The Process: Therapy, Education, and Ritual

The Hoffman Process
by Tim Laurence

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As a method of change, the techniques you are going to be using work in a variety of ways. They provide a bridge that few others have ever been able to build or even imagined building. It's a bridge that connects the therapeutic benefits of "self-inquiry" to the world of "education" and to the methods and practices of "ritual."

As personal growth, the Process helps to identify and resolve issues of the past that affect our present lives, whether they involve relationships, work, or career, or our roles as parents or as spiritual beings. It is not, however, concerned with making a diagnosis and listing personality disorders. Bob used to say, "These are your patterns of behavior," but quickly would add, "but they are only patterns — you yourself are much more." Instead, the Process aims to build up a healthy sense of self that does not need to rely on others, especially parental and authority figures, but that can stand independent and willing to take responsibility for its own actions. A healthy ego is one that is centered in itself first and has worked on its own development through the various stages, from the healthy "no" of a two-year-old, through the rebellion of a teenager, to leaving home both literally and metaphorically when we come of age.

As education, the Process teaches that we can be led out (the Latin e-ducare means exactly that) of old patterns of behavior and can be taught — or, more importantly, teach ourselves — new ways of being. It is a very emotional education, meaning that we feel our way through it, and by that method it lodges deeper within our own learning system. Without it, we would always have to have someone either doing the fishing for us or being paid to teach us how to fish. This way we can go out and find food for our own nourishment.

As ritual, the Process makes real this passage into the world of self responsibility. You may be already familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell, who spent his entire life inquiring into the universal rituals of the Hero's Journey. The stages he identified were:

• Separation — we leave our everyday world
• Initiation — we go through a series of tests
• Return — we take our learnings back into everyday life

So it is with the Hoffman Process. Doing this work, you are taking time out of your regular life to undergo a set of tasks and challenges, a kind of inner search for the dragon. You confront this dragon, slay it (or sit down and have a cup of tea with it, learning the gift it can offer us), and then go back into your regular life again to apply what you have learned. You are forever "marked" by this ritual.

The Human Condition: Four Aspects Make Us Whole

The three pillars of personal growth, education, and ritual build firm foundations upon which we can turn from a human doing into a human being. The Quadrinity Model plays a key role. Bob Hoffman explained that we are composed of four parts, which he labeled the Quadrinity. These four parts are:

• our Emotions or feelings
• our Intellect or thoughts
• our Spirit or essence
• our Physical realm or body

All four parts will be involved as you work through this book.

Our emotional self develops from birth onward. Its function is to provide us with the feelings and emotions needed in order to develop enjoyable and productive relationships with others as well as ourselves. We need relationships to belong, to love and to be loved. When we experience any form of emotional deprivation as children, we acquire feelings of rejection, humiliation, abandonment, and betrayal, which we recreate in our subsequent relationships. Our emotional well-being and growth can be stunted, and we do not mature emotionally. And childish patterns can remain. We say "no" without thinking or automatically reply "I can't do that" when facing a new challenge. We are petrified of standing up and speaking in public. "What if I get criticized?" says the emotional self childishly.

The intellectual self develops from around six years onward. Its function is to provide us with clear thought and reason in order to make decisions in a healthy and rational way. It is required for the development of reason and to ensure survival as we continue to grow and mature. We are driven forward in the world by our need to know. When this is not encouraged or is overstressed in childhood, we develop feelings of being stupid, inadequate, confused, or even mentally unbalanced.

A positive intellectual aspect provides us with good judgment and discernment. A negative aspect internalizes the voice of the critical parent by saying, "Don't do that" and "Don't be so stupid." It has overdeveloped its critical faculty and turned it in on itself or is always looking for faults in others. It's a side of us that is defensive, self-righteous, and hates to be wrong. Oh, and it loves to have the last word!

As emotional adults we would like to be able to respond and articulate our own feelings, but, sadly, many of us stay repressed or depressed. The worst part of it is that we don't even keep the childlike part of ourselves alive — the happy, enthusiastic, spontaneous person inside. What we have in charge most of the time is a highly rational side, what Hoffman calls the "Adult Intellect." We believe that we have to look together, sound intelligent, be efficient and productive, and generally miss out on the fun. Indeed, fun and play are scorned by our adult intellect as being beneath consideration. This has disastrous consequences on our internal peace. At other times, it's the emotional self or "child" inside that is in charge, hijacking our responses to a situation. We come across as being dramatic and highly anxious, or we want to throw it all in.

A large emphasis of this Process is on reconciling the emotional (child or old brain) and intellectual (adult or new brain) aspects of your personality. Through this you can then integrate the four parts of your being. To enable this to happen, you first have the opportunity to explore in depth the relationship with your caregivers when you were children and to understand the effect that these relationships have had upon your subsequent emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual development.

Copyright © 2004 by Tim Laurence. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Tim Laurence is the founder of the Hoffman Institute UK and director of Hoffman International, who organizes the Hoffman Process in 14 countries. He spent much of his adult life in the United States, where he studied with Bob Hoffman. He is now married and has two sons.