Shows
Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightAttachment and Affect, Part 2: The Emotional Tolls: Anxious Exhaustion & the Avoidant FlatlineSend a textWhat if your emotions aren’t “too much” or “too little,” but a volume knob stuck in the wrong position? We dig into how anxious and avoidant attachment patterns act like broken dials—either blaring sirens at every hint of disconnection or muting signals until life feels flat. Drawing on affect theory and rich, real-world case stories, we map what mild, moderate, and severe patterns look like in daily routines, relationships, and health, so you can finally see your experience with clarity and compassion.We unpack anxious amplification: why delayed texts can feel like da...
2026-02-1843 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightAttachment and Affect, Part 1Send a textEver 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 e...
2026-02-1136 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightWhy Knowing Better Doesn't Help Part 2Send us a textWhat if your hardest moments aren’t overreactions, but old forecasts your body still trusts? We go deep into how early emotional climates—missed attunement, slow repair, and tiny verdicts like clumsy—turn into adult patterns of panic, pursuit, withdrawal, and shame. Using vivid stories of Lisa, Maya, and Daniel, we unpack why the mind can know you’re safe while the nervous system prepares for loss, and how that gap creates conflict, self-criticism, and exhaustion.We name the sneaky pull of counterfeit weather: the habits that mimic warmth—doomscrolling, overwork, drama, per...
2026-02-0426 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightWhy Knowing Better Doesn't Help Part 1Send us a textWhat if your body decides what matters before your mind catches up? We dig into Tomkins’ bold claim that feelings aren’t background noise—they’re amplifiers that turn quiet bodily signals into action, shaping motivation, habit change, and what we call “common sense.” If knowledge hasn’t been enough to change your behavior, this conversation explains why.We trace the logic from drives that only motivate in the moment to anticipatory affect, the present-tense feeling that lets memory guide behavior. Along the way, we unpack the ambiguity of affect—how the signal is ri...
2026-01-2127 min
THE BADASS NEW YORKER — by Supriya VaniDr. Scott Conkright on Emotional Resilience, and Reclaiming Inner PowerIn this episode of THE BadAss NEWYorker Podcast, Supriya Vani sits down with Dr. Scott Conkright, a leading voice in emotional resilience and mental health, for a grounded and deeply human conversation on healing, breakups, and rebuilding inner strength.Dr. Conkright speaks with rare clarity about why emotional pain is not a weakness but a doorway—one that, when understood, leads to self-trust, stability, and personal power. Together, they explore patterns behind emotional attachment, the psychological impact of separation, and how individuals can move forward with dignity, awareness, and confidence.This episode is for anyone na...
2026-01-1424 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Weather Inside Part 5: Retire The Avatar To Reclaim Your LifeSend us a textWhat if your body is already telling you what matters and your mind keeps talking over it? We dive into a clear, usable map for change that starts with the feeling system—the fast, sensory guidance that marks relevance before you can think a thought. Instead of treating emotions as problems to crush or content to perform, we show how sensations like tightness, heat, or collapse point to concrete needs: repair, protection, rest, or a new role entirely.We take a frank look at socialization. Men are taught to shut down an...
2025-12-2442 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Weather Inside Part 4: Rewrite The Forecast Your Childhood WroteSend us a textWhat if your most confusing reactions are perfectly logical once you read the weather inside your body? We explore how early climates—those subtle pauses, sighs, and silences—taught your nervous system to predict danger or safety, and how those predictions keep showing up in adult love, shame, and conflict. Instead of pathologizing panic, numbness, or urgency, we trace how a child’s need for control becomes a survival story that hardens into identity, then show how to soften it with experiences of real return.With vivid portraits of Lisa, Maya, and Da...
2025-12-1725 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Weather Inside Part 3: How Feelings Form UsSend us a textWhat 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.
2025-12-1010 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Weather Inside Part 2Send us a textWhat if your emotions are not problems to fix but a precision navigation system that evolved to keep you alive, connected, and learning? We dive into core feelings as the body’s fast meaning-makers, showing how they tag what matters long before your thinking brain catches up.We start with a vivid contrast: plants don’t move, so they don’t need to decide. Animals do, and movement floods life with decisions about safety, energy, and opportunity. That’s where psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ affect theory shines—core feelings are the spotlight of the mind...
2025-11-0629 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Weather Inside Part 1Send us a textWhat 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 st...
