Loyal to Me, Loyal to Them
Loyalty to a person is NOT the same thing as loyalty to a situation, but it benefits those who wish to extract from you if you believe they are the same.
Loyalty to a situation means that you will stay in the situation regardless of the experience which is on offer to you there. This is why it benefits those who wish to exploit you for you to believe that being loyal to the situation is your loyalty to them as a person.
Loyalty to a situation often means being disloyal to my experience. When I am loyal to a situation, I abandon my experience in order to show up according to my commitment, promise, or duty.
This may *seem* like beautiful selflessness, it may seem the only civilized approach, the only thing that could hold society together. (This is why it’s so popular.)
In fact, abandoning my experience does not serve anyone who truly loves me—it only serves those who wish to exploit me or extract from me for their own gain.
My experience is a matter of holistic self-interest. It’s not that I am loyal to AN experience, such as pleasure, it’s that I’m loyal to MY experience, the whole thing, everything I need and want and wish for as a human, everything that keeps me moving. Many of these things are unpleasant and unpleasurable, but still worthy of my time and important to my larger experience of life.
Being loyal to the PEOPLE I care about is part of my holistic self interest, part of what I prioritize when I am loyal to my experience. It is not the same thing as staying in a relationship or being loyal to a situation.
Being loyal to a person means that I take a stand for their agency, their freedom, and my own loving understanding of how they enact this.
If I am loyal to a situation, I may have great difficulty being actually loyal to the person I’m staying in the situation with.
I may stay with them, but if my experience degrades, I’m likely to be thinking uncharitable thoughts about them, blaming them, resenting them, forming contempt, giving out of obligation rather than generosity, and attempting to control them so that the situation I won’t let myself leave will be more acceptable to me. I’m likely to complain about them to other people, share my judgements and projections about them, and generally enact a lot of DISLOYAL behaviors.
My loyalty to others rests on a firm foundation of my loyalty to my own experience. When I am loyal to my own experience, when I ensure that I am offering myself an experience I value through my practices of what I show up for and how I show up, THAT is when I am able to have a kind and respectful relationship with another person.
That is when I can truly exhibit loyalty to another. When I can choose the distance at which I stand, and the relational configuration that allows me to have an experience of them which I value, that is when I can be kind toward them, kind about them, and understanding of all they have going on.
Investing my loyalty in my own experience is one of the most powerful shifts I made to leave codependency behind and transcend even clean transaction into Devotional Love.
I’m teaching three LIVE workshops next week in which you can learn practices of loyalty to your own experience in various contexts. Secure your spot today.
