Most people think that who they really are
is who they're afraid they are, which is
the shame and the patterns.
And it's huge to find out that who
you are is really not who you're afraid
you are and not all the patterns
you've been acting at.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and
this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius.
It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute,
and it's stories and anecdotes
and people we interview
about their life post process and how it
lives in the world
radiating love.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Hoffman podcast.
Andy Milberg is with us. Welcome, Andy. Hi,
Drew. Nice to be here. So we are
talking about negative love,
not two words that are usually
said together, written together, negative
and love.
But here we are talking about
what turns out to be a foundational
principle
of the Hoffman
experience, the Hoffman process.
Andy, will you share a little bit about
negative love? You are often known as the
expert around negative love. You've been teaching for
many, many years. Talk to us a little
bit about what the heck
is negative love.
Well, Drew, it's really the foundational
principle of the Hoffman process that Bob Hoffman
came up with
in the late nineteen sixties. So that's, like,
almost sixty years ago.
He asked two questions.
The first question was why does seemingly
rational adults
continue
to act out automatically
compulsively
in self defeating ways?
This could be through behaviors,
through their attitudes,
through their beliefs,
even when these
attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors hurt them and hurt
the people around them that they care about.
So that was question number one. Why it
is seemingly rational adults do this? The second
question was,
why is it so hard to change?
And that's where he came up with the
fundamental theory of the process, which is negative
lab.
That second question, Bob Hoffman asked about why
it's so difficult to change
these behaviors,
attitudes, beliefs, moods that we've learned
that are not serving us
and interfering with our relationships with ourselves and
others.
We learned them when we were really young.
I mean, we did mention that it's pre
verbal.
We were primarily
emotional
and physical beings. So we took on all
this stuff into our physicality,
into our emotions
energetically.
And what most people are trying to do
as an adult, seemingly rational adult
is think it away.
I shouldn't do this. I'm not gonna do
that again. And then we get, you know,
into a situation.
We get triggered and we do it again.
A really important piece of the Hoffman process
is to
disconnect
from the need to act out these patterns,
to move that energy out of us and
create space
for new possibilities
and more choice in our life.
What a great way to
figure something out to ask what is the
question we're asking in the first place. Right?
Yeah. I mean, he was concerned about the
pain that people
experience in their worlds,
And he was looking for ways to get
free from that. And he went all the
way back to childhood, didn't he? He went
back to birth
because what he realized
was that if you think about a human
infant, the newborn,
a newborn
human infant is one of the most helpless
beings on the planet.
It cannot survive on its own.
Other mammals
have the capacity
to walk, to find food, to have some
kind of
survival skills
very early on, but not human beings.
So a human infant is totally
needy and dependent
on their primary caretakers.
In most cases, their parents
for the components of survival,
which are basically food
and shelter as physical components.
But there's also something else that he realized
that human beings, human infants need
to not only survive, but to thrive.
We can call that love, but what is
love to a newborn?
It's a quality of attention.
It's a connection.
It's a sense that everything is alright.
My caretakers are here for me.
I'm gonna survive. I'm okay the way I
am.
And what he postulated
was that
no parents or caretakers
can give that child what he called an
unconditional
sense of
love and presence
and attention.
So in the moments when that connection is
lost,
then it produces a state of, let's say,
unease,
anxiety,
fear
in this
very primal being
that, oh my god, I'm not gonna survive.
What do I have to do to survive?
I have to reconnect.
There's something wrong.
And a human infant doesn't have the capacity
to realize that, well,
you know, mom's attention is towards something else
right now. Dad's
thinking about the ballgame.
If there's something wrong, it can't be with
the parents
who are the the link to survival. So
there's something wrong with the infinite self
with you, with me. And this is very
early, very young,
very small, non rational.
It's not even a thought. It's a sense
of danger to survival,
way preverbal.
What Bob postulated
was that
if there's a sense that there's something wrong,
I'm not gonna survive and there's something wrong
with me,
then I can change
to reconnect
with my
lifeline,
my caretakers.
And that means being like them,
abandoning my
essence
to take on whatever is around me in
the environment,
which means
my parents'
qualities,
some good,
some not so good.
So again, it comes back
to behaviors, moods, attitudes, and beliefs
that we start to absorb from our environment,
from our caretakers,
and that becomes our identity,
what we call in the process our false
self.
