“Adult Children are intensely loyal, even in the face of clear evidence that that loyalty is misplaced.” Janet Woititz*
When we are little, we depend on our parents or caregivers for our survival. The grown ups are literally the only things standing between us and extinction. We love them with every fibre of our being (even if we may hate them at times too) and we want to be with them. Also, we don’t have the wherewithal to be able to go off and look after ourselves.
No matter how bad a job they may be doing, we aren’t in a position to say to them, “I don’t want to be here anymore, I want to go and live next door with the Joneses.” We don’t want to leave them and, even if we did, we just aren’t able to.
So we stay.
We make excuses for disappointments and let-downs. We try to exert some control on the situation by looking after everybody else in the hope that they will look after us. We learn to avoid the pain and discomfort by distracting ourselves and keeping ourselves busy. We tell ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) “If I were better it would be better” and try to do everything in our very limited power to make things better.
We develop an intense loyalty to our parents/caregivers that gets extended in later life to other relationships (platonic and romantic), to people, places, political parties, sports teams, ideas…We remain unthinkingly loyal to many entities that may not show us the same kind of support and consideration.
This loyalty really plays itself out in love and at work. We stay in jobs that we hate because we feel we need to look after colleagues, bosses or customers. We remain bored and frustrated because we are hard-wired to be loyal to people who gave us an opportunity. We keep going back to a job that makes us feel anxious, stressed and unhappy because we think that it is our fault; if we were better then work would be better.
We stay in relationships-gone-bad because we remember how good it used to be, or imagine how good it could be. We keep associating with toxic, angry, abusive and destructive people because we are so used to making excuses for bad behaviour that we don’t think to hold people accountable for it. And again, we keep trying to make ourselves better – thinner, prettier, stronger, fitter, cleverer, richer… – in the hope that the relationship will get better.
Our misplaced sense of loyalty can really get in the way of us finding what we deserve – love that is kind and work that is a meaningful expression of our values and talents.
And that is a terrible waste.
Right now, choose to be loyal to yourself and let go of one – just one – thing that your loyalty is keeping you trapped by. It could be a piece of clothing, a diet, a political ideology, a person, a place or a thing. Let it go and release yourself in the process! (An eCoaching programme may help you to do that in a systematic and supported way.)
Be loyal to yourself – pick you!
* Janet Woititz identified 13 characteristics that are common to adult children (I have condensed them down to 11 in my book). While not all of us display every characteristic, most of us exhibit at least some of them.
Judy Klipin is a Martha Beck certified Master Life Coach based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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