Are Commandments Good or Bad? (It Depends on Who's Asking)

A patient asked me once whether he should follow the rules. Not any particular rules — just rules in general. His marriage had them. His religion had them. His company had them. And he wanted to know: are these things helping me or holding me back?

I told him the answer depends entirely on who’s doing the asking.

Two Kinds of People in the Same Pew

I think about this through the lens of commandments — religious ones, specifically, but the principle applies everywhere. Sit in any house of worship and you’ll find two kinds of people following the same set of rules.

The first has chosen them. They’ve examined the commandments, weighed them against their own values, and decided: these align with how I want to live. The rules are a framework they’ve opted into. A scaffold for a life they’re actively building.

The second is obeying. They haven’t chosen the rules so much as inherited them — from their parents, their community, their fear of what would happen if they stepped out of line. The rules aren’t a scaffold. They’re a cage. But the cage feels safe, so they stay.

Same pew. Same commandments. Completely different inner experience.

The question isn’t whether rules are good or bad. The question is whether you’re following them because you chose to — or because you’re afraid of what happens if you don’t.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

The Locus of Control

Psychologists have a term for this: locus of control. People with an internal locus of control believe they’re the primary agent in their own lives. Their choices matter. Their actions have consequences they can influence. People with an external locus of control believe things happen to them — that forces outside themselves are running the show.

This isn’t about being strong or weak. It’s about where you’ve learned to place the center of your life. And it has enormous implications for how you experience structure of any kind.

If your locus of control is internal, structure is a tool. You use it when it serves you. You modify it when it doesn’t. You can follow rules without losing yourself in them because you know the rules are serving you, not the other way around.

If your locus of control is external, structure is a trap. You follow the rules because you have to — because the alternative is chaos, rejection, or punishment. The rules own you. And deep down, you resent them, even as you cling to them.

The Therapy Question

This shows up in my office constantly. A patient will describe their life — their marriage, their job, their daily routine — and I’ll hear the same thing underneath the details: “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, and I’m miserable.”

The question I ask next is the one that matters: “According to whom?”

Most people can tell you what they’re supposed to do. Very few can tell you what they actually want. That gap is where the suffering lives.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

Who decided you should stay in this career? Who decided this is what a good marriage looks like? Who wrote the manual you’ve been following — and did you ever agree to it?

These aren’t comfortable questions. But they’re the right ones. Because until you know whether you’re choosing your life or performing someone else’s version of it, no amount of therapy is going to make you feel better. You’ll just get better at performing.

Structure as Liberation

Here’s the counterintuitive part: some people need more structure, not less.

I see patients who’ve spent years in a kind of existential free fall — no routines, no commitments, no framework for their days. They call it freedom. It looks more like chaos. They can’t finish anything. They can’t sustain anything. They drift from interest to interest, relationship to relationship, feeling scattered and purposeless.

For these people, the right kind of structure is genuinely liberating. A schedule. A practice. A set of commitments they’ve chosen to honor. Not because someone told them to, but because they’ve decided this is how they want to live.

The gym at 6 a.m. The phone call to their mother on Sundays. The decision to stop dating people who make them feel bad about themselves. These are commandments — self-imposed ones. And they work precisely because they’re chosen, not inherited.

Structure as Suffocation

Other patients are drowning in structure. Every hour is accounted for. Every decision has been pre-made. They live inside a grid of obligations — professional, familial, social — and there’s no space left for anything spontaneous, creative, or genuinely theirs.

For these people, the therapeutic work is about permission. Permission to question the rules they’ve been following. Permission to discover which obligations are genuinely meaningful and which are inherited performances. Permission to disappoint someone, if that’s what honesty requires.

This is harder than it sounds. When you’ve built your identity around being responsible, reliable, and good, the idea of loosening the grid feels like a moral failing. It isn’t. It’s the beginning of autonomy.

Finding Your Own Rules

The best outcome isn’t no rules. It’s your rules. The ones you’ve examined, tested, and chosen — not out of fear, but out of genuine conviction.

This is what I help people do. Not abandon structure — nobody functions well in pure chaos. But interrogate the structures they’re living inside. Keep the ones that serve them. Revise the ones that don’t. And build new ones that reflect who they actually are, not who they were told to be.

It’s slower than just following orders. It’s messier. It requires you to sit with uncertainty while you figure out what you actually believe. But the life that comes out the other side is yours in a way that the inherited version never was.

The Question That Matters

So — are commandments good or bad?

They’re neither. They’re tools. And like any tool, their value depends entirely on the person holding them and the intention behind the grip.

If you picked up the tool because it helps you build something meaningful, keep building. If you’re holding it because someone put it in your hand before you were old enough to choose, it might be time to set it down and figure out what you’d reach for on your own.

That’s not rebellion. That’s maturity. And it’s a conversation worth having — with yourself, or with someone who can help you hear what you’ve been avoiding.