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

Negative Love

Negative Love is the experience of feeling unlovable. It is the intergenerational pain that is passed down from one generation to the next.

We all have negative moods, attitudes and behaviors that emanate from a very deep emotional level, to reflect our feeling of being unlovable. Every day, in all areas of our lives, we act out our negative emotional needs, preconceptions and attitudes. Unconsciously and automatically, we act out our emotional childhood programming over and over again. The pain and conflict caused by these negative attitudes, feelings, and behaviors have resulted in personal suffering and social injustices, affecting each of us every day both personally and collectively.

Among mammals, humans require the longest period of care and nurture from adults. In fact, we cannot survive our first several years without continuing physical and emotional parental care. Our very lives depend upon the care and nurture we receive from our parents, emotionally as well as physically. Children need to feel that they will not be abandoned and that they are loved and valued by their parents or parental figures.

As newborn babies, love and affection were as vital to us as food and shelter. In order to thrive, we needed a continuous flow of unconditional love from mother and father. We are born with needs that must be satisfied by our parental relationships. The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, in the 1950's, developed what he called "attachment theory" which is discussed in the remarkable book A General Theory of Love. The authors, Lewis, Amini, and Lannon explain:

"Bowlby theorized that human infants are born with a brain system that promotes safety by establishing an instinctive behavioral bond with their mothers. That bond produces distress when a mother is absent, as well as the drive for the two to seek each other out when the child is frightened or in pain." (p. 70)

The authors then say:

"Mothers shape their children in long-lasting and measurable ways, bestowing upon them some of the emotional attributes they will possess and rely on, to their benefit or detriment, for the rest of their lives." (p. 75)

In every situation that we as children experienced our parent’s love being cut off, e.g., divorce, abandonment, death, imprisonment, or their love becoming conditional, the parental bond was broken for us. We felt unlovable, as if a part of us suffocated and died. The basic cause of our inability to relate to ourselves and others with love is this childhood state of feeling unlovable which persists in our adult lives.This is Negative Love.

To understand our negative programming, we have to see the world through the eyes of a child, the child we once were before we had any choice or options, before we had a mediating intellect. John Bradshaw explains why it is that babies need unconditional love in the following way:

"Children are ... egocentric. This doesn’t mean they are selfish in the usual meaning of the word. They are not morally selfish. They are not even capable of moral thinking until about seven or eight (the so-called age of reason). Even at that age their thinking still has definite egocentric elements in it. ..."
"Egocentric thinking means that a child will take everything personally... The impact of not having one’s parents’ time creates the feeling of being worthless. The child is worth less than his parents' time, attention or direction. The young child’s egocentricity always interprets events egocentrically. If Mom and Dad are not present, it's because of me. There must be something wrong with me or they would want to be with me."
"Children are egocentric because they have not had time to develop ego boundaries. An ego boundary is an internal strength by which a person guards her inner space. Without boundaries, a person has no protection. A strong boundary is like a door with the doorknob on the inside. A weak ego boundary is like a door with a doorknob on the outside. A child's ego is like a house without any doors."
"Children are egocentric by nature (not by choice). Their egocentricity is like a temporary door and doorknob, in use until strong (healthy) boundaries can be built. Strong boundaries result from the identification with parents who themselves have strong boundaries and who teach their children by modeling. Children have no experience; they need their parents' experience. By identifying with their parent, they have someone whom they can depend on outside themselves. As they internalize their parent, they form a dependable guide inside themselves. If the parent is not dependable, they will not develop this inner resource."
"Children need mirroring and echoing. These come from their primary caretaker's eyes. Mirroring means that someone is there for them and reflects who they really are at any given moment of time. In the first three years of our life each of us needed to be admired and taken seriously. We needed to be accepted for the very one we are." (Bradshaw, 43)

As children we looked to have our love needs met exclusively within the family. If our parent's behaviors in any way communicated threats to our well being, if they expressed anger, impatience, contempt, indifference, neglect, or if they abused us in any way, we felt that there was something wrong with us. As children we assumed that we were at fault, not them. Little by little we came to experience the world in much the same way as our parents.

Parental abandonment or rejection literally raises the specter of death for the helpless dependent child. As children, we emotionally emulated (i.e. adopted and internalized) our parents negativities in order to guarantee the continuing protection against abandonment or rejection of our parents. Children cannot recognize or acknowledge the inadequacies and faults of their parents because that recognition would evoke unbearable anxiety.

