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.
Check out our other content at:
https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
GroupCast #01: What Lies Behind Door Number Three?
What drives those who are never quite satisfied, always seeking the next challenge or idea? The concept of "divine discontentment" offers a fascinating lens to understand this psychological phenomenon. Drawing from the mythological figure Theseus, who was cursed/blessed by the gods with an insatiable curiosity, this exploration reveals how certain personalities thrive on constant questioning and learning.
At its core, divine discontentment isn't a flaw but a fundamental orientation toward growth. Using Silvan Tomkins' affect theory as foundation, we discover that interest and excitement are actually feeling states - not just cognitive processes. These drive our curiosity and creative pursuits, while enjoyment and joy allow us to process and integrate our experiences. The perpetually curious mind toggles between these states, always reaching for what lies "behind door number three."
This restlessness can create unique challenges, particularly around shame - that biological signal that interrupts our positive affects when we don't get what we want. Society often weaponizes shame, teaching us to blame ourselves entirely for complex situations with multiple causes. For the divinely discontent, this can manifest as chronic low-level shame or feelings of isolation when others don't share their drive for more.
Finding community with others who understand this particular form of restlessness can be profoundly healing. Rather than pathologizing your desire to learn and grow, embrace it as your unique way of engaging with the world. The journey may not lead to permanent contentment, but perhaps that's not the point. Maybe the divinely discontent find their greatest joy not in arrival but in the constant, curious exploration of what might be possible.
Are you someone who feels this perpetual ache for more knowledge, experience, or understanding? Join our community of the divinely discontent as we explore how to channel this drive into meaningful relationships, creative work, and personal growth.
For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright
fantastic. Thank you everybody for showing up and making this the first, my first meetup, and I'm grateful that I'm here with you and that you guys showed up for this and let's have a dialogue real soon, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk a little bit about myself, my background, what brought me to start this project, where I'm going with all of it, where I hope to go with all of it I don't always have as much control over that as I would like where I hope to go with all of it I don't always have as much control over that as I would like and what my hope is for this particular meetup group. So one of the things that I what I really wanna jump into is talking about my expectations or my hopes, that is, around the meetup group and what I'm supposing brought you here. You know, like why this particular group interested you. So I'm going to make a guess around that and before I tell you what my guess is, I'm going to tell you a little story about when I was 18, that's when I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota, and back in those days, usually around September 1st, the temperatures dropped from like this within. This happens in Chicago too. As you know Ohio and all that. It could be like this out in, you know, august and then September 1st hits and it's now 40 degrees. Well, in Minnesota it's even worse, and I had to get up at 8 o'clock in the morning because not only did I sign up for a bunch of psychology courses, because I wanted to be not only a psychologist, but I was also a theater major and also a visual arts major. So, by the way, it took me six years to get my undergraduate degree, because I didn't want to graduate, honestly, I just enjoyed going to school. My parents finally said we're not paying for this anymore, finish it up. So I did, and I applied for a master's degree. Then I applied for a master's degree, then I applied for a doctorate degree and then here we are, 8 o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1:I attended a really well-known class that everybody talked about, that actually outside of the University of Minnesota, arthur Ballet's Intro to Theater History. It filled up the whole theater, a thousand-person theater, and he got up there without notes and gave the history of theater, starting with early Japanese theater, no theater, all those sort of things, all the way up to contemporary theater. So it was really a lot of history. But also he just did a brilliant job. I mean I thought this is what I want to do. I want to do what he's doing. I want to be an actor like him. And he's not even an actor. He used to be head of the department at the University of Minnesota Theater Department.
Speaker 1:He told a story one freezing morning in Minnesota and I had to walk across the bridge across the Minnesota, the Mississippi River for a reason, got there and fortunately he was talking about Theseus and the Greek islands, which warmed me up kind of. Not really. But he talked about Theseus, which I didn't really know much about. Theseus a reminder of the story is the one who fought the Minotaur Ariadne had to grab, gave him the string to get out and all that sort of stuff. But essentially he went from island to island looking for adventure Cool, he wouldn't talk about Greek theater a little bit. And then he said he came back to it and he said, by the way, theseus suffered or was plighted with divine discontentment. And I went that is a cool term, what the hell does that mean? And he said the Greek gods cursed him with a thirst for knowledge and a continually curious mind and one that is never settled, cursed him and blessed him at the same time and I went hmm, that's a cool idea. And it stayed with me.
Speaker 1:About five years after that I was reading Will Durant's History of Philosophy or History of Civilization or something like that, and I think that's where Arthur Ballot, the professor, got it from. That's the only reference and, by the way, I've checked it in ChatGPT and all the other LLMs, that's the only reference to divine discontentment that I've found. So we can trademark this. I just want to let you know we've got it, we've got it covered. I'm using it because I thought the idea of a group of people who are aching in a certain way, who are always wanting more, and they kind of know, if you give this up, if you give this achiness up, you're no longer who you are.
Speaker 1:And so you know patients that come in and say, like you know God, I'm just always. I'm never satisfied, I'm always discontent in a certain way. I don't know what it's about. And I explain to them divine discontentment and I said by the way, it's not quite what you're thinking, it doesn't bring you closer to God. It may, divine discontentment, may, be part of your spiritual journey.
Speaker 1:But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the psychological aspect of it, which is that strange set of personalities that keep saying got everything I want, but what's behind door number three. And that's what happened with Theseus. He had plenty of money, he had everything he wanted, but after a few months he'd say, okay, guys, let's get a ship, let's go get in trouble. And I thought this is something I've been struggling with all my life, which is I should be retiring right now. Hell with that. What fun is that? Right?
