The Weather Inside Part 3: How Feelings Form Us

What if the most honest storyteller in your life isn’t your mind, but your body? We open the door to an overlooked truth: before words and theories, there is weather—warmth and absence, tension and release—and those early shifts become the first narrative your nervous system learns to trust. That lens reframes Freud’s famous Fort Da moment. Instead of a child practicing control over loss, we see a child rehearsing return. Throw the spool, feel the drop; pull it back, feel the warmth. The story isn’t mastery. It’s coherence.

We trace how attachment functions like climate. A reliable caregiver creates a steady season; inconsistency breeds sudden squalls; withdrawal creates drought; explosions bring lightning. Children adapt beautifully to the climate they get, and those adaptations are often misread as fixed personality: overachieving as weather forecasting, avoidance as storm dodging, conflict-seeking as the only path to warmth. Through Ella’s small heartbreak on a playground and the quiet harm of you’re overreacting, we show how invalidation opens a lifelong gap between inner weather and outer words. And with Jamir—a man taught to shake it off—we feel the weight of armor built to survive an early forecast that never promised safe return.

Across these stories, one theme holds: the body remains loyal to its first climate. A partner’s tone can feel like a cold front, silence like abandonment, a small disappointment like a pressure drop in the chest. You are not fragile—you are consistent. Change begins with naming the weather and practicing repair. Repair is the nervous system’s evidence that predictions can be wrong in the best way, that clouds part sooner than expected, that warmth returns on time. Join us as we chart a path from armor to alignment, from negative prediction to lived coherence, and learn practical ways to update your internal forecast. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a gentler forecast, and leave a review to help more listeners find their way back to warmth.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Body’s Old Intelligence
• 0:49 Rethinking Freud’s Fort Da
• 2:40 Feeling Before Thought
• 3:33 Ella And The Cost Of “You’re Overreacting”
• 5:02 The Spool As Reunion Practice
• 6:10 Attachment As Climate
• 7:26 Weather Adaptations In Adults
• 8:43 Jamir And The Weight Of Armor
• 9:45 The Body’s Loyalty And Prediction
• 10:44 Summary And What Comes Next

