The Negative Love Syndrome and the Quadrinity Model©
A Path to Personal Freedom and Love
by Bob Hoffman

Introduction

In the depths of their being, every human carries the understanding that Love is the essence of a fulfilling life. This message appears consistently in all the world's religious traditions. Yet, in the course of my life experience, I asked myself, why is there so much discord and negativity in human relations? There had to be something missing in our ordinary understanding about love and emotions, including the actions and relationships that grew out of this misunderstanding. Feelings of love and affection have enormous power in every aspect of our lives, affecting and coloring our apparently rational behaviors, at times spinning them out of control. My work led me to uncover a very basic misunderstanding of emotional love, and in the discovery, I also found a path to recovering our innate ability to love, and becoming fully integrated adults.

For many years, I worked by myself as a spiritual intuitive, with a small number of people who came to me for healing. Through contact with psychotherapists, I learned that, while an enormous amount of work had been done on the effects of parental conditioning, very little had been done to understand the motivation of children in emulating the negative behaviors of their parents. I had an intuition that this was what lay at the root of the unhappiness of those who sought me out. A more complete understanding came to me in 1967, whereupon I formulated the models and concepts that are the foundation of the Quadrinity Process.

These, then, represent my particular insights into the workings of the human mind, which might seem familiar as I describe them. I coined the word Quadrinity. It refers to the four aspects of a human being: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. The unique capacities and functions of each aspect can be considered separately, but it is the balance of all aspects working together harmoniously that fulfills us.

It has been my experience that most people, certainly those of us exposed to Western culture, give primary authority to the intellect—both our own and the intellects of the authorities selected by our history, religions, or scientific world view. The great physicist Albert Einstein once said: "We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead; it can only serve." (Lewis, 32)

While we recognize that we have a physical body, and many acknowledge that we are spiritual beings, we generally downplay or even disregard any positive role for our adult emotional aspect of self. Even with all our training and education, we still tend to either neglect our emotions or cope with them by abusing substances or behaving inappropriately. Most often as adults we merely tolerate the infantile and pitiable existence of our emotions. This predicament is the basis of what I’ve identified as the "Negative Love Syndrome".

I saw that people really began to understand themselves in a new way once they recognized how the Negative Love Syndrome was active in their lives, along with its causes, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors that are, for the most part, just beneath our conscious, day-to-day experience.

I therefore invite you to relate to the ideas presented here in a personal way, as the child of your own parents. As you are introduced to the following information and do the exercises I've included, allow yourself to experience the emotions that arise as fully as you can. This will be the beginning of understanding, in an experiential way, of your own emotional and spiritual truth.

Although we will be investigating the source of your negative emotional programming, this essay is not an indictment of your parents or you. What follows here may trigger and evoke early memories, including some you may have forgotten. It is intended to give you a taste of the personal freedom that is possible. At the very least, I hope that you find a deeper understanding of your self and your parents. You may even discover something astonishing about yourself by the time you read through to the end.