Attachment and Affect, Part 1

Ever wonder why a delayed text can feel like an earthquake while a real setback barely registers—or the reverse? We dig into the engine room of emotion, starting with nine core human affects that wire motivation, meaning, and action before thoughts arrive. From there, we map how early caregiving teaches our brains to manage intensity—turning feelings up or down, showing them or tucking them away—and how those lessons become lifelong attachment patterns.

We draw a crisp line between core feelings and the emotions we build on top of them, then explore the “volume control” that defines secure attachment: felt intensity and displayed intensity mostly match, and the dial moves with context. When care was inconsistent, that knob often jams. You’ll hear vivid, real‑to‑life examples of anxious amplification—where small attachment cues ignite outsized panic—and avoidant dampening—where the body surges while the mind says “I’m fine.” We show why these patterns are selective, often appearing only in intimacy, and how they’re not character flaws but adaptations to early environments.

Most importantly, we offer a practical path back to flexibility. Learn to track felt versus displayed intensity, spot attachment‑relevant triggers, and practice co‑regulation on purpose. For anxious patterns, space out reassurance and build grounding that outlasts the spike. For avoidant patterns, notice body cues, name one vulnerable feeling, and wait before you fix or flee. Therapy becomes the laboratory for corrective experiences that rewire the settings over time. Join us as we translate complex affect science into usable tools for calmer, closer, more honest relationships.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with someone who’ll benefit, and leave a review so more listeners can find us. What’s one moment this week where you’ll try adjusting your emotional volume knob?

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Agenda
• 0:39 Why Core Feelings Matter
• 3:54 Nine Basic Human Affects
• 6:26 Feelings Versus Emotions
• 9:18 Feelings Create Meaning And Action
• 12:45 When Good Feelings Overwhelm
• 15:20 Co‑Regulation And Learning Control
• 18:05 Flexible Volume In Secure Attachment
• 20:11 Felt vs Displayed Intensity
• 22:20 Anxious Attachment Amplification
• 26:22 Mild To Moderate Anxious Examples
• 30:13 Severe Anxious Crisis Pattern
• 34:03 Why Amplification Varies By Context
• 36:31 Avoidant Attachment Suppression

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hey, Scott Conkryt here with the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. Welcome back. Today, I am going to talk about more than just effects and emotions, which is which is something I talk about all the time and will, of course, reference. But I'm going to start talking about core feeling management strategies. How do we control our feelings? And this is a fascinating and complex subject, and I'm going to do it very slowly so that everybody can follow along. I will, of course, have to cover some affect core feeling basics for those who are just starting to follow me on the Meaningful Happiness podcast. But we'll quickly get through that and then into what happens when tough feelings become too hard to manage. And what happens growing up in terms of learning from parents and others how to take care of difficult feelings. And sometimes, by the way, difficult positive feelings, sometimes especially for children, good feelings can feel too intense as well. So we'll we'll talk about that as well. Before we can understand how people learn to connect with others, we need to understand something simpler. Feelings themselves, and how humans learn to handle them. Sylvan Tompkins figured out something important about feelings. Sylvan Tompkins was a psychologist in at Harvard in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, I believe. He found nine basic feelings that all humans have. They're interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and dismell. Don't worry, it's not on the quiz. Dismel, by the way, is that wrinkly, wrinkled up, nosy feeling when you smell something bad. He made that word up. These feelings aren't thoughts. They happen in your body before you can think about them. They're biowired. You're born with them. A baby doesn't think I'm interested in something. The baby just turns towards whatever they're interested in and looks at it. It doesn't say too that, hey, you know what? I'm going to do that baby thing now that I'm feeling my diaper's all messy. I'm going to start crying. No, it doesn't think about it. It just does it. We do that as well. Maybe not with the diaper thing. That's none of my business. But what I'm saying is that when it comes to affects, when it comes to core feelings, you just do them. Distress happens when there's something that feels bad and it's lasting too long. When something hurts, when there's a messy diaper, like I mentioned, or when mom leaves the room and mom is wanted. These feelings are automatic and they're powerful and they can be overwhelming, especially for a baby whose brain isn't fully developed yet, and won't be, by the way, until about age 21, if lucky. Think about a baby crying hard with no one to help calm them down. That baby isn't just uncomfortable. Their whole body is in crisis mode. Without any ways to manage these big feelings, babies would be completely controlled by them and actually not able to do anything about them. This is where core feeling management strategies come in. They're the patterns we learn that help us handle feelings. We learn to turn them up or down, to show them or hide them, to deal with them without falling apart. We learn these patterns from the people who take care of us. And these patterns become the foundation for how we handle emotions the rest of our lives. So let me, for those who are new, tell you about the difference between feelings and emotions. Core feelings are biological, they're biowired. That's a word I made up. I figured