70. The 3rd Law of Conflict: Can Isaac Newton Help us Heal?

When trust is broken through infidelity, it’s easy to fall into conflict, whether with your partner, yourself, or those around you. But what if the way you react to others’ actions is the very thing fuelling the disconnection you want to resolve? In this thought-provoking episode, I explore the surprising link between emotional conflict and Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Through stories, insights, and personal reflection, you’ll discover why pushing harder in a relationship rarely brings connection and how shifting your internal dialogue can create space for healing, even if nothing on the outside changes. If you’re ready to move beyond blame and towards understanding, this episode is a must-listen.

Key Takeaways:

• Conflict often escalates when we try to control or correct others instead of understanding them.

• Newton’s Third Law mirrors emotional dynamics: push harder, get more resistance.

• Your relationships are shaped by your thoughts, not the actions of others.

• True healing starts with changing your internal narrative, not fixing external behaviours.

• Connection deepens when we accept people for who they are, flaws and all.

💬 Reflection Questions:

Have you found yourself stuck in an emotional tug-of-war with someone? What would happen if you stopped pushing and started accepting?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go! Hello and welcome to episode number 70. I've been thinking if this is your first time here, this is the first time you've listened to this, listened to me, then well welcome. I'm Luke.

It's absolutely wonderful to have you here regardless of the circumstances that may have brought us together. I want you to know that this journey, although probably not one that you chose, is a significant and vital step where we take a situation that wasn't invited but can be the catalyst for so much change, so much growth, so much more understanding of the people around us but also ourselves on a level that maybe we just hadn't explored before. It opens the doors to many areas of human communication and friendships and relationships in general that can be expanded and improved on, yeah, almost immeasurably.

It's a really wonderful opportunity to take and move forward. For those of you who already know me, maybe you've been listening for a few weeks, a few months, maybe a little bit longer, thank you as well of course. I feel like it's, you know, I sit here in front of my microphone and it's you that I'm talking to, literally, and it's very rewarding for me.

It's something that I get a lot of satisfaction, a lot of pleasure from, regardless of the feedback that comes back. And of course when I do receive feedback then even better still, you know, it's like a win-win situation. It's interesting though that many of the people that I do connect with, having discovered me through the podcast, really feel like they know me.

And it makes sense. I try to be authentic and genuine and honest and consistent and obviously my main purpose really is to try and help. This just allows me a platform in which I can do that on a grander scale than just my one-to-one coaching.

It's with this in mind that really, it really highlights the idea that a relationship, a friendship, is one person's thoughts about the other person. Because, I mean, I have spoken about this before. When I was a teenager I'd have posters on my bedroom wall of my motorbike heroes.

For me it was Carl Fogarty, world superbike rider in the 1990s. And then there was also Jennifer Aniston and some, you know, some other famous actresses that took up some of that space as well. And I really felt a kind of a connection, if you like.

You know, I felt warm, I felt nice, I felt excited, I felt all kinds of emotions when I thought about those people. Even if that relationship that I had was clearly one-sided. Obviously I never met Carl Fogarty or Jennifer Aniston.

And the interesting point being that that relationship, I was still in a relationship. I'm not talking romantic, but I was in a relationship with those people. They made me feel, or at least that was how I saw it at the time, I felt emotion, I felt feelings of desire and love and admiration and, you know, all of these things that ultimately created an experience for me.

Yet they didn't have to actually do anything. You know, they didn't, what I mean by that is they didn't have to do anything specifically to me or for me or communicate with me in any way shape or form. They just did their thing and I interpreted that in a way that made me feel good.

And the same is true here in the podcast. For the people listening to me and those who have got to know me a bit more, then there's that connection. There's that relationship that has formed even though you and I may have never spoken in person.

Now isn't that interesting? How your thoughts can create a connection with another human being having never actually met that person. So what does this mean for our personal relationships? For the people that we do know, the people that we are connected to physically or we see regularly, they're in our lives on a day-to-day basis. Maybe it's our children, maybe it's our family, maybe it's our close friend, maybe it's our partner.

Well it means that the connection that we have with them is still the same. It's still essentially just the way that we think and feel about that person. Which means it's within our control.

If we think about the idea of love, well love is something that only you experience. You can't experience somebody else's love. Nor can you give your love to somebody else.

You can have loving feelings for somebody and they can have loving feelings for you. You can't actually exchange them. In addition to this is the idea that people are lovable.

And I want to question and challenge that. I don't believe that people are lovable, at least in the way that we think they are. What I mean by that is their lovability is not dependent on them.

What I believe is in the capacity that one person has to love somebody else. You as an individual and everybody else for that matter is completely lovable. We are 100% lovable.

What this means is that the variation that we see in these relationships and friendships is all dependent on the person making that assessment. In this case it might be you. Let's say you have a friend or somebody that you know well and you feel very positive emotions towards that person.

Does everybody in the world see that person the same way? Does everybody else feel the same way about them? The answer is obviously no. And the reason is no is because we all have different thoughts about that person. So the lovability is not about the person.

How lovable they are is not about them. It's about your capacity to love. Your choice to love.

Because of the quality of thinking that you have about that person. So with all this it got me thinking and I've been thinking about conflict in relationships and and how that potentially relates to physics. I love physics.

I have always really enjoyed experimenting and playing and understanding how things work and why they do the things they do. I've been fascinated by science as a whole and I noticed that, it's funny, there was me and my son stood side-by-side just recently. We were talking about, I think he went through this phase where he absolutely loved planets and currently he's big into robots.

