Loyalty Factor in PTSD

I have written much about loyalty due to my decades of helping the abused and traumatized population. My first publication was The Forbidden Betrayal: Loyalty within Sexual Trauma in Treatment Centers Magazine, February 1993. Since then, I have written many articles on the subject to inform survivors of the power and influence the issue of loyalty has in relationships, whether abusive or healthy.

I was asked by one of my clients that I was coaching the following questions. She asked: "Dr. Bill, I have to ask you about your concept of loyalty. Why is loyalty the hardest issue to overcome in recovery from abuse or trauma? How does loyalty to an abuser form? What powers loyalty? " She paused for a couple seconds, not waiting for my response, and then kept talking, "I think shame is far more powerful than loyalty because as a survivor, I can't say the word "shame" without having a significant amount of highly charged emotions bubble up in my throat. Maybe understanding my barrier to my recovery is either loyalty or shame might, "help me get further along into and be successful in my recovery."

Definition of Loyalty

In general use, loyalty is defined as devotion and faithfulness to a person, place, country group, philosophy, or cause or idea. 

To a person who has experienced and been changed by traumatized or abused by another person, the perpetrator actively works on getting the victim to pledge his or her devotion and faithfulness to keep the secret and the perpetrator. Once the victim's loyalty is fixed to the perpetrator, the victim will always be devoted and faithful no matter what until it changes.

The issue of loyalty is an essential concept to understand if you're seeking to heal. Understanding who you are loyal to needs to be addressed, and then devotion and faithfulness to be returned fully to self. Loyalty to self is the number one step to healing.

Development of Loyalty

Loyalty is an accrued belief forced upon the victim. He or she is made by the perpetrator to accept that the secret must be kept to ensure the "secret of the abuse will be kept at all costs." 

In American society, in fact, in many other societies, loyalty is a highly valued core belief, socially and religiously. 

So perpetrators etched loyalty into a victim's mind through repetitive verbalizing to the protection of themselves from possible discovery. The victim is taught loyalty to the perpetrator so that the victim will never betray the abuser or disclose to anyone what happened or who did it. The victim is forced by the perpetrator, over and over again to promise and declare his or her loyalty out loud to "not betray the secret and declare out loud to keep the secret." 

Emotions like love, fear, and terror are all mixed with the declaration decided by the abuser. The specific emotion used to set the devotion becomes a trigger to provoke an emotional response from the victim to follow through on the promise. Intense specific embedding of emotion with the promise allows the promise to bypass the victim's mental filters, become a core belief, and embed the concept of loyalty (devotion and faithfulness) deep within the victim's subconscious. 

Loyalty is also stored on another level through the formation of an attachment or bond to the abuser. This is done on purpose by the perpetrator. Suggested statements like "I will always be around watching you," "If you ever tell, I will return and hurt you (or family)," "We are always together," and "No one will believe you over me." 

Once the emotional bond is formed between the victim and the perpetrator, loyalty becomes the most powerful and influential belief the victim carries for the rest of his or her life. Once embedded, the victim would hurt himself or herself, ruin his or her own life, or die rather than betray the perpetrator.

The belief of loyalty or loyalty bond is found in, taught, and highly valued in healthy families and societies. The concept of being loyal can be transformed into the most destructive belief by a perpetrator and end up being a massive barrier to healing in a post-abuse or trauma treatment effort. Embedded loyalty can destroy any chance of recovery. 

The loyalty belief or bond to his or her abuser makes it so that the now survivor cannot betray his or her perpetrator even at the threat of death or loss of possible healing. 

Another view is that the perpetrator puts fault upon the victim. At that point, the victim is made accountable for causing the perpetrator to do the abusive act. So the abuser confuses the victim by stating, " I will keep your secret (loyalty to the victim) for causing it, and you keep our secret." That locks the victim into being loyal to the perpetrator and keeps his or her secret causing the act.

