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. 04- Understanding Emotions: insights from Inside Out
Have you ever wondered how our favorite characters from movies would handle real-life challenges like puberty? Discover the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence through the eyes of Riley from Inside Out, as Dr. Scott Conkright navigates her journey with the help of affect relational therapy. This episode of the Meaningful Happiness Podcast promises to offer invaluable insights into the hormonal, cognitive, and social upheavals that accompany this life stage. Learn how newly introduced characters and a revamped emotional console mirror Riley's heightened complexity and self-consciousness, and understand the crucial shift from parental to peer reliance.
Join us for an enlightening discussion that bridges psychological theory and cinematic storytelling. Dr. Conkright dives deep into how Riley's internal and external worlds are reshaped, offering strategies to manage the overwhelming self-awareness and social judgments of puberty. Additionally, we celebrate a film that masterfully captures the intricacies of human emotions, emphasizing the importance of staying connected to our feelings. Tune in for an engaging conversation that promises to enhance your understanding of emotional complexity and provide valuable takeaways for personal growth and emotional resilience.
For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
Welcome back to the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. I am Dr Scott Conkright, talking to you about affect relational therapy, about emotions and how they affect our lives, and with the purpose of making your relationship with yourself and with others better. Today, we're going to go back to our favorite character from Inside Out 1, miss Riley, who was 11 in the first one and is now 13. The puberty button got pushed and everything changes, and so I'm going to talk today about what that really means. What that happens in affect relational therapy as a theory can really help you understand this movie, which is, by the way, so delightful, so much fun. The characters in it that come in and the new console that she gets, and my favorite character, henri which is a French word meaning boredom, by the way is delightful, and so are the others. And poor Riley she makes it through it, of course, and I'm going to tell you how she does it. I'm going to tell you, too, about what happens in puberty, what happens in terms of our affective, emotional world, what happens in our thinking and so forth. And I tell you I don't know about any of you 11, 12, 13, 14 were not my best years. I don't know about any of you. 11, 12, 13, 14 were not my best years. I don't know if they were for you. Riley manages to get through it, just like I just did with that sentence. So if he can get through it, fantastic. So I want to remind you.
Speaker 1:Going back to other things that I've said about affect, relational therapy and theory, shame in my model is very different. It takes a while to get used to, but it's very important for this movie because if anything gets activated in puberty it's shame. So in my model, shame is the affect, which is just a momentary biological response that says I'm not getting the connection that I want from people or things or goals and so forth. What happens in puberty and what happens with Riley is that shame now is in the forefront. This movie basically is about shame and it's about all the ways that she's going to try to manage her shame, the things that get activated by the affect, meaning there's going to be occasions where she's going to think that something's happening that's getting in the way Her friends, her goals, her goals with hockey, her attempts to maintain connection to her parents and so forth. Her inner world gets divided up in lots of different pieces and her console gets completely wiped up. They come in, completely rehaul it and it's now enormous, and the new characters that she brings in are going to make her life much more complicated, but necessarily so, because without that she would not be able or any of us would not be able to manage puberty With all the hormonal changes, the cognitive changes that we go through, the demands that society puts on us and so forth.
Speaker 1:We need that extended and that new cast of characters in our lives that manage what's going on with us. So who gets added? Well, keep in mind, we had joy, we had disgust, we had sadness, we had anger and we had fear, and all those in my model are pretty close to what's accurate biologically we now get. We get ennui, which is honestly as great a character as ennui is isn't really an affect, isn't really an emotion, it's really a defense. It's basically saying, whatever, I do not care, it's basically feigning that you're not interested in what's really happening. An important defense and one that you, for better or worse, see in a lot of teenagers. The other characters that come in are the ones that are going.
Speaker 1:The other affects and feelings are the ones that are going to be helping Riley navigate the most important and difficult aspect of her life right now, which is a form of shame called self-consciousness. Self-consciousness will stay with us the rest of our lives. When you think about it, before puberty there really isn't a whole lot of self-consciousness that stays in any affective, emotional way. I mean kids, of course. Younger kids get self-conscious, but it dissipates, it goes away pretty quickly Once a teenager becomes self-conscious and is aware that other people could see her in different ways and in ways that she's frightened that they might see her or that we are frightened that they might see us. That is a whole different way of being in the world and the aspects of shame and the aspects of that self-consciousness are what Riley is negotiating.