Speaker 1:By the way, the whole idea of always being questioning and hungry for another task, another set of knowledge, is what helped me work through my deciding not to retire, deciding how to do getting older differently, which I came up with the term late lessons, which is I'll go into that story later but basically it's like adolescence, but now I have the money and the time and everything else to do adolescence better than I did before. You know, as an adolescent, you don't have power, you don't have anything, you don't even know yourself, but you have all the energy of being an adolescent. You don't have power, you don't have anything, you don't even know yourself, but you have all the energy of being an adolescent. I still have the energy of an adolescent, more or less. I'm just in a better place. Do I have me completely figured out? Nope, I don't think I ever will. I'm not counting on that. Does that fit with you? Does divine discontentment sound like something that brought you here by chance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm always trying to learn new stuff. Especially my technology field is changing constantly. Now with AI it's exponentially changing Daily, looping kind of stuff. So yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1:So, if it weren't AI, would you say it's part of just your personality in terms of knowing yourself and so forth. Yeah, how about others?
Speaker 4:For me it's books. It's what Books and reading. I don't know what I'm looking for in the books, but it's like you go into a bookstore on a certain day and one book doesn't call you, doesn't speak out. Then you know a month or two later it does because something shifted around and brought the rebels inside of you.
Speaker 1:So what are you looking for in these books? You don't know, but what's behind that? I mean, why don't you just stay home and watch Netflix? I?
Speaker 4:don't know. It's like this spark inside. That's just like the interest is activated and it feels like it kind of feels like it's somewhere outside of me you know, just pushing me on. That's the experience.
Speaker 1:So it's curiosity, it's excitement about finding out about the unknown, what's behind the cover of that book, book number three, that's right. Anyone else, what am I looking for? Well, I'm just wondering do you have that sense of like there's divine discontentment have speak to you at all as a term? And if it doesn't, it doesn't with me or with what?
Speaker 5:I'm doing always for different, better ways of doing things. Sometimes that gets me in trouble because the jobs people always have too much of a change agent or move too quickly. But I get bored easily and if people can't come along I just kind of like push my way through, which is not always good, but I'm always looking at how to do things better differently. What's new out there that's? Why AI is so exciting to me because there's this whole world of possibilities.
Speaker 1:And I mean human resources and HR.
Speaker 5:People can be so important, always just want to do things the same way, and they're just so uninitiated and not innovative. So I'm just going to shake everybody and just say be, different.
Speaker 1:Be bigger, go bigger, so yeah, Well, we appreciate that You're speaking to to exactly what I'm going to go with. This is it? You know theseus, you think with his wealth, and you know he founded Athens, by the way, so he's the originator of Athens, the city we pretty well known. Again, lots of money, lots of wealth, but I suspect, like many people who are divinely discontent, he's pretty lonely, or he was pretty lonely. I don't think he's still around, but they think he's pretty lonely.
Speaker 7:I can attest to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And divine discontent has been part of my life, I think since like late high school, when I kind of really knew that I was different and I came up with a term I forget if it was late high school or beginning of college and the people around me because I'm from the Midwest and I really stood out because I was a big guy and I was intelligent and part of a lot of like engineering programs, things like that, and I called it the people around me.
Speaker 7:They were striving for mediocrity and for those people, you know, psychologically that was win, because many of them come from less than, and if you come from less than, then to be normal is a wonderful thing. That's what they're striving for. But once they achieve what they think, that is, once they can at least measure up to the Joneses, no matter how many loans they take out or things of that nature, once they look like they're part of that group, that's where they find their content and that worked in America, you know, basically from around World War two to about five, six years ago. That worked. You could live your entire life right there. But I think that a lot of people are being displaced right now thanks to AI and things and things of that nature, and it is really shaking things up and causing a paradigm shift. And if you strove for mediocrity right now, you might be in a place where you're in a little bit of a jam, because mediocrity may no longer cut it, because mediocrity is becoming commoditized.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a good point. I appreciate that. It sounds like you know what it's like to be lonely too, to not fit in and to be different, especially if you're not part of the, if you're not aspiring towards mediocrity Because it's kind of a bell-curvish sort of issue, isn't it One thing that I'm trying not to do very deliberately? And I feel this One thing that I'm trying not to do very deliberately, and I feel this, is that I don't mean my project or the concept of divine discontentment to be an elitist sort of approach to things. I'm just saying it speaks to a certain type of person that is lonely in the same way, that might want a community of people that know what it's like to be divinely discontent and so maybe less lonely. So that's what I envision around this group. Robert uses this term all the time Elitism, it's not for everybody. It's pretty cute. So that's what I envision this group to be about, and so I envision it to be a safe place for people to come talk about that, the achiness around that, but also the issues that come with it around relationships and around making life meaningful and making life happy, whatever happy means to you. So I want to make sure that you understand that if you're coming here and you want definite answers to things you can probably should leave now, because I I don't have them. I locked the doors, that's right. Yeah, this is an S session, god, I only have like 20 more pages, if you really want to leave. No, I want it to be a safe place, but I'm also going to use it to go through some of my theories, to talk not so much theory, but to give instruction and skill sets around how to do relationships. What are healthy relationships? What's a healthy relationship with oneself? What's a healthy relationship with others? One of the models that I have comes from my theater background, so with Arthur Ballett. By the way, I was 18 at that time. I received a scholarship from the AFL-CIO as a writer.
