Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth.

In his most recent book, Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth (Bantam, 1992), Bradshaw blends his work on the inner child and family dynamics with a broader reflection on spirituality and the meaning of human relationships. He acknowledges the strong influence of both Peck and Moore. For Bradshaw, spirituality involves learning to relate to God and others in ways that are real rather than "mystified." Mystification, a term Bradshaw takes from psychiatrist R.D. Laing, is "an altered state of consciousness in which a person feels and believes that there is something wrong with them as they are, and creates a false self in order to be accepted by their parents or other crucial survival figures." Real love replaces mystified love when adults work through the childhood pains that bind them in reactive patterns and they become free to take on the responsibilities of soulful interaction.

Bradshaw is a creative synthesizer whose ability to package ideas and model their relevance with personal examples has helped many people. However, the blunt edges of his brutal honesty and his confrontational approach to rooting out the ills from one's family of origin can, in some cases, result in more harm than good. And, though he acknowledges the value of religious community and ritual, his examples reveal his own unresolved resentments toward formal religion. Sebastian Moore's Let This Mind Be in You (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) deals with the connection between spirituality, memories, and the working through of one's development, but is less accusing and more grounded in the tradition.