The Real Reason You Keep Breaking Your Own Rules | Complex Trauma & Boundaries
You know the feeling. You sit down, filled with determination, and craft the perfect plan. Your recovery plan, your boundaries, your rules for a healthier life are brilliant. They are structured, compassionate, and full of hope. For a week or two, you follow them, feeling the steady promise of change.
Then, life happens. A wave of exhaustion, a spike of stress, a moment of loneliness—and just like that, the rules you set for yourself seem to vanish from your mind. The relapse happens, followed by the familiar, crushing wave of shame and self-blame: "Why can't I just stick to my own plans?"
If this cycle sounds agonizingly familiar, please hear this: The problem is not a lack of willpower. The problem is that you are in a battle with a part of your own brain you didn't know was an enemy.
The real reason you keep breaking your own rules isn't a moral failing. It’s a neurological and psychological reality for those healing from complex trauma. Understanding this internal battle is the first step toward winning it.
The Internal Civil War: Your Cortex vs. Your Limbic Brain
To understand why your healthy boundaries crumble, we need to look at the two key parts of your brain involved in this struggle.
The Cortex: This is the "adult" part of your brain. It's where you, in a calm and rational state, set those brilliant, healthy boundaries. It thinks about long-term consequences, logic, and your genuine well-being. Your recovery plan is born here.
The Limbic Brain: This is the emotional, survival-centric part of your brain. It's designed for one thing: to avoid pain and seek immediate relief. For survivors of complex trauma, the limbic brain is often overactive, hyper-vigilant, and easily triggered. It thinks like a frightened or demanding child, screaming for instant gratification to soothe any discomfort.
The moment you feel tired, stressed, lonely, hurt, or angry, your limbic brain gets triggered. It doesn't care about the elegant rules your cortex created. It only cares about one thing: "Make this bad feeling stop NOW."
As the teaching explains, "Sticking to healthy boundaries... is a battle that you have to wage against your limbic brain." When your limbic system "trumps" your cortex, your well-intentioned rules are the first casualty. This is not you being weak; this is your nervous system, shaped by past trauma, following its old, desperate playbook for survival.
The Silent Saboteurs: The Demotivators That Hijack Your Resolve
So, what specifically triggers this limbic takeover? These are the "negative demotivators" that quietly drain your motivation and pull you away from your healthy path. When you're aware of them, you can see the enemy approaching.
Common demotivators for those with complex trauma include:
Exhaustion & Stress: When you're tired or overwhelmed, the limbic brain seeks the path of least resistance. The snooze button wins over meditation. Isolating feels safer than going to a meeting.
Loneliness & Emotional Pain: The deep-seated fear of abandonment, common in complex trauma, can make loneliness feel unbearable. This unmet need for connection can pull you to break your own rules about relationships or substances, seeking relief in unhealthy attachments.
Anger & Frustration: When cortisol (the stress hormone) floods your system, it can feel empowering to "not care" about the rules. You might think, "Screw this, I'm going to get drunk at you!" as a way to express anger, even though it's self-sabotaging.
Feeling "Too Good": Ironically, feeling good can be a major trigger. Your brain might whisper, "You don't deserve this," leading to subconscious self-sabotage. Or, you might impulsively celebrate the good feeling by breaking your budget or your routine, thinking you can handle it now.
Boredom & The "Siren Song": The human brain needs healthy stimulation. In a vacuum of boredom, the "siren song" of your old lifestyle—the friends, the chaos, the substances—can sound deceptively beautiful, promising relief from the mundane and pulling you toward a familiar shipwreck.
Each of these states triggers the emotional, limbic part of your brain, launching an internal campaign to dismantle the very boundaries that are meant to protect you.
Beyond Willpower: Why Dealing with Underlying Trauma is Non-Negotiable
You cannot win a war against your own brain with willpower alone. If the underlying complex trauma symptoms—like shame, toxic guilt, and a fear of abandonment—remain unaddressed, they will continually pull the strings from the shadows.
Unhealed Shame will cause you to say "yes" when your boundary screams "no," because you're terrified of others' anger or rejection.
Unprocessed Guilt will convince you that you don't deserve a healthy life, leading you to tear down your own progress.
A Fear of Abandonment will force you to change your boundaries the moment a relationship feels threatened, sacrificing your recovery to keep someone else close.
Furthermore, unhealed trauma often means you have more than one "you" at the controls. In the framework of complex trauma in adults, we might think of different internal "parts":
The Adult You: Makes the healthy recovery plan.
The Addict You: Gets triggered and seeks escape.
The Traumatized You: Gets triggered and lashes out or hides.
In early recovery, the "Adult You" is often the weakest of these parts. As the teaching powerfully states, "Recovery and setting boundaries is the adult you fighting against powerful negative forces that want unhealthy boundaries." This isn't a fair fight until you strengthen the adult by healing the trauma that empowers the other parts.
How to Fortify Your Boundaries and Reclaim Your Self-Trust
Awareness is the first and most crucial step. But what comes next? How do you strengthen your cortex and calm your limbic brain?
1. Anticipate the Demotivators. Now that you know them, you can plan for them. If you know loneliness is a trigger, your boundary isn't just "don't call an ex," it's "when I feel lonely, I will call my sponsor, attend an online support group, or visit a friend before the feeling becomes overwhelming."
2. Find a "More Beautiful Song." The sailors in the myth survived the sirens not by tying themselves tighter to the mast, but by finding a more beautiful song to play. Your recovery needs this. What is more beautiful to you now than the siren song of your old life? Is it the peace of a sober morning? The trust in your child's eyes? A connection with a supportive community? Nurture that song. Play it loudly in your mind.
3. Understand That Recovery is About Doing It Anyway. Ultimately, your success will hinge on a simple, difficult truth: "Doing what you don't want to do on days you don't feel like doing it." Getting up for your quiet time when you're tired. Going to a meeting when you're sad. This isn't about punishment; it's about the profound act of keeping a promise to yourself. Each time you do what you said you would do, even when you don't feel like it, you are building self-trust and proving to your limbic brain that the adult is finally in charge.
Healing from complex PTSD is a journey of moving from being at war with yourself to becoming the compassionate commander of your own inner world. The rules you set are not the enemy, and neither are you. The enemy is a dysregulated nervous system and unhealed trauma wounds. By understanding this, you can replace shame with strategy, and self-blame with empowered self-awareness.
Your boundaries are worth fighting for, and now, you know exactly what—and who—you're fighting.
Your Journey of Healing Continues
At Tim Fletcher co, we believe this is a journey of compassionate rediscovery. Through our Complex Trauma Series and other resources, we provide a map and a companionable guide for this path. Healing is not about erasing the past, but about transforming your relationship to it, so you can finally live fully in the present, connected to your inherent worth and capacity for joy.
You are not broken. You are adapting. And you can learn a new way.
We offer gentle, affordable self-study courses as well as programs that include group coaching sessions.
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