At some point you started asking where it began. You went back through your early years looking for the moment. You found several candidates and could not prove any of them. I think there's old stuff stuck in me that I can't seem to get past.
That is a smaller answer than the question usually hopes for.
01
What the method assumes
The working view is plain. Nobody arrives with a rule. A person arrives neutral, and family, culture and circumstance write the rest. What got them through, they kept doing.
None of that is good or bad. It worked, or seemed to, and so it stayed.
02
What the method does not claim
It does not claim to know where a rule of yours, if there is one, came from. No page in this library will tell you what happened in your childhood, and subtraction starts from one moment this month and not your full history.
It does not claim there was a single event. Often there is nothing to date. The one rule whose entry mentions a dated origin is Ahead: a time something went wrong, was corrected, and watchfulness followed. Even there, the entry warns against treating the event as the rule, since what it strengthened was usually there already.
And it does not claim that someone did this to you. Where a rule came from and whose fault it is are separate questions. The second has its own page.
03
One example
Two people each learned, somewhere, to keep quiet when things got tense. They might give the same account of where it started.
What they are doing with the quiet now may differ. One may be protecting the calm. Under Peace the fear is that someone's disappointment means you did something wrong. The other may be protecting how they are seen. Under Strong the fear is that if they see you struggle, you lose the only standing you have.
Protecting them, or protecting yourself? Protecting them from being upset is the Peace answer. Protecting yourself leaves Strong or Burden, and a different question sorts those two.
The origin is the same and the present condition may not be. So the origin alone can't be what finds the rule.
04
What to do with the question
Where it began is a real question, and if it matters to you, a therapist is well placed to help with it. If what you find there is heavy, licensed mental-health care is the right door.If tonight is an emergency, call or text 988 (US). This library is not that door.
For the narrower job of finding what is running now, subtraction works from present scenes. If those don't settle it, there is not enough to tell yet, and going further back may not supply what is missing. Sometimes the plain answer is that it is a habit from an earlier time with nothing under it.
Why something costly now may have been reasonable then is on Why Your Rule Made Sense Once.