Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott Conkright

The Weather Inside Part 1

• Scott Conkright

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What if your body makes the first move and your mind rushes in to explain it after? We open chapter one of The Weather Within and unpack a practical, humane map for navigating intense moments by separating core feelings from the emotions we build on top of them. Instead of wrestling storms, we learn to read them: how the nervous system sets our capacity, why hunger and sleep can tip us into reactivity, and where that small but powerful pause lives between sensation and story.

We dig into the signature “lightning strike” of anger and show why it can feel catastrophic on a dysregulated day, even when the trigger looks small. From there, we widen the lens to the nine core feelings—interest–excitement, enjoyment–joy, surprise–startle, fear–terror, anger–rage, distress–anguish, disgust, dissmell, and shame–humiliation—and explore how each organizes attention, behavior, and meaning long before thoughts arrive. You’ll hear how affective literacy helps you name what’s happening in your body, how pattern recognition reveals your recurring weather systems in relationships, and why distinguishing real obstacles from imagined ones can save you from unnecessary storms.

We connect the dots between polyvagal theory, cognitive therapy, and affect relational theory so you can regulate state, revise stories, and understand the deeper forces that make things feel urgent, exciting, or unbearable. Then we get practical: a weekly exercise to catch the gap, label sensations, spot interpretations, and trace the moment right before activation. The goal isn’t to suppress feelings—it’s to build a larger container, reduce avoidable strikes, and choose what comes next with clarity and care.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a better map for big feelings, and leave a review so others can find it. Ready to read your weather instead of drowning in it? Tune in and tell us what you notice in the pause.

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For more information about Scott and his practice, articles, videos, and more: https://linktr.ee/scottconkright

