The Four Agreements, Through a Depth Psychology Lens

14 Oct 2026 · @DepthPsychotherapyShoreditch

Simple to read, hard to live

The Four Agreements is one of those books people press into each other's hands. Don Miguel Ruiz's short text has sold millions of copies since 1997, and most people can recite the agreements after one reading. Be impeccable with your word. Don't take anything personally. Don't make assumptions. Always do your best.

And yet, in my consulting room, I rarely meet anyone who struggles to understand them. What people struggle with is living them. They know they shouldn't take their partner's mood personally, and they still lie awake replaying the conversation. They know they're assuming the worst, and they assume it anyway.

Ruiz presents the agreements as Toltec wisdom, drawn from the ancient Mesoamerican culture of central Mexico and, he says, handed down through his own family. Historians would remind us that this "Toltec" path is Ruiz's spiritual framing rather than an archaeological record. But the heart of his teaching translates remarkably well into the language of depth psychology.

Ruiz argues that we are "domesticated" as children. Long before we can choose, we absorb a dense web of agreements about who we are, what we're worth and how the world works. Most of these agreements were never consciously made. They were simply taken in, and they run us still.

That is almost exactly how a depth psychotherapist thinks about the psyche. Jung spoke of complexes: emotionally charged patterns, formed early, that act with a will of their own. Psychoanalytic writers speak of introjects: the voices of parents, teachers and culture that we swallowed whole and now mistake for our own.

So in this piece I want to read each agreement through that lens. Not as a rule to obey, but as a doorway. Where we keep breaking an agreement is usually where something older is asking to be understood.

I. Be impeccable with your word

Most people hear this as a rule about honesty and gossip. Ruiz means something wider: that words have the power to create or to poison, and that the person most exposed to our words is ourselves.

This is where depth psychology starts to get interesting. Listen closely to how most people speak to themselves when they make a mistake. Idiot. You always do this. No wonder nobody stays. It is rarely kind, and it is rarely original.

The inner critic usually speaks in a borrowed voice. Sometimes it is a parent's exact phrasing. Sometimes it is the tone of a teacher, a sibling, or a culture that told you what a man or a woman should be. Ruiz describes this as an inner Judge. Analysts would call it a harsh superego, or an introject that was never digested.

So being impeccable with your word begins with a question rather than a resolution. Whose voice is this? Once you can hear that the critic has an accent, it becomes something you can relate to rather than something you simply are.

That does not mean silencing it. In my experience, the critic often began as a protector. It tried to keep a child safe by getting to the criticism first. The work is to understand what it was guarding against, and to find a more truthful way of speaking to yourself now.

II. Don't take anything personally

Ruiz's point is that what others say and do comes from their own inner world: their history, their fears, their dreams. Their reaction is information about them, not a verdict on you.

Depth psychology agrees, and has a name for the mechanism. Projection is the process by which we place unacknowledged parts of ourselves onto other people. The colleague who is contemptuous of "weakness" may be fighting his own. The partner who accuses you of not caring may be meeting an old abandonment in your face.

But there is a second half to this that the advice alone can miss. The comments that wound us most are rarely random. They land because they touch something already sore. A throwaway remark about your work stings for days when you grew up feeling you were only loved for achieving.

So when something gets under your skin, I'd invite curiosity rather than more effort at detachment. Why this? Why so much? The intensity of a reaction is often a sign that we have brushed against a complex, an old wound with its own gravity.

There is a risk in this agreement too. Taken too far, "don't take it personally" can become a way of not feeling at all, or of excusing behaviour that genuinely is harmful. Not taking something personally does not mean tolerating it. Sometimes the healthiest response to someone's projection is a boundary.

III. Don't make assumptions

Ruiz's remedy for assumptions is beautifully simple: find the courage to ask questions, and to say what you really want.

What depth psychology adds is an account of where our assumptions come from. The mind cannot tolerate a blank. When a text goes unanswered, or a manager's face is unreadable, we fill the gap. And we rarely fill it with something new. We fill it with something old.

In therapy we call one form of this transference: the way we unconsciously experience people in the present through the template of people from the past. The partner who goes quiet becomes the parent who withdrew. The boss's short email becomes the teacher who humiliated you. The story feels like perception, but it is closer to memory.

This is why the advice to "just ask" can feel so hard. Asking means tolerating not knowing for a moment longer. It means risking the answer. For someone whose early world was unpredictable, a familiar painful story can feel safer than an uncertain one.

So I'd frame this agreement as a practice of noticing. When you catch yourself certain about what someone else is thinking, ask yourself where you have felt this before. Then, if you can, ask them.

IV. Always do your best

This is the agreement that holds the other three, and it is the one most often misread. Ruiz is careful to say that your best changes from moment to moment. Your best when rested is not your best when ill, grieving or exhausted.

For many of the people I work with, especially those in high-pressure careers, "do your best" has quietly become "be perfect". Their best is never enough because the standard keeps moving. Underneath the drive there is often a frightened younger self, convinced that love and safety depend on performance.

Perfectionism, in this light, is less about excellence and more about fear. It is a defence against shame: if I never fail, no one can see that I am not enough. It tends to produce the opposite of its aim, in burnout, procrastination and a life that feels like an endless exam.

The paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott offered a useful antidote in the idea of the good-enough mother. He observed that children don't need perfect parents. They need parents who are reliably present, who fail in manageable ways, and who repair.

I think Ruiz's fourth agreement asks something similar of us. To do our best is to be good enough, and to treat ourselves with the same reliable, forgiving presence we would offer a child we loved.

Breaking the agreements is the point

If you read The Four Agreements and found yourself thinking I know all this, so why can't I do it?, you are not failing. You are finding the edge of what willpower can reach.

The old agreements Ruiz describes were not made by the conscious mind, so the conscious mind alone cannot unmake them. They live in the body, in our relationships and in our reactions. They show themselves most clearly in the moments we break the new agreements we want to live by.

That is why I'd suggest treating each broken agreement not as a failure but as information. The harsh word to yourself, the comment you couldn't shake, the story you told about someone's silence, the night you worked until 2am. Each one points somewhere. Followed with curiosity, it can lead back to the original agreement, and to the younger part of you who made it.

This is the work of depth psychotherapy. We descend into those patterns, contain what we find there, and slowly integrate it, so that new agreements can take root.

If this resonates and you'd like to explore it with support, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. You can book a time here or email me at info@joseph-madden.co.uk.

Joseph Madden is a depth psychotherapist (MBACP) working in Shoreditch, Hackney and Peckham, and online.