Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
Meaningful Happiness is a podcast that unpacks the science of emotions, relationships, and personal growth through the lens of Affect Relational Theory (ART), Chronic Shame Syndrome (CSS), and Latalescence—the second act of life where experience, adaptability, and purpose shape our journey forward.
Each episode explores how shame operates beneath the surface, influencing our confidence, connections, and sense of agency. Through deep insights and practical tools, we uncover ways to rewrite our personal narratives, break free from shame-based cycles, and cultivate a life rich in authenticity, curiosity, and joy.
Join me as we dive into the psychological frameworks and real-world applications that help us navigate relationships, self-perception, and the ever-evolving landscape of human experience.
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Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
Ep. 02- Mastering Your Feelings: The Path to Relationship Control
Unlock the secrets to emotional mastery with Dr. Scott Conkright, the pioneering founder of Affect Relational Therapy! Join us as Dr. Conkright shares transformative strategies for harnessing your emotions to foster happier, more meaningful relationships. Learn how to become keenly aware of your feelings, identify emotional triggers, and make timely interventions to improve your decision-making. Gain insights into the power of attention redirection and discover how thinking follows feeling, enabling you to create connections that are not only joyful but deeply rewarding.
As a therapist pioneering Affect Relational Therapy centered on the nine core affects like interest, enjoyment, anger and shame, I empower you to take control of runaway emotions and feelings by mastering attention redirection - the ultimate mindfulness skill for nurturing proud, meaningful happiness in your most cherished relationships. By understanding how hardwired biological feeling states and body sensations inherently capture human focus while catalyzing ruminating thought patterns, you can build the emotional intelligence to disengage from hostile affects and consciously realign your attentiveness with uplifting values, aspirations and bonding memories. This ethical mind-hacking equips you to curate your experience of captured states, authoring a passionate life narrative imbued with resonant emotional wellness.
For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
Hi, I'm Dr Scott Conkright, the founder of Affect Relational Therapy. I'm here to talk to you today about control, specifically about control of your feelings. Why is that important? The reason that's important is that I know, if you're like me, there are times where stuff happens in life like unexpectedly. You're having a great day, you're driving down the street, all of a sudden somebody honks at you or like lays on the horn, and your mood changes. One. You might be startled or surprised. Or all of a sudden, if they lay on the horn, you get angry. Then you go home to your partner, your spouse, friends, family, whatever. They say something, you say something and feelings get out of control.
Speaker 1:Where do we have control? In that I'm not a control expert. I'm an expert around feelings, and one of the things that I'm wanting to do to help you have control in your life is to understand how feelings work, what they're about, how they happen, what stimuli causes them to take place. They happen, what stimuli causes them to take place and at what point you can intervene those small, little slivers of time where you can make decisions, why you can make those decisions? Because you're calm and you can make an enormous change in your relationships and those small changes make life more meaningful and more happy, and that's what I want for you.
Speaker 1:What are you paying attention to? That is the secret, because the truth is it's hard for me, it's hard for anybody, to know what they're really paying attention to. We think we know what we're paying attention to, but we're often guided by things that we don't know are guiding us. One of the things that guides us profoundly is how we're feeling. It guides our emotional life and it guides what we're thinking. So what you're paying attention to is basically what controls you. So when I go back to like, talking about control, having control is having control over what you're paying attention to. So the only things that you are able to control are what you're aware of, and what you're aware of is a feeling. Now, I know that may sound really strange, but if you're in a fight with somebody let's say you're with your partner whoever you're dating a family member, it doesn't really matter when you get into some sort of riff with them. What you're paying attention to are what you're feeling. What you feel is being directed at you, that you feel defensive, that you're feeling attacked, that you're feeling angry, that you're feeling frightened frightened that they might leave frightened, that they may judge you might feel ashamed. Those feeling states called affects are what's taken over, that's what you're paying attention to.
Speaker 1:So one of the truths about being a human being is that because we are so good with taking in all the stuff around the world, in the world, around the world, in the world, we only have so much memory storage area in our heads. What we keep in our heads and pay attention to is what we feel. And if you want to try that out, think of any good memory and think of any bad memory you have and it's related to a feeling, if only the feeling of being interested in something or enjoying something, but also ashamed of something, frightened of something, and so forth. So, as a psychologist, a little truth about psychologists here, at least for me, I have special knowledge about you, actually the same knowledge everybody else has, but I just happen to be paying attention to this. This is where my attention is going. If I learn what you pay attention to, what matters to you, what you value, where you put your time and energy, in essence, what you're proud of, I know a lot about you because I know what positively pulls you to where you want to go and if I can find out and learn because you've trusted me to share with me this stuff what those hindrances are to your connection, to those positive feelings, essentially those obstacles to getting what you want. I know the other half of the equation and through that I can help you get to where you want to go. But I want to point out again those are feeling states.
