John Bradshaw, whose ideas about family dysfunction and the damaged “inner child” concealed within most adults made him one of the most popular and influential self-help evangelists of the 1990s, died on Sunday in Houston. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, his son, John Jr., said.

Mr. Bradshaw drew on his unhappy childhood as the son of an alcoholic father, his own drinking problems and his work as a counselor to develop a set of explanations for myriad psychological ills.

In his television shows on PBS and in books like “Bradshaw On: The Family” (1986) and “Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child” (1990), he argued that millions of adults fail to achieve healthy relationships because they have never come to terms with the shame, self-blame and “toxic guilt” caused by parental abuse, physical or emotional.

Until they learned to seek out and heal the hurt child within, he said, most adults stumbled through life, expressing their pain through self-destructive behavior and entering into unhappy love relationships with similarly damaged partners, each hoping to find in the other a loving, approving parent.