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

Negative Love can be transcended

Our compulsive behaviors set us up to be rejected and unloved by those whose acceptance and love we most desire. If we win, we lose. This is the inevitable result of the Negative Love Syndrome.

Negative Love has a stranglehold on us. It cuts off our ability to love freely. As adults, we pay dearly for our negative identification with our parents. In effect, we sell our souls. For example, in our relationships we unconsciously try to recapture Mommy or Daddy's love, choosing partners who manifest traits like Mommy or Daddy, or both. Projecting our parents unconsciously and automatically onto our lovers, authority figures, bosses, friends, colleagues, or teachers is known as "transference." This recreates our early family system and projects the horror of the Negative Love Syndrome into the present time. The result is resistance, conflict, giving and receiving rejection, heartbreak, and loss.

As adults we act like frightened eight-year-olds, who would do almost anything to avoid pain, yet we resist help. As adults we do not have to withdraw or to pretend the pain does not exist, but Negative Love causes us to believe that we cannot deal with difficult tasks. We spend our lives avoiding the causes of the problems in our lives, afraid that facing our pain will hurt too much and hoping that it will somehow just disappear. By modeling that they were incapable of dealing with suffering, however, our parents mislead us. It’s not true.

Negative Love programming can be "un-programmed", and our positive real self is always there. Due to their own childhood programming, our parents did not know how to nourish us, our perfect essence. Their own essences had not been nourished by their parents. They were never taught to honor, respect, and love themselves, so how could they give to us what they never had? Had they been able to honor themselves, they would have honored us, and we would have been nourished with love and nurtured with a strong sense of inner security.

Ultimately, to be free of Negative Love, we must

• find understanding, with no condemnation, for our biological parents and our parental surrogates;
• find compassion for the childhood's they lived;
• find forgiveness for what they did to us and what we did to them;
• find total acceptance of them for who and what they were and are.
• love them for who they are, without expectations.

When we are able to truly forgive our parents from the deepest levels of our being, experientially and emotionally as well as intellectually, then we can forgive ourselves. Forgiveness breaks our inner need and dependency on the parents of our childhood, allowing us to be free of compulsive negative behaviors, which use and abuse us. While the work of the Process does not eradicate a particular behavior, it eliminates the need to act out the behavior compulsively and automatically. We can then choose behavior that is appropriate for us in a given time and situation. And this is what we understand by transcendence: choice that is free from the constraints of our inherited patterns.

When we come to love ourselves fully, we end the eternal negative chatter in our heads and find inner peace. The work of the Quadrinity Process can accomplish this, not just intellectually, but fully, in all of our being.