Hi, everyone. So today I would like to talk to you about what we call in the cognitive behavioural therapy world, rules for living. Now, I alluded to these in a previous audio around perfectionism, in the sense that a very common rule, which underpins perfectionism might be "I must do things perfectly", or "I must meet my high standards at all times", and “if I feel I can't, I should put it off or avoid it altogether", or "I should do it perfectly or not at all", you know, those are different variations and just maybe think about how that might apply specifically to you. Any difficulties you might have in that field. Now, that's a rule, which seeks to protect against core belief activation, as all rules do.

And rules are very, very interesting because they differ from core beliefs, core beliefs are set in stone, but that doesn't mean that that stone can't be chipped away at and diminished over time. But rules tend to be developed because of the core beliefs. And what we tend to find is that the goal of the development of the rules is to protect us in some way from this sort of emotional pain that we might suffer from core belief activation, the volcanic emotional response, as I call it. So hence, if you felt like you were not good enough or a failure, you might have a perfectionism rule. If you have a core belief around feeling judged, you might have a rule around pleasing others or avoiding conflict or both. Or, you know, conversely, you might go the other way, and keep people at arm's length so that they don't judge or reject you.

So there's tons and tons of different rules, they are learned, and they are often quite rigid and unhelpful. And they can be culture-specific. And they can be very stubborn and resistant to change. However, they are changeable, because they're habits, and what I find one of the most helpful ways of sort of motivating someone to change their unhelpful rules is to disprove the core belief that it's seeking to protect. So we've already talked about that sort of scale, which might've, you know, hopefully, showed you that one of your negative core beliefs or more is inaccurate. And that can really motivate someone to make those changes.

Now, rules are very, very interesting, because they probably once upon a time were quite helpful, they're often sort of incantations of sort of childhood defences in some way. Like the child who struggled in class may use perfectionism to, you know, to get recognition and acceptance. So one learns that this is a way to get acceptance, but with ADHD it’s not always that straightforward, is it? Because work is difficult for us. And focusing and concentrating in the classroom was difficult or at work or at university. So these rules, as I said, are very often very rigid and inflexible. And we can literally, once we understand that and realize that, we can literally change them, we can write new rules, but you've got to give yourself permission to do it. As I said, once upon a time, they were probably helpful, but what tends to happen is that over time, certainly as we enter adulthood, they tend to almost sort of become quite defunct or they somehow seemingly start doing the opposite of what they intend to do.

So for example, you know, if you have a perfectionist rule, how often do you feel that you've done something perfectly? How often does it feel enough? The chances are not very often, or if you do, it takes an enormous amount of effort. So you're either stressed or you're left feeling like it's never quite enough. So I like to think of them a bit like it's as if you know, one grew up in a very cold place and in order to survive one needed a very warm coat. Now you've kept that coat as you moved into adulthood, but you've moved to warmer climates. The problem is that you're still wearing the coat and it's now heavy and burdensome.