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.
Let’s make happiness meaningful.
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Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
Ep. 03- Unraveling Shame: the Biological Truth of Core Human Affects
What if shame isn’t just an emotion, but a core feeling hardwired into us from birth? In this enlightening episode, I, Scott Conkright, guide you through the maze of core feelings, starting with the elusive and often misunderstood sensation of shame. Learn how platforms like Instagram can trigger these innate responses through relentless comparisons, and understand the reflexive nature of core feelings—known as affects—that shape our perceptions long before our conscious minds even catch up. By dissecting these nine core affects and their intrinsic differences from emotions, you'll gain a clearer path to self-awareness and healthier relationships.
We then move on to the fascinating interplay between positive affects such as interest, excitement, enjoyment, and joy, and how shame can act as an obstacle to these fulfilling experiences. Through the contrasting stories of Bob and Jane, we reveal how our personal narratives shape our emotional responses to everyday disappointments and significant social conflicts alike. Discover the biological rationale behind shame and its protective role in social navigation, as we prepare to uncover how our sensory interface—our core feelings—uniquely color our reality.
Finally, delve into the nuts and bolts of how our affect and sensory systems drive our motivations and actions before any cognitive processing kicks in. From examining the primary sources of motivation—affect, bodily sensations, and pain—to distinguishing between our immediate physical reactions and our autobiographical emotional responses, this episode is packed with insights that empower you to better understand and navigate your true feelings. Join me on this journey to enrich both your personal interactions and your relationship with yourself, as we uncover the essential role of affects in our daily lives.
For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
Hi, scott Conkright, here I'm going to talk to you today about what I think is a revolutionary approach to dealing with a very, very difficult subject, one that I'm very interested in, which is shame. I don't know about you, but looking at Instagram at night doing that doom scrolling sort of thing, it is hard not to feel a certain pang of shame. Seeing these seemingly perfect lives in Santorini or in the mountains, beautiful people doing beautiful things. And I don't know about you, but my life is not quite like that all the time. I like to think maybe 0.1001% of my life is like that. It seems it's hard not to feel like there's something wrong. Those comparisons make it very difficult.
Speaker 1:The issue is is that we're often looking at shame as a personal failure and as a moral infraction of some sort, and what I'm trying to do, what I'm wanting to educate right now, is around the biological basis of feeling states and understanding that could be profoundly, profoundly changing for all of us, because there's a part of shame that we have no control over the affect, the feeling response to things that are happening in the world and our emotional history of shame. So what we have are a set of feeling states that are responses to stimuli that come from outside and sometimes inside ourselves. That are responses to stimuli that come from outside and sometimes inside ourselves that we react to within seconds. Those are biological responses. What we also have that makes things very difficult is that we have autobiographical responses called emotions. So there's a big difference. The affects are reflexive, innate responses to, for instance, a car coming at us and being afraid, or seeing something interesting, and automatically we are wired for novelty and we want to go after that. We can't help ourselves. We're going to do that.
Speaker 1:The famous meme of the guy with his girlfriend looking at another girl from behind him that is showing the affect of interest is in some ways bigger than us. It's the affect that gets us in trouble. I don't know if any of you remember Flip Wilson, but he had a wonderful routine in which he would do something bad and be silly about it, sort of childlike, and say the devil made me do it. Well, as far as I'm concerned, the devil is inside us biologically, insofar as that we can't help ourselves by being interested in things. We can't help ourselves being afraid of things, by being ashamed of things, by being disgusted by things. If you pull milk out of a refrigerator and you're not sure if it is fresh or sour, and you smell it and it is sour.
Speaker 1:That response is not an emotional response. It's a feeling state of disgust, but it's not one that you thought about. It's one that happens, naturally. It's before you think about it. So there are feeling states that happen before we think about what happened, and those are the affects. So one way to think about affects, the simplest way to think about affects, is that they are our core feelings, and there's nine of them.
Speaker 1:And so over time, in this podcast, what I want to do is empower you to really understand yourself, your relationships, what's happening around you, by understanding these nine affects, these nine feeling states that you have no control over. They're built in and wired. You're wired for them. All healthy babies are wired with them. By the way you can see, on a healthy baby, all nine of them. You know when a baby is happy. You know when a baby is unhappy, when it's disgusted, when it's frightened and so forth. That changes over time because over time we learn to hide our feelings. But we know what our core feelings are if we pay attention to them. But the way to understand them and pay attention to them is by first learning that there's a difference between an affect and an emotion. So we're going to start with that Up until about the age of two and a half or so, when babies or babies at that point when toddlers develop language skills, which is around the same time that they start developing memories for things and events and what's going to get remembered around that time?