if Tompkins can do it, I can do it. They come with specific patterns in the face, the voice, the body, and the nervous system. You know when somebody is angry, you know when somebody's full of interest about something, that somebody's excited. So when you when interest activates, your eyebrows raise a little, your eyes get wider, and your head turns towards whatever it is that's caught your attention. There's a feeling of wanting to move closer, figure out what it is. Whereas with distress, the face gets crunched up, and depending on your age, you will cry. The distress gets people's attention. It's an affect built in, a core feeling that's built in that says, I am I'm going through stuff that is too big for me. I need help. Somebody come to my rescue. These patterns are universal. They happen automatically in all humans and even some primates. Emotions, on the other hand, are totally different. Well, not totally different. They're built on affects, they're built on the core feelings, but emotions are what we build from the feelings through learning, through language and culture. Sadness, for instance, depression, melancholy, heartbreak. These are all emotion words. They refer to different versions of the core feelings, for instance, of distress, shame, and fear mixed together. But the basic biological feelings existed before we had words for it. These core feelings tell us what matters. They work by making certain experiences matter more than others. They create motivation and meaning. Listen, without core feelings, everything would be the same. You'd see food, hear a sound, touch something, but you'd have no way to know which things mattered, which needed attention. Did you have to do something action-wise? Was it good or bad or dangerous? Feelings solve that problem. Interest makes new things exciting and makes us want to go figure it out. Makes us want to explore. Enjoyment, on the other hand, makes good experiences feel good. It makes us want more. It's as simple as that. Super complicated, but that's basically what enjoyment is about. It's about making social and making interest and putting in the effort to learn things enjoyable. It's inherently good feeling. Fear makes danger signals big and it makes us want to run. That activates fight, flight, or freeze. Feelings are the body's way of saying, this matters, and do something about it, whether that's positive or negative. For a baby, this is life or death. Interest drives them to explore and learn. Distress, when separated from a parent, makes them cry, which brings the parent back. In most cases. Fear of heights keeps them from having dangerous falls and so forth. Without feelings pushing them to act, babies wouldn't survive. The problem is that feelings, as I mentioned earlier, including the best ones, including the positive ones, can be too much. They can feel overwhelming, especially when your brain is still developing. A baby experiencing full intensity distress is genuinely in crisis. Their stress hormones spike. If this continues without relief, it can actually damage their developing brain. And as I mentioned earlier, intense good feelings can be overwhelming. Too much excitement can actually flood the baby's system and cause problems. Babies can't control these feelings on their own. That's the problem. They can't. They really can't. They are totally dependent on caregivers. They don't have the brain development or the learned skill set yet. They need someone else to help them calm down. This is called co-regulation. Over time, through thousands of these helping moments, babies learn strategies. They learn to handle their feelings. As the child grows, over thousands of these moments, and over many years, if things go well, they learn to handle their feelings, to tolerate certain intensities, and to show or hide feelings based on what's happening around them. But in the earliest months and years, big feelings without help would literally overwhelm the system. This is why core feeling management strategies aren't optional and they're not necessarily bad. They are actually necessary adaptations. They allow developing humans to survive the power of their own feelings. And here's one of the things that I really want to stress is that when I start talking about shame and when I start talking about attachment styles, every person is going to be struggling in some degree with dealing with especially negative core feelings. None of us have perfect, secure attachment. That's a myth. During when bad things happen to us, we are non-optimal. And what we see is that we get overwhelmed by our own feelings. That the management styles, the core feeling management strategies, are not perfect. So if you want to understand yourself and understand why you get upset in certain ways under stressful circumstances, this podcast is for you. What we learn to do with our feelings growing up is what we learn and develop strategies to turn feelings up or down, which is also called modulation. This means that you're learning to adjust how big a feeling is to match the situation. You turn it up when you need it, turn it down when it's not helpful. In secure attachment, this happens naturally. Well, let me let me specify here. In the ideal version of secure attachment, at some point, this happens naturally. The baby feels upset, the parent helps him calm down, turning the distress, let's say, from a 10 to a 3, and the baby gradually learns, I can feel upset without being overwhelmed. Feelings can get smaller. I have some control over how big they get. Of course, the baby is not saying this. I'm making this up, but let's say, not even the toddler's not going to say this either. Adults will say this, but I'm adultifying this baby right now to help illustrate sort of what happens. It actually has it's not done in words. Really, what happens is that this baby, all babies who are learning these modulations techniques, are learning about expectations and they can understand expectations. They can understand