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

by Brené Brown

Over the past two decades, when research participants talked about being angry, the story never stopped there. Their narratives of anger unfolded into stories of betrayal, fear, grief, injustice, shame, vulnerability, and other emotions. Ultimately the combination of data showing how limited emotional vocabularies can be with our experiences of interviewing people about anger and watching them consistently reveal other emotions behind the anger led me to challenge the idea that anger is a primary emotion. The more data we collected, including interviews with more than fifteen hundred therapists and counselors, the more certain I became that anger is a secondary or “indicator” emotion that can mask or make us unaware of other feelings that are out of reach in terms of language, or that are much more difficult to talk about than anger. We live in a world where it’s much easier to say “I’m so pissed off” than “I feel so betrayed and hurt.” It’s even easier to say “I’m angry with myself” than “I’m disappointed with how I showed up.”