By Daniel Benor, MD

What happens when we find ourselves without rules? You might find yourself in this state if you engage in Transformative Wholistic Reintegration (TWR) and other approaches that bring about profound changes on many levels of your being.

We are all creatures of habit. We live by rules that make our lives easier, providing us with an automatic pilot that saves us from having to ponder each move we make, each interaction we initiate, each response that we give.

Some of your rules simplify your personal activities – like how to keep your clothes in order in your dresser and closet; where you put your car and house keys when you come home; which days do you go out to the market and for exercise; and all the other little routines of daily life.

You have rules for interactions with other people – with norms for dressing for formal and informal occasions; ways you speak with close friends and other ways you address your boss; ways you behave at a ballgame and ways you behave in a house of worship; and rules for driving safely.

You have inner rules for dealing with emotions – whether you let yourself cry if you’re sad; how you deal with making a mistake; when or even whether you cogitate on something you feel bad about until you feel you’ve come to a place of inner peace, or whether you bury your discomforts in a filing cabinet somewhere inside and move on with your life.

And then you have meta-rules and habits about how you make and change your rules. As with most people, you probably aren’t consciously aware of these rules about how you make and keep or discard your rules. This is because you develop these meta-rules when you’re young and just beginning to learn about how to navigate through this complex world. Most commonly, your initial rules are: “If it’s uncomfortable, it’s better to bury it and move on.”

This type of rule is really helpful to a child who doesn’t know what to do about uncomfortable feelings. Such a rule lessens distressing feelings so ypu have more energies, to cope better with your life challenges.

When you grow up, however, you tend to continue in automatic pilot mode and often are completely unaware of what your inner rules are, or even blind to the fact that you have these rules. This is unfortunate, because as an adult you have much broader and clearer understandings about life, and many more resources for dealing with problems.

Waking up

Stresses and challenges of life are often blessings in disguise. They invite you to re-examine your rules and the ways you relate to yourself, to other people and to the world at large.

Modest life changes will often push you to question your inner rules. You are pushed into these reassessments when you have to interact with new people or let go of relationships with close friends and family. Often, these changes involve significant shifts in relationships, such as relocating from one school, job or community to another; committing to a close, personal relationship; becoming a parent; or having an elderly, close relative pass on after a full life. Usually, such changes do not push you into major overhauls of your inner rules. You tweak and compromise your rules and learn new ways of coping. And life moves on with a modified set of rules.

Major life changes may be a different story, as when you have to deal with threats such as bullying in a new school or workplace; you discover major differences between yourself and your new partner and/or their family; you have to help a child who has physical or psychological challenges; or you lose a close family member unexpectedly. Inner changes may challenge you as well, such as having to deal with a serious illness or injury; becoming depressed or encountering stressful life challenges.

In these instances you may have to reassess and sometimes to make major overhauls to your inner rules. In essence, you may have to become someone new in order to deal with new situations, and the old rules no longer serve you well.

Tom was an easy-going boy who grew up in a nurturing, supportive home and suburban school environments. His family taught him, more by example than by instruction, to be considerate of others. When he arrived at university, he found himself among people who behaved very differently. Many of them were self-centered, competitive and aggressive. Tom was often ridiculed and bullied for being mild, meek and unassertive. Tom became depressed, found it hard to sleep and difficult to concentrate on his studies.

Tom was fortunate to find a wise counselor in the student health services. Joyce helped him to understand the different cultural backgrounds of the aggressive, bullying students who were so unlike himself. She taught him TWR, to provide tools for de-stressing and getting to sleep at night. Within a few weeks, Tom was able to ignore the bullying and make his peace with the differences in attitudes that had so distressed him.

Tom was lucky to have found Joyce as his counselor. Another counselor might have pushed him to become more assertive and aggressive, which would have required much greater changes in his inner rules in order to get along at his university. Tom was able to continue living within his own rules and navigate through his challenging social milieu.

Sheila grew up in a military family, where her father was relocated every two or three years. She was a sensitive, shy child and suffered greatly every time she had to say goodbye to her schoolmates and friends and start building a social life all over again. She sometimes was able to build friendships with one or two girls, but never found herself accepted as one of the crowd. She came to view and accept herself as somehow basically unlikeable to most people.

When Sheila was in her last year of high school and her father was again relocated, she decided she would stay on, living in a friend’s home in the Atlanta suburb where she had lived her previous two years. She had the great misfortune to fall victim to a date rape shortly before graduation. Ashamed to even speak about this to anyone, she withdrew inside herself, traumatized, fearful and increasingly depressed. She was unable to pass several of her final exams in high school, and decided to go to work as a waitress while she figured out what to do with her life.

Years passed, and though Sheila managed to get her high school equivalency certificate and became a court stenographer, she never managed to find a stable relationship with a man. She kept finding men who were abusive towards her, leading her to leave these relationships after several months. She became increasingly depressed, and did not tolerate the side effects of the several antidepressants her doctor prescribed. Frustratingly, she found it impossible to take off the weight she had put on due to the medications. This damaged her self-image further and increased her depression.

Sheila was a good-hearted person and had developed close friendships with several women. One of these, Gladys, urged Sheila to find a therapist to help her sort out her problems. Fortunately, her job benefits included generous coverage for psychotherapy. These longer-standing issues required major inner work to resolve. Sheila had developed a deep-seated lack of confidence in herself and her abilities to be liked by men and major doubts about ever finding a good relationship.

Sorting out Sheila’s issues required helping her to sense and come to understand her sensitive personality and the traumas she had experienced. This was, relatively speaking, the easier part. Using TWR , one of many Energy Psychology methods, Sheila was able to let go of her many trauma memories and feelings. She was then able to install positive thoughts and feelings to replace those she had released.

After feeling considerably improved, even to the point of not feeling depressed and beginning to lose weight, Sheila was surprised to find herself confused, and feeling a vague, emptiness that was an inner hunger for something that she couldn’t identify.

What Shelia was experiencing is what I call ‘the void.’ I first learned about this in the 1980’s, in articles by David (then Dennis) Gersten, another wholistic psychiatrist. The void is a place we enter when we’ve given up old ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us, but haven’t figured out what we want to adopt in their place. It’s rather like rowing out into a big lake, to the point where we can’t see the shore we left behind, and can’t yet see the shore on the other side.

This can feel very uncomfortable. It is a ‘meta-anxiety,’ which is a worry about how we’re feeling. In this case, it’s about not knowing who we are any more. We’ve left our old habits, self-image and rules for relating to the world behind us. We don’t quite know where we’re heading, and have no idea what the rules will be when we get there. TWR can also lessen the intensity of these meta-anxieties.

Sheila gradually started exploring new relationships with people who were different from her previous friends. Because she felt greater confidence in herself and held higher expectations of being liked and accepted, she also found herself meeting men who were not disparaging or abusive towards her.

Sheila had finally crossed the void, had reached the far shore, and found herself in a new self with a new life.

TWR is an excellent tool for life transformations, as well as a tool for addressing more focal problems.

You may reproduce all or parts of this article in your journal, magazine, ezine, blog or other web or paper publication on condition that you credit the source as follows: Copyright © 2014 Daniel J. Benor, MD, ABHM   All rights reserved. Original publication at WholisticHealingResearch.com where you will find many more related articles on this and similar subjects of wholistic healing.