Human beings are a very relationally dependent species. Our capacity to survive and thrive is dependent on our relationships. This is a beautiful thing because it could make us masters of interdependence and symbiosis. But to the opposite, it can open the door for some serious dysfunction. As people, we have a whole lot of patterns in our relationships that are dysfunctional and detrimental. And one of the most common dysfunctional and detrimental patterns is negative loyalty. A negative loyalty pattern can take on many, many forms. But the function is the same: It is a belief and/or behavior that keeps you aligned with, in confluence with, experiencing closeness with and allied to another person (most especially our early caregivers, such as our parents); but that is detrimental to your wellbeing and best interests. I have never met a single person that doesn’t have at least one negative loyalty pattern. For this reason, let’s take a deep dive into negative loyalty patterns. To do this, we are going to meet three people.
Peter grew up in a household with two parents who both used the cut down for control pattern with Peter. With this pattern, a parent cuts their child down to size (which means to humble them by deflating their sense of self-worth, potential, power, value or importance) so as to keep their self-esteem low enough that the child will continue seeking to earn the experience of being valued, approved of, validated and their greatness being seen, by the parent. The parent lays out what it will take to gain those things, which is doing what they want the child to do for the sake of their own wants and needs. They will tell the child and tell themselves that the child doing those things, is for their own good. When really, it is their way of keeping the child on the hook and getting the child to do what suits them. If you want to learn more about this pattern, you can watch my video that is titled: The Cut Down For Control Parenting Pattern. Because of this tactic that Peter’s parents used, Peter felt bad about himself. He felt as if he was never good enough. But the reality is that thinking highly of himself and having confidence and listening to his own inner compass would have been a huge problem for his parents. It would have guaranteed that he would experience conflict, be disapproved of and pushed away by the very people upon whom his life depended. In order to stay aligned with his parents, have a chance at approval, be close to them and avoid being at odds with them, he had to align with the idea that he wasn’t good enough, had little value, couldn’t trust himself and needed to defer to them to know what to do.
As an adult, Peter maintains this view of himself. He holds tight to the identification with parts of himself that are convinced they “can’t” and as a result, he doesn’t really apply himself to doing even simple things that he could easily do. As a result, it is guaranteed he will fail and then, like a self-fulfilling loop, his low self-esteem is justified. Anytime someone tries to improve his self-esteem, he fights them, as if to prove how bad he is. People around Peter are starting to feel like he wants his self-esteem to be deflated. They are not wrong. Peter is maintaining this view of himself and all the sabotaging behaviors that come with it, so as to keep proving to himself that he is not that great. The reason for this is that Peter is maintaining a negative loyalty pattern with his parents. It has been many years since he even lived in the same country as them. And yet, he is still doing everything to stay aligned with his parents. By maintaining this negative self-image and also the behaviors that reinforce it, he is able to stay close to them. He is keeping himself safe, because he learned that to think differently than this about himself was to invite painful experiences from the people around him. And, he is keeping himself away from the painful reality that he was mistreated by his parents so they could satisfy their own best interests. He is staying allied to his parents by thinking low of himself and keeping himself low.
Raquel, who is now 27, has been doing competitive fencing since she was eleven years old. Raquel has been seriously enmeshed with her mother for her whole life. But she doesn’t know that her relationship with her mother is unhealthy. Raquel would tell you that her mother is her very best friend; the only person who is really there for her. The reality is that Raquel’s mother completely controls her existence. She has made Raquel totally dependent on her in every way, including financially. Sure, they have this very “special” relationship. That is the payoff for enmeshment after all. But Raquel’s mother triangulates her against any other person who comes into her life, isolating her in very cunning ways. She plays the victim to Raquel, so as to ensure that guilt will make her cater to her needs, even going so far as to cry about needing Raquel to do things with her all the time, rather than anyone else, because her focus on Raquel and her sports growing up is what made her loose her husband (Raquel’s father). She decides everything for Raquel, including her preferences, to the point where Raquel is unsure who she really is. Her mother hired a new coach because the last three were not getting Raquel any results. This coach, like the last three have identified that a key problem in Raquel’s game is that when she has the opportunity to go in for the kill shot, she doesn’t take it. Also, if she sees that the opponent is not ok emotionally, she throws the match; despite being far better. This coach has identified that the big cause of this, is that Raquel’s mother is very invested in her being a good girl. Especially being nice and sweet. Raquel wants to be able to be aggressive in her matches. In fact, her coach can tell this is her true nature. But she will not let herself go there. Especially when her mother is watching, which is almost all the time. And as a result, she is unable to truly become a top name in the sport. Raquel will not go there because being aggressive and not nice and sweet means being out of confluence with her mother. This is so threatening for Raquel that she falls apart whenever her coach tries to work on her being more aggressive. She especially develops random injuries that prevent her from play any time she is more aggressive. Raquel keeps herself nice and sweet and meek to be in a state of allegiance with her mother. And she defends her mother, keeping herself stuck in an unhealthy dynamic, rather than taking a real look at any dysfunction that may be present in the relationship. Her mother fired the new coach by the way. Raquel will never actually succeed at fencing at a higher level because of this negative loyalty pattern.
