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

The Vicious Cycle of Adopting Negative Love Patterns

To illustrate the stages of adopting Negative Love traits, let’s use the patterns of "uncaring/unloving/non-supportive"and trace the self-defeating circular logic of the programming. Imagine a childhood situation where your mother and/or father did not display affection and love either to each other, or to you, or both. You learned and adopted this behavior.

Here is an illustration of the vicious cycle.

Reacting unconsciously, you choose either:
1. Adoption: "Mommy, Daddy, I’m just like you, unloving, and unlovable. Now will you love me?"

This is a vicious cycle. We adopt negative traits to get love, but the result of adopting negative traits is that we feel unlovable and can't give or receive love. The more we try to be loved, the more unlovable we become. Negative Love compels us to sabotage ourselves continually by forcing us to reject others or to be rejected by them.

In The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy describes the full spectrum of Negative Love. Can you trace the patterns adopted by this character?

I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter, my parents' definition of me... My parents had succeeded in making me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image of what they needed at the time, and because there was something essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil child. I adhered to the measurements of their own vision... They succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull. But their most iniquitous gift they did not even know they were bestowing. I longed for their approval, their applause, their pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it for years after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have it. To love one's children is to love oneself, and this was a state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance. I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being. I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try to coax him gently toward his maturity.

...I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance and craft and all the instincts of self-preservation jettisoned, I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal, in turning her into the exact image of my mother... I was not comfortable with anyone who was not disapproving of me. No matter how ardently I strove to attain their impossibly high standards for me, I could never do anything entirely right and so I grew accustomed to that climate of inevitable failure. I hated my mother, so I got back at her by giving my wife her role... Like my mother, my wife had come to feel slightly ashamed and disappointed in me. The configuration and tenor of my weakness would define the fury of their resurrection; my failure would frame their strength, blossoming, and deliverance.

Though I hated my father, I expressed that hatred eloquently by imitating his life, by becoming more and more ineffectual daily, by ratifying all the cheerless prophecies my mother made for both my father and me. I thought I had succeeded in not becoming a violent man, but even that belief collapsed; My violence was subterranean, unbeheld. It was my silence, my long withdrawals, that I had turned into dangerous things. My viciousness manifested itself in the terrible winter of blue eyes, My wounded stare could bring an ice age into the sunniest, balmiest afternoon. I was about to be thirty-seven years old, and with some aptitude and a little natural ability, I had figured out how to live a perfectly meaningless life, but one that could imperceptibly and inevitably destroy the lives of those around me.