Atlas of the Heart: The Bestselling Guide to Understanding our Emotions and Developing Meaningful Connections

by Brené Brown

When we develop expectations, we paint a picture in our head of how things are going to be and how they’re going to look.

This means that our expectations are often set on outcomes totally beyond our control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react. The movie in our mind is wonderful, but no one else knows their parts, their lines, or what it means to us.

What expectations do you have going into this? What do you want to happen? Why? What will that mean to you? Do you have a movie in your head? And in this perception-driven world, the big question is always: Are you setting goals and expectations that are completely outside of your control?

When we are intentional and thoughtful about our expectations, and things don’t turn out how we thought they would, disappointment still hurts. Potentially, a lot. One reason it can sting is precisely because we were vulnerable and asked for what we needed or shared what we were excited about.

When someone shares their hopes and dreams with us, we are witnessing deep courage and vulnerability. Celebrating their successes is easy, but when disappointment happens, it’s an incredible opportunity for meaningful connection.

There are too many people in the world today who decide to live disappointed rather than risk feeling disappointment.

This can take the shape of numbing, foreboding joy, being cynical or critical, or just never really fully engaging.

I’ve heard people say that disappointment is like a paper cut—painful, but not long-lasting. I do believe we can heal disappointment, but it’s important not to underestimate the damage it inflicts on our spirit.

Disappointments may be like paper cuts, but if those cuts are deep enough or if we accumulate them over a lifetime, they can leave us seriously wounded. Yes, it takes courage to reality-check, communicate, and dig into the intentions behind our expectations, but that exercise in vulnerability helps us maintain meaningful connection with ourselves and others.

With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or actions.

However, when we reflect back over the long term, we more often regret the actions we didn’t take—what we didn’t do—and we think of those as missed opportunities.

education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure,

I know that some of my own biggest regrets include failures of kindness, including failures of self-kindness.

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.

The idea of “no regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe we have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with our lives.

In our work, we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary. Regret has taught me that living outside my values is not tenable for me.

Frustration sometimes overlaps with anger. Both anger and frustration can result when a desired outcome is blocked. The main difference is that with frustration, we don’t think we can fix the situation, while with anger, we feel there is something we can do.

Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness.

Anguish often causes us to physically crumple in on ourselves, literally bringing us to our knees or forcing us all the way to the ground.

There is another alternative to not addressing the trauma of anguish—we can convince ourselves that we’re okay and keep ourselves upright by hanging our crumpling anguish on rigidity and perfectionism and silence, like a wet towel hanging on a rod. We can become closed off, never open to vulnerability and its gifts, and barely existing because anything at any moment could threaten that fragile, rigid scaffolding that’s holding up our crumpling selves and keeping us standing.

Hope is a way of thinking—a cognitive process. Yes, emotions play a role, but hope is made up of what researcher C. R. Snyder called a “trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency.”6

To learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, consistency, and support. Children with high levels of hopefulness have experience with adversity. They’ve been given the opportunity to struggle, and in doing that they learn how to believe in themselves and their abilities.

“Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.”

Hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thought patterns, particularly self-blame and the perceived inability to change our circumstances.8

Hopelessness stems from not being able to set realistic goals (we don’t know what we want), and even if we can identify realistic goals, we can’t figure out how to achieve them. If we attempt to achieve the goals, we give up when we fail, we can’t tolerate disappointment, and we can’t reset. Last, we don’t believe in ourselves or our ability to achieve what we want.

Despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person’s entire life and future. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair.

I once heard theologian Rob Bell define despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.”11 When we are in struggle and/or experiencing pain, despair—that belief that there is no end to what we’re experiencing—is a desperate and claustrophobic feeling. We can’t figure a way out of or through the struggle and the suffering.

We need to learn how to reality-check our goals and the pathways to them, and how to take the shame out of having to start over many, many times when our first plan fails.

We can’t ignore hopelessness and despair in ourselves or others—they are both reliable predictors of suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, and completed suicide, especially when hopelessness is accompanied by emotional pain.

When we experience despair and hopelessness, we often believe that we are the problem and forget to think about larger issues and context.

One way to build resilience is to practice thinking about the temporary nature of most setbacks as a part of how we look at adversity on a daily basis.

“I’m really scared, worried, overwhelmed, stressed about what’s happening. Will this issue be a big deal in five minutes? Five hours? Five days? Five months? Five years?”

Feeling sad is a normal response to loss or defeat, or even the perception of loss or defeat. To be human is to know sadness. Owning our sadness is courageous and a necessary step in finding our way back to ourselves

we should embrace all of our emotions, as each has an important role to play under the right circumstances.19 So, though you may seek ways to increase happiness, don’t haphazardly push away your sadness. No doubt, it’s there for good reason.”

Additionally, some scholars have speculated that one function of sadness is to cause the person to evaluate their life and consider making changes in their circumstances following a negative event, as well as to recruit help and support from others.20

We like to be moved. We like to feel connected to what it means to be human, to be reminded of our inextricable connection to one another. Sadness moves the individual “us” toward the collective “us.”

“Hence sadness primarily functions as a contributor to and intensifier of the emotional state of being moved.”24

“A central process in grieving is the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss.”26

the loss of normality, the loss of what could be, and the loss of what we thought we knew or understood about something or someone.

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.

“When a person adapts to a loss grief is not over.”27 It doesn’t mean that we’re sad the rest of our lives, it means that “grief finds a place” in our lives.

what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.”

Acute grief dominates a person’s life.

Grief finds a place in their life.

People often think this is depression, but complicated grief and depression are not the same thing.

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, and loss of a loved one to suicide.

sexual assault survivors suffer from numerous losses, many of which are invisible to others.32 Some of these losses include loss of one’s prior worldview, loss of trust, loss of self-identity and self-esteem, loss of freedom and independence, loss of a sense of safety and security, and loss of sexual interest.

“Science is not the truth.1 Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.”

perfectionism is a function of shame.

Shame— I am bad. The focus is on self, not behavior. The result is feeling flawed and unworthy of love, belonging, and connection. Shame is not a driver of positive change.