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

by Brené Brown

The eggshells weren’t on the ground; they were duct-taped to the soles of my shoes. I could never step lightly enough or run fast enough to get away from the cracking, so I made everything around me so loud that it drowned out the sound.

Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.

When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.

We feel stressed when we evaluate environmental demand as beyond our ability to cope successfully.

Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.”

Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed that curiosity is the feeling of deprivation we experience when we identify and focus on a gap in our knowledge. What’s important about this perspective is that it means we have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can become curious. We aren’t curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about. This has huge implications for education.

Is amusement important at work? Research shows that breaks involving amusement may help replenish depleted cognitive resources, and that the replenishment continues through difficult tasks.

There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain. — STEPHANIE COONTZ, historian

It’s often hard to find our way back into our bodies after experiencing anguish. This is why so much effective trauma work today is not only about reclaiming our breath, our feelings, and our thinking, but also getting our bones back and returning to our bodies. When we experience anguish and we don’t get help or support, we can find it difficult to get up off the floor and reengage with our lives. We go through the motions, but we are still crumpled.

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.

In our saddest moments, we want to be held by or feel connected to someone who has known that same ache, even if what caused it is completely different. We don’t want our sadness overlooked or diminished by someone who can’t tolerate what we’re feeling because they’re unwilling or unable to own their own sadness.

I keep thinking back to a conversation I had on Unlocking Us with the grief expert David Kessler. I’ll never forget him saying this: “Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But 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.”

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

I define narcissism as the shame-based fear of being ordinary.

Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people 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. It’s also all of the dreams that we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes, and disappointing others. It’s terrifying to risk when you’re a perfectionist; your self-worth is on the line.

Because we can feel belonging only if we have the courage to share our most authentic selves with people, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

loneliness tells us that we need social connection—something as critical to our well-being as food and water. He explains, “Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hungry.”

Heartbreak comes from the loss of love or the perceived loss of love.

In The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work, Charles Feltman defines trust as “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.” He defines distrust as a general assessment that “what is important to me is not safe with this person in this situation (or any situation).”

Betrayal is so painful because, at its core, it is a violation of trust. It happens in relationships in which trust is expected and assumed, so when it’s violated, we’re often shocked, and we can struggle to believe what’s happening. It can feel as if the ground beneath us has given way.

two quick questions I ask myself when I feel fear, panic, or anxiety rising: Do I have enough information to freak out? The answer is normally no. Will freaking out help? The answer is always no.

Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore. But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted.

Sighing serves as a type of reset button for our body. It not only signals relief to our body, but it enhances relief, and it reduces muscle tension.

For many of us, myself included, it’s easier to live in our heads and be completely disconnected from our bodies. But there’s a cost. Insomnia, injuries, exhaustion, depression, anxiety—the body has powerful ways to get our attention.