When Loyalty Fails

The price of persona.

“Do you want my opinion or my support?”

The first time a clinical supervisor asked me that pointed question, I blanched.

Of course I wanted him to tell me I was brilliant, astute, insightful. I was not any of those things, and his simple question was more helpful than any correction he could have offered. I have used it in my office thousands of times since then.

Do you want my opinion or my support?

Do you want only to hear that I understand? That I can see the world through your eyes, and feel the same things your feel? Or do you want me to add something to that? To challenge what you see and how you feel?

Do you want to hear how you are right, and justified, and validated in your reactions? Sometimes, this is all we want, and truly all we need. Someone to understand, someone to agree, someone to feel with us, so that we can believe what we feel has merit and value.

Sometimes it is all we can handle. When the pain of trauma is so deep, so uniquely personal, that alternative perspectives feel dismissive and minimizing. Then we are searching for validation that our reaction is understandable even if unusual, acceptable, even if overwhelming, and embraceable, even if deeply flawed.

In couples therapy it can be even more complicated. Does loving me always mean agreeing with how I see the world, and your behavior in it? Or can the commitment we gave one another include a different kind of loyalty? A loyalty to the truth, as I see it, shared lovingly, even when it differs from yours.

Do you want my opinion or my support?

It is not a simple question.

But in therapy, if we want the best result, we must go beyond support, to challenge our own views, consider new perspectives, and hold ourselves accountable for the change that needs to happen.

As I watch the disaster unfolding in Washington, I think of how this question applies to leaders. The best leaders surround themselves with people who understand the definition of loyalty at the deepest levels of insight and maturity. Those who know that loyalty to any person, must always include loyalty to overriding values you share. Honestly, integrity, belief in higher values like democracy and the constitution. They surround themselves with people who will differ on strategy, who will challenge analysis, who will present alternative perspectives to expand their understanding and to hold them accountable to those higher values.

But for DJT loyalty means only one thing: Not making him look bad no matter how wrong he is, no matter what lie you must tell, no matter what risks you must take with the integrity of our country.

That is not loyalty. That is subservience to an image of excellence whether it exists or not. It is a betrayal of honesty, a dismissal of trust, in the service of the basest of concerns, one person’s image in the mirror, his persona.

This kind of flattery is a failure of loyalty to the values the leader is there to uphold, the job he is charged to accomplish, the purpose of leadership itself.

Because this simplistic loyalty has been the primary, if not the only quality DJT has demanded of his cabinet hires, the American people are left with some people too ignorant, inexperienced, and unqualified for the jobs they hold; too arrogant to admit their unreadiness; and too focused on achieving personal goals they perceive as more important than the values of democracy.

Today, in a hearing on Capitol Hill, I watched these “leaders” refuse to admit they were even present, “not recall” what was said on a war planning call two days ago and insist that no breach of intelligence occurred when the evidence of that is easily proven and documented.

This is what happens when loyalty fails, when it means only one thing. And when that one thing is supporting a lie that endangers us all.