Were You Raised for Autonomy or Loyalty?

iiievgeniy

 

We spend our lives negotiating 

the paradox of 

being true to ourselves and 

belonging to others.

My early work was as a cross-cultural therapist, working primarily with intercultural, interfaith, and interracial couples. In these sessions, I would inevitably hear one partner—the one raised in a more individualist culture—say to the other: you need to do what makes you happy.

It wasn’t always those exact words. 

The implication, however, was always the same: that authenticity to oneself is a moral imperative. 

This was usually meant in a loving, supportive way. 

“You need to do what’s right for you, not your parents” is permission-giving. 

You’re allowed to focus on yourself. You’re allowed to prioritize your own desires. 

And WE are allowed to make decisions without opinions or guilt from others.

The other partner would often sit there confused or, more often, frustrated. They’d had this conversation before. And here they were again, debating autonomy versus loyalty—being true to oneself, as an individual, versus belonging to one’s community. They would say:

I can’t be happy if it means making the people I care about unhappy.

If you can’t get along with my parents, how are we supposed to be a family?

Religion is a big part of my life. If you won’t convert, I’m not sure we have a future.

For this partner, who often came from a more collectivist society, the conversation always came back to “what supports the group and my place within it?”

The notion of how central is the self has led me to explore a set of questions around the tension between autonomy and loyalty, often presented as two things that are in opposition to each other:

1.Were you primarily taught to prioritize autonomy and independence, to trust yourself and stand on your own two feet, because you alone are responsible for what happens to you?

2. Or were you raised more so for loyalty and interdependence, with a sense that your problems are not just yours?

3. What have been some of the consequences? Do you try to do everything because you can’t rely on anyone else? Or do you hesitate to do anything until you know what everyone else thinks?

Consider your own upbringing. 

You might come from a family with closed doors, who could be inside their room for hours and nobody wondered where they were. In my house, when I closed my door, someone knocked within five minutes and said “Is everything okay?” 

These experiences teach very different ideas about what relationships are.

It isn’t always one or the other, nor is it fixed across contexts. 

We are in constant negotiation between autonomy and loyalty. 

And both come with their own unique challenges. 

Finding the balance demands that we know ourselves—but the self is not something we uncover once and then protect forever. 

Who we are evolves all the time and it evolves through our relationships with others. 

It is often in the presence of others that we discover ourselves and transform ourselves. 

And it is also in the presence of others that it can be so easy to lose ourselves.

It’s easy to understand why people are protective of their autonomy. 

Many have spent whole relationships being consumed by the needs and expectations of another. Boundaries help us understand where another person ends and we begin—they clarify our roles and responsibilities. 

However, in a culture that constantly puts the self before the community, the language of boundaries can serve to calcify autonomy, rather than support it.

The more we treat every accommodation as self-abandonment, every obligation as oppression, and every compromise as a violation, the less we’re able to understand and practice the types of compromises that both relationships and community require of us. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protect ourselves from situations that threaten to devour us. Nor that we should always concede to what others tell us to do.

The task isn’t to solve a problem or pick one side. 

It’s to practice flexible alternation, the ability to move between autonomy and loyalty depending on what the situation requires. 

This means intentionally pausing to consider the context of the situation instead of defaulting to our usual stance. 

1. In which situations should you prioritize your individual needs? Why? 
2. In which situations should you prioritize the needs of the relationship? The family? The collective? Why? 

In long-term relationships, this exploration never ends. 

Ultimately, we’re better off for inviting the tension than trying to smooth it away.

Esther Perel