Brilliant Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 2nd Edition

Are your rules helping you?

Take a few minutes to see whether you can identify any unhelpful rules of your own. Sometimes such rules are not obvious but hidden in our assumptions and moral values. They can often be detected by the presence of the words ‘should’, ‘ought’ and ‘must’ but this is not always the case. They will be closely associated with your sense of right and wrong and often reflect the expectations of other people.

This is not, of course, to suggest that all moral principles and values should be thrown out as dysfunctional assumptions… The rules that cause problems for us tend to be:

• Rigid Such rules are absolutes. They don’t take into account our individual needs or circumstances. They are usually the product of polarised thinking. ...