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

by Brené Brown

Papers by Paul Hewitt and colleagues and Simon Sherry and colleagues provide evidence that people with high levels of perfectionistic traits: Are doomed to fail at meeting their own expectations and the expectations that they assume are held by others Perceive themselves as consistently falling short of others’ expectations Behave in ways that result in perceived and actual exclusion and rejection by others Feel socially disconnected and have fewer social connections I write a lot about perfectionism across my books. It’s a healthy dose of “Researcher, heal thyself.” I often call myself a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring “good-enoughist.”

Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it often sets you on the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. “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.

explain why I describe perfectionism as being both self-destructive and addictive. 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. Again, this is unattainable—there is no way to control perception, regardless of how much time and energy we spend trying. Perfectionism is addictive, because when we invariably do experience shame, judgment, and blame, we often believe it’s because we weren’t perfect enough. So rather than questioning the faulty logic of perfectionism, we become even more entrenched in our quest to live, look, and do everything just right.

They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me—even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.”

As a parent, my goal is to help my children believe in and belong to themselves, and to know that, no matter what, they always belong at home. That we see them and love them for who they are. The pressure to fit in is real and unrelenting, but if we can create that sense of inextricable connection, it’s a fierce protector as they navigate belonging. Be here. Be you. Belong.

Across my research, I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.

Connection is in our neurobiology. This is why our experiences of disconnection are so painful and why chronic disconnection leads to social isolation, loneliness, and feelings of powerlessness.

One of the most important learnings to come out of the research for this book is how to recognize, name, and talk about my feelings of disconnection. I think we underestimate how much disconnection hurts. And it hurts more than our feelings. It can cause physical pain. Disconnection is often equated with social rejection, social exclusion, and/or social isolation, and these feelings of disconnection actually share the same neural pathways with feelings of physical pain. Current neuroscience research shows that the pain and feelings of disconnection are often as real as physical pain. And just as healing physical pain requires describing it, talking about it, and sometimes getting professional help, we need to do the same thing with emotional pain. A couple of serious watch-outs when it comes to disconnection. The first comes from researcher Trisha Raque-Bogdan. She writes, “To avoid the pain and vulnerability that may result when their efforts to achieve connection are unsuccessful, individuals may enact their own disconnection strategies, such as hiding parts of themselves or discounting their need for others. They may learn that it is safer to keep their feelings and thoughts to themselves, rather than sharing them in their relationships.”

This means that rather than making a bid for connection and having the bid ignored or rejected, we hide out or pretend we don’t need anyone. I think most of us have done this—I know I have. And it’s a recipe for loneliness and, for me, blame. I can withhold a bid for connection, then blame someone for not responding. It’s a lot of scrambling to avoid being hurt. And it doesn’t even work. The second watch-out is about perfectionism. There’s actually a “perfectionism social disconnection model,” and this research shows that people who are high on the perfectionistic traits scale behave in ways that cause perceived and actual exclusion/rejection by others. In other words, my perfectionism drives me to show up in ways that lead people to push me away. This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still painful to think about, because ultimately our perfectionism is about trying to avoid being excluded or rejected.

Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He explains, “To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.” Of course we’re a social species. That’s why connection matters. It’s why shame is so painful and debilitating. It’s why we’re wired for belonging.

In a 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Dr. Murthy writes, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness. The elderly man who came to our hospital every few weeks seeking relief from chronic pain was also looking for human connection: He was lonely. The middle-aged woman battling advanced HIV who had no one to call to inform that she was sick: She was lonely too. I found that loneliness was often in the background of clinical illness, contributing to disease and making it harder for patients to cope and heal.”

This is heartbreak.” Then I looked over at Lucy, our second bichon, who was also missing Daisy, and thought, God, this hurts. And it’s totally worth it. The brokenhearted are the bravest among us—they dared to 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).” These definitions perfectly capture what emerged from our data on trust and mistrust.

Trust is more of a cognitive assessment than an emotion. But, as we all know, conversations about trust can bring up a lot of emotions, especially hurt and defensiveness. It’s difficult to talk about trust in our personal or professional relationships, because it’s such a big concept. If someone says “I don’t trust you,” it feels like a general assault on our character.

Reliability: You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities.

Nonjudgment: I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. We can ask each other for help without judgment.

Generosity: You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.

At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect our ego and a fragile self-esteem. Our research team member Ellen Alley explains that our self-esteem is considered fragile when our failures, mistakes, and imperfections decrease our self-worth. In our work, the opposite of a fragile self-esteem is grounded confidence. With grounded confidence, we accept our imperfections and they don’t diminish our self-worth. It makes sense that defensiveness occurs in areas of our lives where we have fragile self-esteem, or across several areas of our lives if the fragility is more general. Any perceived call-out of our weakness is experienced as an attack on our worth, so we fight hard to defend ourselves against it.

