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

by Brené Brown

The antidote to shame is empathy. If we reach out and share our shame experience with someone who responds with empathy, shame dissipates.

Shame is a social emotion. Shame happens between people and it heals between people.

shame is the way I see myself through someone else’s eyes. Self-compassion is often the first step to healing shame—we need to be kind to ourselves before we can share our stories with someone else.

We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.

talk to myself in ways that I would never talk to people I love.

Shame is an egocentric, self-involved emotion. It draws our focus inward. Our only concern with others when we are feeling shame is to wonder how others are judging us.

Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery is perfectionism.

Perfectionism kills curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or we risk looking “less than.”

perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.

Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance.

Healthy striving is self-focused—How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused—What will they think?

“Life paralysis” refers to all of the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect.

Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because there is no such thing as perfection. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Additionally, perfectionism is more about perception—we want to be perceived as perfect.

Perfectionism is addictive, because when we invariably do experience shame, judgment, and blame, we often believe it’s because we weren’t perfect enough.

We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging.

We can never truly belong if we are betraying ourselves, our ideals, or our values in the process.

diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work. We actually call it DEIB (to include belonging)

Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain.

Authenticity is a requirement for belonging, and fitting in is a threat.

Authenticity is a requirement for connection, and perfectionism (a type of fitting in) is a threat.

General or personal insecurity occurs when we are overly critical of our weaknesses. This may include being overly critical of our body image or our performance at work.

we can have high self-esteem but still be insecure if we’re overly critical of our imperfections.

Because our self-esteem is an assessment of who we are and what we’ve accomplished compared to our values and our goals, even with high self-esteem we can still feel insecure if we’re self-critical. That is powerful.

loneliness as “perceived social isolation.” We experience loneliness when we feel disconnected.

At the heart of loneliness is the absence of meaningful social interaction—an intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connections.

As an introvert, I deeply value alone time, and I often feel the loneliest when I’m with other people.

myself back in territory that I know well. We feel shame around being lonely—as if feeling lonely means there’s something wrong with us.

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

God, this hurts. And it’s totally worth it.

our self-esteem is considered fragile when our failures, mistakes, and imperfections decrease our self-worth.

flooding is “a sensation of feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed during conflict, making it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion.”

Looking back, I’ve never once regretted calling a time-out at home or work. Not once. I’ve never experienced a little time and space being a bad thing, but I have plenty of regrets the other way around.

I’m not sure there’s a braver sentence in the human catalog of brave sentences than “My feelings are hurt.” It’s simple, vulnerable, and honest. But we don’t say it very often. We get pissed off, or we hurt back, or we internalize the hurt until we believe we deserve it and that something is wrong with us. But rarely do we say “This really hurt my feelings.”

when we respond to hurt feelings with anger, the other person tends to match our anger with more anger.

Calm is an intention. Do we want to infect people with more anxiety, or heal ourselves and the people around us with calm? As the psychologist and writer Harriet Lerner says, “Anxiety is contagious. Intensity and reactivity only breed more of the same. Calm is also contagious. Nothing is more important than getting a grip on your own reactivity.”

Do I have enough information to freak out? The answer is normally no.

It just doesn’t seem like enough in a world that tells us every minute should be big and life should be OMG-level exciting at all times.

we are surrounded by scarcity, and most of us are almost desperate to feel satisfied and to experience the “enoughness” that contentment brings.

Contentment is positively correlated with greater life satisfaction and well-being, and preliminary evidence shows that experiences of contentment might reverse the cardiovascular effects of negative emotion.

“All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” This always leads to the age-old question: If we’re not satisfied with our life as a whole, does this mean we need to go get and do the stuff that will make us satisfied so we can be content, or does this mean we stop taking for granted what we have so we can experience real contentment and enoughness?

when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted.

“We become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.”

“Remember the day you prayed for the things you have now.”

We either want things for the wrong reasons, then feel disappointed when we acquire them, or we just can’t accumulate enough to feel whole, so we accumulate and adapt, never valuing or appreciating.

While gratitude is an emotion, if we want to experience its full power, we must also make it a practice. Over the past two decades, the research has taught me that, despite the catchy phrase “an attitude of gratitude,” gratitude is a practice. It’s tangible. An attitude is a way of thinking; a practice is a way of doing, trying, failing, and trying again.

The research participants that I interviewed over the years described keeping gratitude journals, doing daily gratitude meditations or prayers, creating gratitude art, using gratitude check-ins with their teams at work, even stopping during their stressful, busy days to actually say these words out loud: “I am grateful for…” In our house, we go around the table at dinner and take turns sharing one gratitude. It’s small, but it’s also big. It gives me a window into the lives of the people I love the most. It’s celebrating goodness.

“Tranquility is associated with the absence of demand” and “no pressure to do anything.”

Contempt is one of the most damaging of the four negative communication patterns that predict divorce. The other three are criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

once a target is viewed with disgust, this judgment seems to be permanent; evaluations of disgust seem to indicate a reprehensible moral character that is immutable and unforgivable.