Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
Meaningful Happiness is a podcast that unpacks the science of emotions, relationships, and personal growth through the lens of Affect Relational Theory (ART), Chronic Shame Syndrome (CSS), and Latalescence—the second act of life where experience, adaptability, and purpose shape our journey forward.
Each episode explores how shame operates beneath the surface, influencing our confidence, connections, and sense of agency. Through deep insights and practical tools, we uncover ways to rewrite our personal narratives, break free from shame-based cycles, and cultivate a life rich in authenticity, curiosity, and joy.
Join me as we dive into the psychological frameworks and real-world applications that help us navigate relationships, self-perception, and the ever-evolving landscape of human experience.
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Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright
Cats, Dogs, and Humans Part 1: How Pure Feeling Shapes Us Before We Can Think or Speak
What if everything you thought you knew about emotions was backwards? Our journey begins with a startling truth: before you could think, speak, or even know who you were, you existed as a creature of pure affect. We dive deep into the fascinating world of pre-cognitive emotional experience, exploring how babies communicate through their first language—the language of feeling expressed through their bodies.
We examine the profound implications of being born with an underdeveloped stress response system, where feelings don't just occur—they become your entire reality. Drawing from the work of pioneers like Winnicott, Reich, and van der Kolk, we unpack how these early affective experiences create lasting patterns in our nervous systems. The conversation reveals how dynamic vitality affects—the choreography of our core feelings—continue to influence our movements, relationships, and responses decades later.
Perhaps most importantly, we discover that these patterns aren't fixed. Understanding how the body becomes its own echo opens pathways for healing and transformation. Through awareness of these deeply embedded rhythms, we can begin to author new stories about ourselves and our capacity for connection. The vulnerable creature you once were still lives within you, and learning its language might be the key to understanding yourself more completely.
Subscribe and share your thoughts on how early emotional experiences have shaped your own patterns of feeling and connection.
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We begin as small mammals with big feelings and no way to handle them on our own. There is no filter, no name, no story, just the flood of being alive. Affect is the first language we speak and is spoken through the body. Affects are the core feelings we are born with. A newborn doesn't need to learn how to feel. Core feelings, or big feelings, or affects, if you want to sound sciencey are already there at birth Raw, reflexive and insistent. They show up in the scrunch of a face, the arch of the back, the clench of tiny fists. These are not conscious acts, at least not yet. They are core feeling signatures.
Speaker 1:The renowned child analyst Winnicott aptly stated there is no such thing as an infant. Analyst Winnicott aptly stated there is no such thing as an infant. He was right. There is always an infant and a mother or caregiver. Affective signatures, including facial expressions, body movements and sounds, convey to the world around the newborn infant what it is feeling, in a big feeling sort of way. Core feelings ensure that the infant is clearly heard and understood by the caregiver.
Speaker 1:The adult in the room may not know exactly what's causing the little creature to be distressed. I mean it could be a dirty diaper, hunger or a pinch from clothing, but the search for the source is underway. Not quite sure why the little one is totally fascinated with running water, but it clearly is. Any new loud sound causes a startle, if not fear. The clearly irate tiny tot needs something to stop when it's mad, and soon. And they need it to stop now. And the parent is quickly trying to figure out just what the problem is. You know this language too. You were also born with it and spoke it fluently at one point. You still know the basics because they haven't gone away. A scowl means anger, a smile is enjoyment, open intent eyes mean interest, tears and wailing mean distress. As an adult, when you see these affects on others, when you see these big feelings or feel them yourself, you immediately tell a story about them.
Speaker 1:For the infant, what's happening doesn't have a narrative. For the infant, what's happening doesn't have a narrative. There is no. I feel sad because there's only physical expression and we are assuming the feltness of the experience. For this infant, this is too much, or this feels good, or I want more. We're inferring that the infant doesn't know. It wants contact, but it reaches. It doesn't understand fear, but it feels it in its body. The body feels and moves before the mind is aware of why.
Speaker 1:From an affect, relational theory, perspective, art, this is the beginning of emotional life, a pre-narrative state where core feelings or affects saturate perception and movement. Affective awareness arrives not as content but as tone or, better way yet, it tells all involved which feeling stage the story is unfolding on. All the world is a stage, shakespeare stated wisely a few hundred years ago If I were to film a David Lynch-inspired movie about a play called Babies somewhat along the lines of the short film with his called Rabbits, and the curtain opened and there was only an infant and a mother on a sofa, you would know what the feeling of each scene was, depending on the affect displayed by the infant and the mother's reaction to it. Each act is a different core feeling, let's say A strange play, but one that all parents watch every day. Biologically, these early affective experiences are shaped by a primitive yet potent neuroendocrine system. The amygdala fires, the hypothalamus sets off alarms, cortisol surges through an undeveloped HPA axis and just as quickly, oxytocin floods the system during a soft skin-to-skin moment with the caregiver and floods the system during a soft skin-to-skin moment with a caregiver. It's chaos and comfort. Without separation. Can't tell the difference between the two, just living them. Experiences lived in the whole body, not just the brain.