Speaker 1:Because they have language, because the storage system in the brain allows them to remember scenes with people, they're going to remember these scenes because these scenes have strong feelings with them, they have affects with them. So generally, the only things that we remember are things that have an affect along with it, and often that affect is just a happy one. It's because it was interesting, it was enjoyable, it was full of love and so forth, or it was scary, or it was disgusting and so forth. Try it out. Take a look at your memories. The memories that you remember and go through all the time are ones that usually have a feeling state with it almost always. That's part of an evolutionary process that says we can only store so much in our brains.
Speaker 1:What we're going to remember are the important things, and the important things for human beings are how things feel. It is how we adjust ourselves to our world so that we can get along with other people and make good decisions. And, by the way, in a later podcast I'm going to talk about how that relates to AI. Ai does not have affects, and so it can only be so intelligent. The intelligence that comes with affects brings us exponentially higher than any AI will ever get, and I strongly believe that. But right now, for our purposes, we're trying to deal with relationships, by the way, the most important relationship being with yourself and then the relationship with everybody else.
Speaker 1:And the three affects that are the most important when it comes to relationships are interest, excitement, enjoyment, joy and shame, humiliation. And let me tell you why the first two interest, excitement and enjoyment, joy. By the way, in affect theory, most of the affects are on a continuum from low to high, so that's why I say interest, excitement. Interest could be something mild, like what is that? Excitement, of course, is like you're in a water park and like whoa, this is great. Enjoyment is basic. By the way, interest, excitement is always up energy. You can always notice it as a stimuli that gets your energy going. You move towards that, move towards whatever you're interested in With enjoyment, joy, it's down energy. The way I think about it is for cavemen or whatever it's we're done, getting food, foraging, whatever we can get into a safe village, we're with our people, we can relax and we're safe and we can enjoy it. It's a down stimulus in which you're able to relax.
Speaker 1:It is the combination over time of interest, excitement and enjoyment, joy that makes for love. Those are the only two ethics that we have that are positive and they are the two core ingredients for love of. Those are the only two affects that we have that are positive and they are the two core ingredients for love of all sorts Desire, interest, obsession, you name. It are under those two affects. What blocks love? What blocks interest, excitement, enjoyment, joy, shame. All that shame is is a block, is a hindrance. So again, think of it on a continuum, on the low end.
Speaker 1:Let's say in the morning you're rushing off to get the bus or the train or get the elevator, it doesn't matter, you're trying to get some place and you're on time. You want to be on time. You don't get there. You see the elevator shut, the door shut on the bus or the train. You're like this. You do what I call the slump of shame. That's the low end of it. Or your friend calls and cancels a meeting, cancels dinner. You might even say what a shame. Okay, that's the low end. A boyfriend, a partner, a girlfriend you're having a fight with them. There's an interruption to the two positive affects. It's going to feel shameful. You're going to have that slump of shame Like once again we're fighting.
Speaker 1:So you notice, the slump of shame starts off on the low end with missing. You know, when I play racquetball, I miss the ball all the time and I involuntarily, you know, I catch myself involuntarily going. Two seconds later I'm back at the game. It's teaching me that I'm not getting what I want, which is the shot that I wanted. It means I need to practice more In relationships. It means that something's wrong and you need to pay attention to what's happening On the higher end as you go up happening On the higher end as you go up with fighting in a relationship, with disagreeing, with not feeling connected, with feeling rejected, with feeling left out. Come home and your partner's looking at their phone and not looking up at you, that is going to feel increasingly shame-based. Of course, public humiliation, somebody discovering something that you don't want them to know about yourself. Public humiliation, shame and embarrassment are in the extreme end. That's what we normally think about when we talk about shame.
Speaker 1:And what's revolutionary about affect relational therapy is the biological basis of shame, meaning that there's a reason for those biological responses, those feeling states, because they're protective. They're what allow us to change our relationships. So when you're out to dinner with your partner and they're mad at you once again for saying something stupid and kind of humiliating about them or making fun of you in front of people or fighting with you afterwards or upset with you, you better pay attention. It means there's a barrier to what you want. If you want positive connection with your partner and they're giving you that feedback, that's feedback to pay attention to. It's kind of shameful. It feels shameful sometimes getting feedback like you were a jerk at dinner. If you were a jerk at dinner, you were a jerk at dinner. Take that in as non-defensively as you can and learn from it.
