Family Secrets: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You, and Post-Romantic Stress Disorder: What to Do When the Honeymoon Is Over. Many of his books were turned into PBS specials. He died of heart failure on May 8, 2016 at the age of 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bradshaw (Homecoming) takes us on a revealing and sometimes frightening tour of the family's mysterious power over us and shows how we are influenced by its ``toxic secrets,'' which run the gamut from ``normal'' problems, such as marital discord and emotional repression, to more damaging experiences, such as drug addiction and sexual abuse. Using the story of The Wizard of Oz as an analogy, Bradshaw explains why we must ``leave home to find home.'' He then takes us on a journey through the ``haunted forest'' and shows, step by step, how to reimagine our families, draw family maps using a tool called a genogram to chart key relationships, and discover the dark secrets of our parents and ancestors-to help us understand what made our parents act as they did. Finally, we can ``get back to Kansas'' by finding and freeing ourselves from our own dark secrets while remaining connected to the family. An appendix discusses the paradoxical nature of memory. Important reading for anyone who has children or grew up with parents. Illustrations. Simultaneous release from BDD Audio. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
With a quarter-million-copy first printing, simultaneous audiobook release, and a new PBS series, self-help psychology guru Bradshaw returns with a vengeance. The subject of his multimedia barrage is the bad stuff family members hide from each other. These dark secrets, as Bradshaw calls them, range from relatively undamaging events concerning death, birth, and suffering to severely, even criminally harmful acts, including alcoholism, incest, and murder. In the book's three major parts, Bradshaw distinguishes healthy from unhealthy secrets, proffers a tool for self-ascertainment of family secrets, and counsels those who unearth dark secrets on what to do with their discoveries. In an appendix, he distinguishes the much-publicized phenomenon of repressed memory from false memory syndrome. The latter, he says, though vociferously advocated by those victimized by family members claiming to recall incest and other enormities, has not been clearly defined by clinicians. He does not, however, clearly indicate what clinicians like him mean when they say, as he does in "A Final Word of Caution," "The traumatic abuse of children by their guardians and relatives occurs with great frequency." What is "great frequency" ? Is this a statement about Bradshaw's clientele, or is he asserting that American society is rife with interfamilial abuse? If the former, it's understandable; if the latter, many will condemn Bradshaw, not unjustifiably, for being an alarmist bent on aggrandizing his trade. (Reviewed Apr. 15, 1995)0553095919Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
The author who mapped our "inner children" now offers counsel on the dangers of closet-dwelling skeletons. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Do You Know a Secret Like This? | p. vii |
| Prologue | p. xi |
| Parable: The Secret History of Dorothy | p. xvii |
| Part 1 Finding Home by Leaving Home | p. 1 |
| 1 When Silence Is Golden | p. 3 |
| 2 When Secrets Are Dark | p. 27 |
| 3 How Is It Possible Not to Know What You Know? | p. 55 |
| Part 2 Traversing The Haunted Forest | p. 81 |
| 4 Beginner's Mind: Re-imagining Your Family | p. 83 |
| 5 Drawing Your Family Map: The Genogram as Rosetta Stone | p. 98 |
| 6 Your Ancestors' Dark Secrets | p. 119 |
| 7 Your Father's Dark Secrets | p. 142 |
| 8 Your Mother's Dark Secrets | p. 169 |
| Part 3 Getting Back to Kansas | p. 197 |
| 9 Discovering Your Own Dark Secrets | p. 199 |
| 10 Freeing Yourself from the Power of Dark Family Secrets | p. 230 |
| 11 Staying Connected with Your Family | p. 259 |
| Epilogue | p. 277 |
| Appendix: The Paradox of Memory | p. 279 |
| Bibliography | p. 293 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 297 |
