Abuser-loyal parts often feel closely attached to abusers and hold warm feelings for them like love, gratefulness, awe etc. In the past, that was a helpful survival strategy because it has an appeasing effect. The efforts to please these people granted us more safety. We also split up the inner picture of abusive people in our life and these parts are able to only see the good in them which helps them to convince themselves that we are safe with them. How else should we have survived living with them in one household without being able to get away and without anyone supporting us or wanting something good for us.
Building attachment bonds
Working with abuser-loyal parts can be emotionally challenging because they know only a small fragment of the truth and that can feel like a denial of the abuse to those who have suffered a lot. I find it helpful to separate parts like that from the traumatized child parts when we first start our inner work with them and consider them part of the group of protectors instead. It keeps the young parts from triggering each other by denying each other’s experience constantly. That would only lead to more ruptures at this point without being useful for anything.
Our main focus will be their need for attachment. We can’t talk badly about their main attachment figure and convince them that they are bad and expect that to work out well. If we just try to take away all their interpersonal safety and stability, they will cling to it even more. It needs an offer of a sound relationship from us instead. It can mean that we provide parts who listen patiently when they praise the good in abusers and then also gently limit the time for that and work on orienting abuser-loyal parts in the outside world and do fun stuff together. As always, we don’t take anything away from anyone, we add options so that the importance of the old attachment can get smaller. Everything that is felt and thought is ok and allowed to be there. This is not about being right, it is about being kind and caring. That is why only those of us who are capable of being supportive should do this job. If we don’t have that in us right now, Ts can support us and take over this task. Abuser-loyal parts are allowed to have their own needs as long as it’s not dangerous or actively harmful and we can come up with ways to give them space to meet these needs.
Comfort
It can sometimes take a little longer to cut contact with abusers because these parts need time for their own process and we cannot enforce a boundary without their cooperation. It can make them incredibly sad when contact is not allowed anymore and that is when we need the safe connection and attachment that we have built up inside to be able to comfort them and hold them tight to create a bit of a counterbalance to their loss. Because they are unaware of the other sides of these people, it is a true loss for them and needs to be griefed, even when other parts experience all of it differently. It can become important to allow them to create their own inner space the way it feels right for them. It might include having things there that remind them of the good that they see in abusers. It gives room to remembrance while it is also limited and contained in a private space so it doesn’t trigger anyone else. The need for this will change as they integrate more.
Broader view of the world
Once the inner relationships are more solid we can gently start to offer more information that adds puzzle pieces to their picture of the abusers. It is more than enough to do that in tiny steps and show them little by little that not everything about the abuser was good. When we look at general beliefs together eg because we are trying to understand more about certain behavior, there will automatically be moments of realization. The reality is different from what ‘they’ said. That will always be connected to a sense of betrayal and betrayal by an attachment figure is especially bitter and devastating. It is important for us to be there for them. There is no need to condemn these people or talk badly about them on top of everything. We have to understand that these are still beloved people and talking badly about them will backfire. Instead, we can gently confirm that betrayal has taken place and that reality is really the way this part has just discovered. Sometimes we end up googling knowledge that normal people have always been aware of and it is completely new for us. New puzzle pieces are added, there is more synthesis, we realize things about the past that have been blocked before and the inner picture of abusers changes slowly.
Sharing
If we have the capacity for that, there can eventually be an exchange with other child parts who have suffered. It is too difficult to start there and abuser-loyal parts cannot believe them early on. But when there is already some awareness that the attachment figures were not all good all the time like we used to believe, it begins to make sense to allow traumatized parts to share a little bit of what they know. For that, we put together even more puzzle pieces and pay careful attention not to over-do it. It will still be very challenging to believe what the others already know. Sometimes it is possible to share inner pictures or scenes to make them more tangible and real. When one part used to have all the white puzzle pieces and another only the black ones, they can mix to create a more grey picture of the abuser. If there are truly positive memories, traumatized kids parts can benefit from knowing that not all of life was always terrible and their view of things can become more grey as well.
We integrate the inner picture by putting everything in the story in the right place and in the proper proportions to each other. Then it can become obvious how small the Good really was. It wasn’t wrong but it was also just a small part of the big picture. Processes like that are always accompanied by grief because we lose something when we allow the inner pictures to change like that. We become more mature but it costs us our innocence and ignorance.
Prohibiting influences
Something we need to pay attention to in the process is the connection between abuser-loyal and abuser-imitating parts. Sometimes there is the attempt to fluence parts and get them to behave in certain ways. We might not even see abuser-imitating parts personally but they enforce their will because they coerce abuser-loyal parts to do things for them. It is necessary to understand that abuser-imitating parts are not the abusers themselves and the loyalties are just being reenacted in this inner relationship. Entanglements like that are not always obvious but they can be the reason why we are not making any progress with parts and problematic behavior cannot be reduced. We can use the concept of the personal inner space to isolate parts from influences like that. They can find some rest in a separated room where they cannot hear dominating parts. Sometimes their whole presentation can change and we find new ways of relating to them. Just because we don’t hear certain inner voices ourselves does not mean that nobody else is trying to take influence. Parts who experience this often consider it as so normal that they don’t even know that it is worth mentioning.
Integrating parts like this is long-term work that needs a lot of patience. If we confront them beyond their capacity it will just cause denial or even a crisis that can easily get life-threatening. It can take years and last into phase 2 because that is when we focus on sharing memories and working on loyalties. During stabilization, our main goal is to get us out of the danger zone of being in contact with abusers and to support abuser-loyal parts in this process so that it is bearable.