People have some strange ideas about what constitutes loyalty. What they view as loyalty may actually be an unhealthy behavior, like codependency, which feels intimate but isn’t good.
The healthiest relationships aren’t ones in which we enable people because of our “loyalty.” We’re all human. We all make mistakes. The only way we can grow and learn from those mistakes is if we have someone to hold us responsible when we screw up.
And then, of course, there are some loyal behaviors that are healthy, but only in limited amounts. It can get complicated.
Still, if you see or practice these 6 behaviors, you may be doing more harm than good in your relationships(s).
1. Extreme overprotectiveness.
There’s nothing wrong with being a little protective of someone you care about. It’s only natural to want to keep an eye on them so they can avoid whatever pain and suffering might be ahead of them. You may see things that they don’t, and want to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do because you’re just trying to protect them.
But in extremes, this is incredibly invasive and demonstrates a lack of trust more than care. It demonstrates insecurity. Consider dating, and the person who wants you to turn on device tracking, or check in every couple of hours when they are out doing something with their friends. They’ll say that it’s so they can keep an eye on you, but the reality is that it’s their own insecurity and anxiety speaking.
They’re trying to exert control over a situation that they have no control over. In a healthy relationship, it’s reasonable to have some expectations, like when will you be home? So that way, I know whether or not I need to come looking for you. But more than that could be a toxic behavior under the guise of loyalty and love.
2. Excessive self-sacrifice.
Martyrdom is not a healthy choice in relationships. You cannot give up vital pieces of yourself to make a friendship or relationship work. You can’t constantly inconvenience yourself, bleed yourself dry, and be okay with it in the long term. That’s not how people work, and that’s not how healthy relationships work. A healthy relationship of any kind is give and take – not just give, not just take.
Still, some people view the act of total self-sacrifice as a good thing. To say that I love and care about you so much that I’m willing to destroy myself, derail my own hopes and dreams, all for what? For you to be happy, and to try to soothe my own insecurity that I’m not good enough to be liked based on just who I am as a person.
Let me tell you why this behavior falls immediately flat. If someone genuinely cares about you, they won’t want you to set yourself on fire to keep you warm. They would rather be cold alongside you, because soothing their discomfort isn’t worth your destruction. In fact, I’d be a little offended that someone I cared about would think that I’d want them to suffer that way.
3. Toxic positivity.
There’s a difference between being positive and toxic positivity. Toxic positivity ignores the real, negative emotions that we sometimes experience when navigating the difficulties of life. In an authentic relationship, intimacy is built when we can sit beside someone in their pain. So many people feel like they need to fix in order to be a good, loyal friend or partner, but sometimes there is no fix. The only thing you can do is be present.
This is a thing called “holding space“. To sit with someone in their pain, nonjudgmental, not trying to diminish the pain or fix the problem. For example, let’s say your friend is going through a bad breakup. There are a lot of superficial niceties that you can speak about it. “Well, they just weren’t right for you.” “You’re on to bigger and better things.” “You need to just get back out and start dating again.”
But none of these common “supportive” responses respects the fact that the person is just hurt, and they need some space to feel their hurt so they can process it. All this is doing, particularly encouraging someone to start dating again without processing the pain, is burying it so it can fester and come back later, much worse.
4. Enabling unhealthy behavior.
Before I knew better, I was more of an enabler than a supportive friend. I was under the mistaken impression that being supportive meant to be supportive all the time, even when someone I cared about was making a big mistake. I bought into the idea that people needed to be free to make their own mistakes, and if I loved and supported them, I would support their decisions regardless of what they were.
Looking back, I can see how naive that belief is, though I couldn’t at the time. I had an ex who had a bad time with alcohol and her past trauma – a real bad time. And I stood beside her for about a solid year of her making excuses about how she couldn’t try, never felt like any of the multiple therapists she saw could help her, and because of that, she just kept spiraling until one day she punched me in the face. And not too long after, she would crash her car because she took a painkiller while half-drunk. She survived and wasn’t hurt too bad, but she had plenty of legal troubles following.
No, I didn’t make the choices that she made. I couldn’t control her, or anyone else. But what I could have done was call her out on her BS more often, even if it meant our time in life together ended. Maybe that’s what she needed to see the truth? I don’t know. Even if I had been aware, I don’t know if I would have been able to do it. She wasn’t a bad person; she was traumatized by bad people and coping in the only way she knew how, and I enabled her because I didn’t know any better.
Sometimes, you just have to step away and stop helping people.
5. Sweeping issues under the rug.
We deny ourselves the ability to forge truly intimate relationships by avoiding difficult conversations. When an issue pops up, it’s usually because some boundary has been pushed or crossed somewhere. One person did something hurtful or caused the other to feel disrespected. By sweeping these issues under the rug, they are ignored and continue to fester and grow until they explode again later.
People tend to run from that which is uncomfortable, but it’s within discomfort that we can truly connect and grow together. By having the difficult conversations, you are expressing that you feel safe to express your discomfort, and vice versa. It gives you both an opportunity to find common ground, figure out where the problem is, and fix it.
That’s good! Because someone who genuinely cares about you won’t want you to feel bad about yourself or unhappy because of their actions. That’s why communication can make or break a relationship. You can ignore bad things for a long time, but you can’t forever. Sooner or later, it all comes back in greater force than when you buried it.
6. Tolerating poor behavior because of a shared bond or because someone treated you well in the past.
Loyalty is often seen as the cornerstone of a great friendship. That’s all well and good, mostly. However, unquestioning loyalty is rarely a healthy or good thing for anyone involved. It excuses and enables bad behavior, and it’s quite harmful to everyone because those bad decisions rarely stay contained neatly in a box.
It doesn’t really matter if someone was amazing to you for the past ten years, but now they’re acting unkind, being abusive, or drowning in their problems that are hurting you, too. At some point, you have to be willing to set and enforce a boundary to let them know that their behavior isn’t okay, and that you do have to prioritize your own health and well-being.
No one deserves unquestioning loyalty because people are fallible creatures who make bad decisions and do wrong things all the time. It’s not noble to keep or put yourself in harm’s way because someone changes for the worse.
Final thoughts…
Qualities like loyalty, supportiveness, and understanding are wonderful with healthy boundaries. Many unhealthy behaviors are actually healthy behaviors that are taken to an extreme, to the point where they’re harmful to everyone.
You may think that you’re being kind and compassionate by tolerating certain behaviors, but some people need to experience repercussions before they can realize something is wrong.
There’s nothing wrong with having healthy boundaries. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not a healthy person themselves, because they don’t understand how damaging their behavior can be.