Speaker 1:About six months after that Happened to bump into Arthur Ballett in the hallway. He said hi, I'm Scott, You're Arthur Ballard, aren't you? You're Dr Ballard. You know one of those awkward things. And I said I'm going to DC. Are you still in DC? He goes yeah, because I'm in DC he goes. Here's my number. Give me a call when you're there. I said okay. So I went to his office and we went to you. Actually, walk by it, where I think I showed you down from where I stay in DC. That was 1980. So I ended up working for him for two summers in a row for the National Endowment for the Arts and then he hired me as assistant dramaturg at the Guthrie Theater after that.
Speaker 1:So my background in theater in writing has informed really strongly all my work in psychology, because I feel like when I'm sitting there and the patient is generally over here, what am I doing? I'm listening to stories. Right, that's what I'm doing all day long. I listen to people's stories. How does one make sense of stories? So that really interests me what I've come to when discovering Sylvan Tompkins' theories because he was, by the way, a playwright before becoming a psychologist, ending up at Harvard and discovering being the originator of affect theory.
Speaker 1:He basically said we have all these feelings that we're born with and because we're storytelling feeling-oriented creatures from birth, literally from birth we're trying to tell stories, if nothing else, through expectation and having as much agency as we can. A newborn can do what Not a lot it can do. It can't do not a lot at all. Okay, it is lying there. What can do what? Not a lot? It can't do not a lot at all. It is lying there. What can it do? It can move its eyes. It can say I've had enough of this, I'm moving my eyes away, enough of you. I'm turning my head away, I'm turning my eyes away, I'm done. Agency is there. The story of agency starts at birth and our stories get more and more complicated because they're all stories that have to do with core feelings and kind of the tragic place that we're in. Actually it's not so tragic, but it sounds kind of tragic when you put it out on paper. In a certain way, we only have two positive affects. We only have two core feelings that are positive. Fortunately, it embraces just about everything. It does embrace anything and everything that is good Interest, excitement, on a continuum, desire, interest what is AI?
Speaker 1:How do you figure this out? All that excitement, energy is in that affect, in that core feeling. The stupidest thing that Western science, literature, philosophy has done is not understand interest, intellectual interest, as affectively based. Interest is a feeling state. So you know, descartes, mahler, beethoven, all those people writing away, writing beautiful pieces of music, writing all this stuff, creating beautiful art, were not thinking these things through, they were feeling them through and using their big brains to put cognitive overlay on what they were feeling.
Speaker 1:When you get excited about AI, when you all get excited about AI, that excitement is a feeling. That's a feeling that you want to wake up to. That's the opposite of depression. So when people are depressed, when people are anxious, it's usually well, not usually it's always because the six negative core feelings that's what I'm saying. There's only two positive ones, and I'll come back to the other positive one. There's only two positive ones and I'll come back to the other positive one. There's only two positive ones. There's six negative ones, and those get in the way. Anything that gets in the way of the positive feelings gives us this feeling, gives us the slump of shame. The slump of shame is not a moral judgment. That's our cognitive brainy overlay about what to deal with that, and I'll explain that in a minute. It is not a moral judgment about the world or about ourselves. When we're feeling that slump, it just means we don't have access to the positive stuff that we want.
Speaker 1:You can't figure it out. You didn't pass the test. None of the people showed up to your meetup. It doesn't matter. I can decide if it's good or bad. I can decide that the test. By the way.
Speaker 1:Shame that failing a test. What does it tell you? Three options Either you didn't study hard enough, the professor's a jerk, or the third one, something in between. Okay, the rest of life is trying to figure out those three things. How much of it is me, how much of it is the world out there? Or, more likely, how much is it in that murky in-between area? Rarely is it all my agency, except when it comes to shame.
Speaker 1:What do we do? We put all the blame on ourselves. I must be stupid, I must be an idiot, I must be a ourselves. I must be stupid, I must be an idiot, I must be a loser, I must not be lovable. Why is that? Because in our culture, we use shame as a weapon. We use shame as a weapon in our education, in parenting and in politics. We make sure that people don't have access to what will make them feel good and we have control over them and give them tests and objectives to have to overcome to get basic stuff, instead of saying oh, you don't understand this math problem, stick around after class. Well, that would mean that we would need 10 teachers for 4 students, right? No, we're going to have like one teacher for 50 students, so 3 fourths of them, who might need more extra time, are going to be sent on to second grade when they really shouldn't be, or because they didn't learn the stuff in first grade. They're now going to struggle even more in second grade with the stuff they didn't learn in first grade. It's tragic.
Speaker 1:I'm explaining all this because what I find so incredibly important is understanding that we're feeling creatures that think, rather than just purely thinking people. Understanding that allows us, then, to understand what makes us happy and what's meaningful to us. But if we don't know that, we're going to tend to blame ourselves for things that we have no control over. Losing jobs, how much of it is you, how much of it is somebody else? How much? It's probably somewhere in the middle, but with job stuff, a lot of it is the other, it's economics, things like that Should you look at yourself, of course. How much of it is you Depends. You've got to look at it.
