Hand Me Down Rules – Senior Living Insights

HAND ME DOWN RULES

Emotional rules inherited without protest

By Ruby MacDonald – Senior Living Insights

Sometimes adult children look forward to the time when they will receive an inheritance, if they are fortunate enough to have wealthy parents or relatives. However, each of us has already received an inheritance such as all of the good traits we’ve been taught unhealthy habits, emotional traits, and unhealthy ways of handling unpleasant events in our lives. Many of us have embraced some or all of the emotional rules that we inherited without even a whimper of a protest even though they do not serve us well.

Most of us have lived with hand-me-down rules all of our lives. Some of them were passed on ever so innocently, from our parents. Some are so deeply ingrained that we haven’t bothered to question their validity. I like to use the old story of the ham that you may have heard a dozen times but I’ll personalize it to make it more interesting. Years ago when one of my young daughters saw me cutting off the ends of the ham before I baked it, she wanted to know why I did that. My reply was because my mother had. But my young inquisitive child wanted to know “why” Grandma did it. When we asked her grandmother, she roared with laughter and then replied, “Well, I haven’t a clue as to why you do; I never had a pan large enough for the whole ham so I had to cut off the ends.” While this story has nothing to do with fear, it points out that we fail to seek out the “why’s” of what we do and then decide if those reasons have validity in our world and if they are enriching our lives.

How many of us still operate by obsolete rules that were learned from parents, teachers, and/or society?

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