2025-10-3029 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Quiet Science of Feeling: How Peace and Happiness Share One Nervous SystemSend us a textWhat if peace and happiness aren’t opposites, but two tempos of the same life force? We follow that question from the body’s first language—movement and breath—into the quiet work of integration, where your nervous system learns to trust its own rhythm again. Along the way, we introduce “ladolescence,” a stage beyond performance where joy becomes contribution, peace becomes belonging, and your days feel less like moods to manage and more like music to conduct.We begin with the body’s memory: the quickening of curiosity, the soft landing of saf...
2025-10-1518 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightFrom Draining to Energizing.. A Practical Guide to Conscious Relationships: Re-Authoring Your Life Story Part 4Send us a textWhat if your body remembers what your mind can’t explain—and those memories quietly script your relationships? We dive into how early imprints shape your nervous system and why real change happens through connection, not just insight. From practical tools you can use today to nuanced stories that mirror real life, this episode is a guide to consciously casting the people in your life so your relationships fuel, not drain, your growth.We start with a clear map: the Relationship Energy Audit to track who leaves you alive or depleted, Role...
2025-10-0842 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightRewriting Your Relationship with Money.. From Scarcity to Abundance: Re-Authoring Your Life Story Part 3Send us a textWhat shapes your financial decisions more deeply than budgeting apps or investment strategies? Your emotional money story – the unconscious narrative inherited from family, culture, and early experiences that dictates not just how you spend, but how you value yourself.Money isn't merely currency; it's an affective object charged with feelings of security, freedom, shame, and pride. When people say they don't have "enough," they often mean "I don't feel like I'm enough." This profound insight explains why millionaires can experience scarcity while those with modest means might feel abundant. Your relationship wi...
2025-10-0135 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightScript Busting: Why "It Is What It Is" Is Killing Your Soul: Re-Authoring Your Life Story Part 2Send us a textWhat secrets might your body be keeping from your conscious mind? Dr. Scott Conkright takes us on a profound journey exploring how our earliest relationships and experiences become encoded in our nervous systems, creating patterns that shape our lives in ways our rational minds can't fully access.At the heart of this exploration lies our relationship with meaning itself. The stories we tell about why we're here aren't abstract philosophical concepts but practical frameworks that determine whether our days feel like empty checkboxes or parts of a purposeful journey. Through Rachel's...
2025-09-2416 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Four Pillars of Authentic Living: Re-Authoring Your Life Story Part 1Send a textWhat if your body is holding onto emotional memories that your conscious mind can't access? This provocative question opens a fascinating exploration into how our earliest relationships shape not just our memories, but our very nervous systems.Dr. Scott Conkright takes us on a journey through what he calls the "four foundational relationships" that shape our lives, cleverly paralleling them with the filmmaking process. You are simultaneously the lead actor, scriptwriter, producer, and casting director of your life's narrative—yet many of us are following scripts we didn't write and playing roles we...
2025-09-1723 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightCompleting Your Interrupted Stories of Trauma: Cats, Dogs, and Humans Part 5Send a textWhat happens when your body remembers what your mind has forgotten? In this deeply resonant exploration, Dr. Scott Conkright unveils the powerful concept of narrative repair—the process through which we heal not by forgetting our trauma, but by returning to it with enough safety to complete the stories that were interrupted.Trauma doesn't just live in our thoughts. It resides in our posture, our breath, our automatic responses to connection and vulnerability. These embodied patterns—what Dr. Conkright calls dynamic vitality affects—were learned in relationships where our full emotional expression wasn't...
2025-09-1016 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightCats, Dogs and Humans: Part 4 - Trauma Whisperer: When Your Body Remembers What You Can'tSend a textYour body whispers truths your mind has yet to comprehend. The nervous system, with its intricate web of responses, stores experiences that predate our ability to form words—carrying forward relationships, traumas, and joys long after conscious memory has faded.Dr. Scott Conkright takes us on a profound journey through the landscape of emotional integration. We begin by exploring how adulthood marks a pivotal shift from mere emotional reaction to reflection. This threshold isn't simply about maturity; it represents the moment when our fragmented experiences begin weaving into coherent narratives. The prefrontal co...
2025-09-0314 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightCats, Dogs and Humans Part 3: How Adolescence Transforms Feeling into IdentitySend us a textHave you ever wondered how we transform from reactive infants into reflective adults capable of emotional sophistication? This fascinating journey through human emotional development reveals the remarkable neurobiological revolution that reshapes our inner landscape.Starting as creatures of pure reflex, our earliest emotional systems function like uncalibrated fire alarms—all intensity with little modulation. The infant experiences the world through immediate, unfiltered reactions, with the endocrine system still learning to calibrate its responses. But slowly, through care and time, toddlers begin developing the first hints of emotional regulation.Then pu...