Speaker 1:It is not a model that we have in psychology right now. We talk about feelings as if they're thoughts. Actually, the primary cognitive model for feelings is that feelings are a cognitive assessment of something that we think through our feelings. Okay, then tell a baby when it's distressed. Okay, then tell a baby when it's distressed that it's acting up. That's not going to happen. That baby is feeling distress and it's going to feel distress, just like an adult is under the same situations. We learn to disguise it, we learn to mimic it and we learn to socially appropriate ways of dealing with it. If we're sad, if we're feeling shame, if we're disappointed, we need to be taken care of in the same way that a child does, the same way that a child needs to be taken care of. Becoming an adult doesn't change our human nature. It just changes the display of what we do. The insides stay the same. So all these core feelings and for you nerds here geeky, I'm not calling you names I mean that with pride and connection, we have hardware that we're born with our brains and our bodies and we learn stuff when we're thrown out there.
Speaker 1:Which is the software? Right, the affect is firmware. Affect is firmware. Affect is the interactive Without affect, without having, without having the hardware being able. Something needs to decide what we're going to pay attention to. I know what you're paying attention to if I have your attention From whatever ways I get it, and there's only three ways I can get your attention Through either startling you or causing some sort of feeling state in you. Hence social media, brilliant. It basically hijacks the affect system. So I can do it through fear. I can do it through negative affect, negative core feelings. The other one is through body signals.
Speaker 1:One of the stories I tell in here is that I used to fly a lot, but starting again due to COVID, but there's, you know, I was distressed. I remember being on the plane I think it was like a couple months ago going like something financial was going on. I think it was something with tax related. So I was totally distressed. I'm going like, of course, you know, this means, oh, that's something upstairs, I don't, it'll go away. So I'm, of course, thinking I'm going to be eating squirrel under a bridge, you know. So, waiting there on the plane, going like, oh my, you know everything's going to go to shit. Then we get on the tarmac. You know we go like what? Right before we, you know, right before takeoff, I'm going good, because I really need to pee. Then the pilot says, oh, we found out we need to wait 20 minutes. Now, what am I aware of? What is the only thing that's on my mind now. Okay, I'm not worried about eating squirrel under a bridge, I'm worried about peeing on myself on a plane like a six-year-old, and I don't know if any of you have been there, but it is not a good feeling. Okay, oh, wow, I can't. It's illegal for me to stand up and go use the bathroom, all worked out.
Speaker 1:But if you want to grab somebody's awareness, you can change something in their bodies. So whatever your body's telling you, and if it's high enough in intensity, it's gonna have your attention. Hence we have hangry Because our body says, hey, something is urgent. And it doesn't do it as a computer program sort of thing. It connects it to affect. So if you're hungry or sleepy or in distress because something's irritating you, affect of distress will keep increasing until all of a sudden, if it doesn't get taken care of, it turns into anger or rage and says you better take care of this now. You give me the damn Snickers bar, right this minute, or something bad is going to happen, or I'm going to smack somebody. That's the second wave, being alerted to something. So affect, body signals and pain Pain.
Speaker 1:Last Thursday I went to bed and I had this feeling that I don't like this awareness that I don't like I'm aware of a tooth in my mouth. It is never a good sign when you're aware of a tooth in your mouth Like hi, number 15 or 18 or whatever. It is never a good sign when you're aware of a tooth in your mouth like hi, number 15 or 18 or whatever it is. My dentist told me which number it was. I think it's one of those. Hi, I'm here, you're like. It's not a good thing. I woke up and it was saying hi really loud, like on a scale of one to ten. It was a two. Two hours later it was a six. Fifteen minutes later my dentist knew my issues Because my tooth had my awareness In big ways.
Speaker 1:When we discover something intellectually or artistically, the reason it's so exciting is because it's so exciting, because excitement is a core feeling. Otherwise, you would just be AI. Ai doesn't care what it's doing, which. For all of you in AI, talk to me if you want to learn how to make computers have feelings, because you have to understand the affect system. If you want to do that, we don't do that right now. We're not doing anything around that. We're teaching computers AI how to mimic feelings, just like we're teaching it how to mimic music. By the way, I would love to use AI for my lectures and have them write them for me. It sucks as a writer, as you all know. Do you guys compose? Does composing music with AI? Have you tried it?
Speaker 3:No, but that sounds like a great idea. I'd like to see what it sounds like.
Speaker 1:I use it to write some things because it generates ideas. It's generative. I'd probably spend more time rewriting it, so I think you could probably bring up some cool musical ideas. You would then spend hours cleaning it up, which is fine. It would just be a process, yeah.
Speaker 6:It's recommended to start with your draft and submit it, versus having to write something. You can also add documents so you can create a knowledge base to help you write.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, so I have the professional team version of ChatGPT. It has all my writing and everything in it. It kind of writes like me, but it says some weird stuff sometimes. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm looking for brainstorming. It's brilliant for brainstorming.
Speaker 2:I'm like, hey, I've got this business idea, or I'm thinking of a name, or hey, I want to write this type of proposal and start talking to it right up. I think it's good. I highly say here go, do it so confident. But here you go, no it's just not it.
Speaker 5:No, it's, it's been different. For me it's been spot on, really Well, that's good. What has been spot on?
Speaker 2:When I ask AI certain things or it tends Like if I'm like having a coding issue, it'll tell me the stuff and it'll tell me to go to menus that don't exist.
Speaker 5:There's lots of times I'll ask something, but before I ask it I'll say I'll ask the question, but before I type in and then in front of it I say analyze or rewrite this question and you can make the best results. And then it writes it and then it answers it through that way, and it's just better that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ask it better. Yeah, tell me what questions do you have? Yeah, yeah, those are topics. This is not time, good to know all the time. Yeah, yeah certain things just go that, and also the different hello London different yeah like I've said we settle in central large language model.
