I've always found Newton's life super fascinating because not only was he like one of the smartest guys ever, but when you read about his life, like he was a total head case, like had a very traumatic childhood, suffered a lot of abuse and just was very antisocial and emotionally dysfunctional his entire life. And so I thought it would be really cool to kind of use him and his life as an example to demonstrate a lot of these topics that we're talking about. you know in terms of identity growth self-discipline etc and so I took his three laws of motion and I basically just created emotional analogs of those so the first one was a for every action there's an equal and opposite emotional reaction and this is basically just the idea that every emotion is simply a response to either pain or the absence of pain So when you remove pain from life, a positive emotion emerges in reaction. And if you add pain into life, a negative emotion emerges. The second one.
The second one, if I remember right, was. Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time. So you could even, you might even say like identity equals our emotions over time. So basically, let's say something traumatic happens. in your childhood.
That pain early on in your life causes a lot of negative emotions. And one of the things that I talk about is that anytime we feel an emotion, it compels us to do what I call equalizing, which is like, if I'm angry at you, I'm going to continue to be angry at you until I either get, you know, retaliate or you apologize. Like something needs to happen to make that anger go away. There needs to be some sort of like equalization between us.
And if there is no equalization, that anger just kind of simmers and sits there forever. And one of the reasons why childhood traumas are so debilitating for people is that essentially these extremely painful experiences occur to our feeling brains while our thinking brains are still undeveloped and don't know how to explain or create meaning around that pain. So let's say something really painful happened to me now, I'd be like, oh, well, you know, he meant well and, you know, shit happens or whatever. But if I'm like a five year old, my explanation for it only gets as far as like, I'm a bad, I'm a bad boy.
I'm a bad person. And the world hates me, you know, like that's and that will stick because it doesn't get equalized and will stick for the rest of my life. And the problem is, is that we forget that that painful thing happened. So we just kind of go through life.
with this feeling of inferiority and pain that lingers that we can't really put an explanation to or explain away. And so the process of therapy is basically unraveling a lot of our experiences until we get back to that original experience. And with our adult thinking brain, we can now put meaning to that pain that is helpful to us, essentially. So that's the second law, is that our identity is the sum of our emotions over time.
And then the third law is our identity will continue to be our identity until new experience acts against us. So to use the music school example, I was a musician. I would introduce myself as a musician. And then I got to second semester of music school and had my ass handed to me.
And suddenly I'm like, oh shit. I'm not a musician anymore, you know, and now I have to go around and it's like, I'm not a musician. I don't know what I am.
But it required, there was some new contrary experience that was required to create that shift within me. And this is why identity change, by definition, needs to be painful and uncomfortable. Because if it's not painful or uncomfortable, nothing's changing, nothing's shifting. There might be a perception of a change.
But ultimately, the only way our values change is that life knocks us on our ass a little bit and causes us to question everything we understand.