John Bradshaw Quotes

I do find acting cathartic.

When you start suppressing feelings at an early age, it hurts you down the road. Full expression of anger and pain is very important.

Acting has made me embrace my childhood. It's become some weird form of therapy. It's like I have a place where I can release all of these emotions. When I was playing Ira Hayes, I didn't have to think about the death of my parents directly. It's just there. I can blend it into Ira's character. I can use Ira's emotions as an outlet.

For a kid who's lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.

There was probably something as a child I wanted to express, something unsaid that I needed to share.

It's good to actually cry. Trust me, I've had a lot of practice over the years!

I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood and was raised by a man who did not emote, ever... I always cry at movies, and when I was a kid, I would try to hide it. It wasn't something a kid in Oaklyn, N.J., did. So I have these weird hang-ups about emotions.

When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.

I was pretty troubled for a long time. And I didn't know that. As a kid, I never talked about my emotions. My mom gave me a journal, but I didn't know what it meant. I just wrote all the time, not even thinking about it. But it also made me feel better.

I get things out of my system through my songs, but, because they can be about so many different things, it takes me a while to get through them emotionally.

For a long time, I couldn't cry on stage. I cried very rarely as a child.

I used music as therapy and embraced being a cry baby.

I'm so thankful for dance because if I had grown up with just the bitterness of the very hard childhood we had, and I'd never 'experienced the love of the dance world, then I probably would have been a very sad person.

Every role that one does - at least, that's what happens in my case - becomes a sort of therapy.

Allow yourself to release the emotions you have struggled all your life to contain.

At some point people either had to throw off the wounds of their childhood or go through life permanently crippled

Everybody has anger or regret in them one way or another. They all try different things to get it out. Some people go to psychiatrists. Some paint pictures. Some people talk it out.

I personally hate psychiatrists. When I was a kid, I saw quite a few of them, and they ruin everything.

Any kind of grieving that is not allowed causes a break. In our culture, grieving in public is not encouraged, but in other cultures, it is done publicly. Some cultures have walls where people can cry. We don't have that. We have theatre where there's always the chance for you to face things within yourself.

Don't hold back from being an 'empath.' Don't be afraid of shedding your tears. Feel it. Feel the full extent of everything. It gives us strength.

Songwriting is therapeutic for me.

I became insular because at home there was no space to grow or to evolve, everything was tight and there was no room to breathe. People don't realise how that affects you as a kid. I wasn't allowed to speak, so my expression was football.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

Once you realise you're carrying around lots of pain, I think go to therapy so you release yourself. You don't want to be a problem bore, poor me.

When I was younger, I used to say, 'I'm not making music. I am getting catharsis for emotion.' For me, vulnerability is an act of uncovering. It's a revealing: the idea of putting aside your armour and allowing pain to enter.