It has very much a kind of timeline
to it. It starts with the total dependency
on parents, the helplessness
of infants who are born.
It starts with innocence,
the purity, the goodness, the light
in each being.
There's a universality to this where all parents
can't be there all the time,
even if we try our best, even if
we come from the best families with the
best intentioned
parents,
that negative love will be present in our
life whether we try or not.
That's correct. But this is not an indictment
of parents.
It is more about the poignancy
of the human condition.
What it is to develop as a human
being,
needing to fit into the family, to
connect,
to
be loved,
and
who we are.
Yeah. There's something
very normalizing
about being human and about acquiring
patterns
that we all have. Like, whether we try
or like it or not or,
read books or heal our childhood,
we will take on patterns
just because it's part of being human. There's
something freeing about that.
Yeah. And one of the interesting parts is
that even something that a parent does that
maybe have a really positive intention
and comes from a place of caring
can have a negative impact on the child.
Parent that is too concerned
hovers,
does things for the child. Now in one
sense, this is lovely. But in the other,
the infant, the child learns
that they don't know how to do it
for themselves. They expect others to do it
for them, and this can show up later
in life, especially in intimate relationships.
So the human infant is a really open
system that's learning all the time,
and some of the things that we learn
limit us
as we grow older.
Yeah. So
because there is that
discrepancy
between what we need
and what can be given to us in
that
gap, we take on these protective
patterns.
And you were just earlier talking about the
false self.
Let's go there a little bit.
So now we're moving into the strategy,
the coping mechanism,
the patterns we take on
given
the fact that we can't get our needs
met, and we have
a kind of abandonment
of self.
What is this false self people talk about,
the gold rings on the negative love map
that we display in the classroom every time?
Well, before I go into that, I'll be
a little personal. It's the idea that, like,
when I did the Hoffman process as a
student,
my attitude coming in was, well, this is
who I am. This is the way I've
always been. I was delighted to find out
that that's not how I always have to
be.
If there's much more available to me when
I break the
automatic
compulsivity
of the patterns, the hold they have on
me, the way they
just get triggered in certain situations
and take me over
energetically
and behaviorally.
When I was able to break the power
of the patterns, it opened up space for
new possibilities
that I did not and could not have
imagined
before doing the Hoffman process.
So that's where we say, you know, when
you're serious about change, that's the change.
And it's not changing into somebody different. It's
actually
reclaiming
all that I can be and my potential
rather than being stuck on this, like, one
lane road for the rest of my life
where something happens in life and I react
to it in the same old way.
I imagine that's a bit unsettling
for students when they come to the process
to
consider that the way they've been
is actually not their authentic self, that it's
a bunch of
roles and characters and
a kind of false self that they've played
in their lives up until now? Well, they
come into the process mainly because something's not
working, and there's some sense that things can
be different.
So I would say that, you know, maybe
there's a not quite believing the first day
that there can be such a profound shift
in seven days.
We'll put the negative love map
in the show notes so people can get
a sense of it. But you're talking about
the power of the cycle of transformation,
aren't you, really, when it comes to
the fact that we can change this setup
that is the negative love syndrome?
Right. Our methodology
in the process has been tested over, what,
fifty nine years now,
and we keep improving it with the latest
research on human behavior.
So, yeah, the cycle of transformation is very
powerful. But, again, let's get back to negative
love and the negative love map.
On that, that initial sense
remember, this is all driven by the initial
sense
that there's something wrong with me,
and this is the most hidden part of
most people's lives.
We can label it as shame later in
life.
But, initially,
it's
there's something wrong with me. I'm not enough.
I'm not good enough.
I expect to be abandoned or rejected.
It's amazing to me how many people come
into the process
seemingly successful
who are
struggling
with those feelings
every day of their life, if not many
moments during the day
of I'm not enough. I'm not good enough.
There's something wrong with me fundamentally.
You know, Andy, when you just said that,
what came to me was the arrows
and the role the arrows play
in the negative love map.
Can you talk about those a little bit?
Well, that initial sense of there's something wrong
with me, that's, like, unbearable.
So that's where we start moving out where
the arrows take us out into
the attitudes, beliefs, behaviors that we see around
us and our parents,
the roles we take on in our family,
the attitudes we have.
