At a glance, these two elder wise men could not seem less alike. Thy, a large, genial 63-year-old Minnesotan with a mane of white hair, directs his sometimes obscure messages, incanted to the beat of a conga, exclusively at males. Bradshaw, 57, bearded, stocky and intense behind a Texan drawl, aims at what he calls “adult children of dysfunctional families”–by which he means just about everyone. Both men, in fact, are working the same psychic turf of wounded childhood. In Bradshaw’s workshops, men and women tearfully hug teddy bears. At Thy’s soirees, strong men embrace one another and weep. Both Thy and Bradshaw are sons of alcoholic fathers, and they evoke a powerful response from the ardent membership of Children of Alcoholics. Beyond that, they appear to be plugging into some widespread emotional need evidently not requited by conventional shrinkdom.
The two new oracles began dispensing their wisdom a few years ago for small groups of troubled thirtysomethings. But with a boost from public-television appearances and a resulting bonanza of videocassette sales, they play now to SRO crowds all over the country. Bradshaw made his initial splash via a 1986 lecture series called “Bradshaw On: The Family” that became a pledge-week staple on PBS stations. Since then he has mushroomed into a corporate entity called Bradshaw Events, any of which can be as hard to get into as a Bruce Springsteen concert. His three-day lecture and workshop at Los Angeles’s Sheraton Universal Hotel two weeks ago played to a full house of 2,100, and a September date in New York packed the 3,000-seat Javits Convention Center. Often, his appearances are sold out weeks in advance. “He seems to really hit people hard,” says Bradshaw Events manager Winston Laszlo. “Which is amazing, because all he does is talk.”
That doesn’t quite nail it. If Bradshaw had gone through with his studies for the priesthood, he might have made a formidable fire-and-brimstone preacher. As it is, he is a rousing performer, lunging around the stage like a tent-show Donahue, all but turning himself inside out for the audience. A recovering alcoholic himself, he draws on his own chaotic personal history to make his points, talking unabashedly of his “sick, alcoholic father,” his “incested mother,” or his shortcomings as a (now divorced) husband and father. The candor may be what makes the lectures work, he thinks. “If I talk about my pain, my alcoholism, my raging at my children, then whatever is going on out there that people are in hiding about, they can come out of hiding.” Many of his listeners passionately agree. “A lot of these ideas were first put out by other people,” says Cynthia Scheider, a film editor who attended a Bradshaw workshop in California. “But you know when he’s talkingtoyou he’s experienced every bit of this. He’s not just a guy who got this great idea and is making money from it. You always feel with him that he’s still working on it.”
Bradshaw, indeed, assures his listeners that, like him, they are all abused children. “A lot of what we consider to be normal parenting is actually abusive,” he maintains. The problem is that parents teach their children not to complain about adversity–a hangover from “survivalistic” ages when such stoicism was a virtue. “I grew up very poor, and I know we were rewarded for not complaining,” says Bradshaw , who thinks there is a penalty for holding back: “Our massive addictive problem, in my opinion, stems from massive denial of emotions. "
A corollary Bradshaw theme has to do with finding the “neglected, wounded child” in all of us–in his view, “the major source of human misery”–and giving it the unconditional love withheld by parents. It is the message of his current book, “Homecoming–Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child,” which has been leading the best-seller lists in the advice category.
Bly, a Harvard-educated editor and translator who won the National Book Award for poetry in 1968, works in more intimate settings. But he is no box-office slouch himself. A Bill Moyers PBS profile of him last January resulted in a best-selling videocassette, “A Gathering of Men,” that has sold about 27,000 copies to date. It also sold more than 10,000 transcripts, topping a 1990 list of such high-demand items as Phil Donahue’s interview with Louis Farrakhan, Geraldo Rivera’s “Prescription for Happiness” and Sally Jessy Raphael’s “Famous People with Unspeakable Diseases.”
