Rules: What are they?

I co-facilitate a project entitled ‘Breaking the Rules’ with my nutritional therapist colleague, marissa-catherine carrarini. But what are these rules? And why are we interested in breaking them? 

You might argue that rules are helpful and we need them to navigate our lives safely. Look both ways before crossing the road, don’t drink and drive for example. Helpful rules are realistic, flexible and adaptable. But not all rules fall into this category.

At Breaking the Rules we are interested in exploring ‘unhelpful’ rules. These are rules which might have seemed helpful or even served you well at one point in your life, but no longer do so. Unhelpful rules tend to be excessive, rigid, unreasonable and leave us little room to move. For example: 

I must always eat everything on my plate.

I should always have my shit together.

I should never need help from others.

If I always please others, then I will be liked.

Theoretically speaking, the concept of ‘rules’ comes from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT; e.g. Beck, J.S. (1995) Cognitive Therapy: Basics & Beyond). Cognitive behavioural therapists (and indeed many other sorts of therapists) believe that we are all shaped by our life experiences, particularly those in our early years. The environment we grow up in, our key relationships, the experiences we have - these all shape our fundamental sense of ourselves, our sense of others and the world around us:

I am... 

Others are... 

The world is... 

In an ideal world these beliefs would be relatively positive and present us little difficulty. 

I am ok just as I am.

Others are accepting.

The world is safe.

However, more commonly we find ourselves holding more difficult beliefs and needing to develop some workarounds to manage the pain or discomfort these cause us. Enter... rules! 

Let’s imagine you grow up in a critical environment, never seeming to get things right, always falling short of others’ standards. You might come to believe I’m useless and Others are judgemental. In order to get by in the world with these painful beliefs, you might develop a rule: If I always do everything perfectly, then I will be good enough. This might make total sense in that environment. Doing things perfectly might be an adaptive choice, preventing further criticism or punishment. But what might this unrelenting standard look like over the course of a lifetime? Is it realistic to always do things perfectly? What does ‘perfect’ even look like? And is it fair that your entire self worth rests on this (‘only then will I be good enough’)? What happens when you can no longer maintain that standard? 

This is the other key concern about ‘unhelpful’ rules - when we (inevitably) cannot maintain them, we are flooded with yet more uncomfortable emotions, such as anxiety, shame and guilt. We can be overcome by anxious or self-critical thinking (e.g. ‘what if they realise I’m not up to the job?!’, ‘I’m always so stupid!’), and our mood might drop or worsen. It’s not difficult to see how a vicious cycle can emerge here, with negative beliefs about oneself (others, the world) fuelled and rule-based coping strategies strengthened. 

In our consulting rooms, marissa and I regularly see people who have become trapped within ‘unhelpful’ rules - recognising they no longer serve them well, but struggling to know how to move forward. Within this series of articles I hope to offer some suggestions which might help. You might also like to follow our @wearebreakingtherules account on Instagram for additional pointers and links to our free downloadable resources.