and they're able to predict what the caregivers are going to do. And that prediction basically tells them whether that's going to give you secure attachment if they can predict accurately that they're going to be taken care of, and they know that in a felt body sense, for anxious and avoidant attachment styles, it's a different picture. And we'll get there in a few minutes. So again, after thousands of these moments, the child builds up brain pathways for control. By adulthood, the securely attached person can feel angry without raging, they can feel sad without totally collapsing, and they can get excited without going overboard. They have a flexible volume control. Here's what happens when co-regulation is inconsistent or missing. When help is inconsistent or absent, the volume control develops imperfectly. We need to understand two different things. Felt intensity, how big the feeling feels to you inside, and displayed intensity, which is how it's like what it says. The displayed intensity is what you're some ways showing with your face and body and in your voice and so forth. It's how big the feelings look to other people through your voice, through your face, through your body, through your behavior. For secure attachment, these two match. What you feel inside matches what shows outside. And you can adjust both based on the situation. In insecure attachment, the relationship between the two gets distorted. The flexible volume controls don't work correctly. In anxious attachment, everything gets amplified. In anxious attachment, feelings escalate beyond what the situation requires in most cases. Both what you feel inside and what you show outside get bigger than they should. This happens on a spectrum from mild to severe. By the way, if you see yourself in any of these, I hope you're clear that I am not trying to pathologize any of this. These are all creative adaptations for people who did what they could to get through bad situations, non-ideal situations. And you may have had the most wonderful parents, but they could have been depressed, they could have been preoccupied, they could have been working a lot. And like everyone, they were perfect. And what you're gonna get is for all of us, for most people, some anxious attachment strategies and some avoidant strategies. So just pay attention to what you might be more prone to. So it's it's really more about giving you the tools to understand yourself better. Now, on the mild end, attachment feelings specifically get moderately amplified, not super big. Your happiness, your joy, when you're with the person that you love, might be slightly more intense than maybe the other person, maybe more than the situation actually calls for. That's a judgment call. Your worry when a partner doesn't text back might jump from mildly wondering to somewhat worried faster than normal. Small hurts might feel bigger than they should. But you can still function. You can still work, have friends, and your relationships aren't dominated by anxiety. So here's a couple examples. And by the way, these are made up. I'm using these just to illustrate these points. These are not real people. Sarah has mild anxious attachment. When her partner texts, hey, we need to talk later, she immediately feels a spike of anxiety. Her stomach tightens, her mind starts racing. A secure person might think, hmm, wonder what that's about. And just go on with her day. Sarah's internal feeling goes from a zero to six out of ten almost immediately. But what she shows might only be a three or four out of ten. She texts back, sure, everything okay? A mild check, not desperate. She can mostly focus on work, though she's distracted. She makes a point not to text or call during the day to her partner. But when they finally talk and it's about something ordinary, I don't know, needing to change dinner plans, she feels foolish for her internal reaction. She can recognize that it was too big, her response, even if she couldn't stop it in the moment. Now, somebody with medium anxious attachment might significantly amplify. At the moderate level, amplification gets more pronounced and starts seriously affecting relationships in daily life. Small disconnections create large internal distress that other people can see. You need frequent reassurance. You have trouble calming yourself down when attachment anxiety activates. Marcus has moderate anxious attachment. When his girlfriend goes out with friends without him, his felt intensity escalates dramatically. Within an hour, he's moved from missing her a little two out of ten to intensely anxious about whether she still cares, like an eight out of ten. What he shows matches his text multiply like like crazy. Hope you're having fun. Then a few minutes later, or 15 minutes later, hey, miss you. Hey, everything okay? He checks her social media repeatedly. He feels absolutely unable to focus on anything else. He might call her just to hear her voice for a second, and when she comes home, he needs a lot of reassurance. He wants to hear about her evening in detail. He needs to be told she loves him. He might express hurt that she didn't text more. His friends have learned that when his relationship anxiety kicks in, he becomes absolutely preoccupied and emotionally unavailable for any other connections. The amplification affects both internal experience and external behavior significantly, creating noticeable strain on him and everybody around him. Now, in the worst case scenario with very high anxious attachment, it's extreme amplification in crisis mode. At the severe end, amplification becomes so extreme it dominates life. Almost any attachment trigger creates immediate crisis level intensity. You experience feelings not just as big, but as overwhelming, flooding, and unbearable. What you show is often super dramatic. Partners describe feeling like everything is an emergency, like they're continually in crisis management mode. You can't regulate even with support. External reassurances help only for