2025-08-2720 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightCats, Dogs and Humans: Part 2Send us a textYour body remembers what your mind may never have known. Deep within muscle and tissue, in the rhythm of your breath and the tension in your shoulders, lies a somatic record of your earliest relationships—created long before you had words to describe them.This profound exploration of embodied memory reveals how our nervous systems develop in relationship with others. From our first moments, our bodies are recording not just what happens, but what to expect. A warm smile becomes an internal feeling of safety. An unanswered cry teaches the system to...
2025-08-1315 min
Men’s Therapy PodcastSurviving Midlife Crisis and Emotional ReinventionIn this episode of the Men’s Therapy Podcast, host Marc Azoulay sits down with Dr. Scott Conkright. He is a clinical psychologist and the founder of Affect Relational Therapy. He is also the host of the Meaningful Happiness Podcast. He is known for his pioneering work on chronic shame syndrome and relational therapy. Dr. Conkright is presenting a bold new framework that he calls Late Adolescence. It is a psychological stage that helps men reimagine life after midlife.
“I decided I’m going to redefine old age,” Dr. Conkright says. He reflects on a moment of deep per...
2025-08-111h 00Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightCats, Dogs, and Humans Part 1: How Pure Feeling Shapes Us Before We Can Think or SpeakSend us a textWhat 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...
2025-08-0624 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightNavigating Your Emotional Operating System: Core Affects and the Four Pillars of HappinessSend us a textWhat if your emotions weren't just random feelings but actually sophisticated firmware—hardwired systems constantly running in your brain's background? This groundbreaking idea forms the foundation of our deep dive into affect theory and its profound implications for authentic happiness.Your emotional operating system isn't infinitely variable. We're all born with nine specific core affects—biological responses that tag experiences as important, dangerous, pleasurable or socially significant before conscious thought even begins. These aren't subjective emotions but universal firmware that shapes how we process everything from relationships to life goals. Understanding inte...
2025-07-2317 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightGroupCast #01: What Lies Behind Door Number Three?Send a textWhat 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...
2025-07-011h 08Meaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightYour Body Knows What Your Mind Doesn't: Decoding Life's Sacred SignalsSend a textThat persistent ache when everything looks perfect on paper but something still feels missing – it's not ingratitude or failure. It's what I call divine discontentment, a profound developmental signal that your current reality has become too small for your emerging self.Through the story of Patricia, a successful CEO wrestling with this very phenomenon, we explore how this sacred ache serves as a compass pointing toward growth and greater meaning. Drawing on affect theory and the pioneering work of Sylvan Tompkins, we examine how our core feelings – those fast, automatic bodily responses that...
2025-06-1848 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightThe Great Age Revolution: Why Everything You Think About Aging Is WrongSend us a textA sleepless night in Washington DC with an aching back became the catalyst for a profound realization: everything we believe about aging might be wrong. As I lay there wrestling with physical discomfort and society's negative scripts about getting older, I experienced a moment of clarity that would transform not just my own perspective, but potentially our collective understanding of adult development.From this awakening emerged the concept of Latalescence – a revolutionary framework that reimagines the adult life journey as an ongoing process of growth rather than inevitable decline. Built upon th...
2025-06-0634 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightYour Body Speaks Louder Than Your Words in RelationshipsSend us a textBeneath the words we exchange in relationships lies a hidden language—a rhythmic dance between nervous systems that shapes our connections more powerfully than what we say. This episode ventures into the fascinating world of Dynamic Vitality Affects (DVAs), the subtle patterns of timing, pacing, and movement that determine whether we feel safe, connected, or understood with our partners.Have you ever felt instantly disconnected from someone without knowing why? Noticed that certain silences feel heavier than others? Experienced the confusion when a simple text lands wrong? These moments aren't just mi...
2025-05-2753 minMeaningful Happiness with Dr. Scott ConkrightPart 4: Before Emotion: Reclaiming the Body's First Language of AffectSend us a textWhat if the key to understanding your emotions lies in sensations you felt before you even had words? Long before we develop language, our bodies speak through "affects" – primal, biological signals that form the foundation of our emotional lives.Imagine a world where you can recognize these signals in yourself and others, where you understand that anger isn't just "anger" but a complex symphony of sensation, memory, and meaning. This understanding transforms how you relate to yourself and connect with others on a profound level.Affect theory reveals that we...
2025-05-0645 min