The well known psychiatrist Karen Horney identified these feelings of childhood insecurity as "basic anxiety." She observed:

"A wide range of adverse factors in the [child's] environment can produce this insecurity in a child: direct or indirect domination, intolerance, erratic behavior, lack of respect for the child's needs, lack of guidance, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration, or the absence of it, lack of reliable warmth, having to take sides in parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility, over protection, isolation from other children, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises, hostile atmosphere etc..." (Horney, 41)

Along with the feeling of insecurity is the sense many parents have that mistreatment is "good" for children. Alice Miller, in For Your Own Good, has observed:

"... we were not even allowed to be aware that all this was happening to us, for any mistreatment was held up to us as being necessary for our own good. Even the most clever child cannot see through such a lie if it comes from his beloved parents who after all show him other sides as well. He has to believe that the way he is being treated is truly right and good for him and he will not hold it against his parents." (Miller, 247-248)

Our early experience with our parents has a profound effect on our lives, shaping our self-image, attitudes, moods and behavior. We developed our survival strategies and life orientations as a result of our conditioning. Not only are we unable to recognize or acknowledge the faults or abuse of our parents, we imitate their faults and inadequacies (attitudes, moods, and behaviors) in order to be accepted by them.

More than merely role models, parents are everything to little children, looming so large as to be godlike. As children, we emotionally identified with our parents absolutely. But parents are only humans, with negative behavioral patterns as well as positive ones. How often have you thought or said, "I sound just like my father." "My goodness, I'm becoming just like my mother." "My God, why am I doing this? My Mother (and/or Father) used to do that. I hated it when she did it, and now I'm doing it."

Of course, we are not our parents, but what then drives the powerful unconscious compulsion to be like them: The primitive but innocent attempt to end the sense of separation from our parents that we experienced as children when they were being negative. This occurred unconsciously. Knowing no better, we spontaneously adopted their patterns as our own, to be like them so we could experience being connected to them again.

The Negative Love Syndrome is the adoption of the negative behaviors, moods, attitudes, and admonitions (overt and silent) of our parents to secure their love. It includes the subsequent compulsive acting out or rebellion against those negative traits throughout our adult lives.

In childhood we emulated, adopted, and internalized (introjected) our parents' negative behaviors, moods, and attitudes to be like them so they would accept and love us. In an essay about the Quadrinity Process, psychiatrist and noted author Claudio Naranjo wrote:

"Hoffman’s idea that the child adopts parental traits in order to be loved... [both] acknowledges the love need as the basic source of identification, [and] implies an assumption in the child's mind that by being like his parents, he would obtain the love that he is not experiencing by merely being himself." (Naranjo 7)

Later, in our adult lives we continue to compulsively act out negative patterns from our childhood in an ongoing attempt to be loved. Even though we know that there are alternatives to our negativities, and even though we recognize on some level that these behaviors cannot bring us happiness, we continue to act them out. Negative love patterns, though unconsciously motivated by our deep need for love, actually produce alienation and/or rejection in our adult lives. It is a Catch-22 situation. Then, when our negative behaviors don't produce the love we want and need, we blame others and become vindictive. In effect, we want revenge for not being loved and accepted and, thus, we become even more hurtful towards ourselves and others. This leads to remorse, guilt, and shame which reinforces the belief that we are essentially flawed. In due time, our own children adopt our patterns in order to secure our love, and the Negative Love Syndrome passes on to the next generation.

In living out these adopted negativities, we obscure our innate and true loving essence, just as our parents did. For transformation to take place, we must first become aware of the negative aspects of our lives. Only then does a way out become possible. The key is in the awareness that we adopted our parents' negative traits. Anything adopted can also be released. Negative Love is not innate or genetic. The Hoffman Quadrinity Process teaches us how to release and resolve the persistent negative feelings of being unloved and unlovable. The way out is a daunting task: we must somehow transcend our parent’s negative traits without feeling inner conflict. To achieve this we must have the courage for honest self-examination and accept that challenge wholeheartedly. We will return to the transcendence of the Negative Love Syndrome after we have further considered the mechanisms by which we adopted the Negative Love patterns.

Briefly stated, our unconscious reasons for adopting negative behavior patterns from our parents are:

• the hope that they will love us if we are like them.
• to vindictively punish our parents by reflecting their negativity back to them.
• to punish ourselves for feeling unworthy and unlovable.