Speaker 1:Here's the issue the biological response to shame can trigger emotional responses to shame. So when you miss the bus, let's take one person. Let's say Bob has really low self-esteem and he's already running late and he's feeling stupid for running late and once again he overslept. And now he's running to the bus. He misses the bus and the doors slam. He doesn't get on and he knows he's going to be late again and his boss is going to be upset with him. And now in his head he's remembering all the things that he's done that he feels shameful about. That's been triggered by the biological feeling response to the disappointment that any and all of us have when the door shuts on us when we want to get on that bus. But for Bob it has a particular meaning. It now confirms a set of beliefs that he has about who he is. It's one more example of how he screws up.
Speaker 1:Now Jane has a whole different approach. You know, she knows that she can be late. She's kind of lackadaisical about it. Whatever reasons, it doesn't go into that script of her being a bad person. So the difference is both of them, jane and Bob, experienced the affect of shame from missing the bus. Both had two different autobiographical stories to tell about what the emotional response to shame was.
Speaker 1:This is empowering. This is empowering for all of us, because our responses, our natural, innate responses, we don't really have control over it. I mean yes, I mean over time. You know we can hide it. We've all been in situations where we felt ashamed. We had to do our best to not show that. We can do our best to fake it, that doesn't mean that we're not feeling it in our bodies. The thing that we always see when it comes to shame is the lowering of the head. It's always an indicator of some level of shame, and even professionals have a hard time hiding that one if they're really feeling shame. So a hard time hiding that one if they're really feeling shame. So I hope this has been helpful.
Speaker 1:I know it's a very, very introduction to it, but what I'm going to do next is talk about how shame I can talk about shame specifically. What I'm going to do is talk about affects and how they, in my opinion, are the sensory interface to reality, basically the firmware that we use to understand the world. So if you really want to geek out on something, stay tuned. I think it's fascinating because there's a way from our hardware, from our brain and then the software, how we deal with the world out there. There has to be a way to interface with that and our feeling states are the way that we do that. It's very unique. We're very unique in that way and that makes you unique. That makes me unique and, as far as I'm concerned, what affect relational therapy can do is really empower you to take control of what you're feeling, thus control your relationship with yourself, improve it and improve your relationship with others. Be back soon. So I'm back and let's talk about the affect system as that sensory interface with reality.
Speaker 1:Whatever reality is, there's some way that we have to interpret what's out there and some way that we have to interpret what's happening inside our inner world and what we do as human beings. As I see it is, we use an affect system, a sensory system that works pretty much the same way that all the other sensory systems work. So, for instance, when you're tasting food, you don't think about what. You think about it afterwards, but when you eat something, it's either salty or sweet, or a combination, or whatever taste buds are being used, same like with any of the senses hearing, so forth. You may say to yourself after you hear something, after you smell something, after you taste something that tastes salty, that was loud, so forth. That's exactly what's happening with the affect system. It's saying holy shit, that was scary, that's frightening, and then you react or that's shameful and then you react. So the affect happens immediately and, by the way, lasts only a fraction of a second until it gets connected to history, to memory, to your own autobiography. But boom, in that second you're scared, you're surprised, startled, disgusted, afraid, angry and so forth. All nine of them. That's the interface that we use. It also does five I think it's five, I'll correct myself if I'm wrong. It has five different things that it does that are super important. So let me start with the first one. So, when it comes to apps and what they do as part of this interface, the first and most important thing that they do is that they are our primary source of motivation.
Speaker 1:Why do you do what you do? Well, most often it's because you feel like it. You think you feel like it, by the way, cognitively, because an affect hit and you've decided that you are interested in something and you're gonna go for it. You need a justification, so you're gonna, cognitively, come up with some reason. Oh, I thought that looked interesting. No, actually it caught your eye because we like novelty and something novel happened into the stimulus in your eye and you turned your head and you looked at it and you went oh, that's fascinating. And you may have gotten lost into it, but that was your brain and your body and your affect system working. It provided motivation to do something positive. Your energy went up to do that exploration, to read further about it, to scroll further, to watch another Instagram reel it doesn't matter All of it or to go after somebody that you're interested in. The same is true with why you ran the other direction, because you thought something was scary.
Speaker 1:There are two other things that have a profound influence in terms of motivation that we often don't think about. One is the body sensations that we have, what in old-fashioned psychoanalysis we call drives. Those are needing to eat, needing to sleep, needing to poop, needing to pee sex. I say breathing already. There's really only five or six of them. If you are on a plane and you need to go, that's what you're thinking about. That is the source of your motivation.
