John Bradshaw: Healing Your Inner Child, Live Studio Workshop

In this historic, uncut 1992 broadcast from The Dini Petty Show, #1 New York Times bestselling author John Bradshaw bypasses standard talk-show banter to deliver a powerful, live studio workshop. The renowned author of Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child uses this rare television appearance to demonstrate his revolutionary psychological frameworks on generational trauma and recovery. Fresh off his Emmy-winning PBS series, Bradshaw leads host Dini Petty and the studio audience through an emotional, live championing meditation. By guiding participants back into painful childhood memories armed with adult strength as protection, Bradshaw demonstrates exactly how inner child healing works, creating a visible emotional shift in the room as audience members experience real-time breakthroughs.

Between intensive workshop segments, Bradshaw delivers a masterclass on the root causes of toxic shame and psychological distress. He defines a dysfunctional family unit simply as one that “doesn’t deal” with its reality, repressing emotional truths instead of confronting them. Bradshaw argues that the true job of therapy is moving individuals out of chronic misery—which often becomes a comfortable, normalized identity—and into facing their actual core pain. He explains the neuroscience of memory, showing how the brain can actively reprocess and heal past trauma decades later, and issues a stark warning on unresolved childhood wounds: you either pass the pain back through conscious healing, or you pass it on.

This archival footage offers a raw look at Bradshaw’s journey from training for the Catholic priesthood to pioneering global self-help recovery. Before his passing in 2016, John Bradshaw celebrated fifty years of sobriety and sold 12.5 million books worldwide. Unseen since its original CTV broadcast, this tape is preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, dedicated to optimizing lost vault media and protecting vital pieces of television history.