Speaker 1:Pride and shame are feeling states. When you are interested in something and you're going after what you want, that is directing all the other emotional feelings that you have and the way that you're dealing with other people in your life. But it's also the source of all your thinking. So, believe it or not, thinking comes after feelings. It's when you're feeling good stuff. If you're feeling good stuff, you're going to think good stuff. If you are in a bad mood, you're going to think really depressing things and so forth. It's not as simple as that, but that's a big part of it. You have to at least understand that affects and feeling states are basically the stage on which everything else takes place. So when I know this about you, you and I can team up and we can then look at the obstacles but, importantly, find ways to go after the good stuff, and that is so important. So here's an empowerment tool for you which is as simple as this the skill to redirect your attention is the most powerful skill you can have to take control of how you're feeling and make the relationships as meaningful and happy as you want, redirecting your attention from what's happening during a bad moment. And that control to be able to say we're not getting what we want, I'm not feeling what I want, let's do something else, let's put our attention here. That skill is the master empowerment tool that you need to make your relationships work.
Speaker 1:You have been in an argument with somebody. I've been in an argument with somebody. It happens there's disagreements and they often feel really horrible. And if you get captured by those feelings, you were captured. You were captured intellectually, cognitively, affectively, emotionally, and you were at it. So you can picture two couples fighting yourself and somebody else, or you can just see it on TV. You can just imagine. There's thousands of examples. What options do you have at that moment? Well, the truth is there are a thousand things you can do differently. Well, maybe not a thousand, but quite a few. You have a lot of options. You can leave, you can change the subject, you could ask that you do something else, you could try to argue them down, you could do lots of ugly things as well, and that's done as well, but if you want to be effective you have to be in control.
Speaker 1:So we're going back to what I talked about at the beginning how to be in control, knowing that you're captured. I mean just that, just the recognition of damn it. I've just been caught up in my feelings. It may be even reflecting the other person hey, we are caught. We are totally caught up in my feelings. And maybe even reflecting to the other person hey, we are caught. We are totally caught up in this. We have the decision. We have the choice to make the decision right now to stop this and come back to it. And that's what mature couples do, and that's the difference between adulting in a certain way around these things. That takes a long time. Why? Because we have so much shame in those moments for having lost control and perhaps losing the argument, but also a lot of fear that we're going to lose the other person or something negative is going to happen. So, in that little sliver of time, if you can catch yourself and recognize that those are the affects that you've been captured by and make the decision to politely stop it and ask the other person to come back to it and say I want to solve this problem. This is a serious issue. We are clearly riled up around this, but I really care about you. Let's not do it in this state because we have no control at this point. Let me give you a couple other examples, because obviously they're not all negative.
Speaker 1:There are ways that we get captured that are so beautiful and wonderful in ways that we want to be captured. When you are in love with somebody, when you've met somebody who's so interesting and enjoyable to be with, those feelings grab you in a wonderful way. That's what we want. We want that type of engagement. What are the feelings, the emotions you're having? The feelings you're having are the affects of enjoyment and interest, and I'll explain those later in another video. Those engender lots of emotions from the memories that we have of similar sort of situations. We are wired for that.
Speaker 1:Look at any infant or toddler. They are all about the nine affects, and what do they love more than anything else is to enjoy and to be interested in stuff Biologically. That is what allows us to go in the world and learn stuff and also to attach to other people. The other affects are the ones that save us from eating stuff that will kill us, or Lions that will come and attack us, and so forth. And shame is the one that says there's a hindrance right now, there's a barrier to our connecting. So, again, going back to the positive part of it, that's what we want and we're good with being captured by that. If you really want to understand how affects and emotions work, affects are the biological basis of feelings. There are nine feeling states that we're born with and if you've ever raised a child, you know this. You know this information because they're all on the face of a baby.
Speaker 1:And if you want to know about being captured, recently I was taking a flight from DC to Atlanta and in the waiting room before getting on the flight, there was this adorable baby that I walked by. It smiled at me and the parents were smiling at me and she was just lovely. I smiled back. Everybody who walked by it was smiling. You couldn't not smile at this child. It was adorable, automatically. I didn't think about it, nobody thought about it, we just did it because that's what we do. That's what we're wired for. And let me tell you, when I got on the plane and that baby got on the plane too, with his parents, and after takeoff, about 10 minutes into the flight, that poor child started wailing, and so did everybody on the plane, because affects are contagious and you hear a wailing, distressed baby with that affect and we all react, often with anger, annoyance and so forth, but we're wired for that. So what I'm saying is that it's contagious and that's how we get captured. So all of a sudden, your plans to read a book have now been captured by this baby and it's affect. So that's how we get caught up.
Speaker 1:By the way, there's a couple other interesting ways that we can get captured. So another part of this trip is that we were on the tarmac for about 20 minutes after the doors closed and we pulled out and I should have gone to the bathroom first. I needed to pee so bad and I have the world's smallest bladder. 20 minutes later, the only thing that was on my mind was needing to pee. I was starting to feel distressed. The idea of peeing all over myself on a plane is not my idea of a good time.
Speaker 1:But again, where is my attention. My attention was on my body and the possibility of a feeling state of shame. The other thing that captures our attention is pain. So those three things affects pain and our body states are what grab our attention. They are what capture us. The control we have is around the attention we put, noticing those, and if you don't notice them and if you're not paying attention to them, you have no control. That's the little bit of wisdom I have for today, but I'll be back next week. Thank you so much. Please subscribe, hit, like all that sort of stuff. I'll be back. Thank you so much.
