Atlas of the Heart

At the heart of Brene Brown's new book is the idea that if we were better able to use language to identify and communicate the emotions we all feel, our lives would be transformed.

To give you a sense of the gap we need to close, Brown and her team surveyed thousands of people about their emotions.

The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The most commonly listed emotions were happy, sad, and angry. That's a pretty limited range of emotions.

On the other hand, Susan David, a psychologist at Harvard, says that "learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.”

How nuanced could we get if we took it all the way? Brown suggests that there are 87 emotions and experiences across 13 different categories.

It's obviously beyond the scope of a book summary to go into detail on all 87 emotions, but keep in mind as we tour through this Atlas of the Heart that the main point that Brown is making is that the differences matter. So after reading this summary, I urge you to go out and buy a copy of this book so you can start acquiring a more nuanced vocabulary as well.

To top things off, Brown gives us a playbook with three skills we can use to help us use those nuanced definitions to cultivate meaningful connection with the people we care about most.

Let's get started.

The barriers we all face with emotions

What are the biggest barriers we all face when it comes to identifying and dealing with our emotions?

Brown digs back into her childhood to the following three things:

1. People will do almost anything to avoid pain, including inflicting pain on others and abusing their power;

2. Most people cannot handle being held accountable for their actions without blaming others or shutting down completely;

3. Very few people understand how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together.

The end result is that when we don't understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and behaviors, we are "disembodied" from our experiences and disconnected from each other. Which, ultimately, leads us to even more conflict and pain.

We'll explore how to resolve this problem at the end of the summary when we get into the playbook for cultivating meaningful connection.

Now let's start working our way thought the 87 emotions and experiences across the 13 categories.

When things are uncertain or too much

What do we do when we face uncertainty or life seems to be too much to handle?

We experience stress, overwhelm, anxiety, worry, avoidance, excitement, dread, fear, and vulnerability.

Anxiety, for example, is defined as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.”

Worry and avoidance are our two coping strategies for anxiety. We deploy worry when we engage in a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future. We deploy avoidance when we decide not to show up and spend a lot of energy on things other than the thing that feels like it's consuming us.

When we compare

Comparison is at the root of a lot of emotions that affect our relationships and our self-worth. To make matters worse, we usually don't know when we are doing it.

As Brown points out, comparison usually gets us from two sides - it's the constant tension of trying to fit in and stand out. It's like our internal operating system has a command that says "be like everyone else, but better."

When we compare we sometimes experience admiration and reverence, but often times it turns to envy, jealousy, and resentment.

When things don't go as planned

When we experience a difference in what we expected (our expectations) and what actually happened, our typical response is disappointment. The more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.

Disappointment can lead to many other different emotions like regret, discouragement, resignation, and frustration.

With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or our actions. When we are discouraged, we start to lose our confidence and enthusiasm about future effort towards our goals. When we are resigned, we give up completely.

When it's beyond us

When there are things that we don't understand, we often feel wonder and awe. This is a particularly common response to nature, art, music, spiritual experiences, and ideas.

Another set of emotions are confusion, curiosity, and interest. When we don't understand, we often get confused, which, in positive cases, leads us to curiosity and interest.

These are all essential to our experience as human beings, because it fuels our passion for exploration and learning.

When things aren't what they seem

This is what happens when we feel two competing emotions or contradictory thoughts at the same time.

Some of the emotions in this category are amusement, bittersweetness, nostalgia, cognitive dissonance, paradox, irony, and sarcasm.

When we feel them, we'll often have the urge to feel comfort and run away. But staying curious a little longer in these situations is the best way for us to learn.

Here's an example of a paradox from Brown's work. We are drawn to authentic and imperfect people, but we are scared to let people see who we really are.

When we are hurting

When we are hurting, we are feeling anguish, hopelessness, despair, sadness, and grief.

Anguish, on one end of the hurting spectrum, is "an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness." When we experience anguish and don't get help or support, it becomes difficult to reengage in our lives.

Hope, on the other end of the hurting spectrum is not the warm fuzzy emotion that most people think it is. Rather, it's something we develop through adversity and discomfort. It's a way of thinking made up of goals, pathways, and agency.

We experience hope when:

1. We can set realistic goals;

2. We can figure out how to achieve these goals;

3. We believe that we can do it.

One of the most important lessons in this entire book is that hope can be learned.

Places we go with others

How we connect with others forms the basis of this chapter.

When we are connecting with others, we feel compassion, pity, empathy, sympathy, boundaries, and comparative suffering.

The question that that everybody in the research and clinical practice community are trying to figure out is:

"What's the most effective way to be in connection with and in service to someone who is struggling, without taking on their issues as our own?"

Compassion, for instance, is the understanding and accepting that we are all made up of strengths and struggle.

