Why Do I Stay Loyal to Toxic People?
Why Do I Stay Loyal to Toxic People?
The Group Text
Three friends, forty-five years. It started with letters, then a daily group email, then a text thread that never really stopped. Wordle in the morning. Insults and stupid videos the rest of the day. The kind of friendship where nobody says anything nice directly — you just show up every single day for decades, and that’s the whole point.
About twenty years ago, politics found its way into the thread. Two of us on one side, two on the other. For a while it was fine — friends disagree, that’s allowed. But over the next two decades it didn’t stay fine. It escalated. One friend started in with name-calling, ugly stuff, aimed at me and the friend on my side. Another couldn’t discuss anything without turning it negative. What used to be funny at year twenty-five was still mostly funny at year thirty. By year forty it wasn’t funny at all. It was just anger, day after day.
There were nights I sat at dinner with my family and wasn’t really there. I was somewhere else, replaying a text from hours earlier, still stunned that people I’d loved my whole life could call me and my friend the things they were calling us. My body was at the table. I wasn’t.
Why Loyalty Can Keep You Stuck in a Toxic Situation
I knew I wanted out. I remember thinking it in almost those exact words — I want out of this. And then immediately talking myself out of it, because that’s not who I am. I’m the guy who stands by his friends. Forty-five years doesn’t end because things got uncomfortable. Leaving felt like the betrayal — not the anger, not the name-calling, but the idea of me stepping back from people I’d loved my whole life.
So I stayed. And it kept getting worse, and I kept absorbing it, because the alternative felt like abandoning a value I’d held since I was a teenager.
It took writing my book, about a year ago, to see what was actually happening.
The safety system doesn’t always sell fear. Sometimes it sells one of your greatest strengths. Loyalty. Kindness. Responsibility. Commitment. It takes something genuinely good about you and quietly points it at the wrong target, until protecting yourself feels like betraying who you are.
You’re not someone who quits on people. You’ve never been that guy. If you step back now, that’s who you’ll be.
That’s not a lie. Loyalty is real. It built forty-five years of friendship.
The safety system didn’t attack my loyalty.
It simply swapped the target.
Loyalty to the friendship became loyalty to the thread — to keeping every channel open no matter what was coming through it, as if closing one door meant closing all of them.
How to Tell If a Value Is Protecting You or Trapping You
This is what makes this version of the safety system so effective. It doesn’t ask you to be afraid. It asks you to be consistent, with a version of yourself that no longer fits the situation. The test isn’t whether the value is real. It’s whether you’re still pointing it at the right thing.
About a year ago I told them: talk about whatever you want, be as angry with each other as you want, but I’m done being part of it. No more name-calling, no more negativity aimed at me, or I’m out of that conversation. I wasn’t asking. I was telling them where my line was.
They abided by it. And the thread went back to something close to what it was decades ago — funny, ridiculous, insults flying, nobody bringing up anything that used to wreck my afternoon or pull me out of dinner with my family.
I hadn’t abandoned my values. I’d finally applied the right one. Loyalty to the friendship meant protecting it, including protecting myself enough to still show up for it.
Take the Lead Challenge
Is there a value you’re holding onto that used to fit a situation but doesn’t anymore? Not the value itself, that’s probably still worth keeping, but where you’re pointing it. Worth a second look.
F. Allen Scott is the author of From Safety to Success, where he explores the safety system framework behind why we stay stuck, and how to finally change that.
Related reading: Why Do I Feel Like a Fraud Even Though I’m Successful?