Introduction
In the depths of their being, everyone understands that love is the essence of a fulfilling life. This message appears consistently in all of the world’s religious traditions. So why, I asked myself, is there so much discord and negativity in human relations? There had to be something missing in our everyday understanding about love and emotions, and our actions and relationships that grew out of this misunderstanding. Feelings of love and affection have enormous power in every aspect of our lives, shaping and coloring our behaviors, and at times spinning them out of control. My work led me to uncover a very basic misunderstanding about 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 describing the emotional effects of parental conditioning, very little had been done to understand the motivation of children in emulating the counterproductive and limiting 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 Hoffman Process.
This booklet represents my particular insights into the workings of the human mind, which might seem familiar as I describe them. I coined the word QuadrinityTM to represent the four aspects of a human being: the motional, ntellectual, hysical, and piritual. The unique capacities and functions of each aspect can be considered separately, but it is the balance of all aspects working together harmoniously that ful ills us as human beings.
It has been my experience that most people do not live in this harmonious balance. Certainly those of us raised in Western culture give primary authority to the intellect – both our own and those of the authorities selected by our history, religions, or scienti ic world view. To create balance, the other three aspects of ourselves need to come into partnership with the intellect. As 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."
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 identi ied as the Negative Love SyndromeTM.
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, 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 ind a deeper understanding about yourself and your parents. You may even have discovered something astonishing about yourself by the time you read through to the end.