A Book Review

While traveling for the holidays, I downloaded the audio of Brené Brown’s latest book Atlas of the Heart, Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. I drove and listened and clicked the button that flags the important stuff. Upon finishing, I counted my bookmarks, 113, and laughed out loud. Throughout January, I relistened to those parts, bought more hard copies for friends, and flipped pages before parting with these gifts. I took notes as if I were in school and ended up with close to 6000 words in a Word document. I reread my notes, highlighted my best takeaways, and can’t stop having conversations about this book. Brown and her team of researchers explore eighty-seven emotions and experiences (87!) that define what it means to be human. Writers need this, right? Doesn’t everyone?

I grew up in a family that didn’t talk about feelings. Maybe this is normal. I remember crying (quite often) to my mother. She would hug me and say, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said time and again. Call it a childish lack of self-awareness. Maybe it’s normal not to understand how we’re feeling. I’m curious how often we deny the truth. At some point, shouldn’t we be able to name our emotions in connection to our experience? How else can we let go of the baggage we carry?

“Our hurt feelings are typically experienced simultaneously with other emotions, such as sadness, anger, anxiety, jealousy, or loneliness. As a result, they don’t always feel the same way, as most other emotions do…Our reactions to hurt feelings can be self-blaming, or we might cry, lash out, or retaliate by trying to hurt the other person, and/or seek out other relationships to find comfort. When reparation doesn’t seem possible, hurt feelings can turn into anger or sadness.”

Brené Brown p. 200

Brené explains my tears as normal along with other common reactions. I find this helpful in understanding not only myself but also others. We’re all prone to hurt feelings (that carry a range of emotions), but a brave, honest, simple, vulnerable way to deal with them is to say, “My feelings are hurt.” I could have used this information earlier in my life, but it’s never too late to practice.

Brown’s work defines the nuance between awe and wonder, joy and happiness, guilt and shame, jealousy and envy. All topics are easily located through the table of contents. Before writing this book, Brown believed resentment was part of the anger family. Research revealed that resentment is part of envy.

“Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, “better than,” and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.”

Brené Brown p. 33

Brown taught me when I start to feel resentful, instead of thinking about what the other person is doing “wrong” or what they “should” be doing, I should think, What do I need but am afraid to ask for?

There’s so much good psychology here. It proved an impossible feat to choose my top ten takeaways. So here are just fifteen more:

15.

“Researchers believe that rumination is a strong predictor of depression, makes us more likely to pay attention to negative things, and zaps our motivation to do the things that would improve how we feel” (79).

14.

“Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice” (224).

13.

“While some people disagree with me, I firmly believe that regret is one of our most powerful emotional reminders that reflection, change, and growth are necessary. In our research, regret emerged as a function of empathy. And, when used constructively, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom” (53).

12.

“Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?” (142)…

“Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it often sets you on the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis” (144-145).

11.

“The heart of compassion is really acceptance. The better we are at accepting ourselves and others, the more compassionate we become. It’s difficult to accept people when they are hurting us or taking advantage of us or walking all over us. This research has taught me that if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior” (128).

10.

“Empathy is an other-focused emotion. It draws our attention outward, toward the other person’s experience. When we are truly practicing empathy, our attention is fully focused on the other person and trying to understand their experience. We only have thoughts of self in order to draw on how our experience can help us understand what the other person is going through.

Shame is an egocentric, self-involved emotion. It draws our focus inward. Our only concern with others when we are feeling shame is to wonder how others are judging us. Shame and empathy are incompatible. When feeling shame, our inward focus overrides our ability to think about another person’s experience. We become unable to offer empathy. We are incapable of processing information about the other person, unless that information specifically pertains to us” (141).

9.

“Contempt is one of the most damaging of the four negative communication patterns that predict divorce. The other three are criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling….

Contempt, simply put, says, ‘I’m better than you. And you are lesser than me’” (226-228).

8.

“Researcher Frank Fujita writes, ‘Social comparisons can make us happy or unhappy. Upward comparisons can inspire or demoralize us, whereas downward comparisons can make us feel superior or depress us. In general, however, frequent social comparisons are not associated with life satisfaction or the positive emotions of love and joy but are associated with the negative emotions of fear, anger, shame, and sadness’” (21).

7.

“Across my research, I define connection as the energy that exists between two 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…

The RTC (Relational-Cultural Theory from the Stone Center at Wellesley) sees disconnections as normative and inevitable in relationships; they occur when one person misunderstands, invalidates, excludes, humiliates, or injures the other person in some way. Acute disconnections occur frequently in all relationships. If they can be addressed and reworked, they are not problematic; in fact, they become places of enormous growth” (169).

6.

“Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else…True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are” (162).

5.

Researchers Alice Huang and Howard Berenbaum “found that people who are more secure are more willing to be vulnerable with others. If we are comfortable with our own weaknesses (self-secure), we are more successful at being emotionally close to others and more likely to have healthy relationships” (174).

4.

“Connection, along with love and belonging, is why we are here, and it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. Shame is the fear of disconnection—it’s the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal that we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection” (137).

3.

“On one of the instruments that measures contentment, 71 percent of the variance in life satisfaction is measured by a single item: “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”

This leads to the age-old question: If we’re not satisfied with our life as a whole, does this mean we need to go get and do the stuff that will make us satisfied so we can be content, or does this mean we stop taking for granted what we have so we can experience real contentment and enoughness?” (211).

2.

“It appears that many of the emotions that are good for us—joy, contentment, and gratitude, to name a few—have appreciation in common…

There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. There’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure—the list goes on…

Gratitude is an emotion that reflects our deep appreciation for what we value, what brings meaning to our lives, and what makes us feel connected to ourselves and others” (214).

1.

“Our connection with others can only be as deep as our connection with ourselves. If I don’t know and understand who I am and what I need, want, and believe, I can’t share myself with you. I need to be connected to myself, in my own body, and learning what makes me work” (272).