Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

by Brené Brown

“we earn a dopamine ‘reward’ every time it helps us understand something in our world—even if that explanation is incomplete or wrong.”

Social workers always use the term confabulate when talking about how dementia or a brain injury sometimes causes people to replace missing information with something false that they believe to be true.

Gottschall explains that all of the shoppers told stories that made their decisions seem rational.

Many confabulations are less the result of health or memory issues and more about the interplay of emotion, behavior, and thought.

responding to their pain with a story about being unlovable—a narrative questioning if they were worthy of being loved. This may be the most dangerous conspiracy theory of all.

If there's one thing I've learned over the past thirteen years, it's this: Just because someone isn't willing or able to love us, it doesn't mean that we are unlovable.

Just because we didn't measure up to some standard of achievement doesn't mean that we don't possess gifts and talents that only we can bring to the world.

Gottschall argues that conspiratorial thinking “is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.”

He writes, “To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens,” and the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are “always consoling in their simplicity.”

We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted.

Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.”

delta | 'del-tǝ | noun the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet—is a mathematical symbol for difference. A capital delta is a triangle.

I learned that one of the most vulnerable parts of loving someone is trusting that they love you back, and I need to be generous in my assumptions.

Two of the most common messages that trigger shame in all of us are “never good enough” and “who do you think you are?”

Self-righteousness starts with the belief that I’m better than other people and it always ends with me being my very worst self and thinking, I’m not good enough.

People aren’t themselves when they’re scared. It might be all they can do.”

Shaming other mothers is not one of the million ways to be a great mom.

“I don’t know. I really don’t. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.”

Maya Angelou talk about how when we know better, we do better.

Either way, I would need to stop being so angry, stop judging, and stop waiting for something different to happen.”

I say “on the surface” because I’ve studied judgment and I know we don’t judge people when we feel good about ourselves.

disappointment, and frustration make us feel, we fool ourselves into believing that they’re easier than the vulnerability of a difficult conversation.

The truth is that judgment and anger take up way more emotional bandwidth for us.

It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are.

Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them.

“I care about you and I’m sorry that you’re going through a hard time. But I need to talk to you about what’s okay and what’s not okay.”

Guilt and empathy are the emotions that lead us to question how our actions affect other people, and both of these are severely diminished by the presence of shame.”

I now recognize that people learn how to treat us based on how they see us treating ourselves.

We need to examine our story for phrases like, “I had my heart set on it,” or “I counted on this happening,” or “I just thought….” If expressions like these show up, we might be struggling with disappointment.

Disappointment is unmet expectations, and the more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment.

“Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.”

disappointment can become resentment. This often happens when our expectations are based on outcomes we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.

Nelson Mandela wrote, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

heartbreak is always connected to love and belonging.

Heartbreak comes from the loss of love or the perceived loss of love. My heart can be broken only by someone (or something, like my dog, though a part of me really believes my dog is a person) to whom I have given my heart.

Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.

I used to tell couples getting married that the only thing I could tell them with certainty was that they would hurt each other.

Heartbreak is unavoidable unless we choose not to love at all. A lot of people do just that.

Longing is not conscious wanting; it’s an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we’ve lost.

Longing is a vital and important part of grief, yet many of us feel we need to keep our longings to ourselves for fear we will be misunderstood, perceived as engaging in magical or unrealistic thinking, or lacking in fortitude and resilience.

I once heard a friend say that grief is like surfing. Sometimes you feel steady and you’re able to ride the waves, and other times the surf comes crashing down on you, pushing you so far underwater that you’re sure you’ll drown.

Those moments of longing can have the same effect as upwellings of grief—they come out of nowhere and can be triggered by something you didn’t even know mattered.

Joe looked up and said, “In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die. If you make a choice to forgive, you have to face into the pain. You simply have to hurt.”

Forgiveness is so difficult because it involves death and grief.

To be forgiven is to be loved.

You should never hate yourself for hating others who do terrible things: The depth of your love is shown by the extent of your anger.

So, forgiveness is not forgetting or walking away from accountability or condoning a hurtful act; it’s the process of taking back and healing our lives so we can truly live.

The question becomes, What has to end or die so we can experience a rebirth in our relationships?

If you are struggling, your partner and children are also in the struggle.

Compassion: Recognizing the light and dark in our shared humanity, we commit to practicing loving-kindness with ourselves and others in the face of suffering.