🫀#13: Atlas Of The Heart by Brené Brown - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

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,

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

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”,

💥On the other hand if you went into the kitchen and said “I’m blown”,

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?

Let’s talk about Worry first:

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:

(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:

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:

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).

🕯 Freudenfreude on the other hand, is when we get pleasure from—yep, you guessed it—someone else’s joy, pleasure or success!

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:

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:

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:

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)

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:

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:

🤯 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:

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:

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

If you found this edition valuable, why not share it with a loved one? 🥰

🧠 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

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