Homecoming is an incredibly profound book by John Bradshaw. It was a great introduction for me to inner child work. I’m still no expert on it but now that I’ve finished working through Homecoming, I see how powerful and healing it can be. Here are my thoughts on this wonderful book.
Despite all the progress I made last year, I still had a hard time working on painful experiences from early in my life. Because I would often feel extremely uncomfortable or get distracted when bringing up painful memories, I didn’t have much success in working through them. That all changed this year. A regular customer at my job recommended Homecoming to me toward the end of last year so I ordered it and put it on my shelf. Back in January I received a sign that it was time to start working through this and boy did it pay off big time.
Right away, I knew that this book would be a game changer for me. Healing began immediately after the first set of exercises and that healing only became deeper as I continued. I was surprised at how quickly the healing occurred even though I was going slowly through the book. I spent anywhere from a few days to a week or more going through each chapter. I’d read straight through a chapter at my usual pace and then, either later that day or the next day, begin working through the exercises. That normally took at least a few days as I gave myself plenty of time to allow everything to come up, feel through it, and do whatever else the chapter had in store for me (more on that in the next paragraph). Accordingly, it took me about four months to work through a book which would normally have only taken me two weeks at most to read. The slow pace was worth it as I effectively worked through the exercises that allowed me to fully experience painful emotions that I had been carrying my whole life and sit with them long enough to heal from them.
Homecoming includes a lot of incredibly powerful exercises. I did most of the exercises in the book, focusing primarily on the ones that seemed to be the most transformative for me. There was a lot of writing about my early life experiences, including writing letters between my current and younger selves. I often felt surprised at what came up during the letter writing and was moved to tears on at least one occasion. There were also exercises related to communication, setting boundaries, and peacefully resolving conflicts. I’ve done a lot of work on each of those so it was great seeing them incorporated into this book. What I found most effective were the affirmations and meditations for different developmental stages. I used my old phone to record them and listened to them when I had enough time to go through them. I found all of this to be extremely powerful and healing. One of my primary love languages is words of affirmation so I especially loved hearing those loving affirmations in my own voice. In these ways, Homecoming gave me almost everything I wanted and needed as a kid but never got.
Parts of Homecoming lined up perfectly with the technique described Letting Go. Having read the latter book several times and practicing the technique regularly for many months helped me immensely while working through the former book. Additionally, Letting Go talks about not resisting the positive emotions. Homecoming is full of of positive emotions, affirmations, meditations, and reminders, so allowing myself to feel the positive was extremely beneficial for inner child work. If you’re interested in going through both books, I highly recommend reading Letting Go first and Homecoming second.
One of the few things I disliked about Homecoming was how Bradshaw would occasionally say that the wounded inner child contaminates one’s life. That came across to me as blaming someone who had already been hurt and blamed for many things despite not actually being responsible for them. The pain and struggles many of us face in adulthood come from our upbringing, not our younger selves. I’d rather he have written those sections in a way that came across as having more compassion for the wounded inner child (as was the case in the rest of the book). Also, I felt that Bradshaw was being premature in advocating compassion for abusive parents. While I understand and even appreciate giving compassion to parents who were themselves hurt by their own parents as kids, I think that compassion and forgiveness must come after the healing has occurred. It’s extremely difficult or even impossible to truly forgive and have compassion for someone who has hurt me deeply while the wounds are still unhealed. There must be a time of working through all the feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, depression, rage, and everything else that comes up. Once the pain is gone, then the compassion and forgiveness flow naturally. Those were my only issues with the book and fortunately they were minor issues that didn’t detract from the great stuff.
I’m so grateful for all the beautiful freedom Homecoming has given me. This is one of the most powerful, freeing, and transformative books I’ve ever read. It came into my life at the perfect time: I started it shortly after a year of unprecedented personal transformation and worked through it in the midst of several other deeply healing experiences. I can’t single out any one of them as the most beneficial since they all supported each other and the earlier ones prepared me for the later ones. Still, it’s clear to me that Homecoming was a major player in providing the deep senses of peace, compassion, empathy, and love I now have for myself. It gave me an incredible amount of healing as well as some wonderful tools that I’m sure will help me work through my remaining struggles. All of that is making it easier to be my true self and that’s the person I’ve always wanted to be.