By Peter Michaelson

I recently visited about a dozen ACOA websites looking for information on the subject of misplaced loyalty. I was struck by how much these websites focused on the symptoms of adult children of alcoholics, while offering little in the way of deeper explanations of their emotional experiences.

A constant on almost all sites was the list of thirteen ACOA characteristics, of which misplaced loyalty is one. The observation is that ACOAs “are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that loyalty is undeserved.”

One website did say that “loyalty is a mask for fear and insecurity,” and that “a strange bonding has occurred.” Misplaced loyalty is indeed about fear and insecurity. The child in an alcoholic family is naturally terrified of abandonment and rejection since he has likely already experienced some level of emotional abandonment from one or both parents. As well, he has seen his alcoholic parent abandon himself or herself in terms of self-support and self-regulation. The child senses this emotional condition in the afflicted parent and identifies with the severe distress of self-abandonment. Extreme loyalty, the child feels, can help to offset the prospect of abandonment, as well as the pain and fear that are absorbed through proximity to the parent’s self-abandonment.

In making this gesture of extreme loyalty to such undeserving recipients of it, the child has to give up something of his or her dignity, integrity, and precious self. Now he may begin to identify himself, or to know himself and feel his value, through this grand gesture of unquestioning loyalty. His value, it feels to him, resides in this “magic gesture.” Doing this, however, leaves him stranded with a limited, painful sense of himself. Later in his life he can only hope that with the right insight or conditions he can heal or outgrow this emotional predicament.

What choice, in any case, does the child have but to stay with the alcoholic parent in the dysfunctional family? The child can’t run away, at least until he or she is older. Many children submit passively, in what feels like complete surrender, to the painful situation. All they have left of themselves, it feels to some, is a capacity for loyalty. They can feel some power and satisfaction in the belief that they are making a choice to practice this loyalty. In many cases, however, this so-called loyalty can more accurately be described as acute passivity. The child can only feel intact through connection to the person to whom he is loyal, as if loyalty is his lifeline. He doesn’t really make a choice, except to save himself in the only way he knows how to do that.

The child can feel he will be annihilated without this bond of loyalty, a feeling aroused by the process of annihilation or destruction he sees in the alcoholic parent. An intense connection to others, as provided in the 12-Step Program, can counteract that fear of annihilation. As an adult, his deeper healing involves a growing conviction of his value and goodness, acquired through a process of overcoming the fear and self-doubt entrenched in his psyche from childhood.

In relationships, the ACOA can also feel some power in believing that he or she is making a choice to be loyal to the dysfunctional friend or partner, when in fact this ACOA is not really able to make this choice (without inner growth) that represents his or her best interest. The alcoholic parent wasn’t able to represent himself in an appropriate manner. So now the ACOA, even when abstinent, is unable as a chronic codependent or enabler to represent himself in a healthy way. He continues to sacrifice dignity and self-respect, and to be trapped in a cycle of passive and passive-aggressive reactions, for his unswerving allegiance to his coping mechanism of misplaced loyalty.

For a deeper understanding of the emotional and psychological experience of alcoholics and drug abusers, read my book, Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions and Compulsions. It can be purchased at this website as a soft-cover book or as a PDF file.