Speaker 1:Before you panic about this whole topic now, let me take a moment to clarify what I just said. Before you ever knew what stress was, before you had words or thoughts or even a sense of you, your body had one job Feel everything. In those first weeks of life, you are a creature of pure affect. You don't think about hunger, affect. You don't think about hunger, you are hunger. You don't worry about abandonment, you just feel the ache of absence in your bones, in your whole body. You don't choose to cry, you become the cry. That's because one of the most important feeling-related systems in your body, the HPA axis, isn't entirely online yet. The HPA axis is like your body's built-in fire alarm, but more sophisticated. It stands for the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis. A mouthful, yes, but all you need to know is this it's your stress response system, your internal alarm, that kicks in when something feels wrong or dangerous. So let's meet the three important players. Again, let's meet the team.
Speaker 1:The hypothalamus Think of it as the watchful boss in your brain scanning for signs of trouble. Now the pituitary gland, the tiny but mighty middle manager passes on instructions. And the adrenal glands? They're perched on top of your kidneys and they operate like emergency responders, ready to pump out cortisol, your body's stress hormone, in a fully developed system. When something stressful happens, like you miss a deadline, get stuck in traffic or feel judged in a conversation, your hypothalamus sends out the first set of hormones which tell the pituitary to send another hormone which tells your adrenals to release cortisol. This helps you focus, move and respond. But a newborn doesn't yet have this coordinated loop. The hypothalamus is still figuring out how to signal. The pituitary is learning its cues. The adrenal glands are in kindergarten, so to speak.
Speaker 1:So instead of stress becoming a signal to act as it does in adults, it stays as a feeling to endure. The infant doesn't respond to danger. No-transcript. It's a world made of feelings. This means the newborn isn't just sensitive to feelings. They are feelings. Life comes as wave after wave of felt experience Interest, joy, startle distress, hunger, warmth, shame, relief. These aren't interpretations or reactions. They are the baby's entire reality. Relief, by the way, is enjoyment. That's why we often smile with relief.
Speaker 1:Before the HPA axis comes online, affect rules the nervous system. The body doesn't know how to scale a response or conserve energy for later. So a misplaced touch or a misfeeding doesn't just feel bad, it is experienced as the most consuming experience ever. The world is a state of total crisis if things don't feel good and life is blissful if it does. There's nothing in between. That's why core relationships in these early months matter so deeply, because when an attuned caregiver shows up in a calm, warm and attuned way, they don't just soothe the baby, they also nurture the baby's emotional development. They become the baby's first external regulator. They do the job the HPA axis can't do yet. They are the fire alarm and the fire brigade and the blueprint for safety and the builder of the blueprint.
Speaker 1:As we grow, the HPA axis matures, providing the means for learning actually to stick and for increased control over our reactions. We learn to anticipate, interpret and regulate our emotions. But the body never forgets those early years. If our needs were reliably met, the stress system develops like a well-calibrated thermostat alert, but not overreactive. However, if our early affective world was chaotic, disjointed or shaming, then the HPA system may become bio-wired for hypervigilance or, worse, become desensitized from overuse. So the body becomes its own echo. So when we say the body becomes its own echo.
Speaker 1:What we're really saying is that experience has a tempo and the earliest tempos, the ones that arrive before language, before memory, before story, those don't disappear. They settle into us, they become how we feel our way through the world. Even when we think we're just reacting to the moment, the body might be replaying something from long ago, not as memory, as motion. This is where dynamic vitality affects, or DVAs, come in. Dvas are not emotions, they're not even feelings in the traditional sense. They are the felt qualities of movement and presence that carry affect before we can name it. Think of the way a body leans forward when interested, recoils when startled, stiffens when ashamed or softens when it feels safe. Dvas are the choreography of core feelings, patterns of tension and release, tempo and intensity. They give us rise and fall. They're not what we feel about something, they're how we feel as we move through it.
Speaker 1:I developed the concept of dynamic vitality affects to give language to the ways affect lives in the body, not just as posture or gesture, but as ongoing, adaptive strategies for survival and connection. In art, dvas help us see how the body doesn't just echo the past. It performs it Over and over, sometimes decades later, in the rhythm of a voice, the arc of an eye movement, the weight of a footstep. Now, this isn't a brand new idea. It stands on the shoulders of those who came before.
Speaker 1:Wilhelm Reich, for instance, working nearly a century ago, introduced the concept of body armor, which he described as chronic muscular contractions that he believed were the body's way of storing repressed emotional experiences. To Reich, this wasn't metaphorical, he believed the body literally held back expression to protect the psyche from overwhelm. A slumped chest wasn't just poor posture, it was grief unwept. A rigid neck wasn't just stress, it was rage unmet. Bessel van der Kolk extended this tradition with the now widely known phrase the body keeps the score.