You know, those are all
a
accumulation
of patterns,
And we call them negative patterns because they're
automatic
compulsive,
and they're really not a choice
when we're in our patterns, when we're acting
out our false self
of who we had to be in our
childhoods
to fit into our family, to belong, to
try to get love. You know, I heard
a teacher say the other day, think of
this acronym,
CARL,
compulsive,
automatic,
reactive,
and learned.
And I was like, oh, that's so good.
CARL. We don't realize that because we, you
know, we go through life and somebody looks
at us
the wrong way, and we go into a
reaction automatically, we make up
stories about it. One of the things I
tell my students at the beginning of the
process is I use the anachronism
guts,
give up the stories.
We make these powerful
stories about ourselves,
about our parents, about our childhood, about other
people,
about situations.
And the stories are are based in the
automaticity
of what we learned about who we are
and how we have to be
in life.
Part of what you're saying is we're learning
things, and we're not even aware that we're
learning them. We sort of think, well, this
is the way it is. This is the
way it's always been. Well, our family is
the only reality we know.
And I remember one of the teachers
would occasionally say,
you went through an indoctrination
camp for kids
called your family.
You know, indoctrination camp has kind of a
negative connotation, but let's just say that is
again the human condition.
And it's not to make your parents wrong
or your family wrong. It's just that we
all grew up as
human beings
with other human beings who weren't perfect,
and we learn from them.
And we learn from them because
bonding
is so important. It's so critical.
Love is not some airy fairy romantic thing.
It's
an key ingredient for survival, isn't it? It
is. And I'm glad you said the word
survival because underneath all this
and one of the reasons why,
you know, to answer Bob's second question,
why is this so difficult to change,
is that when we get triggered, there is
a survival
fear
that can be very subtle.
Most people aren't aware that that's what actually
they're feeling in the deepest core of their
being.
Non rational.
How would I know
that that survival
fear is there? Okay. I'll give you an
example
in my marriage.
This is not as much lately. Thank goodness,
because I've been working on it for a
long time. But
if my wife criticizes
me,
my
initial reaction
you know, most people have fight, flight, or
freeze.
My initial reaction is to fight.
But if I slow down and look underneath
that,
it's
actually
kind of a freeze, a fear of abandonment.
Now, all she may be doing is giving
me some feedback about something that could be
useful for me, but to my little infant
brain,
oh my god. She doesn't like me. She's
criticizing me. She's gonna leave me. I'm gonna
be
all alone, abandoned, and I'm gonna die.
Wow.
That's the there there's no joke. Yeah. That's
pretty primal.
When you look at the deeper levels of
negative love,
it comes back down to survival and fear.
But our
rational
adult minds
don't like to feel that.
So that's where we especially make up stories
about what's going on.
And in this case, I can make up
a story of, oh, she's wrong. She's always
criticizing me. What's wrong with her?
That's to protect myself.
That's the protective mechanism.
You mentioned that earlier about that patterns are
a protective mechanism
against the fear of abandonment,
rejection,
and
that we won't
survive. Oftentimes,
people have the experience of
doing things that
sabotage,
that we're all familiar with self sabotage, and
knowing better
and yet still struggling, still making the same
mistake.
Part of
what Bob said is that stop looking
here at the present situation
and not being able to find answers because
you'll keep repeating it. Instead,
allow yourself
to go back into childhood
to remember
the little being
that was the origin
of where these patterns
came.
So part of what you're saying is they
work
because they kind of gave us what we
wanted. They helped us feel connected, and then
they don't work as we get older. Right?
Right.
Right. It's a brilliant
survival strategy
based on the I forget which part of
the brain it is. It's the back of
the brain. It's the early brain,
survival oriented.
But when we're in the present as an
adult and that gets triggered, we go back
into that survival brain. We're trying to solve
things
as a three year old or a five
year old.
And our adult,
let's call it our wise adult self, or
in the process we call it the spiritual
self, goes offline when we get triggered.
And the trigger can be very quickly, again,
on an early
emotional and physical level. It was a brilliant
adaptation
strategy.
And it ultimately falls short. Right? Because in
the process, you know, we have incredibly
successful people,
famous people, and wealthy people. By any measure
of success, we have those students who sign
up for the process
because there's some sense that I thought
that this
successing,
this efforting, this striving
would bring me peace, love,
happiness, contentment,
but it's an illusion, isn't it? Negative love
is a bit of an illusion.
