Trauma and Self-Loyalty

We often think of trauma healing as an individual undertaking. Healing sessions are usually one-to-one. When we self-care, we focus on ourselves — even in a group activity. We read books, journal, and do inner work mostly on our own.

It's easy to assume healing happens in isolation, but it doesn't.

Healing is relational.

Healing starts with us, at first, but soon extends to impact all our relationships — with our partner, family, friends, colleagues, and communities.

But bringing the healing we've experienced individually into our relationships can be challenging.

Maybe we're used to self-abandoning and feeling like our needs don't matter. Or our bodies might react with a stress response at the first sign of tension — launching into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. It could be difficult to identify our authentic needs and desires, so we feel confused about what we truly want.

That’s why repairing our inner relationship with loyalty is an essential step on the trauma healing journey.

Misplaced Loyalty and Self-Betrayal

When we betray our boundaries to prioritize others, it’s often because we think this will bring us a sense of love, safety, or belonging.

(It might, but it’s not the same deep and abiding connection to self-love, inner safety, and belonging that comes from staying loyal to our own needs.)

Those of us with unresolved trauma tend to orient outwards to get safety, rather than learning how to generate inner safety.

It might feel safer to betray our boundaries and needs, in favor of what others want, but doing so does not create real safety.

It’s normal for those of us with trauma to have relational patterns of self-betrayal and misplaced loyalty.

Those of us with developmental trauma might feel misplaced loyalty to childhood caregivers who were (often unknowingly) the source of trauma. We might feel it’s not safe to be angry with them because we see our anger as “disloyal”. We don’t want to betray people we love, so we betray our own feelings instead. We fear that our anger, which is a natural part of the healing process, might harm them or our relationship with them. We bypass it or refuse to go there, out of misplaced loyalty.

If we have sexual trauma from previous intimate partners, we might feel misplaced loyalty to those former partners, because we don't want to recognize the impact of the abuse on our boundaries and trust.

Those of us with complex PTSD (or CPTSD) from repeated traumatic events, might feel misplaced loyalty to whoever brought us comfort, even if the relationship was not good for us. We tell ourselves not to be ungrateful, because something was better than nothing.

All trauma involves betrayal. We heal that betrayal by becoming loyal to ourselves again. We learn how to stay with ourselves without the betrayal of self-abandonment.

Realigning our misplaced loyalty in this way puts us back where we belong — in the center of our own lives.

Self-Loyalty

Self-loyalty means that no matter what happens in the world, we refuse to self-betray, we refuse to abandon ourselves on the inside. We refuse to treat ourselves poorly or neglect our needs like others did to us.

Self-loyalty means staying present and loving with ourselves, whatever life brings. It's a practice and a commitment to a different way of being.

Rather than looking to others for safety and approval, we give it to ourselves first.

Prioritizing ourselves doesn't mean we never put others first. Doing so is often admirable and necessary, especially within families. But self-loyalty does mean we don't devalue ourselves or deprioritize our experience.

Repairing our relationship with self-loyalty is an important part of trauma healing. Without it, we can't create the inner safety we need for healthy, thriving relationships.

Until we do this work, we often feel lost and unhappy in relationships without knowing why.

We put other people's needs before our own, in a futile attempt to create safety.

Even if we’ve done trauma healing work, we may remain hypervigilant because we still locate safety outside ourselves. Then we get confused because we don't understand why the healing work we’ve done isn't transferring to our relationships.

When we repair our self-loyalty, we set the foundation for fulfilling relationships in all aspects of life. We naturally feel our boundaries and notice the moment they are crossed, instead of overthinking what happened for hours — or days — after.

We can easily identify our needs and desires and communicate them effectively.

And we feel more centered and present in the daily conflicts that are a normal part of healthy relationships.

No matter how far away this kind of relationship with ourselves might seem, every ounce of effort will bring us closer.

Wherever we are on our journeys, there is always opportunity to deepen the relationship to our own self-loyalty.

How to Repair Self-Loyalty

We can always, at any time, return to a place of alignment within ourselves.

Whatever stressful things happen in the external world, we can decide to stay present with ourselves and treat ourselves with love.

For those of us with trauma, each opportunity is a chance to correct the damage that happened when we didn’t get what we needed in the past.

As we return to staying centered in our experiences, and to cultivating self-love, we create a new way of being with ourselves.

Rather than looking to others for safety and approval, we give it to ourselves first.

We do this until it becomes second nature for us to stay centered and in our power. We choose ourselves, again and again, until we find our way home.

5 Steps to Repair Self-Loyalty

1. Make a commitment to yourself to say as present and loving with yourself as possible.

How you treat yourself is a choice. Living with unresolved trauma — especially over years or decades — can create unhealthy relationship dynamics not just with others, but within yourself. The first step to changing this is to commit to a different way, even and especially when it gets hard.

2. Notice when you're no longer present and loving with yourself. Gently bring yourself back to your commitment.

Inevitably, there will be experiences that rock the boat and throw you off balance, making it hard to find stable ground. Life is just like that. What you do in those moments determines the direction of your healing.  Will you treat yourself with contempt and self-abandon? Will you repeat the unkind patterns that you learned from others? Or will you choose to stay present with yourself and your experience of life, learning to hold your center?

3. Grow your ability to be present with yourself.

Presence is a practice. Daily habits like mindfulness meditation build your ability to maintain conscious awareness no matter what the external world brings. There is no substitute for daily practice. I'll be offering my '3 Minute Mindfulness' class again publicly — for free — later this month. Stay tuned. (And sign up for updates if you haven't yet.)

4. Grow your ability to respond to yourself with love.

Self-love is a measure of your healing and growth. But it can feel forced to tell someone to love themselves more, when there are often very good reasons why that is difficult. It can feel hollow and inauthentic, and create an even deeper feeling of wrongness and despair. That's why I like to focus on your willingness to love yourself, more and more. You might not always get there. You just need to be open enough to try. (And doing this work at all is an act of self-love.)

5. Notice and ask for what you need from yourself and others.

When you learn to stay with your experience, instead of abandoning yourself when things get rough, you experience greater clarity about what you need. From there, you are ready to share that clarity with others. Speaking up about your needs can feel scary and uncertain. When you do speak up, it’s easy to get fixated on trying to control the outcome. It helps to remember that the outcome isn't up to you — but sharing is.

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Putting these steps into practice will build a foundation of loyalty that reorients our experience of life. We come back into ourselves, and to being at the center of our own lives.

When we’re present and loving with ourselves, we cultivate greater aliveness and joy. We enjoy a deeper self-trust. And this goes on to create ever more satisfying relationships in our lives.

The road might be bumpy, but it’s worth it.

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