Family systems

When Loyalty Becomes Collusion

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  7 min read

A woman in her forties spent most of a first session working up to one sentence: that something had happened to her as a child, that an older sibling had known, and that the sibling had told her telling would destroy the family.

She had believed it. She had carried it for thirty-one years.

She had gone to every Christmas. She had smiled and passed dishes. She had helped the man in question to his chair. She had experienced her silence as loyalty for three decades, and had only recently begun to wonder whether it was something else.

“What would you call it?” she asked.

I told her I would call it collusion, and that the word was not an accusation, and certainly not of her. A nine-year-old does not collude. A family does — and then hands the child the bill.

Loyalty is a virtue. It also has an object.

Let me insist on this before anything else, because the rest will sound harsh without it. Loyalty is good. Ruth’s loyalty to Naomi is one of the most beautiful things in Scripture. Loyalty is the glue of families, and a family without it is not a family — it is a group of people who share an address and a Wi-Fi password.

But loyalty is always loyalty to something, and the object matters more than the intensity.

• Loyalty to a person is not the same as loyalty to whatever that person does.
• Loyalty to a family is not the same as loyalty to the family’s story about itself.

When loyalty starts to require the concealment of harm, the silencing of the person harmed, or the protection of a wrongdoer from consequences, it has changed into something with a different name: the cooperation of many in the protection of one, at the expense of the truth and of everyone the truth would have protected.

The ledger nobody can produce on request

The family therapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy spent a career on what he called invisible loyalties — the unspoken obligations that run between family members, often across generations, below the level of conscious choice.

Families keep a kind of ledger of fairness: a running account of who owes what to whom. A child who was cared for owes care. A sibling who was covered for owes covering. And the debts are not enforced by rules. They are enforced by a feeling installed in childhood that to withhold payment is to betray.

Almost nobody could produce their ledger if you asked for it. Almost everybody has paid an entry from it this month.

Three sentences that mean the same thing

Collusion rarely announces itself. It arrives as care, in a small number of recognizable sentences.

“It would destroy your mother.”
“This isn’t the time — not with everything else going on.”
“What good would it do now?”

Each is offered as protection, and each has the same structure. Each asks one person to carry something so that everyone else does not have to. And each will still be true next year, which is how thirty-one years happen: not by one decision to stay silent, but by a decision that is always reasonable and never expires.

The test that cuts through it

When a family cannot tell whether it is being loyal or colluding, one question separates them faster than any amount of discussion:

Who is paying for this silence, and did they get a vote?

Loyalty distributes cost among people who chose it. Collusion concentrates cost on someone who did not — usually the youngest, the least powerful, or the one already harmed. If the person absorbing the price is the same person the silence was supposedly protecting, the arrangement has stopped being loyalty. It is simply a bill, forwarded.

What Jesus said about the sacred-sounding excuse

There is a passage in Mark that reads as though it were written for exactly this. Jesus is describing a practice in which a person could declare their resources Corban — dedicated to God — and thereby be released from the obligation to use them to care for their own parents.

His objection is not that the declaration was insincere. It is that a genuinely sacred-sounding commitment was being used to nullify a real one. “Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition.”

Families do this with the language of honor, of grace, of not gossiping, of keeping the peace. The words are real words and they name real virtues. They are also, sometimes, the mechanism by which someone is left holding what was never theirs to hold.

What loyalty looks like when it is healthy

Breaking collusion is not the same as breaking with a family, though it is frequently predicted to be. In practice it usually looks like three unglamorous things.

• Naming the harm without prosecuting the person. The goal is an accurate account, not a verdict — a sentence that could be read aloud in the room and would survive it.
• Refusing to trade one person’s reality for the group’s comfort. Nothing is required to be said to everyone. Something has to be permitted to be true.
• Staying. Not always — and not where there is danger — but far more often than families fear. The person who tells the truth and does not leave is the strongest evidence a family can get that the truth was survivable.

Loyalty that can hold a hard fact is stronger than loyalty that requires the fact to stay hidden. The second kind is not more devoted. It is only more fragile, and someone specific is paying to keep it standing.