Negative Love Syndrome
Negative love is inter-generational pain that is passed down from one generation to the next. Everyone is guilty and no one is to blame. We all have negative moods, attitudes, and behaviors that come from a very deep emotional place. Created by childhood programming, we act out these negativities every day, over and over again. The pain, the feeling of being unlovable, and the con lict caused by these negative attitudes, feelings, and behaviors result in personal suffering and social injustices that affect each of us every day.
Among mammals, humans require the longest period of care and nurture until they achieve independence. In our early years, our survival depends on intensive and continuing physical and emotional parental care. So, as a result, children need to feel that they will not be abandoned and that they are loved and valued by their parents or parental igures. In fact, as newborn babies, love and affection ?re as vital to us as food and shelter. In order to thrive, we need ?
continuous low of unconditional love from other and ather. We are born with these needs that must be satis ied by our parental relationships. The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, in the 1950s, developed what he called attachment theory, which is discussed in the remarkable book, A General Theory of Love. The authors, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard 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.
“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 bene it or detriment, for the rest of their lives.” (iii
In every situation that we, as children, experienced our parents’ love being cut off (e.g. through depression, anger, abandonment, death , or their love becoming conditional, the parental bond was broken for us. We felt unlovable, as if a part of us had suffocated and died. The basic cause of our inability to relate to ourselves and others with love is this very state of feeling unlovable, which I call negative love.
To understand how this feeling of unlovability leads to 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 babies need unconditional love in the following way:
“Children are… egocentric. This doesn’t mean that they are sel ish in the usual meaning of the word. They are not morally sel ish. 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 de inite 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 identi ication 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 on whom they can depend outside of 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 re lects who they really are at any given moment of time. In the irst 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.” (iv
As we looked to have our need for love met exclusively within the family, parental abandonment or rejection literally raisef the fear of death for the helpless, dependent child. So, as children, we emotionally emulated (i.e. adopted and internalized our parents’ negativities in order to guarantee the continuing protection against abandonment or rejection by 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 identi ied this feeling of childhood insecurity as basic anxiety:
“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.” (v)
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.” (vi)
Our early experience with our parents has a pro