Absolutely.
Especially when it's based in a sense of
I'm not okay the way I am. I'm
not good enough.
And some of the successful people who have
done the process,
you know, that I've worked with, what I
see is like,
okay. If I just if I'm just a
little more successful, if I just make a
little more money, if I just, you know,
achieve more,
I'll be okay.
But
it doesn't work that way
when the fundamental belief is I'm not okay.
So we that's what we address so strongly
in the process
to break up that system and recognize that
our essence, our deepest core, our essence,
we are okay, and we don't have to
try to keep proving it
to
mom, dad, or the world
by achieving more or accumulating more.
Part of what you're talking about there is
shame. Right? This feeling of not good enough,
and we go right at shame, don't we?
We address it. We name it. We talk
about it. It's a big piece of the
process. Right? It's a really important piece.
Really important.
And there's something about
benevolent witnesses,
and we know that both John Bradshaw, Healing
the Shame that Binds Us, and Brene Brown,
lots of research and writing they have done
on shame.
But in a way,
the teachers, the students,
the classmates are all benevolent witnesses,
aren't they?
Yes. And that's one of the I would
say one of the bonuses of the process
is how doing the work in a group
setting.
And a lot of people come in feeling
very much alone, and I'm
nervous about doing this work in a a
group setting. But the group setting turns out
to be incredibly supportive,
and people who come in feeling, well, nobody
could understand me. Nobody else in the world
would feel this way, realize that, wow.
I'm not alone. I'm not the only one.
I'm not uniquely broken.
So it's an amazing experience of the process
to see how people
reclaim their ability to connect with other people
and don't feel so isolated and alone in
the world.
That common humanity is important, isn't it? Extremely.
It's a beautiful term, common humanity. Part of
what the arrows represent back to those arrows.
Because I know for me, it took me
a while to be like, what is it
with these arrows? Why are they going that
way?
And once I got trained to be a
teacher, I was like, oh, I see. We're
heading in the wrong direction. We're we're moving
away
from our spirit. That's what patterns do. They
send us
away from this pain of shame
into these coping strategies, and then
they send us outside of the false self
looking externally.
And there's really two key pieces here
that represent the outermost rings. Can you talk
about them? Oh, yeah.
If I only find the right person, everything
will be great
or the right group affiliation.
Well, unfortunately,
people disappoint us, so that strategy doesn't work.
And as far as the you know, looking
for the one who will complete us,
Many of us have done that more than
once.
But then there's always
work, substances,
activities.
If I just throw myself into my work,
I'll be okay.
Or I can always count on the bottle
of Jack Daniels or whatever it is, the
substance.
Addictions take on many forms, don't they? Yes.
And, of course, we've got the nationally approved
one, which is shopping
amplified by the Internet.
But I want to go back to what
you said about it's taking us in the
wrong direction.
We're really looking for reconnection with our
authenticity, our essence,
our core,
and by moving out away, looking for something
outside of us,
we get farther and farther away from that.
So that's another thing that's beautiful about the
work of the process is that from the
first day we connect you or reconnect you
to
what we're calling your spiritual self, your essence,
your core, your authentic self,
and building
your relationship with who you are
if you're not your patterns.
And for many people, that's a revelation that
there actually is more to me than my
patterns.
Yeah. I mean,
it's a little scary
to think I am only my patterns and
wildly liberating to know that there's this whole
another authentic way of being. Right?
Yeah. I sometimes use three circles to describe
this. There's an inner circle, which is who
we really are.
Then there's another circle, which is who we're
afraid we are,
which in process terms is that shame
statement.
And because of that, there's an a bigger
circle, which is who we want the world
to think we are. So they don't know
that we're that shameful person that we think
we are.
And most people think that who they really
are is who they're afraid they are, which
is the shame and the patterns.
Andy, this is huge. Yeah. It's huge
To find out that who you are is
really
not who you're afraid you are and not
all the patterns
you've been acting out. So on some level,
who we are afraid we are
is who we're trying to hide. That's one
circle.
And then the other circle is who we
develop
in reaction
to who we're afraid we are.
But that's the false self. That's another circle.
Both those circles are not who we are.
We are instead this third circle, which is
the
authentic,
innocent,
innately good,
wise, whole being
that is this third circle.