Speaker 1:Guess what's tied to that body sensation? An affect, multiple affects, probably You're thinking, uh-oh, the idea of peeing on myself in a plane, in public, is not my thing. So you're worried. You might be having fear about shame. You may be disgusted with yourself, you may be frightened, you may be like who knows what goes on in your head. But there is affect that says this is urgent. So we know from the Snickers commercials, if you remember those, what hangry is. We all know what a kid is. I know what I'm like when I don't get enough to eat. So hunger matched with an affect of distress makes me a cranky kind of guy, same with sleep and so forth.
Speaker 1:It's important to think about that when you're thinking about what's motivating yourself and other people in your life. You have to have those affects and what their body state is when you're working with them. When I say working with them, when you're with them, hanging out with them, when your friend comes over or your partner comes in from work and they're being snippy, you might want to ask hey, babe, have you eaten? I know you didn't get much sleep last night. What happened at work? Are you distressed? That allows you to take it much less personally and realize they are just reacting at a biological level, at a feeling level, with the affects and perhaps also the drives. So we have affect drives and the third one which often people don't think about what motivates us really fast Pain.
Speaker 1:You get hurt, that's the foremost thing on your mind. You break a leg, that's the foremost thing on your mind. Something happens, you go oh, that hurts in there. Not only is the pain sensation distressing, but the affect of distress is going to come up really fast If it lasts too long or gets sharper and sharper. Fear is going to come in. What does that do? It tells you take care of this buddy, take care of it now. This is the most important thing you need to do. The affects say this is important. This is important right now.
Speaker 1:The reason I stress this is that we've really we've really done a bad job around understanding shame. We've viewed shame mostly as a moral issue, because as kids, when you think about it, we're interested in everything. But at some point I was going back to something I said earlier around age two and a half, we were able to express all the affects as freely as we wanted. But pretty soon, you know, around two or so, especially with the advent of language and memory, kids start faking feelings. They can start explaining things, but at the same time parents are saying you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this, go to bed, eat this, finish this, do your homework, so forth. So all of our affects need to be tamed. They need to be tamed because you can't spit food out in a restaurant onto somebody else's plate. You can't wipe your hands on somebody else's clothes. You can't go up to a stranger and hold hands. You can't put your hands down in your pants in public. You can't do a to a stranger and hold hands. You can't put your hands down in your pants in public. You can't do a whole bunch of things. Your parents, to protect you, are telling you the things you can and cannot do in a particular society. They're trying to save your life and make sure that you can go to an adult, so that you're a productive adult, but at a cost.
Speaker 1:What happens in our society is that we overdo it with shame. The shaming that takes place in parenting, in an education and in relationships is probably the most heavy-handed use of shame you can get, and so what happens is that we have toxic levels of shame everywhere. But everybody who's watching this has at least one memory of shame with a teacher, a coach, with other students in an educational, sports or recreational event. That was not necessary. That didn't have to happen. It was corrective. You may have done something wrong. You may have done something that you shouldn't have done, but that's not a moral failure, but often because of the way our culture is, so ashamed of shame, the people doling out the shame are afraid of shame and don't like shame, and they often overdo it.
Speaker 1:And so what everybody's managing nowadays is not the positive affects but all the shame associated with the positive affects. It almost becomes scary to be excited or interested in something or to enjoy something, because it's associated with getting caught enjoying yourself or being interested. Like I can't relax and really enjoy it, because what if somebody catches me really being lost in that? And maybe that was not okay in my family. To be that at ease and that happens a lot in families Happens certainly around sexuality. It's a different podcast, but I'll certainly come back to that. But I just covered one motivation for right now, but I'm going to come back to number two in a minute. See you soon. Okay, I'm back.
Speaker 1:The second reason that it's an interface that affect is an interface and is useful for us is that it helps prioritize what to do. So we're often conflicted about the different choices that we have in a day, but we're usually going to prioritize what feels either the most positive or what's the most negative. Okay, and that is often a struggle. Think about it this way. I mean, people ask me all the time, my patients ask me all the time why is it that I know what I should do? I know what I shouldn't do, but I do it anyhow. I know I shouldn't get up at midnight and have hugs like a pint of it at night, but I do it anyhow. I know I shouldn't like get up at midnight and like have hugs like a pint of it at night, but I do it anyhow. Well, that's a complicated question, but the bottom line is we are all trying to basically follow what's called Tompkins blueprint, trying to maximize positive affect, minimize negative affect and ideally, express all of our affects and make a world in which we can do that. All of life is compromising around that blueprint.
