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. 08- Managing Negative Emotions: Using Affect Theory to Overcome Shame and Anger
Have you ever wondered how your complex emotions come to be? In this episode of the Meaningful Happiness Podcast, we promise you'll gain a deep understanding of affect theory and how it shapes our emotional landscape. We explore how basic affects like interest, excitement, and shame combine to create intricate emotions such as hesitant curiosity and passionate advocacy. Our conversation is enriched by insights from experiments with ChatGPT, providing you with a nuanced perspective on managing your feelings and maximizing positive emotions.
Curiosity is more than just a fleeting interest; it's a resilient force shaped by a blend of emotions like distress, anguish, and excitement. Discover the role of resilient curiosity in developing emotional intelligence and how modern stressors can trigger the fight-or-flight response. Host Dr. Scott Conkright shares personal stories of self-doubt and social anxiety, shedding light on the fear of negative judgment that fuels these feelings. Learn practical coping strategies and gain emotional awareness to better manage your inner turmoil.
Loneliness and rejection can be particularly painful, often tapping into deep-seated memories of shame and exclusion. We discuss how these feelings differ between humans and animals, noting our tendency to ruminate and amplify distress. Attachment styles play a crucial role in our responses to shame and social anxiety, affecting how we handle rejection and self-doubt. By exploring these complex emotions, we aim to enhance your self-awareness, creativity, and communication skills. Remember, self-doubt and self-consciousness are universal experiences—be kind to yourself as you navigate them.
For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
Hi, I'm Dr Scott Conkright. This is the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. Hi, this is Dr Conkright. Hi, this is Dr Scott Conkright. Welcome to the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. Guess what I'm going to talk about today Feelings and affects kind of to be expected, right.
Speaker 1:One of the things I really loved about learning about affect theory is the wonderful way that affects combine to make emotions, and what I find really fun and pretty amazing at some ways from a literary point of view is how they combine to make really subtle emotions that writers try to find the words for. So I played around with this on ChatGPT. I put in all the affects and descriptors and so forth, and I have a private account with one of the apps where I can put in all my writing and things like that and all my research and everything else and everybody else's, and so it has that big database of stuff on affects and what I did is I put in all the Apex and said to start combining them and to do all the permutations and to give me what the descriptors would be possibly. And I got through hundreds of them. I think there's just a few thousand, maybe more. I don't know what the permutation I don't remember high school algebra at all, something like each one. So there's nine, so I'm not even going to try, but I think they multiply out into a pretty big number. I didn't get that far, but I will say that when I started reading them I went wow, this is really amazing. And so I'm going to give you some of these, and in the process, I'm going to talk more about feelings and affects, and some of the stuff that ChatGBT gave me is powerful. It gave me some insights and it's going to give us some insights that I think were otherwise not available.
Speaker 1:One of the pleasures that I have is to sit around at night when I'm bored and throw in various ideas and see what I get. It always gets my interest. So one of the interests I have right now that I'm going to do in a podcast coming up is talk about attachment theory and attachment styles based on shame defenses. So I'm going to just briefly touch on that today. Where am I? Let's see. So the whole point of this, as far as I'm concerned, is to understand how we feel, know what the feelings are, know where they're coming from and have some understanding of how to take care of ourselves around the bad feelings, recognize them as affects, so we can stop feeding the negative ones. And then how do we maximize the positive ones? That's really what we want. We want both. We certainly want to increase the positive ones and minimize the negative ones. And in order to minimize the negative ones, we've got to recognize them sooner and not feed them. They love to be fed, especially shame and anger.
Speaker 1:So you think about, we need to think about the affects in a couple of different ways. There's possibly three ways. Metaphorically, you can put them together. Or think about the affects as blending ingredients for food. They could be words that make up sentences and then paragraphs, or they could be colors and variations of colors, and so when you add them together, like on a palette, the affects create all the different emotions.
Speaker 1:So again, we have two positive affects, one neutral and six negative ones. The positive one, the, is. The positives are interest, excitement and enjoyment, joy. They're on a continuum. And then there's shame, which on the low end I talked about last week. On the low end I'm calling shame self-consciousness, self-doubt, and both of those are probably at really mild. Self-doubt and really mild self-consciousness are probably the lowest you can get on the shame scale. And then you move up from there. When you combine the affects of interest and excitement interest, excitement plus shame, shame, self-consciousness you get curiosity with insecurity. What in the world could that mean? Well, what it says here, what it printed out for me not printed, what it spat out for me said imagine being eager to learn something new but feeling unsure of yourself. This combination might create a hesitant curiosity where you're interested but hold back because of self-doubt. Alternatively, on a more positive note, you can use that and it can motivate you to improve, improve whatever you're doing, to improve yourself. It can draw you to learn more, to reflect more, to take a look at your insecurities and see how you can overcome them. So combining those two again, interest, excitement and shame, shame slash, self-consciousness gives that particular one, and my guess is that there's others as well, and if you think of some, write me know, put it in the notes or in the comments.
