Learning to break the rules

The hidden burden of family roles

One of the most difficult things to recover from a childhood of being raised in dysfunction is our sense of self. This turns up in a lot of ways, one of which is the rules we live by that keep us small or in roles that don’t honor who we are, but rather serve the family system that we came from. We have a latent sense of self, trying to emerge and develop, but it can feel like being tangled up and tightly bound in rules about who we are supposed to be.

In my own recovery, a pivotal moment came when I realized that in my family I played the role of the sick one, the one who was never doing well, who had problems, and addictions. Both of my parents got things out of the roles I played. When I was ‘the problem’, I could take the focus of negative energy off of their mistakes, and when I was sick and needed help, they could feel like they were parenting, even though it was their behavior that made and kept me sick.

The survival trade-off and the rules we inherit

In return, I got to be a part of a family conditionally, and I genuinely needed that in order to survive childhood. As I got older the deadliness of living by those rules and denying what I truly felt and who I truly was became more and more painful and oppressive. I continued to live as though I was sickly, and incapable, when in reality I had an inner adult who had made choices to not be like that at all! My inner child still felt like I was that person and was not aware of the inner adult that was now present to take care of them.

I did not, and really could not break out of those roles until I learned that there were rules I had learned as a child that were keeping me in them. I had to notice what they were, and I had to risk breaking them before I could access more of the truth of who I really was.

In my case these rules included that I was meant to never consider my own needs or wants seriously (they should remain a dream or at most an afterthought), I should always exhibit supreme levels of tolerance and understanding, never show feelings that might make another person uncomfortable, and lie to protect my parents.

Inverting the truth to protect the family

In order to build a workable sense of self as a child without any feelings or needs, I told a story about who my parents were that justified their actions, that painted over a lot of what they did, and that ultimately allowed me to keep loving them. They weren’t persecutors in my story, and they weren’t neglectful or selfish, they were misunderstood, they were victims, they were even heroes, struggling against a broken system, and they were being kept down by ‘the man’.

The truth was more or less the opposite of all of this, and keeping their inversion of the truth alive made me very sick. At the heart of it was a belief that I was the one with whom there was something wrong – actually they were toxic, and tolerating them made me sick. Their rules around what made me acceptable put me in this position, and I carried on following those rules well into adulthood.

Deconstructing the rule of "always being good"

Let’s examine an example rule that is quite common:

The rule that you, the child, should always be good.

Does this rule make sense? What did good actually mean in your family? Did it mean that you should always please one or both parents? Is that a sensible definition for ‘good’? Perhaps it meant that you should always put others before yourself. Is it realistic to expect a human child to adhere to a standard like this? Who in the home should really have been putting others before themselves, and is it possible that you were being put in a position where you had to take on this responsibility?

To complete this example, it is likely that when we adopt a rule like this (that we should always be good), what is really going on is that we had to take on the responsibility of one of our parents in order to survive. In this case, we have to make up for our parents’ refusal to put their children before themselves. We can be as good as we like, and all it will ever do is put a superhuman expectation on us, and not solve the problem of other people’s unfair treatment of us. We learn then to try to control others by being good. Our inner child may hold onto what they believe it means to be good as a way of trying to control the world at large, which is a hugely frustrating, impossible, and exhausting way to live.

What is the truth about what it means for a child to be good? The truth is that being ‘good’ is not the business of a child; it’s the business of a parent. A child’s job is to be themselves, to accept love, nurturance, and guidance.

Identifying the unspoken rules you carry

We need to learn to break a rule like being ‘good’ in order to give ourselves permission to be human and real, because it was never our business to follow it to begin with.

Now, that doesn’t mean thinking of the worst behavior possible and committing to our ‘villain era’. What that does mean is looking at the behaviors we learned, and being willing to act differently and be with ourselves through the feelings of distress that come with that.

To start identifying rules you may be living by, take a look at some of the examples below. As a child, did you learn to be:

• Useful to others: Believing you must be useful to have belonging and love?

• The perpetual fighter: The one who always fought the big bad person (perhaps an abuser) – and are you still fighting today?

• Overly forgiving: Totally forgiving, and thus finding acceptance for your overwhelming grace and virtue (which was actually allowing yourself to be emotionally trampled)?

• The designated supporter: The person whose job it was to step back and let others go first? Were you taught to be the supporter, and not the center of attention? Did you hear, for example, ‘Girls/boys have it too easy and should step back and let others have the power, love, support, attention’ – and did you learn to be that good girl/boy who did that?

• An emotional object: An object for other people to use to feel better about themselves? Did a parent use you as a therapist? Or as a surrogate partner, in physical, sexual or emotional ways? When we are used like this, it gives us a very strong message about the rules we should follow in order to survive.

Taking small steps toward adult freedom

The rules we learn to live by can be hard to uncover, because many of them become baked into our identity. A vital step in recovery is in uncovering these rules that we are still living by, and taking steps to break them in adulthood.

What might it mean for you to break the rules that were put on you as a child? Once we have worked with our inner child around the truth and grief of having such conditions placed on the right just to be ourselves, it is time to start looking at the actions we can take as adults to change. We will work with our inner children a lot around this stuff over many years, but while the process is slow, changes and shifts are often quicker than we expect.

How do we live in such a way that we change the narrative on these rules that constrict who we are into who our parents required us to be? It can be a frightening undertaking, but it’s the ultimate work of recovery. It’s the way we recover a different life for ourselves in the present.

Sometimes it can hit us like a flash of lightning, and we see all of a sudden:

The things I want are not out of reach; the way my parents raised me just made me believe I’m not allowed to be the kind of person who would reach out to grab them.

This can sound very dramatic, but often the steps we need to change are initially internal, and we can graduate to small outward steps slowly. For example, are you allowed to think what you really think about other people? What would happen if you allowed yourself to do that, instead of censoring your internal voice? Or, are you allowed to consider your needs and wants to be of primary importance? Do you know what you would like out of life, but consider the thought of it taboo? Why is that, and could you consider that maybe it shouldn’t be taboo?

Once we have begun to think out of the box, we can take small external steps like setting aside more time for something important to us, planning a trip, or browsing job or course listings. Something my therapist, Amanda Curtin, told me that will always stick with me is that when we take care of our inner child and our recovery first, things that were never possible before become possible. She was absolutely right, both for me and the others who were in my recovery group. Things changed for me that were immovable before, and so I want to extend that branch of hope to you, too. It can seem so dark, and we can live in that place for so long, but change is possible.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.