Let's call it a little heart. A little
heart.
That's a nice visual.
Yeah.
Our essence
is that heart centered,
generous,
loving,
kind,
spirit.
So when you took the process, was there
a negative love map, or was that developed
more recently?
No. There was no negative love map.
I did just see that we've made the
negative love
syndrome,
trademark. Well, I think that's been trademarked for
a while. That's one of the intellectual properties
of the process.
This is
really the first piece we deliver in every
process. We have a welcome
session, which is just sort of orients people
to the work, each other,
the cycle of transformation. But, really, the first
foundational piece is the negative love syndrome talk.
You often do it when you teach. I
imagine Bob was pretty good given he sort
of was the origin of this from his
own essence.
Well, I don't remember
from my process if he gave the negative
love talk or if someone else gave it.
We're going back thirty six years. Thirty six
years ago, Andy. Yeah. And I'm still learning
about the nuances
and the subtleties
of negative love. Because on the face of
it, it looks pretty simple.
You learn to be who you are from
your parents. You take on their patterns
or you rebel against their patterns.
Neither of which means you're being yourself. It
means you're either being them or not them.
Now that's kinda binary,
but there's a lot of nuances and subtleties
in how that shows up,
how we might
adapt,
how a parent was
to our particular circumstances
in life. But there's still the connection.
And,
you know, I find different ways that, oh
my goodness, I didn't quite see that connection
before.
You know, I just realized something recently about
what happened when we moved when I was
eight years old.
There was no communication with me
and how that impacted me.
That just came up recently.
So
to be open to to continuing to learn
about this
and find ways in which
negative love limits my life is really a
gift,
even though it's uncomfortable sometimes.
You know, Andy, when you talk here, part
of what I hear you doing is doing
a little bit of time travel.
You're in the present, but you're also willing
to remember the past. And so many
people say, oh, is it why is it
always about childhood? I I healed my childhood,
or I don't have any issues from childhood.
But
part of what I hear from you is
a real openness,
a curiosity,
a willingness to allow the past
to inform your present, allow what happened in
the past that it still lives in your
body,
and it obviously has some
effect on what's happening today.
That's pretty cool. And the intention is to
get freer and have more choices in life
even at 77 years old.
We go back
not to be stuck there, but actually with
the intention to be even more free of
it. Good point. Well said. Well, you you
said it. I mean, we're not just navel
gazing or indulging,
but you're really doing it because you wanna
show up more alive
even at 77.
Absolutely.
How is life at 77? You've been teaching
for so many years. You're down in Mexico
with your wife.
How are things going in this aliveness journey?
I would say my life is the best
that's ever been.
Seriously? Yeah. On so many levels. I mean,
I'm not physically
as limber as I used to be, which
has been showing up at my table tennis
club. But the expansion in consciousness and the
ability
to be present,
to open my heart to my wife and
my friends
and my colleagues,
that keeps expanding
and to keep learning.
I mean, right now, Jonin and I are
doing
a course with Terry Reel from the Relational
Life Institute
on couples therapy
because we feel like, you know, we've both
been interested in couples therapy and work both
individually and together on that.
And we feel he has a way of
approaching it that really resonates with us. So
we're doing online courses with him.
I imagine that benefits both your marriage, but
also something you guys wanna bring into your
practice in working with couples. Right. Beautiful.
And table tennis, another word for ping pong.
Wait a minute. Big difference, Drew. Well, what
is the difference? Talk to me. Well, technically,
the difference is spin.
But the way we do it is, like,
there's a couple of us who are really
into improving and competing.
We table tennis players
are a lot more intense
than the ping pong players.
I did hear it's so good for your
brain, isn't it, as you age? It's supposed
to be one of the best activities
for body mind.
Andy,
for all of this negative love talk and
for getting a chance to
talk with you, you're teaching less, but
we're on the calendar for later in the
year. I'm looking forward to that. Thank you
very much. Really appreciate this.
Thank you for listening to the Hoffman podcast.
My name is Matt Brannigan. I'm the CEO
of the Hoffman Institute Foundation and a Hoffman
teacher. Our mission is to provide greater access
to the wisdom and power of love within
ourselves, in our relationships,
and in the world.
To learn more or to support our mission,
we invite you to visit hoffmaninstitute.org.