Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self [Paperback]

Lucia Capacchione (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 1991

The Inner Child lives within all of us, it's the part of us that feels emotions and is playful intuitive and creative. Usually hidden under our grown-up personas, the Inner Child holds the key to intimacy in relationships physical and emotional well-being, recovery from addictions, and the creativity and wisdom of our inner selves.

Recovery of Your Inner Child is the only book that shows you how to have a firsthand experience of your Inner Child -- actually feeling its emotions and recapturing its sense of wonder -- by writing and drawing with your non-dominant hand. Expanding on the highly acclaimed technique introduced in The Power of Your Other Hand, here Dr. Capacchione shares scores of hands-on activities that will help you to embrace your Vulnerable Child and your Angry Child, find the Nurturing Parent within, and finally discover the Creative and Magical Child that can heal your life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Melody Beattie author of Codependent No More The best book I've read yet on how to talk to your Inner Child and find what it needs. Practical, helpful, and easy.

Louise Hay author of You Can Heal Your Life Healing is making ourselves whole. Healing our Inner Child is a major part of our recovery. Lucia Capacchione is a master at gently guiding you through this process. Love yourself enough to recover from the past.

About the Author

Known for her discovery of the healing power of writing and drawing with the non-dominant hand, Lucia Capacchione is an art therapist with a Ph.D. in psychology, serves as a consultant to Walt Disney Imagineering, and is nationally recognized for her workshops in recovery and co-dependence. Her work has been highly praised by such leaders in the health-care field as Dr. Bernie Siegel, Norman Cousins Joan Borysenko and Dr. Gerald Jampolsky. She has written six other books including The Power of Your Other Hand. The Picture of Health and The Creative Journal.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (March 15, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671701355
• ISBN-13: 978-0671701352
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > Self-Help > Inner Child

More About the Author

Lucia Capacchione, Ph.D., A.T.R., R.E.A.T., www.luciac.com


I am a Registered Art Therapist, Expressive Arts Therapist, workshop leader and best-selling author of 15 books. My innovative methods spark and nurture creativity in all areas of life. I originated:

* The Creative Journal Method, blending writing with drawing (The Creative Journal series of books for kids, teens, adults)
* Healing through writing and drawing with the non-dominant hand (The Power of Your Other Hand and The Art of Emotional Healing)
* The Visioning® process of life design through collage and journaling (Visioning)
* Inner Child/Inner Family healing through the expressive arts (Recovery of Your Inner Child)

I was originally a professional artist and Montessori-trained child development specialist, one of the first Head Start directors in the U.S. After successful careers in both art and education, I stumbled onto the healing power of art and of journaling with my non-dominant hand while struggling with a mysterious life-threatening illness. Journaling through drawing and writing with both hands opened my right hemisphere. It gave my emotions a means of full expression, helped me remember and work with dreams, develop my intuition and connect both hemispheres of my brain. My Creative Journal opened new worlds to me (internally and externally) and it paid huge dividends in terms of my health. My full recovery without medication led to a new career as an art therapist.

Methods which I developed for my own healing and refined in private practice with others are now being used worldwide for treating addictions, trauma, and childhood abuse. Many of my books are used as texts in courses on therapy, psychology, writing, art, career development and applied creativity. My work is being used in mental health and recovery programs, medical centers, school systems (kindergarten through college), prisons, health and healing programs, spiritual retreat centers, business, and industry. I have trained professionals word-wide in the Creative Journal Expressive Arts Certification Training, and consulted for corporations, community groups and schools throughout the U.S., Canada, Italy, the UK, Australia and Mexico.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great resource for the discovery of your inner child!, August 1, 2001

By 

Denise M. Austin (Norcross, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self (Paperback)

This is one of the best books I've read on how to discover your inner child. It has many excercises to use to "talk" to your inner child. It showed me how to have a first hand experience with my inner child...and to actually feel the emotions. By writting and drawing with my non-dominant hand, I could actually have conversations with my inner child. I learned a lot about who my inner child was, the way she was feeling and how to make her feel happier and safer! The book stirs up many emotions that were buried for years, thus, helping me become healthier! One of the best self-help tools I have ever used!!

60 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding resource for the the brave at heart, December 21, 2005

By 

Tobey Crockett (Los Osos, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self (Paperback)

In response to other reviews here, I would agree that the emotions which can come up under the aegis of these methods might be too intense for readers with absolutely no grounding in self examination at all. People who need therapy first and foremost will not get therapy just by reading this - or any other book - and they should get a good referral and go do that. But those who are indeed ready, willing and able to undertake their own self examination will find so much that is useful and eye opening here, it seems a shame to dissuade anyone from working with this book and these methods. Therapists and their clients should welcome this as an opportunity to dive more deeply, quickly and thoroughly into the healing process. Capacchione's work is really brilliant.

I have previously worked with her Visioning book and really love that and have reviewed it as well. It can be said perhaps that just as that book shows us how to look to our future, the Inner Child work developed here shows us how to understand our past. Under careful guidance, the reader is walked through and encouraged to interact with an array of internal figures who compete to shape our reality, whether we realize it or not. The reader gets an opportunity to examine past patterns and see how this is related to conflicting internal needs for support, protection, vulnerability, self expression, survival and so on. The reader then re-directs this internal pantheon to a more harmonious, healing and supportive dynamic, allowing one to release old material and perhaps to discern with fresh eyes how such old patterns may be playing out in the present. It is so much better to see things for how they really are, rather than through the veil of past dramas which continually reassert themselves through our unconscious until we are able to heal ourselves from these burdens. This book gives one the opportunity to put that old material to rest, to truly love oneself rather than looking to the outside world to supply what we can truly only find from within and to move into a new phase of renewal, creativity and healthy relationship.

I can not say enough to praise this and other books by Capacchione.

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Art Therapy, Inner Child, Internalized Parent..., May 9, 2000

By 

"redwoodgames" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method for Liberating Your Inner Self (Paperback)

This book has Art Therapy exercises and dialog exercises with your inner child (who can be playful, vulnerable, angry, etc). For instance you might be instructed to ask your inner child a question by writing it with your dominant hand. Then you answer the question with your nondominant hand (e.g. for many of us our left hand that we don't usually write with). There are also exercises that involve your internalized Parent (nuruturing, protective, critical, etc.)

The exercises seem to be a blend of Art Therapy, Transactional Analysis and Gestault Experiments. As such the exercises can be somewhat risky since they bring up intense feelings. I wouldn't use some of these except under a therapist's supervision.

However, this book seem VERY useful for adding to the tools of a practicing therapist.