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm Dr. Scott Conkrite. What if your body is holding memories your mind can't access? We explore how early relationships shape your nervous system and how healing begins through relationship, not just insight. Tune in now. Your body has something to say. Hey Dr. Scott Conkrite here with the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. Today I'm going to bring to you chapter one of my book, The Weather Within, Why We Feel the Way We Feel. And this is chapter one. In this chapter, I'm going to teach you the single most important distinction in your emotional life. It's the difference between what happens in your body first, which is the core feelings that are automatic, biological, and instant, and what your mind does with it secondly, the emotions, the stories, the interpretations, the meaning making. This distinction is the foundation for everything that follows in this book, and it will change how you understand yourself. The moment that changes everything. Your face is burning, your jaw clenches, your hands ball into a fist, and your whole body goes rigid. You can feel heat rising up your neck. Two seconds ago, you were fine having an everyday conversation. Now you want to explode. What just happened? Here's what most people would say. They might say you're angry. A therapist might help you explore your rage. And your friends might just tell you to just calm down. But here's what actually happened. Multiple streams of information converged in an instant. Your mind registered that something you valued got blocked or violated. Or at least you interpreted it that way. Someone could have interrupted you, or you noticed they weren't listening. Either way, your brain made a split second assessment. Obstacle, disrespect, threat to what matters to you or did in that moment. That assessment instantly connected to memories every other time you felt dismissed or powerless. Meanwhile, your body was already in a particular state. Maybe you were tired, maybe you'd skipped lunch that day, perhaps you were already running on fumes. All of this is information. Your interpretation, your memories, your body's connection flooded into your feeling system at once. And your feeling system did what it is designed to do. It generated the core feeling of anger in your body. Your face flushed, your muscles tensed, your jaw locked, and all this happened before you had a single conscious thought like I'm angry, or I'm furious, or I'm pissed off. That automatic bodily response is what is called a core feeling. It's the lightning strike. Now here's a key concept that will change how you see your emotions. Core feelings are biological first, interpreted secondly. Here's something important. Your core feelings aren't just responding to what's happening around you, they're also responding to what's happening inside you. Your feeling system is constantly receiving updates from your body's basic drives hunger, exhaustion, pain, sex, the need to use the restroom, breathing. These are things that your body takes care of but lets you know when they are urgently needing attention. These aren't emotions, but they absolutely influence which core feelings fire and how intensely. Anger is experienced differently when you're well rested versus running on a few hours of sleep. Anger is experienced differently when you're fed versus when your blood sugar levels have crashed. Your body state is always part of the equation. This is particularly critical here. The state of your nervous system acts like a filter for all of this information. When your nervous system is regulated, when you have what researchers call good vagal tone, you can feel anger and move through it. It's uncomfortable, but it's manageable. But when your nervous system is dysregulated, when you're chronically stressed, sleep deprived, or already activated by other strong feelings, that exact same anger feels catastrophic. The core feeling isn't necessarily stronger, your capacity to hold it has shrunk. Your nervous system state determines the size of your container, so to speak. This is true for all nine of the core feelings, and I will introduce all nine of them soon. Everything that follows the core feeling, the thoughts, such as I'm so angry, or they're so disrespectful, or I need to set them straight, is considered an emotion. It's the story you tell to make sense of the lightning strike that already happened, that the anger got activated in your body. You need a story to explain that. This distinction changes everything. The weather and the weather report. Most of us spend our lives trying to understand, manage, and control our emotions. We ask ourselves why we feel certain ways. We judge ourselves for having feelings that seem irrational or too intense. We build elaborate stories about what our feelings mean about us as people. But we're starting in the wrong place. We're writing weather reports about storms that have already passed through our bodies. Core feelings are like the weather. They roll in fast, often triggered before you even know why. You can't control the core feeling once it's activated, but here's what most people miss. You have enormous influence over what activates it in the first place. Think about that moment of anger. What actually triggered it? Maybe somebody cut you off in traffic? Or your partner forgot something important you asked them to do? Maybe your boss dismissed your idea without really listening to it. Or maybe you just thought someone was being disrespectful based on incomplete information. Maybe you told yourself a story about being undermined or ignored, and your feeling system treated that story as if it were a fact. Core feelings don't distinguish between real obstacles and imagined ones. They fire either way. This is where your agency lives. Not in controlling the core feeling after it fires, but in learning to recognize the moment before the interpretation, the assumption, the story you're telling about it to yourself that will activate the feeling. And in your building your capacity for this through rest, through nervous system regulation, through not running yourself into the ground so that when core feelings do fire, you have room to feel them without being overwhelmed. You can also learn to stop walking into unnecessary storms. Not every thought needs to be believed, not every interpretation needs to be treated as truth. Not every memory of past powerlessness needs to dictate how you read present moments. The weather will still come. Core feelings will still fire, but you can learn to distinguish between real obstacles and the ones you're imagining. You can build a bigger container, you can strengthen your capacity to feel the heat without immediately erupting or needing a story about why you're being attacked or what it means about you. That's where growth happens, in the space between the lightning strike and the weather report, in the moment where you feel anger rising, but haven't yet decided what it means. In the pause between the core feeling and the emotion. This trick isn't to outsmart the weather or to never feel heat or cold or any of the core feelings or the things that feel emotionally like heat and cold. It's to expand your capacity to feel the fire without immediately needing a story about why it's burning. Two ways to take charge. Now, understanding the weather metaphor opens two important ways you can take charge of your emotional life. The first is what I call immediate recognition. This is your ability to notice and name a core feeling in real time. When you can say ah that's anger, or