Self Imposed Rules

Sometimes the only thing in our way is one sentence in our brains. This episode explores how to get out of your own way.

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Transcript

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Hey my friends, welcome back to the podcast. Let's talk about rules today. We have all sorts of rules that we all live by. Some of those rules are passed to us by the government. Some rules might be passed by our religious institutions, like the 10 commandments in Christianity, for example. Some rules are taught to you by your parents, things like chew with your mouth closed or say please and thank you. And some rules we make up for ourselves. And a lot of the time when we make up our own rules, we aren't even conscious that it's a rule that we have made up. Like in our brains it is just how it is, or how it should be, or needs to be. And we can't even see that it's a made up thing by our brains. I think an example will make this more clear. I was actually talking about this not long ago with a friend and she said that she had this internal rule for herself that basically said that only hard work so called counted. So if something wasn't hard, it didn't count or it wasn't good enough to feel good about. She couldn't feel proud of herself if she didn't work hard. She would only allow herself to so called "count" something or to feel good about something if it was hard. And because of this rule she had unconsciously made for herself, she started making things harder than they needed to be. She started overcomplicating things so that more things would count, so to speak. But all this ended up accomplishing was exhausting her and making her actually get less done because she needed to make everything hard. And it wasn't until she realized that she had set this little rule for herself, that she was able to see what was going on and to see why she was so freaking tired all the time, and was feeling pretty crappy. She was able to see that things didn't need to be hard to count. That wasn't a real thing. That was a self imposed thing. And she could let that go any time and nothing bad would happen. I have done this myself more times than I can count. And I usually don't even realize it until someone else points it out to me. I can't tell you how many times I've been to see my own coach and she starts pushing me on something and I'm like, Oh my God, you're right. I don't have to do it that way. Or I don't have to do this thing at all. I'm self imposing this on myself. I had one of those self imposed rules in my marriage. I had this self imposed rule in my head that it wasn't okay to leave a marriage unless they cheated on you or hit you. And I was miserable in my marriage. He controlled what I wore. He controlled all the money. He controlled who I talked to, where I went, he controlled nearly every facet of my life. He was cruel and he just lied all the time. And he would do things that I hated just to get a reaction out of me so he could justify punishing me and doing weird psychological warfare tactics. It was completely miserable. It was abusive. It was toxic. It wasn't a good marriage. But he never hit me. He shoved me into walls a few times. But he never hit me. He pinned me against the countertop until I gave in to what he wanted, but he never hit me. And as far as I knew he never cheated either. So according to my little rule, I couldn't leave. It wasn't justified in my head. That little rule helped keep me trapped in that marriage. According to my rule, if I left I would be the bad person. So I couldn't leave unless he hit me or cheated. And that contributed a lot to my staying in that marriage for as long as I did. And even when I had kind of relaxed that rule enough to actually leave, it still haunted me a little bit afterwards. I kept feeling the need to justify my decision to leave. I was a little defensive about it. Not necessarily because anyone else was questioning it. But because in my own head I had a little bit of that self imposed rule hanging around. So I was really just feeling the need to justify it to myself all of the time. And it was very sinister, because when I was abiding by that rule, I did not recognize it as my rule. I would have just called it fact or like how it is. Like everyone thinks that way. I would have said that everyone agrees with it. Not true obviously, but that is how I thought about it. I did not know that it was a self imposed rule. Which is often the case with self imposed rules. So how do you know if you have a self imposed rule? Well, I can promise you that you do. We all do. And that's okay. We all make little codes to live by. But when you start to feel stuck, or trapped or unhappy, I think it can be useful when you're looking at the reasons why you're feeling that way, to evaluate those reasons to see if any of them are self imposed rules. This would mean questioning each of those reasons, even the ones that your brain tells you are straight up facts. And this is hard to do for most people, myself included. I usually need someone else to point out my blind spots for me. It's really hard to see them yourself. Not impossible, but much harder. So I really recommend taking it to a coach, or a therapist, or a friend that you trust to tell you the truth, and just vet your reasons against someone else's evaluation. And this can really help gain perspective where self imposed rules are concerned. And once you know that it's self imposed, then you can begin to unravel it. You can find other perspectives and shift your thinking. It lets you let go of the rules that aren't serving you. Because sometimes the only thing that's holding us back or making us miserable is one little sentence in our brain. And we don't have to keep those sentences. We can change them. Thank goodness that we can otherwise I would still be stuck in that miserable marriage. And so that's what I would offer you to consider this week, my friends. Where might you have a self imposed rule that isn't good for you? And where can you gain the perspective needed to change it? Alright, my friends, until next time, be well.