Where do rules come from?

We are Breaking the Rules. But where did these rules come from?!

In my previous article, I explained our understanding of ‘rules’ and why we might be interested in exploring them (you might like to read that first if you haven’t already done so). In summary, at Breaking the Rules we are interested in ‘unhelpful’ rules - rigid, excessive and unreasonable beliefs and behaviours which don’t serve you well. But where do rules come from in the first place? 

Simply put, rules are learned. Rather than being formally taught, rules are usually learnt through trial and error and in response to our life experiences. For example: a significant life event, a relationship, the nature of the environment you find yourself in. At the time that rule forms, it might seem adaptive, helpful and an appropriate response to your experiences. The rule might even serve you well for a period of time. For example: if you grow up in conditions where food isn’t always available, a helpful rule might be I should always eat everything on my plate. Similarly, if you’ve been bullied at school, you might learn If I isolate myself from others, then I will be safe from further hurt. 

Within that environment, and for that particular period of time, rules such as these might serve you well. But rules that aren’t adaptable, flexible and realistic inevitably become unhelpful. Unless they shift and change with your life as it evolves, they will become restrictive and stop serving you well. For example, if your life is now financially secure and food is always available, you might no longer need to always eat everything on your plate. It might now be more helpful if your rule evolved towards I eat until I am full.

But how else do we learn rules? What about less specific influences? 

Of course all of us are immersed in the particular culture we exist and grow up in. For example: our families, the country we live in, the political landscape, the culture of a particular era. The rules we develop often reflect the norms of these cultures - the conclusions we’ve come to as we observe the world around us. Clearly an exhaustive list of these influences is way beyond the scope of this article, but to give you a starting point and perhaps get you thinking...

Family mottos - these might be said directly or simply implied through people’s behaviour or their expectations of others. Some examples might be ‘the only person you can depend on is yourself’ or ‘practice makes perfect’.

Gendered assumptions based on sex - for example, ‘big boys don’t cry’; ‘sparkly wrapping paper is for girls’; ‘girls are better at baking’; ‘daddy is better at fixing things’. Not only do these comments affect behaviour, expectations and create difficulty if one does not fall into these gendered categories, they create a rule-based-belief-system: there are only two genders and these are distinctly opposite to one another.

Diet industry - this heavily promotes the idea that bodies need to be manipulated and controlled to be ‘ideal’, ‘safe’ and ‘acceptable’, and this is best achieved by following a set of rules. Simple mottos such as ‘lose weight for your wedding day’ or ‘lose weight for your holiday’ have become the norm. Yet they teach us that nice times in life go hand in hand with restriction and limits. We can’t just go on holiday and simply be.

The media industry - whether it’s magazines (for example: adverts for plastic surgery alongside articles on lipstick perpetuate rule-based thinking - we need to manage our appearance); films (for example rom coms perpetuating rules like ‘I should be in a relationship to be a valued person’ or ‘I need to look a certain way to be attractive’); reporting on celebrities (notably on their bodies, such as the Kardashians or the infamous Kate Moss quote “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”); or social media where curated images can imply that everyone has their shit together, and certain ways of living are of more value or interest than others. 

Or maybe you picked up rules from the era you grew up in? If you were a teenager in the 1990s, for example, you might have learned rules around what a ‘desirable body’ should look like (heroin chic or the ‘lollypop look’) or how to be a ‘successful woman’ (ladette culture or overt sexuality in the office to overcome deep-rooted sexism). Perhaps you picked up the ‘health ideals’ promoted by the diet industry at that time, such as eating low fat or low carbohydrates. Or maybe you took on rules about how to parent alongside having a career? 

All of us are learning and acquiring rules over the course of our lifetimes. The question is, do these serve us well? Are they realistic, flexible and adapted to the circumstances we currently find ourselves in? Often we can be aware that the rules we’ve acquired no longer work for us, but it can be difficult to move beyond them or embrace new ways of thinking and being. This is the work of Breaking the Rules - supporting people to step away from restrictive beliefs and behaviours and confidently embrace their perfectly imperfect selves.