wow, this is shame, something profound happens. You reclaim authorship over your emotional landscape. You become the observer within the storm rather than the object of it. Now anger is usually the easiest core feeling to identify. You know when you're angry, but even anger has a complexity to it that can really only be understood when you know how core feelings work. In intimate relationships, anger is usually triggered by shame, which we'll cover in depth later on. Many of the other core feelings are more difficult to parse out. They blend with other feelings easily. Shame and fear together give us guilt. We worry about the consequences of what we've done to somebody. Disgust and fear together provide us with contempt when it comes to feelings about other people. And we are all very good at intellectualizing our feelings. Even the most touchy feely people intellectualize what they feel to make sense of them. This is what I call affective literacy. It's a form of awareness that precedes and enables regulation. The weather metaphor works beautifully here because it suggests both inevitability and neutrality. Rain isn't good or bad, it simply is. You didn't make it rain. You're not broken for getting wet, but you can learn to recognize rain when it falls. This recognition doesn't control the affect, the core feeling, but it repositions you. Instead of being consumed by any of the core feelings, you're the one who notices them moving through. That shift creates space, not to eliminate the feeling, but to choose what happens next. The second way to take charge involves recognizing which weather systems you habitually attract or generate. This moves from the small picture, what's happening right now, to a bigger picture, the patterns that shape your whole life. It's where self-knowledge becomes relational. How does your personal feeling style interact with other people's feeling styles? Are you weather compatible, so to speak? I just made that up. Sounds good. Sounds kind of humorous actually. But often what we like or don't like is the weather the important people in our lives bring with them in how their weather front affects ours. Some people realize they carry a permanent storm system that exhausts everyone around them. Others discover they only feel safe in emotional drought, avoiding any weather that might make them vulnerable. Still others find they're constantly drawn to relationships where someone else's chaos feels familiar, even necessary. For them, they are somehow entangled in a self-propagating tornado of various intensities, getting sucked in and spat out with little control. This pattern recognition is where affect relational theory goes beyond what you might have learned from therapy before. It shows not just how your system reacts but why. Core feelings are the driving force of meaning itself. They decide what feels important, desirable, or threatening before your thoughts have a say. Your core feeling patterns aren't just reactions, they are the organizing principles of your relational life. And your relational life here includes everything you do because everything in life is done with a feeling. Think about it. The weather metaphor deepens here. Can you notice which seasons dominate your internal climate? You can learn which climates you thrive in, in which you enter at your own peril. You can prepare for storms, strengthen your shelter, and stop mistaking every cloud for catastrophe. You can become curious about the weather you create for others. Both forms of agency matter. Immediate recognition keeps you from drowning in the moment. Pattern recognition keeps you from drowning in your life. How this fits with other therapies. If you've tried various forms of therapy, you might wonder how this framework fits with what you already know. Here's how they connect. Polyvagal theory taught us how the body reacts under threat. It explains how our nervous system detects safety and danger. It gave us a map of what happens in our bodies when we feel threatened or safe. Cognitive therapies like CBT taught us how thinking makes emotions stronger or weaker. They showed us how to spot unhelpful thoughts and change them. Useful stuff. They gave us tools for managing our mental stories. Affect relational theory explains why we care in the first place. Why do we move towards some things and away from others? Why does something feel urgent, shameful, exciting, or unbearable? Art identifies the elemental forces beneath both body and thought. Here's what makes art essential. Your core feelings give meaning to everything else you do. Everything. Without understanding them, calming your nervous system or changing your thoughts becomes just a set of tricks. You might learn to calm down or challenge your thoughts, but if you don't understand what drives your feelings, you're only working with half the picture. Art shows you that you have power, not in suppressing your feelings, but in recognizing the patterns of emotional weather. How do feelings arise? How do they interact? How do they shape the stories you tell? The more you understand these patterns, the less you confuse the weather for reality. Where your power really lives. Let's be clear about what having power means here, because this is where most people get confused. There's a tiny moment between the core feeling, the body signal, and the emotion, the story you tell about it. The lightning strike happens. Then almost immediately your mind reaches for a story. I'm so stupid. God that scared me. That's really amazing. Those people suck. Those are judgments often. They're interpretations. But in that gap, in that in between space, where recognition can interrupt reactivity is where your power lives. Most therapeutic approaches assume agency happens after the emotions form. They teach you to challenge the thought thoughts like I'm stupid, or to regulate after you're already flooded with shame or fear. And these skills matter a lot. I teach them myself. But art goes earlier in this process. Growth happens in the pause where recognition interrupts the automatic story. In practical terms, this is where you can do three things. First, you can choose not to add narrative fuel to a temporary feeling. Don't feed the fire. Secondly, you can create capacity to feel without needing to immediately explain. And thirdly, you can relearn how to tell stories that help you process rather than multiply distress. That last point is super crucial. Affect recognition doesn't eliminate pain, it restores authorship. You're not trying to feel less, you're learning to feel without immediately needing a story about what it means. Because most of the time the story is what makes the feeling unbearable. The shame itself is temporary. The belief that you're fundamentally defective, that's what lingers. When you can separate the lightning strike from the weather report, you discover that the weather is often totally manageable. It's the story about the weather that drowns you, so to speak. Let's quickly review the nine core feelings. This book is organized around nine core feelings that I'm going to go into various depths along this journey. These are the biological response patterns that every human being shares, regardless of culture, language, or background. They evolved over millions of years to help us survive and thrive and connect with others. They're hardwired into your nervous system, and they're firing all day long, whether you're aware of them or not. And here they are. Interest, excitement. One thing that I need to point out right here is that when I list these, they're going to be on a continuum. So I'm going to from all except two or three, I'm going to be listing, I'm going to be listing them in pairs. So the first one is interest-excitement. Meaning on the low end, it's interest. And what I mean by interest here is just like you've noticed something. It doesn't mean that it is interesting in and of itself. It means that the affect, the core feeling of, oh, what's that? Whether it's a scratch on your car, which then might lead to distress, or an Instagram reel. Excitement, of course, is on the high end. And so there's a continuum there. And so that's true for all the affects, except for a couple of them. So interest excitement, critical. