The Psychology of Loyalty in Codependency Relationship

Abstract

The article considers the problems of emotionally close relations between people in the context of codependency. The article describes the specificity of the development of loyalty as personal formation. In the nature of codependency, there is a progression of the sign of the narcissistic process. A person that has got an increased sensitivity to his/her own comfort zone needs a compensation for their own disadvantage, which is expressed in the compulsive desire to control the lives of others. Their main goal is to achieve a sustained emotional contact and the fact of recognition of their uniqueness. Loyalty for such a person is associated with an emotional burden and the necessity to emphasize its unsteady uniqueness. The basic needs of personality in codependent relationships contents very unevenly, because in the mind of a person with narcissistic signs there is no completed idea of the proximity and certainty of relationships. Loyalty cannot take place in a sustainable personal formation, because its nature is based on the compensation of trauma and the disadvantage of the partner. Loyalty which was formed on the basis of neurotic attachment is based on hopeless expectations, on dissatisfied needs, exaggerated results of interaction filled with double references, feelings of guilt, and a deficit of the sense of belonging. In the codependent relationship, loyalty acquires special modifications and interspersed with other personal structures the nature of which determines the successive cyclical dissatisfaction with this kind of relationship. Loyalty is conditioned by the need to fill its own narcissistic “I” which is incapable of keeping its structural integrity on its own. Without regular support of another person, it quickly desolates and actualizes in a high anxiety. The proximity is realized not in emphasizing the significance of the latter but in the opposite form: depreciated.