Speaker 1:Second one is when you combine enjoyment, joy and anger in their call chat. Gbt in this case is calling it passionate advocacy. So when you find deep joy in a cause but you're facing obstacles, anger can fuel your drive to fight for what you believe in. This blend creates a wonderful emotion where your joy in the cause and frustration at barriers combine to make you a passionate advocate. It's pretty cool as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1:Now, this one, the next one I think everyone will relate to quite a bit many of you will when you combine fear-terror continuum of fear-terror and self-consciousness. Now fear on the low end and self-consciousness-shame on the low end. You can get variations depending on how intense each one of those is the fear and the shame continuum. You're going to get social anxiety, which is a fascinating thing to think about. The social anxiety has to do with a couple different sources of shame. So fear of judgment that's where the fear part comes in is the fear of the judgment, especially fear of shame as well, and the sense of shame can lead to social anxiety. You might dread social situations not just because you fear them, but also because you're deeply aware of how other people might judge you. And that fear, that worry that people are judging you, can get really heightened. And your self-consciousness around, being around other people, depending on how much shame you're living with, how much self-consciousness and self-doubt you're living with, can get remarkably uncomfortable. At an extreme it can become paranoid, become really paranoid, to the point where you're not going to leave the house, you know, isolate.
Speaker 1:So when we add distress, anguish and interest, excitement, we get resilient curiosity. So feeling distressed can be overwhelming when facing a difficult situation, but if you're curious and interested in the challenge, this mix can lead to resilient curiosity. It pushes you to keep exploring and learning, even when things get tough. So one of the things I wanna point out to here is that it's very rare that we're going to have an affect all by itself, in isolation. I think the only time you see that is in infancy, and very quickly. It doesn't take more than a year or two where they start getting more and more complex, they start blending together and so you'll get that curious, apprehensive, frightened, but at the same time really interested in what's happening. And it's how parents in the world around these infants, around children, instruct them about how to deal with these complex feelings. That is part of their emotional intelligence and affective intelligence.
Speaker 1:So the next one is what happens with the fight or flight response. So when you add anger and fear and terror combined, the body is going to respond with fight, flight or freeze. But you notice, in this case the way this model works is that the mind, the brain, our neurological system works with our affective system, and the affective system is what triggers the vagus nerve, in this case, the neurological system. So the fear comes first and then your body immediately goes into fight, flight or freeze. This mix is the essence of that, where you cut between the urge to act and the desire to escape. It's a survival mechanism, but in modern times, in current times, it can be triggered by our imaginations. It can be triggered by much less dangerous things, such as really stressful situations.
Speaker 1:I'm going to get up in front of a bunch of colleagues and give a presentation Getting in front of a camera. The first time I got in front of a camera to do this, it took a while. There was a little bit of a panicky feeling. I was very, very concerned about how other people might understand me. I was a little concerned about how other people might see me. I wasn't used to being in front of the camera. I think it was more on the social insecurity spectrum than the fight or flight response. So let me explain to you how I'm understanding self-doubt.
Speaker 1:Self-doubt is that voice in your head, sometimes under very mild situations, where you're just questioning your value, and what I mean by that is you question your value and your place in the world, where you feel like I'm not fitting in here or I think I'm being judged in ways that I negatively, that I don't want to be judged, that it makes you hesitant, it leads to a little bit of anxiety, thinking that I might get out of here sooner than later. I mean, I was at an event the other day where it was clear that I was on the political spectrum on one side of it, on a very different end of the political spectrum than the other people that were in the room, and I was being asked to talk about some political things and I chose to say things that were not very controversial and more joining. But I got myself out of there as quickly as I could. It just didn't feel good and no matter how much work you do about your own self-consciousness and your own self-doubt, there are going to be situations where that's going to be a normal response. I mean, let's face it, people do judge each other. I try to own my judgments, I try to not be judgy, but I certainly have my judgments and I think that's okay. I think that's for all of us. We have judgments that we have to have. We're going to see things in a certain way.
Speaker 1:For those who are feeling very self-conscious and full of self-doubt, the feeling is one that people are thinking of you negatively. It is probably not likely if, for no other reason, people are not going to spend that much bandwidth on you. They just don't care and I'm sorry to tell you that. If that's what you're suffering from and I'm not laughing at you, I'm just saying it's not like they don't care about you. They're just not giving you the time that you think they might be giving you. Rarely from the people I know who really suffer from a lot of self-consciousness and a lot of self-doubt the things that they're thinking that people judge them about in my estimation they're rare. They're not judging this person for looking stupid or being ugly or anything like that. Most cases I think they probably view these other people, these other people, in positive ways. Honestly, the person suffering from that. If you suffer from that, you don't know that, but I'm hoping learning about this will help. So at least you know what affects are being triggered with self-doubt, which is the affect of shame, and then the other ones with social anxiety. Those combinations pay attention, learn all nine of them and when you start learning how these combine. You can start taking care of the affect part of it and I'll actually, in a podcast coming up, talk about specific things we can do to identify each specific affect and then how to not feed it, how to calm it down, how to feed it another line, how to give it another script.
