The Importance of Understanding Loyalty Contracts
Loyalty Contracts can be conceptualized as an internalized system of beliefs, feelings, reactions, and expectations that were created and deeply rooted in early parent-child interactions as well as the experience of a person’s socio-cultural environment. Loyalty Contracts reflect the spoken or unspoken rules that one must obey to remain safe, preserve the relational connection, and develop a sense of personal value. From an early age, children internalize the beliefs and expectations imposed upon them by their parents’ rules and expectations.
When family rules, messages, and expectations are fair, loving, consistent, and applied equally to all members, children will likely grow up with
a sense of confidence in their own abilities,
a trust in others,
a general sense of optimism,
the capacity for mutuality in adult relationships.
Unhealthy loyalty contracts, on the other hand, are comprised of rules and expectations that were often unfair, harsh, abusive, depriving, or inconsistent. Unfair loyalty contracts give no allowance for the child to challenge whether the rules are unhealthy, unfair, or impossible to achieve. There is little if any room for the child to have a voice or be seen for their unique gifts, talents, needs, and temperament.
Unfair contracts may be confusing for the child; the rules and treatment may feel painful, and even frightening, but these conditions are accepted as a given because it is all that the child knows.
For example, if a parent has an over-driven standard of perfectionism, the falseness of perfectionism never gets questioned.
The child will either attempt to over-achieve to meet the parents’ standards, or s/he will feel shamed and inadequate when missing the mark. Either outcome interferes with authentic self-emergence.
Depending on the degree of trauma and/or deprivation in the family and the cultural experience at large, most children who grow up in family environments with unhealthy loyalty contracts carry a secret, internalized longing for rescue.
At the same time, the reverse is also true. There is a fear of breaking free of the old loyalty contract, based on a belief that:
the child isn’t worthy of something better,
the external environment continues to be unsafe,
no one can really be trusted.
What is noteworthy is that the child’s confusion and fear that are the result of early attachment failures become split off or go underground – However, these wishes, fears, and longings remain in the unconscious, carried forward into adulthood. Here is where we can understand how early attachment injuries will manifest through destructive relational patterns in a person’s adult relationships.
For example, if a child grew up with an abusive or alcoholic parent, the child (now an adult) will often marry an abusive or neglectful partner. The unconscious wish/belief is that the now adult person will be able to get his or her partner to change (something they could never do as a child with the parent). And if they can get their partner to change, they will finally receive the love and acceptance they longed for —a longing that had been buried deep within the psyche.
What is interesting is that this longing is often unclear to the individual, a powerful force that remains under-examined, even though it continues to manifest as a repeating pattern in adult relationships. One way this longing can be outwardly recognized is by examining the beliefs that motivate a person, beliefs that are carried forward as over-compensations placed on the self to make up for the parental deficit. For example, a person might think— “If I am good enough, strong enough, attractive enough, smart enough, I can get my partner to change so that he/she will love me. And if I do all these things, THEN my partner will see my value and love me, AND I will be rescued from the pain of my past.” The tragedy in most of these scenarios is that the partner doesn’t change, and the cycle of disappointed longing continues.
How does one break this cycle? By helping a person (client in therapy) see that over-accommodating or trying to change oneself in order to find someone who loves them isn’t where the problem lies. Rather, it is through understanding the nature of the unfairness of the demands of the early loyalty contract —recognizing the unfairness of parental demands as well as recognizing that there was a prohibition against naming the abuse or neglect is what will help a person break free. Not only does this help take the pressure off the individual, but now they can also more clearly begin to identify what constitutes healthy mutuality and fairness in a relationship. In addition, being able to grieve the loss of childhood trauma and/or missed opportunities helps the person let go of unhealthy expectations for rescue and/or the need for perfectionism. This in turn helps individuals recognize “red flags” in people who are abusive or narcissistic prior to jumping into yet another destructive relational pattern.
To learn more about loyalty contracts, and how to help, please refer to our Developmental Roadmaps, also in my third book, Embracing Therapeutic Complexity, I examine the idea of loyalty and I frame that understanding through the lens of, “Loyalty Contracts.” The definition of a loyal contract can be conceptualized as an internalized system of beliefs, feelings, reactions, and expectations that are created and deeply rooted in early parent-child interactions. They also have origins in a person’s socio-cultural, religious, or ethnic context. Loyalty contracts reflect the spoken or unspoken rules that one must obey in order to remain safe and connected to others.