My Daily Reflection: Loyalty

I am a loyal person.  Maybe I was taught that loyalty is a virtue and I held on to that notion longer than is useful.  The more I learn about dysfunctional relationships the more I recognize that those who cause us harm tend to want us to stay in their lives because their power and control over us gives them satisfaction in the form of power and control.  Maybe they don’t even realize that this is what they are doing; maybe it is just their nature. 

Sadly for loyal people, this strategy of the “controllers” works for a long, long time….because being loyal requires giving others the benefit of the doubt.  “Maybe they don’t know that that comment hurt me or made me feel disrespected or unloved” is the feeling that I have come away from far too many interactions with those people who I thought were “important” people in my life. 

I am learning hard lessons in my senior years!

I am learning that when I have had enough and when I voice my opinion that I have had enough I have discovered that those who enjoyed the fruits of my loyalty (my willingness to overlook their meanness)  were more than eager to dump me when I no longer played the required role of loyal door mat. 

So what this has taught me is that the bullies, users and abusers, manipulative and controlling people have NO DIFFICULTY ENDING RELATIONSHIPS WHEN THEIR NEEDS ARE NO LONGER MET. 

It is only the loyal people that are willing to put up with so much in order to preserve a relationship that they have a hard time letting go.

The more I study this phenomenon the more I realize that it is important to have sort of a guide line that gives me permission to let go of people that hurt me.  And more importantly to evaluate and see that when I have been dumped by such people it should be seen by me as a revelation that I cared more about preserving the relationship than they did. Their only reason for preserving the relationship was to gain what I gave them in the way of service to their ego whereas my reason for preserving the relationship was loyalty. 

My track record in life has been that I have most often been the dumpé; whenever my usefulness was over, I was dumped.  I was the one that got hurt over and over again because I was loyal even when I felt disrespected and unappreciated.  I have suffered the pangs of pain as I tried to figure out why I was not good enough to keep in relationship with when all I asked was to be treated with kindness and respect.  Why was I always being dumped when I said NO, to anymore verbal or emotional abuse?

I have come to the conclusion that I need to dump in hindsight in such cases.  I need to recognize that the relationship that I was dumped from was not a healthy one in the first place.  I need to make peace with those rejections from a place of new understanding. 

The fact is that the treatment that I received and that I tolerated for the sake of loyalty was in fact a sign of the problems in the relationship and the fact that the other person felt no reason for them to change meant that I should have actually done the dumping much earlier in the relationship.  I should not have clung to the relationship in loyalty as long as I did thus ensuring my eventual dumping.  It was only a matter of time that my usefulness would come to an end.  It was my loyalty that blinded me to that fact! 

Sometimes in life we learn lesson way late!  What I would have done to have this knowledge and information 40 or 50 years ago!!  How much heartache would I have been able to prevent, if I had had the skills to recognize the signs when my loyalty was misplaced.  If had been able to recognize when it was time to end a relationship before my usefulness ran out and before I was dumped!

Renate Dundys Marrello

2018 – 01 – 11 

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