And again so very sort of science-based you know which is fun for me because it means I get to re-ignite my memories about things that I learned when I was younger and you know learn some new things and yeah so really exciting. Anyway we've been talking about Newton's laws and how every action has an equal and opposite reaction and I was thinking about the two of us just stood there on the ground at the time and this sort of idea was forming and basically the premise being that you know my son was stood there he weighs I don't know 25 kilogrammes something like that and so there's this weight of 25 kilogrammes pushing down on the earth and the earth is pushing back by the same amount. It's matching his force if you like.

This therefore means that they are cancelling each other out then the relative movement between them is zero. Now I'd just like to caveat that I recognise that weight kilogrammes are a measure of mass not a measure of force and to be technically correct I should be using Newtons but for the sake of what I'm talking about hopefully this just makes sense and then I thought about okay what about me so I'm stood next to him and I'm much heavier than he is I weigh I think around 75 kilogrammes so let's say roughly 50 kilogrammes heavier than he does and so therefore I'm stood there my weight's pushing down to the ground at the force of 75 kilogrammes and the earth is pushing back up by the same amount and therefore cancelling it out so I thought well that's interesting there's the we're both pushing down on the ground and the force pushed back up is meeting our individual weights and this continues you know the heavier the something becomes the greater force it applies on the ground and therefore the greater force is essentially pushed back up to counterbalance it. What I've noticed in all the work that I've done and all my own personal experiences is that the harder you push the harder you resist the harder you challenge somebody who you disagree with whatever the circumstances the harder the force you get back.

So it's almost if we go in a situation where we are reacting to our emotions someone has said or done something that hasn't aligned with our values our morals or or whatever it is we've just been frustrated by it in some way and we react in the situation maybe we shout or we say something passive-aggressive or something sarcastic or we're just rude and inconsiderate and we're not opening to the possibility that they may know something that we don't or they may be just looking at it from a completely different situation and we basically apply all of this force towards them. Now of course if we go based on the idea that with Newton's third law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction then the harder we push the harder the resistance in the turn and we see that all the time we get angry with somebody guess what they nearly always get angry back and even if they don't even if it's met with a more dismissive a more disconnected a more disinterested approach then there's still resistance for us it still feels like resistance because we're not getting the thing that we want and we have to push really really hard to overpower that and let's say we do let's say we do overpower it and I'm thinking particularly in like a dynamic where you've got like a parent and a child because ultimately you are responsible for your children if a child continues to do something that you either don't want them to or isn't safe or whatever that there becomes a point where you can as a parent theoretically overpower that and I don't necessarily mean in a physical sense but maybe we could restrict the use of a device for example or we could ground them or we could you know what whatever the the consequences we could do something that is kind of out of our child's control so we are able to like overcome it but then it's okay well how do we feel about that decision you know when we sit back and now our son or daughters are upset or angry or maybe they've gone back to the room and they're crying or they've stopped talking to you or they've said some things that you know really didn't sound very nice and actually all that's happened is the resistance has come back in a different form but the same is still true the harder you push the harder the resistance and when we get two opposing forces like that they essentially cancel each other out to an extent but what ends up happening is it creates like a wall it creates like a divide between the two conflicting thoughts or ideas which leads to no forward progress and this is really the crux of what I'm talking about here when we believe that the other person has to change for us to feel better then we are always going to be victim to the behaviour of that other person if we can accept the other person for who they are with their faults and their flaws and their mistakes and their humanness and still accept them as being lovable still accept them as being worthy and we we choose to see the person from that perspective it doesn't mean all their individual actions are necessarily right or wrong it's not really about that it's about looking at the human beyond and it's like do I want to increase connection with this person or do I want to decrease connection with this person now for most people particularly when it's in our close relationships usually we're wanting less conflict we're wanting to increase connection we're not wanted to do things that have the opposite effect yet the harder we push the further away we get from the results that we're trying to achieve so what can we take from all of this well how about we work backwards we can recognise that when we create conflict or when we are involved in conflict that the harder we push the more resistance we get back which usually increases the intended outcome we're not forming strong relationships we're increasing disconnection ultimately breaking down relationships rather than building them up then we can also note that our quality of thinking about another person affects the likelihood that we would even enter into conflict with that person if we can understand and accept and truly love that person for who they are regardless of their individual let's say behavioural faults or at least our perceived perception of behavioural flaws and faults then it reduces the likelihood that would even want to enter into conflict and we might want to consider other alternatives in terms of how we communicate with that person and overcome challenges that we face together and then finally dragging it bringing it back to the start we're recognising that our relationship is all about our thinking about that person which is completely within our control so ultimately by choosing to think in a way that better suits our long-term goals to view people in a more positive light to be able to accept them for who they are even if there are certain elements that you do not like or aren't in a line with how you would do it or maybe you even think that they're wrong you know of course these are all subjective statements they're things that you feel you believe and it's one thing to be able to own those thoughts and say okay this person sees something differently to me and that's okay versus this person sees something different to me and they're wrong and I'm going to do everything I can to solve that which as we've learned cannot be solved all you end up doing is forcing and when we apply the force we're met with equal force and no progress is made so take from that what you will think about how that applies to some of your relationships whether it be with your partner whether it be with friends work colleagues your boss or anybody for that matter how can you take this today and implement it in your life in a way that's going to ease, increase connection and improve your relationships. Hope that's been useful look forward to speaking to you all again next week if anybody would like any more information like to question me on anything specific have any particular topics that you'd love me to cover in the podcast then please let me know drop me an email contact me on social media you can contact me at Luke at LifeCoachLuke.com or you can access my social media accounts at MyLifeCoachLuke.

Other than that have another amazing week and I'll talk to you all soon.