Speaker 2:That's the basis of payout and so basically, it's taking everything it's been trained with and based on math probability this house is getting so it doesn't generate. Generative AI is the next evolution where it'll actually make up stuff, but right now we're still in the hey, all these books are loaded in. It has a big memory of all that, but does it Right and so? And yes, given the preference before those? You know, I'm imagine you're an expert PHP programmer 20 years. You know analyzes this. That that's good to bring context. You get better results, yeah, but these are the ones do it differently.
Speaker 2:Like log is better writer than chat. You may teach such a beauty if you're really good skeleton of like a contractor or something. But if you want like the meat of it, like, you have to do that one or be right yourself, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's lots of fun techniques to like switch around, like I'll go from ChatGBT to Claude sometimes and then to another one. Yeah, that's pretty good.
Speaker 2:And people Claude sometimes, and then to another one. Yeah, that was perplexing. That's pretty good and people watch Gemini. It's literally nurture.
Speaker 7:Because it's based on what it was trained with.
Speaker 1:Yes, Well, so we're going back to how we're programmed. The affects basically tell us what to pay attention to. They're what bring things into awareness. Nothing comes into awareness unless there's feeling, affect or body sensation. So something's got to decide what to pay attention to, and the reason it's decided that it's going to be affect or evolutionarily is because we walk around in space. Think computationally how much that takes. Something has to stay the same.
Speaker 1:When you think about what's changing, when you think about just the story, space going from still to videography massive, massive, okay. Now just live that, okay. What do you pay attention to? Only the things that you're feeling. That's only things you remember are the things you've done repetitively over and over again. Remember are the things you've done repetitively over and over again, which is a different type of memory than episodic memory, which is the feelings, the things that you remember that are always related to feelings. Because we don't have infinite storage, we don't have extracortical organizers where I can like download shit into my you know it next to my bed. You know just boom. I wish he did it be better names and be better at so many other things. That's now a whole fuck. That's exactly. I get chat GPT on it too.
Speaker 1:So that's why, that's why core feelings are so important and, lastly, that the most important one, going back to it again, oh, I want to tell you that the other positive one, the other positive feeling, is enjoyment, joy. So interest is always up energy. Look at that, look at that. Oh, hey, hey, come here, check this out. Let me play this for you. Let me do this. Whatever, enjoyment is always down energy. It's always feeling safe, where you feel like there's very few resources that you have to use to just chill out. We need that Evolutionarily. We're saying, okay, interest is like going out exploring the world. Enjoyment is coming back and saying let's make a nice meal. All the wild animals are out there, all the party goers are out there.
Speaker 1:District, by the way, is right down the street, the largest, I think, dance club in Atlanta. You can hear it on the weekends Just down the street. Inside here it's peaceful, I can enjoy myself. I'm sure people are enjoying themselves there, but it's up energy over there, clearly. So those two positive affects I challenge you to think of anything you really love and really enjoy that isn't within those two. That's a challenge, think about it. I mean it sounds kind of like limiting, but it's pretty broad.
Speaker 2:I heard something one time that resonated. I said we make decisions for two reasons One to gain pleasure, two to avoid pain. That's about as interesting.
Speaker 1:That's the pleasure principle. That's Freud's pleasure principle, essentially. Okay, tompkins made a matrix out of it, so he just made it more complex the nuances.
Speaker 1:Hmm, he found the nuances in that. Yeah, so it's the complexities. So when you think of, for instance, again with shame which is what I wanted to end with is that shame is the most important factor in our lives. Why? Because of all the memories that we have, the ones that we tend to remember are the ones that shame sticks out when we didn't get what we wanted. We always remember the tests that we fail, the jobs we didn't get what we wanted. We always remember the tests that we fail, the jobs we didn't get, who broke up with us, the things we didn't accomplish, as well as we tend to remember all of our wonderful successes, all the positive ones too.
Speaker 1:Given that we live in a culture that uses shame as a tool of control, and in really high levels of shame, most of us are walking around with chronic shame syndrome, with constant low-level shame, in which it becomes a lens for which we see everything that we do. So we're always on the alert for being disappointed, saddened, not getting what we want. So, again, shame only as a biological response to stimuli. Out there is basically just saying I didn't get the elevator, I missed the elevator, I missed the bus, I missed the ball, I missed get the elevator. I missed the elevator, I missed the bus, I missed the ball, I missed getting the hoop. You know, I missed the shot. It's all it is. I didn't get married to the person I wanted to marry. There's gradations. Obviously, if we have lots and lots of it and we don't know how, we don't recognize it for what it is and we don't learn how to help each other detoxify it, we're going to live with chronic shame all the time, and so I feel like this is one of the places that I want to bring that to, and this is one of the missions of my life, which is to bring these topics out and have people start dialoguing about it. So that was a little less than two days worth of material right, so I kept it under two days.
Speaker 1:Was it close About a day and a half? Does it feel like a day and a half? Feel like four or five hours? It's good. Don't tell the truth. This is the time to lie. To me, it felt really fast and really interesting and really good. Okay, good, you're hired. I loved it. Let's keep talking.
Speaker 6:I'm done with my part so you talked about two aspects positive aspects.
Speaker 1:You said there's six negative aspects.
Speaker 1:Oh, do you really want to go there? Do you really want to go negative? Is that next session? I can quickly mention them if you want. That's going to be a memory issue here. There's one neutral one, which is surprise startle. By the way, the majority of them are on a continuum, so they start mild and they go high. So surprise is low up to startle. So that's basically reset.