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about this one. This is what pulls your attention towards something new. Enjoyment dash joy. This is what makes you smile, what bonds you to people and experiences. Surprise, startle. This is your reset button when something unexpected happens. Fear terror is what tells you to get away from danger. Anger rage is what mobilizes you to overcome obstacles. Distress, anguish, this is your cry for help when you're overwhelmed. Disgust, this is what makes you reject what's toxic or contaminated, usually around the mouth. Dismell is a word that Sylvan Tompkins invented to describe the same thing in many ways about bad smells. It's what happens in your nose. It's stinky. Shame, humiliation. This is what makes you feel self-conscious on the low end. It makes you kind of want to hide in it and it causes what I call the slump of shame. So it can be on the very low end to the very high end. One of the issues we're going to be spending a lot of time talking about is how shame works in relationships, and how on the low end, shame is present everywhere in intimate relationships by necessity. And we'll understand this as we go. Once you understand these nine core feelings, what triggers them, what they feel like in your body, and what they're trying to tell you, you'll have a complete understanding of why you feel what you do. Most importantly, you'll learn to pause in the crucial space between the core feelings hidden in the emotion forming. That pause is where you get to choose what happens next. You're not broken when you feel intensely. You're just experiencing the weather. Let's learn how to read the forecast. Here's some things to try this week. I want to give you something practical to try. This week, practice catching the gap between the lightning strike and the weather report. Here's how it works. First, notice your body. When something feels intense, pause and scan. Where do you feel it? In your face, your chest, your stomach, your shoulders, wherever. Where is it? Where are you feeling it in your body? Secondly, name it as physical. My face is hot, my chest is tight, my shoulders are tense, I'm slumping. This is a core feeling. Third, catch the story. What thoughts are you having about it? Are you saying to yourself that you're stupid, that they the that whoever you are talking to you believe hates you, that you always mess up? These are emotions. And the fourth is to ask, what happened right before it? Did something get interrupted? Did you face something unexpected? Did someone pull away? This helps you see the trigger pattern. You don't need to do anything with this information yet. Just practice noticing the difference between what your body does automatically and the story your mind tells about it. Let me leave you with the key ideas from this chapter. Core feelings, what I'm referring to metaphorically as the lightning strike, are automatic and biological. They happen in milliseconds, as physical sensations that occur before a thought. They're triggered by patterns your nervous system detects. And they're influenced by your body's state and by your nervous system's regulation. You cannot control them once they fire. Emotions are the weather report. They're the stories, the thoughts, and the meanings that you add afterwards. They're your interpretation of the core feelings and what they mean. This is where most of us get our suffering from, actually. And this is where your agency, your capacity to have control, and your capacity to make choices exist. You have two ways to take charge of your emotional life. The first is immediate recognition. This is the ability to name what you're feeling in the moment, building on what I call affective literacy, core feeling literacy. The second is pattern recognition. This is the ability to see which weather systems dominate your life and relationships. Your power lives in the pause between core feelings and emotion. You can't control the lightning, but you can influence when it strikes. You can't control the weather, but you can build a bigger container for it. Growth happens when you can feel without immediately needing to explain and react. Here's where art fits with other approaches. Polyvagel theory explains how your body responds. Cognitive therapy explains how your thoughts respond. Art explains why you care at all. What makes things matter in the first place? Important stuff to know. Remember, you're not trying to eliminate core feelings. You're learning to recognize, understand, and respond to them wisely rather than reactively. You're learning to distinguish the weather from the rest of the world. Let me give you a simple summary of the key distinctions we've covered. Core feelings are your body's automatic responses to what's happening around you and inside you. They occur before you think. They show up in your face, your muscles, your skin, and how your body feels. You can't stop them from firing, but you can learn to recognize them. Core feelings feel either good, bad, or neutral. And they can blend later on and feel very complex. And they can make things feel urgent, and that's mostly what they do. They tell you what matters. Feeling, interestingly, is when you notice the core feeling happening in your body. That's what a feeling is. An emotion is when you add memories and stories to that feeling. It's what happens when your mind tries to explain why you feel the way you do. A mood, however, is a feeling that lasts for an extended period of time. It could be a few hours, it could be a couple days, maybe a week, but you're kind of stuck in a core feeling place. Over time, without realizing it, we all develop rules to try to get more good feelings and fewer bad ones out of life. These rules become patterns. They're the ways we automatically respond to life. We're built to do this. These patterns are what make up your personality. The weather will always come. Core feelings will always fire. But when you understand the difference between the lightning strike and the weather report, between what your body does automatically and the story your mind tells about it, you get your life back. That's where growth happens. In the space between feeling and meaning, where you can choose what comes next. You can start narrating your own life story. In the next chapter, I'm going to explore why we even have core feelings in the first place and why these nine specific systems evolved to help us survive as well as to thrive. Thank you. That is the end of chapter one. Show up next week for chapter two. So be sure to subscribe and follow along. And if you're curious where you are on your own growth journey, take the free self-discovery snapshot at scottconkrite.com. You can also join our newsletter for weekly insights and learn about upcoming therapy, meetups, and live workshops. Till next time.

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Scott Conkright

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