Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

by Brené Brown

For children, it’s easy for everything to become a source of shame when nothing is normalized. You assume that if no one is talking about it, it must be just you.

there were flavors of teasing that people used to work out stress or hurt, and once unleashed, that type of teasing wouldn’t stop until someone was crying.

I understood that people would do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power, and I understood that there were very few people who could handle being held accountable for causing hurt without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down.

being able to see what’s coming doesn’t make it any less painful when it arrives.

In fact, knowing probably just upped my anticipatory anxiety and my intolerance for vulnerability.

It’s awful that the same substances that take the edge off anxiety and pain also dull our sense of observation.

We see the pain caused by the misuse of power, so we numb our pain and lose track of our own power. We become terrified of feeling pain, so we engage in behaviors that become a magnet for more pain. We run from anger and grief straight into the arms of fear, perfectionism, and the desperate need for control.

When we stop numbing and start feeling and learning again, we have to reevaluate everything, especially how to choose loving ourselves over making other people comfortable. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done and continue to do.

I’ve learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; it’s a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego. It’s the desperate scramble of self-worth quicksand. When people are hateful or cruel or just being assholes, they’re showing us exactly what they’re afraid of. Understanding their motivation doesn’t make their behavior less difficult to bear, but it does give us choices. And subjecting ourselves to that behavior by choice doesn’t make us tough—it’s a sign of our own lack of self-worth.

I also learned that when you hold someone accountable for hurtful behaviors and they feel shame, that’s not the same as shaming someone. I am responsible for holding you accountable in a respectful and productive way. I’m not responsible for your emotional reaction to that accountability. Sadly, I’ve also learned that sometimes, even when the pain takes your breath away, you have to let the people you love experience the consequences of their own behavior. That one really hurts.

People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power;

Very few people can handle being held accountable without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down; and

Without understanding how our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors work together, it’s almost impossible to find our way back to ourselves and each other. When we don’t understand how our emotions shape our thoughts and decisions, we become disem...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness.

Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.

we have compelling research that shows that language does more than just communicate emotion, it can actually shape what we’re feeling.

Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity.

80 percent of emotions experts now agree that there are universal voice and facial expression signals that reflect our emotional experience.

So often, when we feel lost, adrift in our lives, our first instinct is to look out into the distance to find the nearest shore. But that shore, that solid ground, is within us. The anchor we are searching for is connection, and it is internal.

We feel stressed when we evaluate environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully. This includes elements of unpredictability, uncontrollability, and feeling overloaded.

Overwhelmed means an extreme level of stress, an emotional and/or cognitive intensity to the point of feeling unable to function.

doing nothing was the only way back for someone totally overwhelmed.

we don’t process other emotional information accurately when we feel overwhelmed, and this can result in poor decision making.

That’s what anxiety feels like to me. Escalating loss of control, worst-case-scenario thinking and imagery, and total uncertainty.

anxiety as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.”

A trait is considered to be something that is part of an individual’s personality and therefore a long-term characteristic of an individual that shows through their behavior, actions, and feelings. It is seen as being a characteristic, feature, or quality of an individual. For example, someone who says “I am a confident person” or “I am just an anxious person” is stating that these attributes are part of who they are.

A state, on the other hand, is a temporary condition that they are experiencing for a short period of time. After the state has passed, they will return to another condition. For example, someone who says “I am feeling quite confident about this interview” or “I feel nervous about doing this” is describing states.

So, when we say that anxiety can be both a state and a trait, it means that some of us feel anxious mainly in response to certain situations, while some of us can be naturally more predisposed to anxiety than others.

Generalized anxiety disorder is different from both trait and state anxiety. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “generalized anxiety disorder is a condition of excessive worry about everyday issues and situations.”

An intolerance for uncertainty is an important contributing factor to all types of anxiety.

Our anxiety often leads to one of two coping mechanisms: worry or avoidance. Unfortunately, neither of these coping strategies is very effective.

Worrying and anxiety go together, but worry is not an emotion; it’s the thinking part of anxiety. Worry is described as a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.

What really got me about the worry research is that 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). I’m not suggesting that we worry about worry, but it’s helpful to recognize that worrying is not a helpful coping mechanism, that we absolutely can learn how to...

Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing t...

“It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. 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.”

The entire premise of this book is that language has the power to define our experiences, and there’s no better example of this than anxiety and excitement.

Anxiety and excitement feel the same, but how we interpret and label them can determine how we experience them.

excitement is described as an energized state of enthusiasm leading up to or during an enjoyable activity, it doesn’t always feel great. We can get the same “coming out of our skin” feeling that we experience when we’re feeling anxious.

Similar sensations are labeled “anxiety” when we perceive them negatively and “excitement” when ...

The labels are important because they help us know what to do next.

Dread occurs frequently in response to high-probability negative events; its magnitude increases as the dreaded event draws nearer.

Because dread makes an anticipated negative event even worse, we often prefer to get unpleasant things over with quickly, even if doing them sooner means that they will be more unpleasant (e.g., a more painful proc...

For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is now—in the present. Fear is a negative, short-lasting, high-alert emotion in response to a perceived threat, and, like anxiety, it can be measured as a state or trait.

Fear arises when we need to respond quickly to physical or psychological danger that is present and imminent. Because fear is a rapid-fire emotion, the physiological reaction can sometimes occur before we even realize that we are afraid. The typical responses are fight, flight, or freeze.

We can never forget that we experience social pain and physical pain in the same part of our brains, and the potential exposure to either type of pain drives fear.

Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

leaders don’t have all the answers, but ask important questions

We’ve found that across cultures, most of us were raised to believe that being vulnerable is being weak.

the ability to embrace vulnerability emerged as the prerequisite for all of the daring leadership behaviors. If we can’t handle uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in a way that aligns with our values and furthers our organizational goals, we can’t lead.