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A Path to Personal Freedom and Love by Bob Hoffman
The Vicious Cycle of Adopting
Negative Love Patterns
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Written by Bob
Hoffman, this entire booklet offers substantial insights into
the principles on which The Hoffman Quadrinity Process is based. It
is available in its entirety via web links below, as a PDF
download and as a free printed booklet upon
request. |
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To
illustrate the stages of adopting Negative Love traits, let’s
use the patterns of "uncaring/unloving/non-supportive"and
trace the self-defeating circular logic of the programming. Imagine
a childhood situation where your mother and/or father did not display
affection and love either to each other, or to you, or both. You learned
and adopted this behavior.
Here is an illustration of the vicious cycle; reacting unconsciously,
you choose either:
- Adoption: "Mommy, Daddy, I’m just like you, unloving,
and unlovable. Now will you love me?"
- Vindictiveness: "I don't care what happens to me as long
as I get even with you."
- Shame: "Oh no! Now I've done it. You'll never love me.
I feel guilt and shame for being so mean. I'm truly bad and unworthy."
- Self-sabotage and self-punishment: "I'll make sure that
no one loves me, to prove to you that I'm unlovable, just as you
taught me."
- "To maintain my unlovable condition, I will adopt all your
negative traits, Mommy and Daddy, and use them to fight and reject
my own positive essence. Then I'll be just like you." (Self-sabotage
and self-punishment)
- "Now will you love me? I am just like you." This vindictively
mirrors the pattern back to them. The end resulting in more self-punishment.
- Then, it's back to step one again, and again.
 This
is a vicious cycle. We adopt negative traits to get love, but the
result of adopting negative traits is that we feel unlovable and
can't give or receive love. The more we try to be loved, the more
unlovable we become. Negative Love compels us to sabotage ourselves
continually by forcing us to reject others or to be rejected by
them.
In The
Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy describes the full spectrum
of Negative Love. Can you trace the patterns adopted by this character?
I had lost nearly thirty-seven years to the image I carried
of myself. I had ambushed myself by believing, to the letter,
my parents' definition of me... My parents had succeeded in making
me a stranger to myself. They had turned me into the exact image
of what they needed at the time, and because there was something
essentially complaisant and orthodox in my nature, I allowed them
to knead and shape me into the smooth lineaments of their nonpareil
child. I adhered to the measurements of their own vision... They
succeeded not only in making me normal but also in making me dull.
But their most iniquitous gift they did not even know they were
bestowing. I longed for their approval, their applause, their
pure uncomplicated love for me, and I looked for it for years
after I realized they were not even capable of letting me have
it. To love one's children is to love oneself, and this was a
state of supererogatory grace denied my parents by birth and circumstance.
I needed to reconnect to something I had lost. Somewhere I had
lost touch with the kind of man I had the potential of being.
I needed to effect a reconciliation with that unborn man and try
to coax him gently toward his maturity.
...I had married a fine and comely girl, and with brilliance
and craft and all the instincts of self-preservation jettisoned,
I succeeded over the years, through neglect, coldness, and betrayal,
in turning her into the exact image of my mother... I was not
comfortable with anyone who was not disapproving of me. No matter
how ardently I strove to attain their impossibly high standards
for me, I could never do anything entirely right and so I grew
accustomed to that climate of inevitable failure. I hated my mother,
so I got back at her by giving my wife her role... Like my mother,
my wife had come to feel slightly ashamed and disappointed in
me. The configuration and tenor of my weakness would define the
fury of their resurrection; my failure would frame their strength,
blossoming, and deliverance.
Though I hated my father, I expressed that hatred eloquently
by imitating his life, by becoming more and more ineffectual daily,
by ratifying all the cheerless prophecies my mother made for both
my father and me. I thought I had succeeded in not becoming a
violent man, but even that belief collapsed; My violence was subterranean,
unbeheld. It was my silence, my long withdrawals, that I had turned
into dangerous things. My viciousness manifested itself in the
terrible winter of blue eyes, My wounded stare could bring an
ice age into the sunniest, balmiest afternoon. I was about to
be thirty-seven years old, and with some aptitude and a little
natural ability, I had figured out how to live a perfectly meaningless
life, but one that could imperceptibly and inevitably destroy
the lives of those around me.
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Overview | TOC |
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| 11 | Author |
Notes
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