Hello, and welcome back to Wreaking More Joy.

I’m Janette Dalgliesh, and in this season, Reclaim, we’re digging into the nuts and bolts, the practical solutions, as we continue exploring how women can disrupt outdated BS in our heads and rekindle the romance with our purpose, especially in our working lives.

Today I want to start with a client story, told with permission. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, which very much includes my client.

We’d been working together for a few weeks when she came to a session in a really distressed state. She’d had a bad day, and when she told me what had happened, I could see why.

She’d been at the park with her family. At one point she’d asked her husband to watch their two small kids while she went to get ice-creams. No big deal.

She came back to find her little ones on the big kids’ climbing frame, way up in the air, the one they were definitely not allowed on. And her husband was looking at his phone.

She lost her shit. Yelled at him, yelled at the kids, the whole nine yards.

By the time we spoke, she’d sorted things out with the family.

Turned out the phone had been an urgent text from her husband’s workplace, not doomscrolling or gaming. It was an error of judgement, for sure, but he’d been momentarily distracted, not checked out.

The kids were fine, everyone was safe, but she was still visibly upset.

When we dug deeper, she said: “I’m just so mad at myself; I should have been able to regulate my emotions better.”

Oh, honey.

No.

Of course it’s hard when you’re doing your best to practise gentle parenting and non-violent communication.

But we are all, also, human animals with a nervous system capable of hijacking every internal resource when danger seems immediate and potentially lethal.

That reaction, the yelling, the fear, the fury, was a perfectly reasonable response to the situation.

Her kids, potentially in danger. Her partner, apparently oblivious. Her nervous system did exactly what an animal’s nervous system is supposed to do when it perceives a threat to its offspring.

The thing that brought her to tears wasn’t the incident. It was the feeling that she’d broken a rule. Done something wrong. That her strong emotional response was the problem.

And I want to use that story to introduce you to one of the most powerful questions I know.

It comes from the Latin: cui bono?

Who benefits?

It’s a question prosecutors use, and historians, and authors of detective fiction, and anyone who wants to understand why a particular rule or system exists. You follow the benefit, and it tells you a great deal about who made the rule, and why.

It can be tempting to ask ‘who taught me this?’ but honestly, that’s not always the most efficient answer, because it leads to an almost endless series of ‘and who taught THEM?’ questions.

Cui bono cuts to the chase.

So let’s apply it here.

The rule my client was applying to herself: strong emotional responses are a failure of self-control, especially in women.

Cui bono? Who benefits from women believing that?

Not my client. Not her kids. Not even her husband, who was so startled by her reaction in that moment, you can guarantee he’ll do things differently next time.

The one who benefits from women keeping their anger locked in a dungeon is the system that is frightened of women’s anger.

Women’s anger, when it’s given appropriate expression, is data, a warning a signal.

It is fuel, the spark with the power to disrupt the status quo.

And there are systems, and people within those systems, who have a vested interest in keeping that power suppressed.

In this situation, who benefits from the rule “women must not get angry” is the status quo.

Not her. The system.

Now, I want to be clear about something, because this is not a call to throw out every rule you’ve ever been given.

When you ask “cui bono?”, the answer is ultimately almost always ‘the system’ when you go deep enough.

And that doesn’t always mean every rule is a bad thing.

There are three kinds of answers you’ll find when you ask cui bono.

The first: sometimes the rule benefits you directly. “Stop at a red light” is a rule, and when you follow it, you are absolutely one of the beneficiaries. So are your passengers, and all the other drivers and pedestrians around you. So is the system. Everyone’s safety matters. Keep that rule.

The second: sometimes the rule doesn’t benefit you personally, but it benefits your community, and you’re glad of that. I pay tax, and I do it gladly, because I like living in a society that funds schools and aged care centres and healthcare and libraries and roads I may never drive down. The benefit isn’t mine alone, but I’m choosing to participate with my eyes open. I don’t just tolerate it, I celebrate it. When the answer to cui bono? is ‘community’ it’s nuanced and worth pondering.

The third, and the one we’re focused on today: sometimes the rule harms you, and the primary beneficiary is a system that has an interest in keeping you controlled, compliant, and quiet. The “rule” that women must never be too loud, too angry, too ambitious, too much; the “rule” that you should be grateful for what you have and not ask for more; the “rule” that your needs come last.

Those are the ones that deserve some disruption and a little wiggle room.

The tool for looking at them is the same in every case: cui bono? Who actually benefits from me following this rule?

And is that a benefit I want to continue contributing to?

Here’s the thing about asking this question: it doesn’t automatically tell you what to do. It gives you information. And what you do with that information is your choice.

That is the whole point.

You are not a victim of the rules that were handed to you. You are also not obliged to comply with all of them for the rest of your life, simply because someone, somewhere, decided they were correct.

You are a sovereign human being, with the capacity to look at any rule, ask who benefits, and make a genuinely informed choice about how you respond.

My client didn’t need to try and suppress her emotions; nor did she need to condemn herself for them. She just needed to step back from the rule and see clearly who benefited from her belief that her anger was the problem.

And that opened up a completely different set of questions to work with: what did she actually need from her husband going forward? What could they work on together so she felt she could trust him in the future? What did the kids need, to understand about safety? What did she herself need that might be useful next time, for handling the aftermath of a scary moment?

Real questions. Useful questions. Questions with answers that actually served her.

That’s what happens when you ask cui bono and let the answer inform your choices, rather than simply absorbing the rule and turning it inward as self-criticism.

So here is your practice for this week. It’s a simple one, but don’t underestimate it.

When you notice yourself feeling that particular flavour of self-criticism, the one that sounds like “I should have…” or “a person like me ought to be able to…” or “what is wrong with me, why can’t I just…”, pause.

And ask: cui bono? Who actually benefits from me believing this about myself?

If the honest answer is “I do”, great. Keep the standard, and keep your eyes open.

If the honest answer is “my community does, and I’m okay with that”, also fine. That’s a choice made in full awareness.

But if the honest answer is “the system does, and I don’t”, then you have just spotted a brain weasel working on behalf of something that is not your friend. And you can start to make a different choice.

You don’t have to dismantle it all at once. Just look at it. Name it. Ask the question. That act alone starts to loosen the grip.

And if you’d like a journal prompt alongside this: think of one rule about how you ‘should’ behave in your working life, one that makes you feel a bit small or a bit wrong when you think about it.

Ask: cui bono? Who benefits, really?

You don’t have to do anything with the answer yet; just let yourself see it clearly.

If you’re finding that some of these rules feel very stubborn and very deeply installed, please know that’s not a sign you’re broken. It’s a sign the grooming went deep. Looking at it honestly is a genuinely brave thing to do. Take it gently, and bring a lot of self-compassion to the process.

Next week, we’re staying with this territory, because there’s one specific word that the brain weasels absolutely love to deploy, and once you know how to spot it, you’ll see it everywhere. And I’ve got a delightfully simple tool for defusing it.

Until then, take care of yourself, gorgeous one, and go wreak some joy.

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