Change Your Rules – Change Your Life
Welcome to Format Free Fridays at AskDrDarcy.com, the one day a week when I break the format of answering your questions and I dispense that which we rarely welcome in life: Unsolicited advice.
Today we’re talking about rules. Not societal rules, organizational rules or even familial rules, but the rules that YOU have adopted over the years and which form your core beliefs. Our rules are the seeds of our principals and values. Every thought stems from them. And if you read my blog with any consistency, you know that thoughts are what form our moment-to-moment mood. I’ve written extensively about this. Click here if you’d like to read more about it.
I personally have a love-hate relationship with rules. It’s the Virgo in me vs. the shrink in me. I love rules. Let me rephrase that: I love MY rules. I love my concepts of right and wrong. Rules help me feel a sense of predictability and certainty, both of which are Virgo traits. The thing is, as a shrink, I’ve been educated about how important mental and emotional flexibility are, which are the antithesis of certainty and predictability. What comes naturally to me is an affinity for control, and not just control of myself, but of everyone around me. You should have empathy for my friends. And my wife. And for me.
You see, I don’t really give in to my desire to control the world because I know it’s an exercise in futility and that it would result in stunting my growth. The push-pull of this is exhausting. And until I have this muscle built, it’s going to require consciousness on my part to control my impulse to control the world. What the hell was my point… Oh. The point is that I am at the very beginning stage of changing my rules, reminding myself to be flexible, trusting that the world will rotate even without me orchestrating each rotation. Which brings me to you.
We all have a set of rules which we rely on to give us shortcuts for processing information. It wasn’t always like that. When we were babies, every thought was original. But as we were exposed to more and more data, our resourceful brains created shortcuts to help us skip a few steps. It’s like a computer relying on code to save space on the hard drive.
In some instances, our rules serve us well. They help us predict what’s likely to happen in our environment. When I hear the gushing wind outside my apartment window, I know that it’s a result of my proximity to the river coupled with how high up my floor is. Conversely, when my sister spent the night recently, she wondered if we were about to be caught in a tornado (she will kill me for telling you this).
There are some instances, however, in which our rules do not serve us well. I had a client who was very sensitive to rejection. She’d go on a date with a guy and if he didn’t call or text her immediately after the date to tell her what a good time he had, she’d be curled up in the fetal position, leaving me voicemail messages about wanting to kill herself. Her rule was that she couldn’t live through abandonment. I’m not saying abandonment is pleasant, but it’s a part of life, and if you want to live in this world in a socially appropriate way, you’re going to feel abandoned a handful of times in your life. That’s just the way it goes. If you make peace with this fact, you won’t suffer. All that my client had to do was change her rule and her life would have improved significantly: Abandonment sucks, but it’s a part of life. I’ve lived through it before which gives me proof that I can live through it again. She eventually did, and then she wondered why it took her so long to decide to change her rule. Because in the throes of trying to avoid abandonment, she was on the lookout for it, and being on the lookout for it meant that she would often misinterpret her environment and presume that she was about to be abandoned. As a result, she suffered hundreds if not thousands of abandonments instead of the handful that most of us do. Ironically, when she changed her rule and decided that she could live through abandonment, she wasn’t erroneously reading rejection into everything and everyone, and her suffering ended.
We all have rules that are no win rules. Rules that result in us experiencing more of what we want to avoid. What are your No-Winners? I want to hear from you at Darcy@AskDrDarcy.com