🫀#13: Atlas Of The Heart by Brené Brown - Book Summary & Key Takeaways
Why is the language of emotion an essential skill to build? How well can we actually read emotions in other people? Why is Confusion actually a good thing? What do we keep getting wrong about empathy?
Hello courageous people! 👋 Welcome to Edition 13.
This week, our featured book is 📚 Atlas Of The Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience 🖋 by Brené Brown which was just released five months ago.
This book has incredible application in helping us to put names to our emotions and experiences. It is very much as the title suggests—an atlas—in that it is more of a reference book than a read from cover to cover book.
Would I recommend this book? Absolutely. Would I recommend that you read it from front to back as you would normally … probably not 🤔. Read on and you’ll understand what I mean.
Let’s jump in. All text in italics are quotes taken directly from the book.
🏔 What is the Atlas Of The Heart’s mission?
Atlas Of The Heart is Brené Brown’s tenth (🤯) book and it has been in the works in some form for the past twenty years of her career.
Fifteen years ago while working on shame resilience research, Brené and her team asked participants to list all of the emotions they could. They ultimately collected over 7,000 responses and the average number of emotions people could name?
Three.
They were happy, sad and angry.
Which is pretty unbelievable if you ask me. Brené says,
When I think about this data, I think back to a quote from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that I came across in college: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
What does it mean if the vastness of human emotion and experience can only be expressed as mad, sad, or happy?” - page xxi
Atlas Of The Heart is here to rescue us from the perils of our own limited language and experience as human beings 🗺.
Why is being able to accurately label our emotions such an important skill to build?
If we have a wider range of language available to us, it means we can:
make meaning
connect with others
heal
learn
improve our self-awareness
“Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.” - page xxi
In all, the book covers 87 human emotions and experiences, grouping them by categories, also serving as the chapter titles. This list of 87 are the distilled data from 550,000 comments and 66,625 participants.
There are far too many to cover in the newsletter (this moment happens to me every single week, when I find myself realising “oh, so this is why this is a whole book” 🤪) so instead we will focus on some of the more surprising reveals and revelations.
😳 What’s the difference between Stress and Overwhelm?
Brené spent six years waiting tables while she was studying at university, and still uses two of the terms she learnt working in the restaurant business today:
🌱 “In the weeds” meaning being stressed, and
💥“Being blown” meaning being overwhelmed.
🌱If you walk into the kitchen and said “I’m in the weeds”,
“The response would be, “What do you need?” I might say, “Can you take bread to tables 2 and 4, and re-tea tables 3 and 5, please?”
💥On the other hand if you went into the kitchen and said “I’m blown”,
“Well, that’s completely different. The kitchen gets really quiet. No one asks what you need. Normally someone runs to the hostess stand to find out what tables you’re running that shift—they don’t even assume you know at this point.
When you’re blown, you can either step outside or into the cooler or go to the bathroom (and cry). Whatever you need. You’re expected back in ten minutes, ready to go, but for ten minutes, there’s a complete takeover.” - page 5
The difference between being in the weeds and being blown and overwhelmed, is that in former state you can still function, in the latter you can’t. And the research shows there is only one way to come back from being overwhelmed and unable to function:
Doing absolutely nothing.
So next time you are overwhelmed, give yourself time, permission and space to take ten minutes out. It’s the most effective strategy we have available to get control again and feel better. 😌
😖 What are the two (maladaptive) coping strategies of Anxiety?
“Our anxiety often leads to one of two coping mechanisms: worry or avoidance. Unfortunately, neither of these coping strategies is very effective.” - page 11
Let’s talk about Worry first:
“Those of us with a tendency to worry believe it is helpful for coping (it is not), believe it is uncontrollable (which means we don’t try to stop worrying), and try to suppress worry thoughts (which actually strengthens and reinforces worry).”
The research has shown that it is possible to build our ability to control our worrying, and when it does bubble up we are better to lean into it and explore it.
On the other hand, we have Avoidance:
“Avoidance is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. And avoidance isn’t benign. It can hurt us, hurt other people and lead to increased and mounting anxiety. […]
You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.” - page 11
(I for one felt as though my happy little bubble of avoidant tendencies had been well and truly pierced by this section of the book. They say that awareness is the first step, right? 😬)
😒 What causes us to feel Resentment?
Firstly, I’ll admit that in reading this book and the way that its chapters and categories are arranged, is the first time I have even truly become aware that our emotions live in grouped families. The language of “the anger family” or “the envy family” and each of their members was somewhat new to me.
The family in which resentment lives—the anger family? or the envy family?—came as a particular surprise to Brené:
“For years, I assumed that resentment was a form of anger related to my perfectionism. I mostly felt resentful toward people whom I perceived to be not working or sacrificing or grinding or perfecting or advocating as hard as I was.” - page 30
Brené’s perception of resentment—an ongoing issue for her that she states she’d been working on for decades—changed in the course of one conversation, when she was interviewing Marc Brackett, an emotions researcher:
She asked him if resentment was part of the anger family. He replied, “No. Resentment is part of envy.” Brene’s response:
“Oh, holy shit.
I’m not mad because you’re resting. I’m mad because I’m so bone tired and I want to rest. But, unlike you, I’m going to pretend that I don’t need to.
I’m not furious that you’re okay with something that’s really good and imperfect. I’m furious because I want to be okay with something that’s really good and imperfect.
Your lack of work is not making me resentful, my lack of rest is making me resentful.”
It took Brené twenty-six years to fully understand what was underneath her own resentment and she is absolutely on a mission to make sure none of us have to search for answers and seethe with our own bubbling resentment for as long as she did.
🤨 Have you heard of Schadenfreude, Freudenfreude, Shoy & Bragitude before?
I certainly hadn’t. Perhaps I had read the word Schadenfreude somewhere before, but wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it meant until I read this book.
