Newton's Law

Newton’s Law

William R. Colagrande, MS

Quick, what is Newton’s Third Law of Motion? Give up? Among other concepts to be found in Sir Isaac’s 1687 treatise, his third law can be paraphrased as For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Although his work was in describing the physical laws of motion, you can apply this axiom to emotional exchanges as well.

Think of it this way: as infants and young children we are certainly going to encounter instances where something out in the environment is going to have a negative impact upon us. Some important need is not being met. It hurts us. Emotionally, we react much as we would when we get too near a flame: we withdraw instinctively. By withdraw I mean that we retract, as it were, our emotional sense receptors. This serves to help blunt the pain and also provides a wonderful opportunity to feel like you have an option in this or similar situations: you don’t have to just stand there and take it; you can react to defend yourself. This latter point is a very important consideration for the developing ego.

Ideally, in a short time, we manage to cope somehow with the hurt and begin to open up to the world again. That is, unless these assaults from the environment occur too early or too often. The more they happen and the earlier in terms of the infant’s psychological development they occur, the greater long-term damage they inflict. Think of a clam. The clam has a very soft body, very tender (unless overcooked) but it does lie within a very hard and solid protective shell. When something adverse impinges upon the clam he slams his shell very tight. Gradually he reopens it again, once the threat passes. With the human infant, his “clamshell” when re-opened, may not open as fully as it did previously. Still smarting from the intrusion, the human infant protects himself. He is more on the alert now for danger. When the next threat comes, he’ll be able to react more rapidly and protect himself more effectively.

When this type situation happens too early in the infant’s psychological development, the outlook is not good. The results can range from some types of psychoses on the bad end of the continuum to chronic difficulty making emotional contact on the good side. When the impingement occurs after the infant has achieved a certain level of psychological development, the individual may experience problematic emotional relations, but he will be able to relate.

Now, let’s say you’re with your spouse or perhaps with a good friend. They accidentally (hopefully) say or do something that hurts you. You will react, at least momentarily, by withdrawing emotionally. Depending upon the situation, you may cope with the situation rather quickly and relax into an attitude of emotional openness again. Or, it may take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, etc to cope. You may go to the grave never having fully coped.

Often, when we have an argument with our spouse or other loved one and things go unresolved, we suffer a painful, lonely feeling. We may still feel hurt, angry or resentful, but we also notice we miss contact with the other. Missing them is basically a good thing: it’s what drives us to learn to cope with difficulties in order to emotionally reunite with our loved one.

A lot of the time we may think that the lonely, missing feeling is attributable to the fact that our loved one has (at least) momentarily turned away from us. We miss the positive emotional contact we’re used to getting from them because they aren’t broadcasting any at the moment. And this may well be true: at the moment they may not be feeling warm and cuddly towards us.

But there is a second option that we often overlook: that we are feeling lonely and sad not because our loved one is rejecting us but because we are rejecting them. By contracting emotionally, closing our clamshell, we are cutting ourselves off emotionally from the world. We are going to tend to feel scared and lonely as a result. The good news is that while we can’t effectively influence when our loved one is going resume responding positively toward us again (though flowers and candy are certainly worth a try), we can determine when we are going to be emotionally open again. We can effectively learn to limit the emotional damage to one aspect of our lives (in this case, relationship) and not allow it to color our entire experience.

A big difference in our present lives, which I find often gets overlooked, is this: when we were infants we truly were dependent; now we only feel that way. Feeling emotional dependency, requiring others to respond to us in a certain way, is a common enough occurrence. It can be very problematic particularly if we haven’t upgraded our coping skills recently. Coping is not the same as resolving and it is helpful to learn how to resolve life’s problems rather than just manage them. If you are experiencing a lot of problems in your life or perhaps just two or three persistent ones, think of it as a sign from the universe that you are overdue for a coping upgrade.

Where the clam/human analogy breaks down is that the clam is limited to only one simple reaction. As humans we have a lot more choices. Turning away emotionally is really a rather crude level of defense, ok for infants but a less than satisfactory option for adults. Struggling to remain open in the face of adversity helps not only give us confidence and combat loneliness, but allows for greater sophisticated and therefore more satisfactory outcomes in our most important relationships.

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Comments, questions, concerns? I’m always interested in your feedback: e-mail bill@i4hd.com with your ideas.