Speaker 1:So basically, any time there's a clap, like a light honk in traffic, like oh, he's coming by, or somebody slamming on the horn, that's going to bring anger. Anytime that there is an intensity of stimulus that lasts too long and is too high, it's going to make you mad, it's going to bring on anger and I can promise high it's going to make you mad. It's going to bring on anger and I can promise you it's going to happen. We're wired for it. We are bio-wired to react in these affective ways. Dismell is a word that he came up with and, by the way he came up, he discovered all these because of being the first stay-at-home dad. I think it was 1950s, his son was born and I think he was on sabbatical or something like that. So he was like observing his kid and I'm like that kid keeps making faces and everybody around him keeps responding to these different faces and the different noises coming out of this kid. What's that about? Think about it here's the first philosopher psychologist that actually hung around with a baby, which is probably would have been a smart idea to have women philosophers starting way back earlier. We'd be a lot further on in progress around these things. So in this case it happened to be a guy, because there were only one or two psychologists or philosopher women, you know, at that time. But he said there's something meaningful here.
Speaker 1:Oh, when that baby starts crying and I feel distress, or it feels distress, I feel distress. We now know that this is due to mirror neurons and things like that. What does a parent do when an infant is in distress? It does what it needs to do to make the infant not feel distress.
Speaker 1:So it sells all these faces and the distress of I'm sorry, the face of dis-smell is the stinky one. It's not going in my mouth, uh-uh, nope, it's also as an adult that says you stink, you're a piece of shit. So when we're in love and we meet somebody or we're into somebody, it's like I'm going to gobble you up. I could just gobble you up. You're just wonderful, I want more of you. Yum yum, yum, yum. Then you break up, you stink, you're a piece. I could just flush you out of my life. We just go back to the affects. We just go back to the core feelings. We just do adult versions of them. We just do adult versions of them. So dis-smell is that one, disgust is so one is with the nose and if you've ever fed like a six-month-old to a one-year-old food, you probably saw it inside out she didn't like broccoli.
Speaker 1:You know that stink, all those faces. We still do them as adults, like her. Yuck, you know him. We have a great word, supercilious. I don't use that word very often. It's a word that's pretty highfalutin, but it means highbrow. It means like contempt by raising your eyebrow Cil is eyebrow in French, so supercilious means like hmm, hmm, no, you don't belong here, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Distress, anguish so distress on the low end, anguish on the high end. Anger, rage, fear, terror. How far am I now? That's three. One more Shame humiliation.
Speaker 1:Shame, by the way, I wish this is one thing I've struggled with from the beginning of this project. I call it. My project is one. Everybody takes shame as a moral failure. So yeah, I don't have any problem with shame. Yeah, you do, but I mean we all do.
Speaker 1:But I'm not talking about shame as moral failure. I'm talking about shame as any interruption to what you're trying to have with people. What is the first sign of shame at that level? It is self-consciousness. If all of a sudden you're in a room and you're feeling good and then all of a sudden you recognize that everybody's looking at you in a funny way because you just said something or you cracked a joke and it was flat. You're now super hyper aware of you.
Speaker 1:You are self-conscious in a way that you weren't the minute before, which is generally what we don't want, okay, and then you can just think of gradations. You know, I'm aware of being sad, I'm aware of being disappointed, I'm aware of not fitting in, I'm aware of being different. That doesn't mean you've done something shameful. It means you're feeling the biological, core feeling of shame. What you do with that cognitively and make a moral judgment about it you have control over. You don't have any control about the core feeling of shame, and that's a big difference. Did I get all of them? Is there a total of nine now?
Speaker 1:If I count anger as one rage as one, so anger rage is one. They're on a continuum Dismell, dismell, distress, distress, anguish Is distress separate from dismell? I'm sorry, disgust and dis-smell are the only ones that are not on a continuum. The other ones are on a continuum Humiliation yeah, I think I got them all.
Speaker 3:Can shame be ever a good thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in the right dosages. It's supposed to tell you be self-conscious, you didn't get what you wanted. If you tell me a joke that didn't work for me or landed on a funny, where you go like, yeah, I'll work on that joke, or maybe not tell that one, where you go like, yeah, work on that joke, or maybe not tell that one, and I go like, eh, it wasn't very funny, but I still like you and we'll hang out. But maybe don't go into comedy whatever. Think through this career thing a little bit more. But that's feedback that you want.
Speaker 1:My daughter felt shame, not moral guilt, when I said Aria, don't make me upset right now and keep getting up and not going to bed. This is the last time I'm talking to you about going to bed on time. Please go to bed. I don't want to go to bed. Go to bed Because she't want to go to bed. Go to bed Because she knew I was going to. I didn't get angry. Angry but I said Come on, let's. You have to shame your child, but basically saying I'm not happy with you. We're not connected in the way that we want to be connected. By the way, that's the best tool that parents have. They don't have to like overdo the shame With young kids. They want you are the number one thing in their life. They just want to be with you. You just need to use enough shame to get the job done, and that's it.
Speaker 4:Shame's difficult to talk about because affects of shame as a biologically based feeling. This is, I understand, what most people are thinking when they talk about. Shame is their emotional memory that's been built up over their life, and not the biological affect biological based affect that's the struggle, thank you.
Speaker 1:That's the struggle that I've been having because I can't come up with another word.
