From OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, March-April 1996: John Bradshaw's pioneering work on family dynamics has won him international recognition. As an author, John has popularized concepts in psychology and made them generally accessible. John is a dynamic speaker with the rare ability to simultaneously enlighten, inform, and heal. Moreover, John personifies the best qualities of the self-help movement—he is the same warm, emotive person on stage and off. John is a genuinely caring human being and it shines through everything he does.
—Bart Brodsky
Bart Brodsky: John, you say some family secrets are healthy. Please explain.
John Bradshaw: Generational secrets can be healthy. Some things may not be appropriate for mom and dad to be sharing with kids. There's also mom and dad's private life, that they need to have. Then, the kids need secrets, too. Teenagers usually have secrets that they don't share with their parents.
BB: At what age should secrets begin?
JB: Children have a right to privacy. It's a natural right. Obviously, an infant can't possibly proclaim its privacy. But, I think, as soon as children have a sense of shame, which is about 2 1/2 years old, they ought to be able to close the door to their room. As they grow older, they ought to be able to lock the door, lock the bathroom door. If parents have a suspicion about drug paraphernalia, it's their responsibility to check that out. But, generally speaking, most kids do not get very much privacy, and privacy is really necessary for the development of the self.
BB: You would give kids a lot of leeway in terms of keeping their things the way they want to keep them?
JB: Yes. It's what we would call individual secrets. You need an area of privacy, where you can just be with you. It's like developing film. You need a darkroom.
BB: And that's how the "healthy self" is developed?
JB: The healthy self is developed by having enough space in order to build boundaries. Children don't have any boundaries when they are born. So, one of the most important areas of privacy is parents' maintaining good generational boundaries. That is, not sucking kids into their marriage or their own personal life. And kids being taught that they have a space, and that it's their space, and nobody's going to violate it.
BB: How is the healthy self violated in family relationships?
JB: Going to the bathroom, for example. So many people have shared with me in therapy how their dad or mom would just come in. It can become a trauma, a nightmare. It's that continual suspicion that if we don't watch over kids all the time... that they're innately bad.
BB: You hear so much about children being abandoned, that what you're talking about are the errors in the other direction, misplaced closeness.
JB: Yes. And there's been a kind of mania in the recovery movement that, "You're as sick as your secrets." I've said it myself. I did a Geraldo one time and said, "We're as sick as our secrets." And I'm taking that back. Not all secrets are sick. What happens is that when you get your space violated, then you start using protective secrets, because you don't have any space. The ancients always considered birth, death, the sacred prayer, to be private matters, not something to be made public. Once you can't be private in these matters, then you have to develop secrecy in order to protect yourself. So, what I've tried to show is that these natural behaviors of concealment—birth, death, suffering, elimination, sexuality, eating—have you ever been eating and had a whole bunch of people watching you?—
BB: Yes [laughs]! Haven't we all?
JB: Yes, it's an awful feeling! And that's why we have so many dangerous secrets, like the secret rituals in eating disorders, the secret rituals of anorexia, fasting. A lot of that is around boundary violation, no allowance for privacy, or what I call "good secrets."
BB: You have said, in effect, that in a healthy family, the children eventually leave. To me that summarizes this situation with boundaries succinctly. We need to give ourselves and our kids permission to blossom and grow.
JB: Absolutely! Now, this is new material: What I've been able to do is go deeper into the whole realm of what I call "natural shame." You know, Darwin wrote a whole treatise on blushing; Havlock Ellis wrote extensively on sexuality about modesty or blushing. The problem in English is that we don't have a word for this. We have a word "shame," but we usually think of it as disgrace, where the French, German, Latin, Greek, all have two words. They have a word that means modesty, and they have a different word that means disgrace. Healthy shame is, sort of, the shame before an action, where you get a sense of limits, like you're shy. "Because there's strangers in the house." This is a good emotion to have!
BB: You're a great champion of family issues. How did you originally get interested in this area?
JB: I like being in a family! I can remember the pain that I went through when my dad divorced my mother. I can remember the pain when my grandmother died, [losing] the tradition of going over to her house on Sundays. We weren't a very intimate family, but there was still something about the solidarity. So I think I've always just been fascinated with it personally. And, you know, the teacher teaches what he needs to know the most. I was doing my own therapy when I first got into family systems. And it sort of put things together for me. And I got fascinated with it!
BB: There's no question, your books and lectures have had an astounding cultural impact. I'm impressed that you can present your ideas with so much passion. You have a unique capacity to touch people's hearts at the same time you help them understand quite complex material. The content of your presentations is first rate!
JB: I have a profound respect for the power and mystery of the family. I've always found I had an ability to translate material, to make it accessible to a lot of people. Public speaking is real easy for me.
BB: And you'll be speaking in San Francisco again soon. Do you have a special message for our readers?
JB: I just love Bay Area people! They've been the greatest; they've totally welcomed me! I think there's the highest level of consciousness on the West Coast. Here are the most open people, people who are looking at various points of view, people who can handle differences and allow differences.... My work was being shown in prime time [in San Francisco] two years before it took off on the East Coast.
BB: And we're delighted to have you back!