Post by Susan Peabody on May 14, 2016 18:24:36 GMT
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I just got this email from one of my clients:
"I speak tomorrow at 10 at my home coda meeting at the SF Gratitude Center. I wanted to reference one of my many author mentors (including you) and sadly discovered that our good friend John Bradshaw passed away May 8th and his funeral is today in Houston, Texas."
My response . . .
Dear Nicky:
Thanks for letting me know about John Bradshaw. Yes, he changed my life, and he changed the world. Before John, all we had was Claudia Black''s work on growing up in an alcoholic home. She had such a good model for recovery, that I used to tell my clients to read her book and pretend that they had grown up in an alcoholic home. (I still tell people to read the book, Alcoholics Anonymous and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions and pretend they are an alcoholic.)
But John took Claudia's idea of an alcoholic family and applied it to any child who was neglected and abused. This changed everything. Now the whole world could get help for all kinds of problems. (By the way, this idea, that the whole family suffered, actually came from Virginia Satir who lived in Berkeley. Before that all we had was the "identified patient.")
John was an iconic teacher and pioneer, but he is was also a role model to people because, like them, he had so many relapses. He helped me and others understand that it is progress not perfection, which in turn wipes away our shame. (Everything I know about shame came from John as well.)
John's wisdom came from God, and through John, as it does for all of us writers. We just let it flow from us, and then try to preserve it in our own little way. I am proud to be part of this self-help genre where a writer takes a complicated subject and makes it understandable to the layman. I am also proud to be, like John, considered a pioneer in my own field ( love addiction). I owe God so much for this. Dare I say,
"Praise the Lord."
God bless you John Bradshaw . . . save a place for me in the beyond.