a moment before the cycle repeats itself again. Jennifer, who has severe anxious attachment, when her husband is 20 minutes late coming home from work without calling, her felt intensity goes from zero to ten instantly. She experiences full panic, you know, you know, with heart racing, can't breathe properly, mind, her mind is flooded with catastrophic thoughts, like he's dead, he's leaving her, he's having an affair, on and on and on. It can change day to day. What she shows is equally extreme. She calls him repeatedly, ten times in a row. She calls his workplace, she might even get in a car to go look for him. She's crying and shaking when he finally answers. When he arrives home, his phone died, he stopped for gas, whatever, normal stuff. She can't calm down. She's sobbing, accusing, desperate for reassurance. She needs him to prove he still loves her. She might be upset for hours or days afterwards. This pattern repeats multiple times per week with different triggers. Her husband describes feeling like he's walking on eggshells, never knowing what will trigger the next crisis. She's lost jobs because her relationship anxiety interferes with her work. Her friendships suffer too because she needs constant support. The amplification has become so extreme it's not just a relationship pattern, it's affecting her whole life. So felt and displayed intensity don't Don't always match perfectly, even in anxious attachment. Some people have learned to partially hide what they're feeling while still experiencing extreme intensity inside. They feel the panic but hide it better, creating internal suffering without others seeing it so intensely. Others might show intensity that slightly exceeds what they feel internally, not because they're being dramatic or manipulative, but because they learned that only maximal external expression gets responses. So they unconsciously show more than they feel. Most commonly, both felt and displayed intensity are genuinely amplified. But understanding the relationship between them helps explain why some anxious people seem more manageable to partners. That's because their display is somewhat controlled even when internal feelings and experiences are extreme, while others seem constantly in crisis because both internal and external intensity are at maximum. The modulation failure in anxious attachment is also selective. It primarily affects attachment relevant emotions. A person with anxious attachment might handle anger at work effectively, manage frustration with traffic calmly, deal with disappointment about canceled plans in a reasonable way, but when the emotion involves attachment and attachment themes abandonment, rejection, disconnection, being loved, modulation can completely fail. A mild slight from their partner feels catastrophic. A normal evening apart feels unbearable. A delayed text creates genuine panic. The amplification is situation specific. It's not that all emotions are stuck on high, it's that emotions related to core attachment wounds activate a specific amplification process that bypasses normal control. With avoidant attachment, the suppression split is what it's called. In avoidant attachment, the volume control creates a deep split between what's felt and what's displayed. Often there's also a split between conscious awareness and what's happening in the body. The primary pattern is dampening. Feelings get turned down, minimized, suppressed before reaching full intensity, or even awareness. But this dampening operates at different levels of the system, creating complex patterns. Research consistently shows that avoidant people have high body arousal, for instance, elevated heart rate, stress hormones, sweating, while reportedly low distress. This means the body is experiencing intense feeling, the physical part of the emotion is fully activated, but conscious awareness is dramatically dampened. The felt intensity at a conscious level might be two out of ten. I'm fine, I'm just a little uncomfortable. While the body intensity measured by instruments is eight out of ten. Stress response fully activated in this case. What you show typically matches conscious experience. Appearing calm, controlled. What you show typically matches what your conscious experience is. If you feel calm, you're gonna be appearing calm. If you feel controlled, you're gonna look controlled. If you're not not really affected by things, you're not gonna show that. You're not gonna show that you're affected. The body, on the other hand, tells the truth that consciousness is shut out. Tom has avoidant attachment. His long-term partner says she's thinking about whether the relationship is meeting her needs and suggests couples therapy. A secure person might feel anxious, felt the intensity six to seven out of ten, and express that I'm worried about this. I hey, can we talk more? With body intensity matching felt intensity. Tom's body response is extreme. The heart rate spikes, stress hormones elevate, nervous system goes into defended mode. Body intensity is a nine out of ten. But his conscious felt intensity is minimal. Uh, okay, sure, fine. Um, he might be a little annoyed consciously. The conscious felt intensity around it is it like a two out of ten. And what he shows is even flatter, and this is the strangest thing. Okay. What he might say is, okay, if you think we need therapy, we can do therapy. That's it. Displaying an intensity of one out of ten. If you asked him, he'd genuinely report he's not upset or handling it just fine. He would believe that's true because his conscious awareness is genuinely dampened. But if you measured his body, you'd see a significant increase in distress. The dampening in avoidant attachment doesn't affect all feelings equally. It specifically targets vulnerable attachment-related emotions, just like it does with anxious. The person might experience and express anger relatively openly. Anger can feel safer because it creates distance rather than closeness. It's a big difference. They