Buddhist nun Pema Chodron says it this way in her book The Places That Scare You:

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."

When we fall short

When we fall short of our expectations, we experience shame, self-compassion, perfectionism, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment.

This is an example where nuance is important in our emotional vocabulary. The following four emotions are typically used interchangeably, even though they are not.

Shame usually sounds like "I am bad." The focus is on ourselves, not the behavior.

Guilt usually sounds like "I did something bad." The focus here is on the behavior.

Humiliation usually sounds like "I've been belittled and put down by someone." With shame we feel like we deserved it, with humiliation we don't.

Embarrassment usually sounds like "I did something uncomfortable, but I know I'm not alone."

When we search for connection

Human beings are wired for social connection.

That's why feelings like belonging, fitting in, and connection are so important to us. And why disconnection, insecurity, invisibility, and loneliness hurt so much.

The absence of love and belonging will always cause suffering. It's wired into our DNA.

Insecurity is a term that we usually use when referring to self-doubt, but there are actually three kinds:

1. Domain-specific insecurity is when we are feeling unsure about a specific resource in life, like food, finances, or physical safety;

2. Relationship or interpersonal insecurity is when our relationships aren't filled with support and trust;

3. General or personal insecurity is when we become overly critical of our weaknesses.

When the heart is open

Opening up our hearts to others is risky business.

It opens up the possibility of love and connection, but it also opens up the possibility of heartbreak, betrayal, defensiveness, and flooding.

Brown points out that love isn't something that we give or get, it's something that we nurture and grow. It can only be achieved to the level that it exists in each person separately.

Love can also only survive the injuries of blame, disrespect and betrayal if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.

When life is good

Even though life is a struggle much of the time, when it's good we experience what Dolly Parton wishes us in her hit song "I Will Always Love You": joy and happiness.

Dolly knew that joy and happiness are not the same thing. Joy is sudden, unexpected, short-lasting and high-intensity. Happiness is more stable, longer-lasting, and usually the result of effort on our part.

Other emotions we feel when life is good include calm, contentment, gratitude, relief, and tranquility.

But we can also find a way to ruin the party in any situation, as we sometimes do when we feel forbidding joy - our inability to experience positive emotions in positive circumstances because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When we feel wronged

When we feel like we've been wronged, we experience anger, contempt, disgust, hate, self-righteousness, and dehumanization.

Anger is an emotion we feel when something gets in the way of an outcome we desire or when there's a violation of the way we believe things should be.

It is often confused with, or comes along with, one of the 87 emotions in the book.

Here are three things that Brown knows for sure about anger from the last twenty years of her work.

1. It often masks emotions that are more difficult to name or own;

2. It's like the indicator light in your car - it's a good sign that you should pull over and check things out;

3. It can be a powerful catalyst for change, but just make sure you don't confuse the spark with the change itself.

Places we go to self-assess

When we are looking back on our past experiences to analyze how well we did, we are likely to experience pride, hubris, or humility.

Pride is a feeling of pleasure related to our accomplishments.

Hubris is when we have an inflated sense of our own abilities, and it is tied to our need for dominance.

Humility is being open to new learning along with an accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths and opportunities for growth.

Cultivating Meaningful Connection

Now that we've covered the map, it's time to create a game plan for using it well.

Brown defines connection as "the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship"

That's a tall order, and it requires us to acquire the skills of grounded confidence, the courage to walk alongside others, and story stewardship.

Grounded Confidence

The opposite of grounded confidence is when we self-protect when we feel uncertain or fearful. It prevents us from acting in ways that are aligned with our values.

Here are the ways we can cultivate grounded confidence:

• knowing and applying the language of human experience and emotion;

• practicing courage;

• being vulnerable;

• staying curious;

• committing to mastery and practice;

• feeling connected to your own self.

The courage to walk alongside

Having the courage to walk alongside another is other-focused, uses language designed to connect, and is empathic and nonjudgmental.

Here are the ways we can cultivate this kind of courage:

• committing to be other-focused;

• practice compassion;

• practice empathy;

• practice non-judgment;

• being relational;

• setting and respecting boundaries.

Story Stewardship

At the core of this skill is to realize that we are not good judges of emotion in other people. So rather than guessing what people are feeling, we ask them.

Then, we honor the sacred nature of the stories that we hear, knowing that we've just been entrusted with something incredibly valuable.

Here are the ways to build your skill as a story steward:

• listening, discovering, and staying curious;

• building narrative trust - believing, acknowledging, and affirming what you hear.

Conclusion

That's a lot of ground to cover in 12 minutes. This is one of those books you'll want to get as a reference tool to take with you on your journey as you start building your emotional nuance, and as you connect more deeply and meaningfully with others.

What's waiting on the other side is everything that life has to offer.