The Conflict of Negative Love
Our compulsive behaviors set us up to be rejected and unloved by the very people whose acceptance and love we most desire. If we win, we lose. This is the inevitable result of the Negative Love Syndrome. The Negative Love Syndrome has a stranglehold on us. It cuts off our ability to love freely.
As adults, we pay dearly for our negative identi ication 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 igures, 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, con lict, rejecting or being rejected, heartbreak, and loss.
As adults we act like frightened eight-year-olds who would do almost anything to avoid pain, yet resist help. As adults we do not really have to withdraw or to pretend the pain does not exist, but Negative Love Syndrome causes us to believe that we cannot deal with dif icult 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, our parents were incapable of dealing with suffering however, they misled us. It’s not true.
Our attachment to negative love programming can be released, 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 essences. Their own essences were not 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 developed a strong sense of inner security.
Negative Love Can Be Transcended
• Find understanding, with no condemnation, for our biological parents and our parental surrogates
• Find compassion for the childhoods 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
When we are able to truly forgive our parents from the deepest levels of our being, 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 mean by transcendence: choice that is free from the constraints of our negative love programming.
When we come to love ourselves fully, we end the eternal negative chatter in our heads and ind inner peace. The work of the Hoffman Process can accomplish this, not just intellectually, but emotionally, physically, and spiritually as well.