might show frustration or annoyance, they might even display excitement about achievements or things that they're interested in. But the feelings that signal need for connection, like sadness, fear, loneliness, longing, tenderness, the desire for comfort, these get suppressed dramatically. This creates a personality that seems to have emotions, so they don't appear so they don't appear flat or depressed, but they lack emotional vulnerability or softness. Lisa has avoidant attachment. She expresses irritation effectively when her coworker takes credit for her idea. It's displayed with anger of, like, let's say six of ten, six out of ten, felt anger six out of ten. These match. No suppression of these feelings at all. She shows enthusiasm about her obby. She talks excitedly about a book she's just in the process of reading and laughs genuinely at jokes that she finds funny. To casual acquaintances, she seems emotionally expressive. But when her parent is diagnosed with cancer, she appears remarkably calm and controlled. She says, hmm, that's difficult, but we'll manage. With minimal feeling display, the displayed intensity, let's say, of two out of a ten. If you asked her how she feels, she'd say, hmm, I'm I'm concerned, I think, yeah, of course. But there's no point in falling apart. So the conscious intensity, felt intensity is a three out of ten. But if she were in therapy and you did body work, tracking her body, you'd find chest tightness, shallow breathing, clenched jaw, shoulders raised up, all signs of significant distress, body intensity, an eight out of ten. The vulnerable feelings, the fear about losing her parent, the sadness about her mortality, desire to be comforted, are almost completely suppressed at the conscious level while the body carries the full weight of it. Like anxious attachment, avoidant attachment exists on a spectrum. No big surprise, right? Mild avoidant. You have some access to vulnerable feelings, but find them uncomfortable and limit expression of them. You can acknowledge, I miss you, and say that, but rarely. You can say, I need help, but only after trying everything in yourself, independently, of course, first. You can show vulnerability, but it feels exposing, and you recover by creating distance afterwards. Now, with moderate avoidance, you have very limited access to vulnerable feelings. You might intellectually know that you should probably feel sad about that, but you can't access the sadness as a felt experience. The display of vulnerability is rare and is often followed by shame or withdrawal. You function pretty well independently, but struggle significantly with closeness. If you're somebody who's avoidant, severe avoidant, you have almost no conscious access to vulnerable feelings. You genuinely believe you don't feel lonely, don't need emotional connection, don't miss people when apart. The suppression is so complete it appears to be absent of feeling rather than suppression of feeling. Display is completely controlled, even in situations that would make most people cry or seek comfort. You remain stoic. Your life may be functional but emotionally isolated. The critical point here is that both patterns lack flexibility. What both anxious and avoidant patterns share, despite being opposite in direction, is the loss of flexible control. Secure attachment, that mythical aspirational secure attachment, has a volume knob that works perfectly. It can turn up intensity when appropriate, deep grief at a loss, excitement at good news, anger at injustice. It can turn down intensity when appropriate. Disappointment about canceled plans stays as disappointment, not devastation. Annoyance at traffic stays as annoyance, not rage. The person can adjust both felt and displayed intensity based on the situation. Internal experience and an external display generally stay connected and match. Anxious attachment has a volume knob stuck on high for attachment. Anxious attachment has a volume knob stuck on high for attachment relevant feelings. A small trigger creates large responses in most cases. Moderate concerns can become crises. Vulnerability is experienced at maximum intensity. You can't dial down even when you want to. The amplification is automatic. Avoidant detachment has a volume knob stuck on low for vulnerable feelings. Significant triggers create minimal conscious response. Genuine losses are experienced with dampened intensity. Vulnerability is suppressed before it even reaches awareness. You can't dial it up even when appropriate. The suppression is automatic. Both patterns represent rigidity, the opposite of the flexibility that characterizes secure control. The anxious person wishes they could feel less intensely, but can't stop the amplification. The avoidant person might benefit from feeling more fully, but can't access the suppressed feelings. Neither has choice in the moment. Both are operating with volume controls that were set wrongly during development and now run automatically with very little control depending on how severe the attachment issues, how severe the attachment issues are for that person. One creates too much conscious intensity, anxiety, the other too little, the avoidant. Neither matches what the actual situation requires. Understanding this complexity, the relationship between felt and displayed intensity, the body mind splits, the selective nature of amplification and suppression, the spectrum within each pattern is important for self-understanding and getting help. It explains why anxious people aren't being dramatic. They may come off as dramatic, but they're genuinely experiencing that intensity. And why avoidant people aren't emotionless. They're physically experiencing intense feelings that are being shut out from awareness. Both patterns are volume control problems that developed as adaptations to specific early environments. Both require extensive correction experience to develop the flexible control that was never built in childhood. But that is the work of therapy.