Speaker 1:Loneliness and rejection, I think, are further up on the shame continuum scale. Loneliness is really painful for human beings. Again, I think, like I said in the previous podcast, we are sophisticated dogs Maybe not even that sophisticated, honestly, but we certainly have the means with our brains to make ourselves pretty miserable, which dogs don't have. Dogs have it better off than we do because they are not going to ruminate. They're happy to see us. We don't do the same thing. We can take something and put it in our head and make it real and feed our shame, feed our anger, feed our resentment and so forth, and we can isolate in ways that dogs would never do. If dogs have the opportunity to be with other dogs, they go with other dogs, they go off and do that. Give a dog a ball. They're happy. Humans are not that easy.
Speaker 1:The loneliness part of it, especially if it's related to rejection is one of the most painful things you can do to a human being. I say that it's moving up from self-doubt and self-consciousness. But the truth is, even mild loneliness hurts and it can also tap into those pools. Even mild loneliness can be super painful because it taps into a pool of memories that we all have of being left out, being rejected, not being loved, being excluded in real or imaginary ways. And again, if the affect of shame is triggered, the memories the emotional memories of shame are going to be triggered and that's the only pool it's going to go to. Just like if you're frightened, the pool of memories around affects is going to be fear. Same with anger. With each of the affects it's going to go to that particular pool of memories. The problem is that you're going to use that pool of memories. You're going to pull those up and say look at all the evidence there is that I am shameful, that I deserve to be lonely, what is wrong with me? And that just adds to the pain of being by yourself, even if it's for reasons that are justifiable.
Speaker 1:You just moved into a new city, you don't know anybody, you have a new job, your friends all have COVID, like what happened to me a couple weekends ago. Almost all my friends had COVID and I'm grateful that I did not get it, but it really was not fun to spend the weekend by myself. There were a couple moments where I went. I'm feeling pretty lonely, cognitively in my head. I could calm myself down, I still felt it, and it was nearly impossible during a couple moments to not jump into that pool of memories and remember things like junior high school. A couple of experiences earlier than that were because I moved every couple years all my life. I didn't have friends to play with. Those little memories that came through my head, I went. I remember those those were really awful and remind myself. Those are not your circumstances right now. Your friends want to be with you. They just happen to be sick, so I took care of myself and didn't feed it. I didn't feed the shame.
Speaker 1:We are social animals so we don't want to be alone. Let me clarify that when we want to be alone, that's totally fine and that's a normal thing. For me, as pretty much an introvert, I like being alone. What's lonely is when you want to be with other people and you don't have the means. People aren't there, you don't have the resources, or you're sick, you don't have transportation, you might have hearing and sight problems that don't allow you to drive or to get around.
Speaker 1:Whatever hindrance there is to positive affect, to connection with others is going to feel shameful and it's going to feel distressing. So again, moving up the continuum a little bit here to postulate that resentment and mild distress feel at times like shame-based, because they're very similar, the distress like sadness, for instance. Sadness I think of as a combination of distress, usually mild distress and shame where you're really longing for somebody or an animal, or a job that you've lost, or anything that you want that you don't have now can cause sadness. Connection with others, connection to a career, connection to a place, homesickness, things like that. That type of sadness is really based on mild distress. It feels awful and it feels like there's that longing and that longing is clearly for connection and biologically we're wired to feel a certain type of shame. Again, not something that's worthy of being ashamed about, but we're feeling the biological affect of shame and anything that triggers the biological affect of shame is going to go into that pool again, like I said, of our shame memories.
Speaker 1:So how you respond to shame, self-consciousness, self-doubt, vary, of course, with your attachment style. If you have an anxious attachment style, you're likely to experience shame in those even lower, milder forms of shame more intensely. This is part of what it means to have an attachment style that is anxious. You're likely to be very hyper-aware of the potential for rejection, potential to feel really negative things around other people. You're always worried about their judgment and that brings up a lot of self-doubt and insecurity. So this often manifests in social anxiety, which fear of judgment around that gets amplified With avoidant or detached. You tend to avoid, tend to feel it less because you're actively trying to feel it less. So you're doing things to make sure that you don't feel it, compartmentalizing it, keeping it aside somehow, but also not confronting it. And so it's still there, but it's not being shown to you or anybody else.
Speaker 1:So, as we end here, I just want to stress that the feelings that people have about self-doubt, self-consciousness is super common. It's pretty ordinary. We all have it. There's no way to avoid it. I don't know anyone. Even those actors who are in front of large audiences may not feel it while they're performing, or even in front of a large audience, but they may in other circumstances, in more interpersonal relationships, for instance.
Speaker 1:What I'm really trying to stress right now is that the feelings that we have, that are the combination of, are really complicated. They're wonderful to study. Knowing them really helps you know yourself. It helps you pinpoint for yourself what you're feeling and to be able to articulate it both to yourself and then to others. The more that you can name what you're feeling, through both your affective experience and your emotional experience, will also let you be a better creative if that's who you are a better writer, better painter, better musician. Most importantly, I want you to understand that shame is on a continuum, that it's not an on or off switch, that you're either ashamed or not ashamed, or mild low ones and then higher ones. Take that from today's podcast. That it's a good thing. I'm happy. I'll be back Until next time. Take care of yourself, be well and be nice to yourselves. Bye.