Speaker 1:His research shows how trauma isn't just remembered in the mind, how trauma isn't just remembered in the mind. It's stored in the body's systems of sensation and response, especially in individuals who couldn't make sense of what was happening to them. For these individuals, triggers in adulthood don't awaken memories. They awaken bodily patterns, such as a collapsing tone, a racing heart, a frozen breath, without any conscious connection to the original event. This is precisely what DVAs are designed to help us name, because the affective world of the infant doesn't vanish as we grow, it just gets translated, it gets coded into rhythms of interaction, into expectations about others, into scripts that we live out without ever knowing we're following a script.
Speaker 1:If you've ever flinched at kindness or waited for rejection even as you were being embraced, and if you've ever noticed that your body tenses before your mind registers, why? Well, you're not reacting to the. Now you're echoing an old DVA, one that was formed when your nervous system was young and your needs were many and the world didn't always know how to show up for you. And that's the heartbreak, but it's also the hope, because DVAs are not fixed, they're learned, and what's learned can be relearned and unlearned. New experiences of safety, attunement and emotional honesty can start to reshape the choreography. The body that once collapsed can slowly begin to lift, collapsed can slowly begin to lift. The voice that once trembled can steady, the breath can open. The echo can change.
Speaker 1:As we grow in awareness of these rhythms, not just as facts but as felt realities, we begin to reclaim our authorship. We stop becoming a character in somebody else's script. We begin to compose our own In art. This is the work To feel the echo. To feel the echo, to trace it to its source, to meet it with compassion and then, slowly, consistently relationally. We choreograph the self, because beneath the story, beneath the thought, beneath the emotion is the rhythm of a body that remembers how it survived and if we listen carefully, it may also remember how to thrive.
Speaker 1:But affect isn't just reactive, it's predictive as well. Even in infancy, our systems begin to learn sequences of things that hunger precedes milk, that sound predicts presence, that touch can soothe but can also hurt. These are the very first patterns, and they are laid down not in words but in expectation. The nervous system, still immature, begins to calibrate around what happens next. Memory begins not as conscious recall, but as body memory, a kind of felt-sense, anticipation, a subtle orientation toward or away. Over time, these stored core feeling experiences become the lived material for emotional scripts. They inscribe. This is how things go for me. And if those early signals are misattuned, if the cries are met with absence or confusion, the script begins with uncertainty. The system learns to brace, to cry louder or to go silent.
Speaker 1:In art, this isn't necessarily pathology, it's adaptation. In art, this isn't necessarily pathology, it's adaptation. The body is doing its best to stay alive and anticipates good and bad feelings in a relational world that doesn't yet make narrative sense. Philosophically, this beginning is profound. Before we know we need, before we act, we feel.
Speaker 1:Identity begins not as a thought but as a condition of exposure. We are thrown into life without an eternally driven mandate to do something such as getting up and foraging for food. We are utterly helpless, more dependent and more vulnerable than any other mammal at birth, and the first thing we need to encounter is not the self but the other. Our vulnerability is not a weakness. It is the very condition that makes meaning and connection possible. Parents and caregivers are the self at the beginning.
Speaker 1:It takes several years for the infant to turn into a toddler and then into an independent person capable of living on their own. It is a long, arduous, extremely complex but essential process. We want dependence for very long times. It allows the child's energy to go into learning, not just schoolwork but, more critically, to learn how affect. To learn how affect, thinking, emotions, memory and storytelling all come together. The hope is that by the end of adolescence, the young adult will be a competent storyteller, one who has the agency to tell healthy, mostly positive stories, I hope, about themselves and the world around them. And so we begin as affective creatures, not cognitive ones. Thought will come later. Language will come later too. Narrative storytelling will come later too, but affect comes first. It is the essential motivating factor that allows humans to become fully human, and being fully human means having narrative and affective competency. More of that coming up when babies are born.
Speaker 1:They're experiencing pure, intense feelings, but have no way to understand or control them on their own. Unlike adults who can think about their emotions, babies simply are their feelings. When they are hungry, scared or happy, that feeling state completely takes over their whole body. They convey these feelings through facial expression, body movements and sounds, rather than words or thoughts. Babies' stress response systems aren't fully developed yet, so they can't calm themselves down when upset. They depend entirely on their parents or caregivers to help soothe them and make them feel safe. These early experiences with caregivers are significant because they teach the baby's developing brain how feelings work and what to expect from relationships and what to expect from relationships. If a baby's needs are met consistently with warmth and care, they learn that the world is generally safe and that their feelings can be managed. However, suppose their early affective experiences were chaotic or neglectful. In that case, their stress systems may become overreactive or shut down, as I mentioned earlier, which can influence how they handle emotions for the rest of their life. We don't intervene if they don't intervene and do something. Essentially, we all start as pure feeling creatures before we learn to think, speak or tell stories about our experiences or
