The Evolution of Rules
Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings
during Melanie’s NLP TimeLine Therapy session 8-7-09
(Name is changed to protect client’s privacy.)
“The role of rules in human life is an evolving process. People, in their less evolved stages, have a greater need for rules than they do as they become more evolved. This is because they’re not present enough in the here-and-now to be in alignment with Divine order. They need an external structure, because they don’t have the connection internally. And so they need a parent, basically, whether it’s in the form of the church or policeman or a physical parent, or some outside authority that tells you ‘You may not do this. You may not do that.’ The evolving of this process is slowed down by limiting decisions* (made on a broad cultural scale and passed down through the generations) that people can’t trust their actual experience or desires. So then it becomes a question of — do we need the structure because we really can’t trust ourselves, or because of limiting decisions causing us to believe we can’t.
Related to this is the idea of original sin, which leads to the limiting decision, something along the lines, that who you inherently are is bad, so you have to be controlled. It is the belief that if you do what you want to do you’re going to do something bad. This dysfunctional concept gets in the way of people trusting that what really matters to them is beneficial, and therefore they must control themselves and lean on external authorities and concepts to determine the way to structure or run their lives. And so this ends up with old unevolved and dysfunctional patterns being handed down generation after generation.
(Melanie is saying her mother used to say, “I have to control you. That’s what parents have to do.”)
“Your mother thought this because she saw how she herself was, and she thought that’s the nature of people. She couldn’t control her temper, she couldn’t control herself sexually, and she was an alcoholic. Now, when a person is out of control like she was, there is some way that she’s blocking herself from going toward what really matters to her. Instead, she’s going for substitutes.
Any kind of addiction, including sexual addiction, or any of the addictive things your mother did were substitutes for what really did matter to her. And you are now blocking what really matters to you. The reason you can’t trust yourself, is because you’re not giving yourself what you really need and want, and therefore you are addicted to substitutes. Addictions are a substitute for what you really want emotionally, such as love or acceptance. So if you have made a limiting decision, for example that you are not lovable or worthy of love, you give up on getting the real thing and try to get it through symbolic substitutes that you can control. But when you try to get love or acceptance or some form of emotional nourishment by eating or drinking or smoking, or any other kind of addiction, you’re not satisfied because it doesn’t give you what it is that you’re really wanting. And so you keep trying to get more and more of it, because in the moment it gives you a temporary feeling of satisfaction. You can love and be loved infinitely, because emotions are not physical and therefore are limitless. Whereas food or alcohol are physical and there’s a limit to what you can physically put in your body, and so eventually physical addictions take their toll on the body.”
* For an in-depth description of “limiting decisions,” click here.