Jabari comes from the ghetto. A neighborhood with a serious crime rate, high levels of unemployment, terrible schools, limited access to resources and where everyone lives in poverty. His family, just like every other family he knew, was all too aware that their terrible life experience owed a lot of itself to the discriminatory practices of the Jim Crowe era. While they suffered from all that poverty entailed, poverty was also something that united them. They saw the rich white man as the enemy and as the oppressor. Jabari really hated being poor. He wanted a bigger life. But he hid anything he did to try to become better and more from his family. Jabari had a real aptitude for math, so much so that a teacher took a real interest in him and in his chance to get into a prestigious engineering school. Jabari would be the first person in his family to ever go to college. Under the arm of this teacher, in order to align with better opportunities, Jabari started dressing differently. When he turned 18, he started attending toastmasters club and improving the way he spoke. And when he applied to the engineering school with several letters of recommendation, he got accepted. The problem is, all of this made Jabari feel really, really uncomfortable. Almost like he didn’t belong with these upper-class people, who had lived a totally different life than he had. People who liked different food and different activities and different music. Jabari came under fire from his entire family and all of his friends, especially his best friend. A constant barrage of teasing, mocking and “who do you think you are?” Digs about him thinking he is better than everyone else. And lectures about how he is acting like the oppressor. His older brother even took to responding to any request that Jabari made to anyone with “yes’m master”. The ostracization and sense of non-belonging was all too much to bear for Jabari emotionally. He passed the deadline for responding to his college acceptance letter. When he was confronted by his teacher about why he was throwing his life away, he angrily defended “That isn’t me. That’s just who you want me to be!” He started dressing like he used to dress again. He started hanging out with his friends in dangerous parts of town. He took a minimum wage job working at an airport with his best friend. Jabari sabotaged his entire future, his potential and his deep desires to stay allied with ‘his people’. To stay aligned with and in coherence with his family and friends and culture, whose identity was firmly rooted in something they all professed to hate… being poor.
These are just three examples of negative loyalty patterns. As I said in the beginning, loyalty patterns can take on any form. There are ancestral loyalty patterns. Many physical ailments are loyalty patterns. You even see this in dogs (another socially dependent species) when they develop ailments that mirror their owner’s ailments. What keeps a scapegoat a scapegoat well into their adult years, is in fact negative loyalty. What unites all of these forms that negative loyalty can take is that at their root, these are things that do not benefit a person, but that keep a person in a state of allegiance to and confluence with someone that matters a great deal to them. Most especially, a parent.
Something that is important to know, is that a negative loyalty pattern transcends childhood. And it transcends death. A person often maintains a negative loyalty pattern to someone else far after that person has already died.
To Identify negative loyalty patterns, it is smart that when you identify any detrimental pattern whatsoever within yourself, you ask: If this belief or behavior were keeping me aligned with, in agreement with, close to, safe with, out of conflict with, or loyal to someone… who would it be keeping me aligned to, close to, safe with, loyal to or out of conflict with? And then: How would this belief or behavior work to keep me aligned with, in agreement with, close to, safe with, out of conflict with, or loyal to this person? For example, if you have a pattern of letting go of your needs and wants in a relationship, you may realize that this keeps you feeling close to and out of conflict with your partner. You may then realize that letting go of your wants and needs enables you to conform to your partner and make them want to stay with you because your life will revolve around their wants and needs. And that this prevents you from ever risking getting into a conflict and ever risking being rejected. So, ultimately it is a way of preventing the loss of the relationship. You may also realize that you learned to do this initially with your mother because there were big consequences for having wants and needs in that relationship. So, not only are you trying to maintain your alignment with your partner, you are also maintaining your alignment with your mother with this behavior.
Another approach you can take is to take the detrimental pattern and imagine changing it for the better and ask yourself: Who would have a problem with me now? What would happen and why? For example, if you have a pattern of self-criticism, imagine praising yourself. You may then realize that the person who would have an issue with this, is your father. That doing so would immediately invite his beratement. You may then realize that he wanted to maintain power over you in order to feel in control and on top in his relationship with you. And that he could not do that if he felt you were “too big for your britches”.
Negative loyalty patterns very often fit into the category of self-sabotage behaviors. Only there is no such thing as true self-sabotage because all self-sabotage behaviors (no matter how extreme they are, including negative loyalty patterns) ultimately serve a self-preserving/self-protecting function. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: There Is No Such Thing As Self Sabotage.
It is only by looking consciously and directly at what we are doing that we are in the position to make a choice as to whether to continue with our current way of demonstrating our loyalty to someone. In other words, when we look directly at the fact that we are maintaining a detrimental belief or continuing a detrimental behavior so that we can stay in allegiance and confluence with a specific person (or group of people). And when we see that doing so keeps us from seeing more of the reality of them and more of the reality of our relationship with them. We can then make a truly conscious choice about whether to choose to maintain this way of being loyal to them, no matter the consequences of doing so. Or whether, we are going to choose to adopt a new belief and new behavior, despite the consequences we may face by doing so. With this in mind, it may help you to watch my video titled: Why You Should Consciously Choose Consequences.
It is tempting to tell ourselves the story that we are maintaining a negative loyalty pattern out of love or because someone loves us. But it is not love to want someone to do something detrimental to themselves so we can feel loved. Nor is it love to maintain our own, as well as another person’s dysfunction, so as to prove our loyalty to them. For this reason, with any negative loyalty pattern, you can also ask yourself: How is this not actually serving them and their highest and best interests? Negative loyalty patterns prevent our progress as individuals. They prevent our progress as a society and they prevent our progress as a species. So, be part of the change today by identifying your negative loyalty patterns. And choose another way to show your loyalty to those who you love and to those who love you, and/or that you wished loved you.
