Ultimately, to Be Free of
Negative Love, We Must…
It is time to see how this applies to you and your life. If you are willing to be curious and open, you can experience the truth of the myriad of subtle and overt ways you adopted your parents’ negative patterns. Before beginning these exercises, however, let’s examine a set of defenses that can defeat us before we begin: denial, invalidation, cynicism, and skepticism.
Denial is our primary defense that we learn in very early childhood when we deny our parents' negativity, and later in life we deny our own. We learn invalidation by copying how our parents invalidated themselves, or because they invalidated us. Self-invalidation provides the rationale for giving up on ourselves and denying who we really are. The result is that we become skeptical and cynical, believing that we can’t be free.
As you do these exercises, carefully watch to see if you get stuck in one or more of these big patterns. If you do, re lect on how and from who you learned them.
In order to be free, we have to be completely honest with ourselves. By facing our truth, we can free ourselves from the learned, programmed, behavioral deceptions. We must dare to go through the emotional pain of our childhood, and to come out on the other end. It is better to face this pain once and for all than to carry the burden and pain of compulsive negative love programming.
No one can or will wave a magic wand over you and make it all go away. As we tell our students, you must do the work of the Process. You are your own savior. With guidance and help, you can change yourself. The struggle is short lived and intense, but the end result is inner freedom.