NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMOTION
Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts
Against It
Here’s a common sob story. Boy cheats on girl. Girl is heartbroken. Girl
despairs. Boy leaves girl, and girl’s pain lingers for years afterward. Girl feels
like shit about herself. And in order for her Feeling Brain to maintain hope,
her Thinking Brain must pick one of two explanations. She can believe either
that (a) all boys are shit or (b) she is shit.
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Well, shit. Neither of those is a good option.
But she decides to go with option (a), “all boys are shit,” because, after
all, she still has to live with herself. This choice isn’t made consciously, mind
you. It just kind of happens.
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Jump ahead a few years. Girl meets another boy. This boy isn’t shit. In
fact, this boy is the opposite of shit. He’s pretty rad. And sweet. And cares.
Like, really, truly cares.
But girl is in a conundrum. How can this boy be real? How can he be
true? After all, she knows that all boys are shit. It’s true. It must be true; she
has the emotional scars to prove it.
Sadly, the realization that this boy is not shit is too painful for girl’s
Feeling Brain to handle, so she convinces herself that he is, indeed, shit. She
nitpicks his tiniest flaws. She notices every errant word, every misplaced
gesture, every awkward touch. She zeroes in on his most insignificant
mistakes until they stand bright in her mind like a flashing strobe light
screaming, “Run away! Save yourself!”
So, she does. She runs. And she runs in the most horrible of ways. She
leaves him for another boy. After all, all boys are shit. So, what’s trading one
piece of shit for another? It means nothing.
Boy is heartbroken. Boy despairs. The pain lingers for years and morphs
into shame. And this shame puts the boy in a tough position. Because now his
Thinking Brain must make a choice: either (a) all girls are shit or (b) he is
shit.
Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.
When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work
constructing a narrative to explain that something. Losing your job doesn’t
just suck; you’ve constructed an entire narrative around it: Your asshole boss
wronged you after years of loyalty! You gave yourself to that company! And
what did you get in return?
Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds and hanging onto our
identities like tight, wet clothes. We carry them around with us and define
ourselves by them. We trade narratives with others, looking for people whose
narratives match our own. We call these people friends, allies, good people.
And those who carry narratives that contradict our own? We call them evil.
Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a)
something or someone’s value and (b) whether that something/someone
deserves that value. All narratives are constructed in this way:
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Every book, myth, fable, history—all human meaning that’s
communicated and remembered is merely the daisy-chaining of these little
value-laden narratives, one after the other, from now until eternity.
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These narratives we invent for ourselves around what’s important and
what’s not, what is deserving and what is not—these stories stick with us and
define us, they determine how we fit ourselves into the world and with each
other. They determine how we feel about ourselves—whether we deserve a
good life or not, whether we deserve to be loved or not, whether we deserve
success or not—and they define what we know and understand about
ourselves.
This network of value-based narratives is our identity. When you think to
yourself, I’m a pretty bad-ass boat captain, har-de-har, that is a narrative
you’ve constructed to define yourself and to know yourself. It’s a component
of your walking, talking self that you introduce to others and plaster all over
your Facebook page. You captain boats, and you do it damn well, and
therefore you deserve good things.
But here’s the funny thing: when you adopt these little narratives as your
identity, you protect them and react emotionally to them as though they were
an inherent part of you. The same way that getting punched will cause a
violent emotional reaction, someone coming up and saying you’re a shitty
boat captain will produce a similarly negative emotional reaction, because we
react to protect the metaphysical body just as we protect the physical.
Our identities snowball through our lives, accumulating more and more
values and meaning as they tumble along. You are close with your mom
growing up, and that relationship brings you hope, so you construct a story in
your mind that comes to partly define you, just as your thick hair or your
brown eyes or your creepy toenails define you. Your mom is a huge part of
your life. Your mom is an amazing woman. You owe everything to your
mom . . . and other shit people say at the Academy Awards. You then protect
that piece of your identity as if it were a part of you. Someone comes along
and talks shit about your mom, and you absolutely lose your mind and start
breaking things.
Then that experience creates a new narrative and new value in your mind.
You, you decide, have anger issues . . . especially around your mother. And
now that becomes an inherent part of your identity.
And on and on it goes.
The longer we’ve held a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the
more fundamental it is to how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
Like interest on a bank loan, our values compound over time, growing
stronger and coloring future experiences. It’s not just the bullying from when
you were in grade school that fucks you up. It’s the bullying plus all the self-
loathing and narcissism you brought to decades worth of future relationships,
causing them all to fail, that adds up over time.
Psychologists don’t know much for certain,
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but one thing they definitely
do know is that childhood trauma fucks us up.
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This “snowball effect” of
early values is why our childhood experiences, both good and bad, have long-
lasting effects on our identities and generate the fundamental values that go
on to define much of our lives. Your early experiences become your core
values, and if your core values are fucked up, they create a domino effect of
suckage that extends through the years, infecting experiences large and small
with their toxicity.
When we’re young, we have tiny and fragile identities. We’ve
experienced little. We’re completely dependent on our caretakers for
everything, and inevitably, they’re going to mess it up. Neglect or harm can
cause extreme emotional reactions, resulting in large moral gaps that are
never equalized. Dad walks out, and your three-year-old Feeling Brain
decides that you were never lovable in the first place. Mom abandons you for
some rich new husband, and you decide that intimacy doesn’t exist, that no
one can ever be trusted.
No wonder Newton was such a cranky loner.
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And the worst thing is, the longer we’ve held onto these narratives, the
less aware we are that we have them. They become the background noise of
our thoughts, the interior decoration of our minds. Despite being arbitrary and
completely made up, they seem not only natural but inevitable.
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The values we pick up throughout our lives crystallize and form a
sediment on top of our personality.
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The only way to change our values is to
have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from
those values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with
pain and discomfort.
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This is why there is no such thing as change without
pain, no growth without discomfort. It’s why it is impossible to become
someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.
Because when we lose our values, we grieve the death of those defining
narratives as though we’ve lost a part of ourselves—because we have lost a
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