Speaker 1:So if you feel like most of your life is a form of suffering, then at midnight the only enjoyment joy that you can get is a pint of Haagen-Dazs. Your brain may go there. That's an affective decision. That's not a cognitive decision. That's not even an emotional decision. That's an affective decision. It's a totally different system that, in my field, we don't even talk about. The affective system isn't even recognized, for the most part, as a sensory system in my field, which is why I'm so happy to bring it to you, because I do believe that it's very empowering.
Speaker 1:Related to prioritizing things. Affect also allows us to make good decisions, and the older you get, you know how complicated decisions are. But I'm going to ask you to go on a little journey back in time and try to remember a couple things that may have happened in a few years ago when you tried out new things, or that you were. For instance, what was your experience like with your first sip of scotch, if you ever drank scotch? Nobody on this planet likes scotch as a baby. A baby will spit out alcohol because it tastes toxic. They will spit it out because it's poison, because it actually is.
Speaker 1:As an adult, you learn to overcome the affective responses because there are other reasons. The sense of having an enjoyment, joy with people that you really care about will deepen if you can overcome your aversion to certain things. That happens in sexual activity as well. That happens too when you're learning stuff. If you've been in science classes, if you've been to medical school, if you've had to dissect an animal. It's kind of gross but it's fascinating at the same time to have to get your hands in there and squish around with stuff and all that. I liked it. I thought it was disgusting too.
Speaker 1:There were a lot of affects going on. Shame as well. If I didn't do that, if I didn't get my homework done by getting in there and opening up that dead rabbit or whatever it was, and learn all that stuff and open it up and all that dissect it, I would not have passed the course. So at every level we're dealing with some feeling level. Everything that we're doing there's some feeling level involved. So that's what I'm really trying to push is that there's never a time in your life that affect is not involved, unless you're dead. So I'll be right back with the last one, okay.
Speaker 1:Lastly, affects communicate. Again, going back to the baby, a baby tells you exactly what it's feeling in the purest of forms. There is nothing in a baby's face and body that is interfering with what it's trying to communicate. One reason that a baby's smile is so infectious is that we know it's sincere. I mean even with adults that give. I'm blanking out on the name, it's a French term that with a real crinkling in the eyes, douxing smile, I think it's called.
Speaker 1:Even with that, we can still be suspicious of some people in our life and say why are they smiling at me? Is that real? Yeah, it looks real, but I know that person. They're faking it really well. As an adult, we can always be suspicious. With a baby, we know that there's nothing except genuine smile, interest, anger, distress and so forth. As adults, especially in intimate relationships, the more we lower the shame barrier and let the other in, the more we're going to let our face and our bodies display what we're really feeling. So if we come in after a long day of work and we're distressed, a partner may ask, hey, how are you doing? We may say, yeah, I'm fine. But in all likelihood we're going to look distressed and we know people that will say I'm fine and they're clearly angry and so forth.
Speaker 1:Affects are the best source of knowing what somebody's feeling, so learn them all nine of them. I'll come back soon and I'll teach you all nine of them after I teach you a little bit more about what the affects are. But it so cool to know what they are because you'll start going around looking at people as you're going for walks with the people in your life and going like, yeah, they're distressed, yeah, they're acting ashamed, yeah, they're angry, or that's the anger that's covering up shame and so forth. By the way, the disgust thing, the affect of disgust, the spitting out of things or thinking things are stinky, those are very relational, we have that in our language. Things are stinky. Those are very relational, we have that in our language.
Speaker 1:It's not just an affect. It later becomes a way of dealing with things that we don't like and especially people we don't like. You're a piece of shit, you're disgusting, you stink. Where do those come from? They are the opposite of interest, excitement and enjoyment, joy. When we fall in love, we often tell the other person I want to gobble you up. I could gobble you up, breakup. What do you say? You're a piece of shit, get out of here. You stink, it's all expelling, it's all stuff that we want to get out of our bodies, that we don't want. We want them in our bodies. Now, we want them out of our bodies. So affects are in the body. They're not here. They're not emotions. Emotions are in the body. They're not here. They're not emotions. Emotions are in the head. Affects are in the body. So if you really want to know what you're feeling, identify the affects. It'd be so empowered by that, thank you. We'll be back soon.