Speaker 1:So what's happening in puberty? Well, as I referenced earlier, there are hormonal changes and those hormonal changes cause neurological changes. The body is changing as well and socially things are changing. The child is moving away from a dependence on the parents and now the social world of friends is more important. But what's frightening is that, with all the changes that take place hormonally, cognitively, neurologically there's a new awareness. Hopefully, if all goes right, there's an awareness that people may see us in ways that we don't want to be seen, or they may see things that we don't see, and the complications and all the implications of that are frightening.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, do I smell bad? Do they see the side of me? All of a sudden, you're recognizing parts of yourself that you have judgments about people. You get a group of teenagers all doing that together and it is a shit show. It is frightening.
Speaker 1:It's an almost paranoid world for some, because it's no longer safe the way pre-puberty was. You can't go back to mom and dad and say they were mean to me. You could, but in some ways you're so self-conscious and so embarrassed by it all and embarrassed by your new body and the changes that it's making and also all the new thoughts that you're having that you can't make sense of yet that you're not going to be that vulnerable with your parents, no matter how wonderful they are. Parents can be safe in many ways, but not in that way. What's most important at this period are your friends, and so that is what Riley is negotiating, and fortunately, things go well for her. It's a beautiful, beautiful movie, and it's absolutely tender the way that she struggles with these issues. I love it when she wakes up one morning and smells herself and goes oh my God, I'm too disgusting, I stink, I can't, I'm too stinky to go something like that to go to school. We've all been there. At least I've been there. I hope you guys have been there. I can't imagine you not having been there.
Speaker 1:If you've been through adolescence or you feel like you have too many zits or something doesn't fit, your clothes don't fit in the right way, you're having a bad hair day, all those things are primary for that kid at that point, and that is because of the issue of shame. Shame is now forefront in everybody's life at that age. That's why I think my theory is so helpful is that there's a barrier now, a major barrier at this age, to getting the good stuff that you used to get from parents from just waking up and being in the world. No longer just waking up and being in the world is easy. Everything needs to get rewritten. Everything that you counted on is destroyed. Well, not everything. I'm exaggerating like a teenager. Too many things get disrupted and the console and the self-identity of oneself has to change.
Speaker 1:So one of the important things that takes place beautifully is that Riley. Riley is all of a sudden is doing stuff that makes her ashamed of herself out of a need to feel pride. She wants to be with the cool girls, she wants to be part of the hockey team that she made friends with and she so wants to fit in. She dyes a little piece of her hair red, she dishes her other friends piece of her hair red, she dishes her other friends and she goes into the room, the coach's room, and tries to and reads actually the results and then does really mean stuff on the ice rink and inside of her world, her team comes together and they recreate her in that moment. It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful, that it doesn't happen that quickly, but metaphorically in that moment, in that film.
Speaker 1:She is at the beginning of the movie, basically all good. The self-definition is I'm a good person. Then it becomes I'm a bad person, then she's a complex person, she's all these things. She's all these things because the console now that is taking care of her is able to integrate all those different parts of her. Again, I wish it happened overnight. It doesn't happen that way.
Speaker 1:But this movie beautifully illustrates ultimately what happens if all goes well with all of us, that we accept that we're sometimes disgusting, that we're hateful, that we're not honest, that we don't live up that we don't live up to our own expectations, that we're sometimes mean to our family and friends and loved ones and so forth, and that we sometimes just are not who we want to be. But we're also sometimes who we want to be. We're also sometimes the friend that everybody wants. We sometimes come through for people. We sometimes really do the right thing, by ourselves and by other people's standards, and, of course, not consistently. And that's what the movie does so well is that if you, if you're able to do that integration because you have the family and the friends and so forth to help you through that without shaming you too much during that process, you'll figure it out and you'll get on the other side of that and you'll be able to be an adult and navigate adulthood, which is, I think, going to be Inside Out 3. They could have 20 of these when she's 80, we'll still need another Inside Out and we'll learn from it.
Speaker 1:I hope that is my review. I think it was an absolutely fantastic movie. I think it illustrates how affects work, how emotions work, but I think it says beautifully how complex we are, how imperfect we are, but that we need to keep in touch with our feelings and lead with those. They are our guide to doing the right thing. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Appreciate it so much.