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hi, I'm Dr. Scott Conkright. What if your body is holding memories your mind can't access? If you've ever watched the sky before a storm, you know there's a moment when everything inside you responds before your mind catches up. The light changes, the air thickens, you sense something is coming. Your body reads the world with an intelligence older than thought. Children react to people this way. Infants react to faces this way. And long before you knew anything about psychology, attachment, narrative, or memory, your inner world was already alive with weather. Today I want to take you into one of the smallest, most overlooked moments in a child's life. A moment Freud misunderstood, and a moment that quietly reveals how every human being builds the story of who they are. Not from thought, from feeling. Let's start there. Freud watched a boy toss a wooden spool across the floor. The spool vanished. Then the child yanked the string and pulled it back again and again. Freud called this game Forte da there and here. Freud assumed the boy was doing something remarkably clever. He thought the child had discovered a symbolic way to master separation, a way to accept that the world sometimes removes, takes away what we love. But Freud was watching the wrong thing. He watched the spool. He should have watched the child's face, the child's breathing, how the mouth softened when the spool returned, the tiny breathless pause when it disappeared. The child was not practicing mastery. He was practicing predicting his own weather. What Freud missed is that the first story ever told is not cognitive. It is about core feelings. Something is here and it feels warm. Something goes away and it feels cold. Something comes back and the warmth returns. The child is building the earliest form of coherence. The child is making sense of feelings, not of thoughts. And that is where the rest of your emotional life actually begins. A newborn doesn't know the meaning of anything, yet her entire body is fluent in shifts. The mother moves two inches away, the absence is immediately felt, not cognitively, biologically. Long before memory, the infant knows the difference between held and not held, the way you know the difference between sunlight and shadow, even with your eyes closed. Every quiet moment in an infant's day is a small weather report. There is warmth, then absence. Felt as a drop or a collapse, sometimes big, sometimes small, then we hope, the return. The sun comes out, she goes away, it's cloudy. She comes back, the sun comes out again. Now let me bring you into Ella's world. She's eight, still young enough to lose herself and play, still old enough to sense emotional change with the sensitivity of a violin string. Her best friend leaves the playground without a wave. A single moment, nothing big and tragic, nothing dramatic, but her body reads it instantly. It's a small collapse, a tightening in the throat, an ache she can't name, and she cries a little bit. Her brain doesn't say ah, a separation event. Her brain is silent about this. It is the weather doing the speaking. In this story, the teacher approaches with the great sentence every child hears at least once, you're overreacting. These moments matter, because this is where the child's natural weather sense starts to get overwritten by adult discomfort. Ella feels the shift. The adult denies or minimizes that shift. The child then begins to doubt that the shift is real. What happens to a human being who repeatedly feels something genuine, yet is told the feeling is wrong, what happens then? Well, they stop trusting themselves. This is the beginning of the gap between the weather inside you and the stories you tell to explain it. Let's go back to the boy with the spool. His parents had left the room earlier that day. He felt the drop. He felt the rupture, he felt the dimming of the connection. Not because something catastrophic happened, but because feeling is his first language. The spool is his way of managing what he cannot name. Throw the spool, feel the drop. Pull the spool, feel the return. The boy is building a prediction. He is learning that the feeling state that frightened him eventually shifts. He comes back. Warmth returns. This is the origin of human narrative. Not symbols, not words, not cognition yet. Narrative begins as a way to organize feelings. A child's first story is simply this I lost the feeling, then it returned. Freud believed the game was about separation. In truth, it's about reconnection. The spool is a rehearsal for reunion. Adults tend to talk about attachment as a psychological concept, which it is, but to an infant, it is a meteorological one. It's all about the weather inside. Every caregiving pattern has its own climate. A parent who reliably returns generates a warm, predictable season. A parent whose mood flickers unpredictably creates a landscape of sudden storms. A parent who withdraws emotionally builds a climate of drought. A parent who explodes builds a climate of lightning. A child adapts to whatever climate he lives in. We mistake these adaptions for personality, but they are simply survival strategies for weather. It's how we get overachievers, underachievers, avoiders, clingers, people who apologize for their own breathing, people who brace before every silence, people who only feel close during conflict, people who intellectualize everything, and people who feel half alive. They are all weather adaptations. There's nothing inherently wrong with them, nothing inherently weak about them. They were the best the child could do in the climate they experienced. Think of Jamir, the man who grew up hearing don't cry, shake it off, be a man. His body still carries the echo of those sentences. When his chest tightens in meetings, that is old weather. When he gets short with his wife at night, that is old weather. When he lies awake at three AM unable to quiet the storm inside, that is old weather. He's following the forecast that was written into his system long before he ever had a choice. Freud thought the spool game marked the beginning of mastery. Jimir reminds us that mastery was never the point. The point was coherence. Coherence between what you feel and what you're allowed to express. Coherence between your weather and the climate around you. Coherence between the drop and the return. Jimir never got that coherence. So he armored himself. And that armor is heavy. One of the most humbling truths in emotional life is that the body does not keep up with your chronological age. You can be forty-seven years old running a company, raising children, paying a mortgage, and still feel eight inside when someone you love turns away. Your adult brain knows you are safe. Your body remembers otherwise. Your body reacts to pattern, not reason. This is why your partner's tone can feel devastating. This is why silence can feel like abandonment. And this is why a small disappointment can feel like a collapse in the chest. You are not childish, you are consistent, your body has integrity. It remembers the first stories you ever practiced, the story of Fort Da, the story of core feeling prediction. If the return in your childhood was inconsistent, your entire adult life becomes an attempt to rehearse the return that never came on time. This is where we land for today, at the end of part one. So far, we've talked about feeling as the first language, Freud's Fort Da as core feeling prediction. We talked about early weather turning into attachment, attachment shaping adult reactions, and the humbling reality that your emotional life is loyal to your earliest climate. In the next sections, we will go further. We will talk about the stories we build around these feelings, the way conflicts reveal old weather, why counterfeit climates confuse us. That's an interesting topic. How repair softens fears about negative prediction. Repair teaches us that our prediction that things are going to go badly isn't always accurate. Until next time, I'm Dr. Scott Conkryth with the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. We'll see you next time.