The Disloyalty of Healing
Part of me gets confused when I receive care from people I love, like a stray cat, skittish and wary of offers of love and support. This part of me anticipates connection will be withdrawn, as punishment, if I don’t connect “right.” I tense and scan others repeatedly, expecting to receive disdain in response to my joy. This part urges me not trust in the warmth of connection because it might be a trap. It looks real, she warns, but it’s likely contempt waiting to attack.
I know her well, this part of me who adapted to early emotional abuse and neglect, and who tries her best to protect me with constant vigilance and anticipation. She’s so focused on survival that she’s willing to pay the cost of reduced care and connection, if only she can keep the pain from happening again.
She gets anxious when people show the same relational traits as my parents and quickly starts to perform her version of compliance to earn emotional safety and connection. I feel her in my body as an intense focus outward and speeded-up speech. There’s a clenching in my jaw as I over-explain myself and a bracing in my solar plexus as I tense, waiting for something bad to happen.
This aspect of me learned how to navigate challenging situations that were far beyond her young abilities and relational skills. She figured out how to parent herself and do what was needed to get by as well as she could. These are younger strategies learned in an earlier time. It’s unfair to turn on this part of me now and blame her for worst-case scenario planning or relational hypervigilance.
Instead of making this part of myself wrong, I have learned to turn towards her with understanding and compassion. Instead of letting her lead, I notice her activation and take care of her needs.
The Necessary Betrayal
Healing involves turning towards ourselves with care to give ourselves what our parents didn’t give us in childhood. Doing so, we let go of family trauma that tells us belonging is earned through suffering, obedience, and silence. We face the beliefs we carry, passed down through generations, that love means compliance and that asking for more is ungrateful.
Healing means betraying the values and beliefs of our families and venturing into new territories, uncertain yet determined to create our own cultures of care.
It means turning our backs on expectations of filial obedience, of feeling shame for what happened to us, of the insistence that no matter what happened, we must never talk about the family — even within the family.
Whether spoken or unspoken, these rules are hard to break. But we must reckon with them and forge our own way, if we are committed to healing.
As for me, there is the part who is distraught that healing means turning away from the people who raised me and going further than they did. She would rather stay behind and keep them company in their anger and pain, even when that means experiencing their contempt and control. To this younger part, loyalty means doing it their way, no matter the cost.
There is something admirable about this. I imagine it’s the choice many in our lineage made before us, to sacrifice our healing at the altar of belonging, not daring to go against the people we love, refusing to put ourselves and our own wellbeing first.
We might think that if we stay aligned to harmful family patterns, we can fix them with our one-way flow of care and compassion. But that compassion’s rightful place is self-directed. We can become the leading edge of healing and growth in our families, whether or not they’re able to join us there.
Upward Psychological Mobility and Complex Trauma (CPTSD) Healing
There is a leaving behind that is necessary for trauma healing. Trauma gets passed down dutifully, like a family legacy no one wanted but no one knows how to change. We feel like we're betraying the family system by choosing to heal. And often, we are.
We betray the idea that we can heal our parents through our sheer force of will, superior understanding, or self-sacrifice.
We betray the idea that any good can come from suffering and replace it with the experience that good begets good, gentleness comes from gentleness, and love — real love — is always given and never earned.
We betray the empathic reversal that burdened countless past generations of children who unquestioningly shouldered their parents' exiled shame and anger and strapped it to their little bodies, as it if was theirs to feel and struggle with.
Instead of feeling sorry for the parents who abused and neglected us, just as they were likely abused and neglected, we acknowledge that adults always have a choice. We gently take the suffering they expected us to carry to the next generation and lovingly refuse to pass it on.
This kind of healing is not for the faint of heart.
We pay for it, one way or another, whether we do the work or not. We can choose to suffer with the family burden or summon all our strength to face it, cast it off, and do our best to create a new and different kind of family, one whose legacy is defined by kindness and connection.
This kind of work changes everything, from now on.
But work like this demands we confront the loyalty and duty that wants to keep us stuck, flowing our energy backwards rather than towards ourselves and the families we choose and grow. Trauma keeps us trapped this way, revisiting the past again and again, hoping this time it will be different.
To heal from intergenerational trauma, we must gently reckon with the bargain we've made to earn belonging. This necessarily involves a betrayal of the old ways, so we can forge new kinds of love and emotional safety that we don't pay for with our lives.
There is a death, of sorts, required to detach. We need to see the ways we were denied love and safety as children. We need to reckon with how we were made to serve our parents’ needs rather than them taking care of our own. It takes skill to navigate these wounded waters without getting pulled under, by guilt or shame. But we need to put responsibility where it belongs — with the adults in the family, with our caregivers – and gently absolve our younger parts who thought they could fix or protect us.
The responsibility for processing the traumas and emotions of an older generation was never ours.
We must let go of the story that things were fine, that we made it through okay, that the way we grew up didn't really affect us.
This is terrifying to the younger parts of us who equate family belonging with survival. Stepping away from the family system towards health can feel like abandoning all we know and everyone we care about. We don't want to hurt the people who raised us, but neither can we stay stuck at our own expense, condemned to repeat the pattern with the next generation.
That's why it's helpful to think of complex trauma healing as upward psychological mobility, of being willing and able to go beyond what our parents were able to achieve. This forward progress is a good thing. It’s what our family would want for us, from a certain perspective.
On Leaving the Past Behind
When we do our own healing work, we let go of the role we were given, of the need to rescue our parents or save the family. We step out of being the hero and pay attention to how trying to rescue them has impacted us. We allow them to be responsible for themselves, no matter what.
It is not our job to save our parents.
It never was.
We acknowledge that it's not our job to help our parents with their emotions, their responsibilities, or their choices. There is often grief that we cannot protect them from the realities they've created for themselves.
Those of us with complex trauma may also grieve the protection that we didn't get, as children, because our parents were looking to us for care and support instead of caring for, supporting, and protecting us.
There is grief in recognizing that the only ones we can save are ourselves. We must learn to tolerate and stay present with the grief and our wounded, most vulnerable parts long enough for them to feel the support and holding available from our hearts. We give our younger parts unconditional love and positive regard, so they turn towards us instead of the past.
We recognize that the past is over, and we are not doing anyone a service by continuing to carry it and replicate old patterns.
We look to the present and chose to integrate, finding and healing all the lost and wounded aspects of experiences that might be held as traumatic memories, flashbacks, or emotional wounds. We let go of all the ties we have binding us to the past out of misplaced loyalty and find new ways to connect with and belong to our family of origin.
Carrying the family trauma burden is not a healthy way to create belonging.
It's far better to be a hero, not because we're trapped in the role by our caregivers, but because we healed our intergenerational trauma and made sure its legacy stops with us.
We learn to see self-care as a natural flow of energy, attention, and emotional resources that are rightfully ours to self-nurture. We learn to self-center in our needs and our reality and create a better future. Doing so, we create a legacy that rewrites our family history.
What a gift healing can be, if we’re brave enough to navigate the betrayal.
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Elie Losleben supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.