Speaker 4:I keep trying Self consciousness is what's the example, effectively, of shame in the baby. I know it manifests in the slum, but what's the stickiness?
Speaker 1:I am wanting to get more of those slow motion videos that infant researchers do. I haven't had the time to do so, but I found a couple of them where it shows just in milliseconds like an infant trying to reach something or do something. You know, a young toddler trying to get something, and then it's like you can see this millisecond of slumpiness. But keep in mind, for an infant, if there are no negative affects, for the infant toddler, everything is interesting and enjoyable, except it doesn't take much for one of the negative affects to get in the way. But if it's in that interest, excitement, enjoyment, joy, phase, the whole world is new, everything is interesting. So it doesn't take long, so it goes. I can't get that. Well, look at that, look at that, look at that, look at that, look at that. I can't get that out. Well, look at that, look at that, look at that, look at that, look at that. You know, so it's.
Speaker 1:As it gets older you'll see more and more of the slumpiness. Turn for three, two to five, all the way up to 99 years old. Turn the TV off of somebody who's watching a show that they like. What, what, what, what are you doing? Whoa, hey, no, no, it's not bedtime, is it? Oh, come on, come on. Reaction to shame, most of the time is anger 90% of anger in relationships is shame his reaction.
Speaker 4:If Shane, I guess a little bit further from the biologically based, it's anything that's a anytime, these barrier to positive affects, I mean, do you see, like depression and anxiety? I guess more depression is the idea that came up downplaying and diminishing want as a protective mechanism against shame, because if you don't have anything to want, then it's a desire or want that you have.
Speaker 1:That's very insightful. Yeah, I think that's a big component. That's one of the scripts that we write about feelings. How do you deal with shame? Well, in some families, in some societies, you don't ask for much, or you have a story that tells you that you're unworthy, or that shame is expected, or it's because of your awful personality Not laughing at that, but I'm just saying it's because you're the fault of it. So that's where the moral part of it comes in, for a lot of people is that they make a moral judgment about themselves, or that they were told directly and indirectly if you were smarter or if you were this, if you were that, if you tried harder, or if you weren't so lazy, if you weren't so interested in other things like gaming, you'd actually get your homework done.
Speaker 4:I don't know if it's too much of a problem with the language, but it's like you should be ashamed of yourself. How's that fit in there?
Speaker 1:That's a weird. That's a weird thing to say, Because what's the opposite of shame is pride. But you said don't be so prideful, Right? Okay? Well, now we're screwed. We can't do anything around shame or pride without feeling like okay, now am I doing this, right? Well, I can't do shame or pride, right.
Speaker 4:What sort of effective background like would you be passing on shame or, I guess, what's the inverse. So if there's, you know, somebody I don't know, concoct an example where it should be a shame for Eli and the other people.
Speaker 3:Well, my brother once was throwing stones at cars that were parked on the parking lot. I think that would be normal for my dad to be and he did. I don't know if he used exactly those words, but it would be normal for him to be and he did. I don't know if he used exactly those words, but you know it would be normal for him to act. He should be ashamed of himself for doing that stupid act, that bad act.
Speaker 4:So I think it was like yeah, but was the feeling state that your pawn was in? Was that anger? Couldn't it be anger, disappointment or Like what motivates? What's the motivator to cast shame onto somebody?
Speaker 3:Well, one hopes that the motivation for him was for my brother not to do that anymore and for him to feel the rightful feelings of what he had done was wrong. So one hopes that that's the case.
Speaker 4:But like, a moral sense.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, I think there's something wrong with the moral sense.
Speaker 1:Well, that's it. It's very complicated because once we start learning language and start socializing, parents have a lot of work to get their kids ready to go to preschool and kindergarten. They need to make sure they're not pooping in their pants and they're not pulling their junk out and playing with it in public and all sorts of things like that. We need to socialize them because they're going to get into a lot of trouble otherwise for their own protection and safety and they have to do things that they don't sometimes understand and they have to. Like when I've raised kids, you're going to do it because I said so, Because I don't have time to explain to you right now, because your ass is going to get in trouble by me and the police are going to get in trouble by me and the police going to get involved. You know you don't throw rocks and destroy cars. You know like he should have been ashamed of himself.
Speaker 1:You know like he should have known better you know, like he was only three years old, but you know still well, he was older than that.
Speaker 3:But the worst part was like I was also there and but I was like playing football with my friend and I saw him doing it, but I kind of didn't do anything about it. I was like, oh, whatever, you'll figure it out. So it was like, so I also got a dose of Javale and I at the time, you know, I felt, you know, I wish I wasn't caught. It's like stuff like that. But then, at the same time, like thinking on it right now, it's like, yeah, I should have done something about it. Maybe, you know, post that experience, I have done something about it. I can't think of it right now in particular, but you know it's a negative reinforcement.
Speaker 1:Well, it's an interesting and complicated issue right there, because with people I feel like I can intervene with. I bet if Logan was out in the parking lot and he started throwing rocks at the car, you'd say Logan, why are you doing that?
Speaker 1:I thought you could hear that, huh, but you almost feel like that's part of the way we learn is that we actually have to learn to protect each other. So we don't. We all stay in line in a certain way. So that can feel moralistic and that's a good type of shame. Except there is civil disobedience which should be allowed to, which is morally correct to do, politically and otherwise. But you have to have the morality in place first. So shame has this role in teaching kids around that. And then you want them to get to a point where they call it all into question and move beyond it, which is what I'm calling later lessons, you know, which is when you start.