Bly’s for-men-only version of the forsaken-childhood theme is that most boys feel remote from their fathers and remain bonded to their mothers into middle age. “The male ego is very weak-kneed in many ways,” Thy says. “Men love that admiration from the mother.” Thus they need mentors to conduct them into the male world. In the workshops, Bly says, men show their vulnerabilities without fear. “On the first night of a seminar,” Thy says, “I may simply put out a question like, ‘Why are you having such trouble in relationships with women, or your father?’ And the amount of grief and loneliness that pours out is tremendous. So sometimes by the third day there’ll be a lot of weeping.”
Bly conveys his mentoring message in the form of the Grimm Brothers’ tale of Iron John, a primordial “Wild Man” who is dredged up from the bottom of a pond by the king’s soldiers and imprisoned in an iron cage. The Wild Man persuades the young prince to steal the key from under his mother’s pillow. (“That’s where Freud said it would be,” says Thy, in an aside that never fails to crack up his audiences.) Once freed, he becomes the boy’s mentor, teaching him to live in primitive harmony with nature.
Woodland outings: The Iron John story underpins the so-called Wild Man weekends, an organized rite of passage in which groups of men go off into the woods to beat drums, dance around a fire and bare their souls. By some accounts, as many as 50,000 men of all ages have signed up for the woodland outings. It has been called a movement, with Thy its patron saint. But some of Thy’s fans are skeptical about the value of the forest forays, and feminist critics deplore it as a regression to the old macho model of masculinity. Thy, a bit on the defensive, says that when he urges men to embrace their masculinity he doesn’t mean the “absurd John Wayne model” but rather the opposite: men who act boldly and spontaneously, but are able to reconcile with a “hidden feminine principle” in themselves. “Women have to realize the macho man is often an incompletely initiated boy, often very angry at his mother or father.”
Grown-ups weeping, hugging dolls, listening to fairy tales–what does it all mean? Some of it, certainly, harks back to the touchy-feely heyday of the 1970s, when gurus like Werner Erhard were getting people “in touch” with themselves. Thy says he disagrees with psychologist James Hillman, his codirector at some of the workshops, who thinks the response reflects a failure of traditional psychotherapy. “What we’re experiencing is the second stage to therapy–that if it didn’t come along, we’d still be in the 19th-century condition where you bite your lip and keep going till you die.” That makes a close fit with Bradshaw’s theme of repressed emotions. There is clearly a crossover audience for the two. (Bly’s books and tapes are sold at Bradshaw lectures.) Both say it’s all about expressing by people taught not to express. “A little realization of failure is the common thread,” says Thy. “Like Bradshaw, I honor that time when men realize the models they have are not working. They’re the ones who come.”’
Parent-bashing: Both men do touch some home truths in their melange of philosophy, psychology and myth. But some therapists think their popularity reflects mostly the current penchant for parent-bashing–blaming life’s failures and frustrations on deficiencies in our upbringing. Bradshaw hotly denies the charge. “I don’t even hold my mom and dad responsible for what happens to me,” he says. “They were adult children, and it was like being raised by 180-pound 3-year-olds. But we’re all accountable. Until I take responsibility for my own wounded inner child, I’m gonna be acting it out on my children or on myself "
Although he has a master’s degree in psychology, Bradshaw says he came to the guru role through “incidental education–I constantly have to explain I’m not a doctor or a shrink.” He got into counseling 25 years ago when people started asking him for advice. “One day,” he recalls, “somebody said, ‘You know you spend whole hours a day doing this, you ought to start charging for it’.” Eventually he built up a huge practice and founded a codependency treatment center in Rosemead, Calif. Last year he earned close to $1 million.
Bly is less driven, but not entirely averse to capitalizing on his modest fame. He has put out half a dozen video- and audiocassettes, and a best-selling new Iron John book. Meanwhile, there is more Bradshaw on the way. San Francisco’s KQED has taped him in a new 10-part series, scheduled to debut soon on PBS stations. Whatever it is these two new mahatmas are evoking, they seem prepared to lead it onward. “A movement? A movement implies a doctrine,” says Thy. “I just say something is stirring, and I think it’s something positive. "