Case Study

Throughout my 38 years of work in the helping profession as the owner-founder and executive clinical director of a specialized inpatient psychiatric PTSD and Dissociative program, I witnessed significant progress in the clients from admission to discharge. Clients were able to stabilize in 14 to 20 days from childhood sexual abuse and all types of trauma (physical, emotional, verbal, mental, spiritual, confinement, death of a loved one, divorce, rape, robbery, neglect, abandonment, natural and/or man-made catastrophes) as a result of participating in the trauma treatment program.

I remember a client who was admitted into the program in total despair with symptoms of complex PTSD and major depression. She was experiencing severe flashbacks, panic attacks, eating disorders, drug abuse, self-harm, acts of self-sabotage, and thought addiction. She had been in many inpatient and outpatient treatment programs for 16 years and was still having episodic relapse bouts causing multiple hospitalizations a year. Yet, with successful completion and participation in the program, she left stabilized in just 14 days, filled with hope. 

After discharge, she returned to her family, home, and her job. She worked on her recovery process with extreme drive, willingness, and commitment. Even though her accomplishments were significant, all of a sudden, with no warning signs at all, she stopped practicing her recovery and began to engage in self-defeating and self-sabotaging behaviors once again as well as in her thought addiction. She returned to my program just six months later in much chaos, crisis, pain, and presenting the same symptoms as before. Her primary need during this hospitalization was to recant to the program staff all of what she had truthfully verbalized about her abuse and abusers and strongly reaffirm her loyalty to her abusers stating her abusers were good and had not hurt her. She worked hard and by the end of her second time in the program admitting while at home, her loyalty belief had been triggered, and she realized that she was more loyalty issues strongly connected to her abuser and not at all with being herself. 

Loyalty belief/bond is a powerful recovery issue that can cause a survivor to either align again with his or her abuser and relapse from a recovery path or set a stronger course of healing and align loyalty back to self. 

Thoughts

Back to the original question asked at the beginning of the blog about a bond of loyalty vs. shame. The statement mentioned by the client was, "I think shame is more powerful than loyalty." I wrote to her, "you are partly right." 

My explanation started with the question - what is shame? Shame, I believe, is not a feeling. Shame is a concept that is taught or told by a person that the person broke a belief, law, rule (man's or God's), principle, standard, or relationship. Loyalty is the most robust emotional attachment that two or more people can have in common, as well as an ethic, moral or religious tenet. So whether a child is taught within a healthy environment or forced to learn through pain, terror, or coercion that being and keeping loyalty to family, country, group or authority is what makes them a "good person." Loyalty is the highest form of allegiance, devotion, faithfulness, or love, which a person can give to another. Breaking that standard or rule would bring on strong inner guilt and the need to fix what they broke. 

As I have learned more and expanded on my theories of loyalty, I discovered that the origin of "loyalty" is that it is an embedded mind code. The mind code influences the formation of an extremely highly valued core belief. 

Perpetrators use shame as a tool in an effort to "control" another person..keep them in line..a way to remind a person that indiscretion or betrayal is bad..a method to make a person "tow an emotional line".. or not betray an attachment to the person, or family (group, religion or "occult"). 

This "reminding process" or "shaming process" is used in the treatment of addictions. The phrase "don't you feel bad you relapsed" is used after a person in recovery has broken his or her promise to be clean and sober one day at a time. Shame is put upon the victim to make a person break a belief or a promise. By definition, shame is an accusation made toward a person to make him or her believe they had broken a belief, rule, standard, loyalty, ethics, morals, laws, tenet, or promise that they had been taught or told to follow. It comes across as "Don't you feel ashamed that you broke your promise?” “Don't you feel ashamed that you didn't follow this rule?” “Don’t you feel ashamed that you betrayed and told this secret?" So based on what I have learned, shame is a subcode of loyalty.

Take Away

So for anyone, loyalty and shame are by far more powerful influences on how you behave, think, feel, and react to life situations. In the recovery journey from abuse or trauma, your loyalty issues should always be investigated and dealt with completely. To heal the wounds of one's soul from abuse or trauma, loyalty should be removed from the perpetrator and always be re-affixed strongly upon yourself first.

          Coach Bill

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