Speaker 1:You're old enough, starting at 23, 24, to start writing your own story, Because somebody has to tell you a story that you have to follow up. To that point I basically, with my kids, had to tell them this is the way to do it. Why? Because I'm your dad, I'm the boss of you Bottom line. Now, as an adult, your job is to start figuring out what story is best for you. You can call mine and everybody else is into question. Good luck with the throwing rocks at cars. If that works for you probably won't, you know. It's just it's not going to work. Better to learn it early, right?
Speaker 1:So the shame has a role. Shame has a role in relationships. I don't like it when you talk to me like that, anything in a relationship in which you're getting feedback that hurts my feelings. When you say that, oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, oh I feel ashamed for hurting your feelings. Good, I want you to feel ashamed. You know I don't want you to feel horrible, but I certainly want you to feel self-conscious next time you do something like that.
Speaker 1:So you don't do it, because it's not cool when you talk over me in public, when we're at dinner, and you say stupid stuff in front of everybody else and they now think I'm like stupid, whatever. You know, we all have those sort of things with people that we're intimately involved with. That's how we give feedback. Smacking them upside the head is not the way to do it, not the way to do it. Overly shaming them with name-calling and everything else doesn't work. It's too intense for the crime. So shame has a very necessary place. It is on a scale of one to 10, our culture seems to be fine with starting at five and going up fast when we really need like a two or three in most cases, but we need to know what it is in order to learn how to.
Speaker 4:Yeah, just for me, just having this idea of shame is like a barrier to positive effects. That's really helpful for me, you know, just to anytime that I feel myself feeling bad for any reason, just to be able to recognize that and kind of wonder what the positive connection is, because sometimes it's like material or person to person, or sometimes it's my relationship to an idea or an ideal or an imagined future or imagined self. I mean, we get this a lot in music. Nothing ever goes the way that we want it to.
Speaker 4:It'll go well, I'm not saying I'm not being deprecating, but it's never the way we want it to. So it is difficult to feel that connection, that really positive connection with the performance, even when it was a great performance. They'll say yes and then they'll just go to the next one.
Speaker 6:We are our worst critic, yes, especially performing. We know where we made the mistake, or missed a note, or didn't hold the best song, or whatever. But the audience doesn't, and that's where you get the feedback. And you might think, oh it's, they only do all the mistakes I make. It might be an educator, or you do the juries and stuff, or you study music.
Speaker 4:They know.
Speaker 6:It's their job to know, especially if they were a new teacher. But the audience.
Speaker 2:What could it be? As you were talking about us. We should always treat shame as a bit of a passive-focus, like our diet, like food, and also nourish us for things bad. Whatever we're constantly having to do, right, we're just messed up by something, stuff, whatever. You know I get more energy on these days. It sounds like I gotta keep shame. That kind of thing Help, all I say.
Speaker 1:Again, we have to know what it is in order to do that. You know, when patients come in and sit down for the first time, I ask them if they're physically comfortable. Is the lighting okay? Most of the time, especially if I see if they're feeling a little bit uncomfortable because their environment needs to feel warm, because if they're distressed by it being too bright or not bright enough I have no control over the noise here, but I try to make the environment comfortable enough for them because there are things that we can do to lower distress in our bodies.
Speaker 1:It also attend to potential points of shame in relationships. When people come into therapy they're usually experiencing lots of distress and shame in their lives, otherwise they wouldn't be coming to see me. It's usually a sign of a certain type of defeat to have to go for some people to say I can't figure this out myself. I'm going to go see a therapist. So they're coming to me in shame as it is. I have to keep that in mind and immediately try to give them as much agency as I can, to give them as much control to them as possible. One I'd say it's pretty courageous for you to come here. I want to make sure that you get what you need and that you take care of yourself in relation to me and that you have the right to take care of yourself in relation to me. And often they're like but you're the doctor, you know everything. Okay, well, look that one I have to disavow right away. You know I don't know everything. Thanks again, just curious if you have any questions or thoughts, feelings, reflections before we end. I'm just curious if you have any questions or thoughts, feelings, reflections before we end.
Speaker 1:What I will be doing soon is offering a series of relationship workshops four-week courses in which I actually do psychoeducational stuff. I do most of the talking I did more of the talking tonight than I meant to, but it will really be much more instructive with specific topics around each one of the affects and then a skill set that I'm teaching and then a series of those relationship workshops. Honestly, the way to really learn this is to be in group therapy because it's in vivo. The way you do relationships gets played out with other people, with a skilled clinician, and you get to find out what you're not aware of in terms of your own shame and what's preventing you from connecting in ways that you want to with other people, and the only way really that I know of is to really learn that in the moment with a lot of feeling, is to be around other people who are committed to learning about themselves in that type of process, and then you can just keep coming back to these if you want to just do it informally and if that's what you need to do for X amount of time.
Speaker 1:You're not obligated to do the relationship workshops or the groups, but they're ones. I suggest I run several groups. I'm really looking forward to the relationship workshops because I really love doing them, but I'm glad you asked those will be available. I hope in a couple months there's a little bit of work involved in trying to get all these things going.
Speaker 2:As you might know, but the group therapy is now. You can sign up anytime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can sign up. Yeah, I have groups forming all the time, so if you're interested in group therapy, reach out and you'll have people like, like this group, just everyday people that with curiosity and a desire to learn about themselves, and a little bit of humility and in the right amount of pride, and it's a good combination. So thanks for asking.
