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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
Read between
October 11, 2015 - May 10, 2016
lot of cheap seats in the arena are filled with people who never venture onto the floor. They just hurl mean-spirited criticisms and put-downs from a safe distance. The problem is, when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect. But when we’re defined by what people think, we lose the courage to be vulnerable. Therefore, we need to be selective about the feedback we let into our lives. For me, if you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback.
Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. This change often brings a deep sense of loss. During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there’s nowhere to go back to.
The Rising Strong Process The goal of the process is to rise from our falls, overcome our mistakes, and face hurt in a way that brings more wisdom and wholeheartedness into our lives. THE RECKONING: WALKING INTO OUR STORY Recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave. THE RUMBLE: OWNING OUR STORY Get honest about the stories we’re making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what’s truth, what’s self-protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives. THE
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A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.1 —Reif Larsen I LOVE MAPS not because they dictate the route or tell me when or how to travel, but simply because they mark the waypoints I will eventually visit.
Creating is the act of paying attention to our experiences and connecting the dots so we can learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
The rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings—what emotions we’re experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.
whatever it takes to drown the criticism, we could easily rage and blame the kids for making us look bad, we could spend the entire ride home vowing to never see our dad again—the list goes on. The opposite of recognizing that we’re feeling something is denying our emotions. The opposite of being curious is disengaging. When we deny our stories and disengage from tough emotions, they don’t go away; instead, they own us, they define us. Our job is not to deny the story, but to defy the ending—to rise strong, recognize our story, and rumble with the truth until we get to a place where we think,
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We don’t know what to do with the discomfort and vulnerability. Emotion can feel terrible, even physically overwhelming. We can feel exposed, at risk, and uncertain in the midst of emotion. Our instinct is to run from pain. In fact, most of us were never taught how to hold discomfort, sit with it, or communicate it, only how to discharge or dump it, or to pretend that it’s not happening.
Miriam Greenspan, a psychotherapist and the author of Healing Through the Dark Emotions, was interviewed by Jungian therapist Barbara Platek in The Sun Magazine.2, 3 The article has been required reading in my classes since it first appeared in 2008. Greenspan explains why she believes our culture is “emotion phobic” and that we fear and devalue emotion. She cautions: But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or
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The bad news is that many of us are raised believing that emotions aren’t worthy of our attention.
Being emotional is a sign of vulnerability, and vulnerability is weakness. 2. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. You can feel emotion all you want, but there’s nothing to be gained by sharing it with others. 3. We don’t have access to emotional language or a full emotional vocabulary, so we stay quiet about or make fun of it. 4. Discussing emotion is frivolous, self-indulgent, and a waste of time. It’s not for people like us. 5. We’re so numb to feeling that there’s nothing to discuss. 6. Uncertainty is too uncomfortable. 7. Engaging and asking questions invites trouble. I’ll learn something I don’t want
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Mizuta Masahide wrote, “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon.”10
The next day I asked Steve if exquisitely tender is an official medical term. I had heard him use it before, and it struck me as funny—like marvelously sore or fantastically achy. He explained that it’s used to describe the kind of pain that someone can’t hide even if they’re trying their best to be stoic. Then he said, “We also call it chandelier pain—like it hurts so much to the touch that people jump as high as the chandelier.”
And just so we don’t miss it in this long list of all the ways we can numb ourselves, there’s always staying busy: living so hard and fast that the truths of our lives can’t catch up with us. We fill every ounce of white space with something so there’s no room or time for emotion to make itself known.
There is so much wisdom in our bodies. We just need to learn how to listen and trust what we’re hearing.
Scraping the underbelly of our emotions
