A pattern is the shape of what keeps happening: you get close to someone, you pull away.
A rule is the condition your system is obeying when it does that: if they see all of me, they leave. The pattern is visible from the outside. The rule is not, and the rule is what fires.
01
The short answer
Most people can describe their pattern in a sentence. Very few have named the rule, and you cannot interrupt something you have not located.
02
What a pattern is
A pattern is a recurring sequence. Trigger, response, cost, repeat. It shows up across different areas of life with different surface details: the fight is about dishes, then about money, then about your mother, and it is the same fight. A pattern is evidence. It is where the looking starts, not where it ends.
03
What a rule is
A rule is the if-then your nervous system runs on. If I am not producing, I do not matter. If everyone is okay, I am okay. If I ask, I owe. It was learned early, in a situation where it was accurate, and it has not been updated since. You would not say it out loud, because said out loud it sounds obviously false. Your body does not care how it sounds.
Project Gina's library describes 9 rules of worth and safety. They are hypotheses, not types, and any honest test has to be allowed to conclude that none of them fit.
04
Why the distinction matters
"I shut down in conflict."
"If I say it, something bad follows." (Peace)
"If they see this get to me, the image breaks." (Strong)
Same pattern, two rules, two completely different things that would need to change. Person A needs to find out that someone can be upset with them and nothing terrible follows. Person B needs to fall apart in front of someone who stays. Advice aimed at the pattern ("communicate more openly") helps neither, because it is aimed at the smoke.
Different smoke. Same fire. Or: same smoke, different fires. You cannot tell which from the smoke.
05
How to tell them apart in your own life
- Describe what keeps happening in one sentence. That is the pattern.
- Take the last three times it happened. In each, ask: what would have happened if I had not done the thing?
- The answer your body gives, before your head edits it, is pointing at the rule.
- Check: does that rule also explain the other two moments? If it only explains one, it is not the rule, or not the only one.
06
How Project Gina uses this
Subtraction starts with the pattern because it is the evidence. It descends to the rule because that is where change happens. It then tests the rule against moments from across your life and removes it if it does not hold. That is subtraction.