The Law of Cause and Effect
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We have all learned Newton’s Laws of Motion at one point or the other during our education and applied it mainly to Physics. I have however tried to apply this to all areas of my life, unrelated to Physics. Commonly, when people have problems in life and feel powerless to solve them, this third law of motion is utilized to try and improve the situation.
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I have learned from my own experiences that when you direct positive words, actions and energy (‘positive energy’) at someone, the same positive energy gets thrown back at you. The quality of your thoughts controls your actions. If you have a negative mindset, your actions immediately start to follow suit, and thereby the energy directed at the people surrounding you becomes tainted with negativity.
Try and think about how this applies to mothers. We all begin our journey of motherhood with the intent to be calm, level-headed, fair and happy mothers; not only for our own sanity, but for the main purpose of setting a good example for our children. Do we all become OUR mothers? No, because as we evolve through life, we learn to judge right from wrong and make our own decisions on what to teach our children, however keeping in mind how our parents raised us. We most definitely learned from them every step of the way. As adolescents, we watched them closely and mimicked their words and actions every minute of every day. Everything positive and negative would have been picked up and ultimately embedded into our subconscious, waiting to thrust through the surface at some point in the future.
We want our children to be healthy, happy and free. Simple as that. For them to be so, their mothers need to be healthy, happy and free individuals. No one can deny that every family has its own set of problems and setbacks; however I have always been a firm believer of people being responsible for their own lives and the direction it takes. Similarly, I truly believe that mothers are responsible for the energy that is received by their children and we all want to nudge positive energy in their direction. If we are able to do that, based on Newton’s law of motion, this energy will bounce right back to us.
I have briefly mentioned in a previous post that articles all over the internet, preach to us that shouting at our children when they are throwing a tantrum about something, will only bring out the worst in them. So the best solution and RIGHT way is to let them calm down before having a rational conversation, and not shout back. This may be true, but easier to accomplish in theory than in practical life. Whether we are able to control ourselves and follow this piece of advice, or we are unable to control ourselves all the time resulting in heated and mean words being thrown at our children, the respective energy is absorbed by them. If we shout back, the negative energy is absorbed and emerges in the form of tantrums, lashing out and days of crankiness. We wonder why the shouting does not keep them in line and make them behave. I am not going to bring anger management techniques into the picture as there are already millions of websites with this information. Maybe we have our answer here....the law of cause and effect. If we are in a difficult situation with our children, the burden is on us to find a way to attract the kind of energy we want to reflect onto them, enabling them to make use of it and send it right back to us mothers.
I have often sat brooding after a ‘non-desirable’ session with my son, over the consequences that would result from the shouting which had just ensued. Practice makes perfect; so I have been training myself to nab the anger which often rises when your child is throwing a tantrum. Sometimes mumbling “calm yourself” to myself helps too. Would he repeat everything I said to his teachers in school? Would he think that this is the way that people are supposed to manage and solve problems.....by shouting at each other? Would this behaviour manifest in him and follow him for the rest of his life? Most of all, did I scar him in any way?
It is okay to shout back at your child sometimes. It should not be something that other mothers criticize, seeing a mother go through this. Often, on the street, in a restaurant, or even in school, we would have all seen a mother in a tough situation with her child, and others around her whispering, and for a lack of another word, ‘judging’. It happens in movies and in reality too! Isn’t this something that all mothers resonate with?
Making ourselves aware of the effect of this on our children, can help us be a little more pro-active in trying to send out positive energy instead of negative. We need to fill our minds with the kinds of thoughts we would want our children to be thinking 24/7; thoughts that can enable us to be a better version of ourselves, and be spectacular mothers. It’s a vicious circle, so at the end of the day, practice makes perfect!