😏 Schadenfreude is when we get pleasure (the -freude part) from someone else’s pain or misfortune (the Schaden- part).
“That kind of bonding might feel good for a moment, but nothing that celebrates the humiliation or pain of another person builds lasting connection.” - page 34
🕯 Freudenfreude on the other hand, is when we get pleasure from—yep, you guessed it—someone else’s joy, pleasure or success!
“As Steve and I support our kids in learning how to cultivate meaningful connection with the people in their lives, we’ve always told them that good friends aren’t afraid of your light.
They never blow out your flame and you don’t blow out theirs—even when it’s really bright and it makes you worry about your own flame.
When something good happens to you, they celebrate your flame. when something good happens to them, you celebrate their flame.” - page 36
We could all do with some more freudenfreude in our lives, and an intervention was designed with two new words in order to foster freudenfreude:
“Shoy:
Intentionally sharing the joy of someone relating a success story by showing interest and asking follow-up questions.Bragitude:
Intentionally tying words of gratitude toward the listener following discussion of personal success.” - page 37
These are four words (and three behaviours 😉) I’m certainly going work on.
😵💫 Why is Confusion is actually a very good thing?
Before reading the section on Confusion, if I had to nominate whether confusion was a good thing or a bad thing, I would have said categorically that it was a “bad” thing.
But Confusion, it turns out, is an emotion which is essential in knowledge and learning. Experiencing confusion is actually extremely motivating, because we become inherently motivated to solve the problem and get more information in order to resolve it.
But because being confused is uncomfortable, this can happen:
“How often do we observe people (and ourselves) dismissing new data or information that challenges our ideas, in order to avoid confusion or the risk of being wrong?
If you ask me, stopping to think, engaging in careful deliberation, and revising old thinking are rare and courageous actions. And they require dealing with a healthy dose of confusion. And that’s uncomfortable.”
So if we find ourselves at the junction of being comfortable or being confused, incredible things can come from allowing ourselves to enter into a state of confusion, rather than avoiding it.
Confusion biases us towards action 💪.
😭 What is Disenfranchised Grief?
Grief was not a new concept to me, and I think most people understand what is meant by grief. But what did strike me as something I had never heard of before was the concept of Disenfranchised Grief, from the research of Tashel Bordere:
“Disenfranchised Grief is grief that “is not openly acknowledged or publicly supported through mourning practices or rituals because the experience is not valued or counted [by others] as a loss”.
The grief can also be invisible or hard to see by others. Examples of disenfranchised grief include:
loss of a partner or parent due to divorce
loss of an unborn child and/or infertility
the multitude of losses experienced by a survivor of sexual assault, for example: loss of one’s prior worldview, loss of trust, loss of self-identity and self-esteem, loss of a sense of safety and security, and loss of sexual interest.
loss of a loved one to suicide
The power of having a term and a specific set of words to describe a human experience which is not usually acknowledged or supported cannot be understated.
✋ We need to talk about Empathy.
It think a lot of the time we aren’t quite hitting the mark with our perception of what Empathy is and how we should show up with it: (I touched on this in the book summary for The Resilience Project as well a few weeks ago)
“We need to dispel the myth that empathy is ‘walking in someone else’s shoes.’ Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences.” - page 123
Listening, and believing are the parts we need to embed. Brené also goes on to say that the research shows there are two different elements to empathy:
“Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotions.
Affective empathy, feeling something along with the person who is struggling, is a slippery slope toward becoming overwhelmed and not being able to offer meaningful support.” - page 122
Affective empathy runs the risk of it not being constructive or useful anymore towards the person we are trying to be empathetic towards.
👀 How well can we actually read emotions in other people?
Understanding our own emotions is one (extremely challenging) thing, but understanding and reading how emotions are showing up in other people is an entirely different ball game. In the final pages of the book, Brené makes a stunning admission:
“I’m going to start this section by acknowledging that I’ve been wrong about something for years.
For two decades, I’ve said, “We need to understand emotion so we can recognize it in ourselves and others.” Well, let me go on the record right now: I no longer believe that we can recognize emotion in other people, regardless of how well we understand human emotion and experience or how much language we have.”
🤯 This is a pretty big statement!
The reason why Brené has flipped on this belief that she held for so long and spruiked so publicly is that:
“Too many emotions and experiences present the exact same way. There’s no way to know through observation if your tears come from grief, despair, hopelessness, or resentment, just to name a few. Absolutely no way.” - page 264
So then, if we are now saying that we shouldn’t try and deduce or hypothesize how someone is feeling, how are we supposed to know how they are feeling, so that we can be there for them with compassion and empathy?
It’s simple:
“We ask them. It’s only then that we are able to connect with the grounded confidence to engage and the courage to walk alongside. When they tell us what they’re feeling, what happened, what they fear or desire, we listen and we become trusted stewards of their stories.” - page 264
So there we have it, a brief wander (or sprint?!) down the garden path of our human experience with emotions, all leading towards the place of true belonging and meaningful connection.
If you have the opportunity, I would recommend having this book nearby as a reference for when difficult situations and emotions crop up. It is exactly as it says, an atlas and a map to help us find ourselves and each other.
Until next week,
❤️🙏 Eleanor
🧠 Resources & Links
🖥 Extra resources & links on Brené Brown’s website - including pdf guide to the 87 emotions and Discussion Guide
📸 Follow Brené Brown on Instagram - 4.1m followers
🐥 Follow Brené Brown on Twitter - 968k followers
📕 Next week’s book
Coming out next Friday 29th April 2022 is edition #14 featuring:
📚 Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture
🖋 by Roxane Gay
If you’re not already, subscribe now to get the next edition straight to your inbox! 📬
Amazing & helpful as always, thankyou !!