Flooding This seems like the perfect place to talk about the concept of flooding. The body can become overwhelmed when it senses danger, and for a lot of us, a difficult conversation, hard feedback, or an argument is enough to send our body into overdrive. We can feel overwhelmed, attacked, and confused. According to the Gottman Institute, flooding is “a sensation of feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed during conflict, making it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion.”

Now when I feel flooded, I’m as likely to say “Time-out” as he is. This is a good thing because, according to Gottman, chronic flooding sets us up to dread communicating.

There’s only so much our bodies and nervous systems can stand before they flip the survival switch and stop communicating and start protecting or attacking. 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.

Vangelisti and team explain that hurt happens through social interaction. In fact, hurt feelings are most often caused by people with whom we have close relationships when we feel devalued or rejected by the other person. Most behaviors that result in hurt feelings are not intended to be hurtful; they typically involve actions that are thoughtless, careless, or insensitive. However, “the more intentional an action is perceived [as], the more hurtful it feels.”

One thing that motivates me to be a little braver in how I handle my hurt feelings is research that shows that when we respond to hurt feelings with anger, the other person tends to match our anger with more anger. I can tell you this has happened in my kitchen about 1,365 times. However, when repair seems possible and we share our hurt feelings and try to reconnect without the anger, the other person tends to respond with constructive actions including apologies and amends. I’ve tried “I’m so pissed off right now because you’re a jerk but I’m going to say that my feelings are hurt so you apologize right this second.” It’s clearly not what they had in mind.

Joy is sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high-intensity. It’s characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon. Happiness is stable, longer-lasting, and normally the result of effort. It’s lower in intensity than joy, and more self-focused. With happiness, we feel a sense of being in control. Unlike joy, which is more internal, happiness seems more external and circumstantial.

I love thinking of joy as “the good mood of the soul.” There is definitely something soulful about joy. Based on our research, I define joy as an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation. Researcher Matthew Kuan Johnson explains that people find experiences of joy difficult to articulate. He hypothesizes that the very nature of joy pushes the boundaries of our ability to communicate about lived experience via spoken language. He also suggests that because language can shape lived experience, cultures that have more words to describe the emotion of joy may also experience joy more richly.

For me personally, one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from two decades of research has been understanding the relationship between joy and gratitude. Researchers describe the relationship between joy and gratitude as an “intriguing upward spiral.” I also love this term—such a great antidote to the downward spirals that we always hear about and, unfortunately, sometimes experience.

The intriguing upward spiral goes like this: Trait gratitude predicts greater future experiences of in-the-moment joy. Trait joy predicts greater future experiences of in-the-moment gratitude. And dispositional or situational joy predicts greater future subjective well-being. It all just spirals up.

This seems like yesterday, but it happened sixteen years ago, when Ellen was in the first grade. We played hooky one afternoon and spent the day at Hermann Park. At one point we were on a paddleboat in the middle of a pond when I realized she had stopped pedaling and was sitting perfectly still in her seat. Her head was tilted back, and her eyes were closed. The sun was shining on her uplifted face, and she had a quiet smile on her face. I was so struck by her beauty and her vulnerability and the joy on her face that I could barely catch my breath. I watched for a full minute, but when she didn’t move, I got a little nervous. “Ellie? Is everything okay, sweetie?” Her smile widened and she opened her eyes. She looked at me and said, “I’m fine, Mama. I was just making a picture memory.” I had never heard of a picture memory, but I liked the sound of it. “What’s that mean?” “Oh, a picture memory is a picture I take in my mind when I’m really, really happy. I close my eyes and take a picture, so when I’m feeling sad or scared or lonely, I can look at my picture memories.” She used the word “happy,” as we often do, but there’s no question that I was witnessing joy, that swirl of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation.

Looking at happiness as a trait, researchers found that people’s “usual” level of happiness is fairly stable and highly based on hereditary factors, and that for most people, the level could be described as being on the happy side of neutral. (Happy Side of Neutral is yet another great band name.)

Looking at the data we’ve collected, I would define the state of happiness as feeling pleasure often related to the immediate environment or current circumstances. We need happy moments and happiness in our lives; however, I’m growing more convinced that the pursuit of happiness may get in the way of deeper, more meaningful experiences like joy and gratitude. I know, from the research and my experiences, that when it comes to parenting, what makes children happy in the moment is not always what leads them to developing deeper joy, grounded confidence, and meaningful connection.

I define calm as creating perspective and mindfulness while managing emotional reactivity. When I think about calm people, I think about people who can bring perspective to complicated situations and experience their feelings without reacting to heightened emotions.

First, whether calm is a practice or something more inherent, there are behaviors specific to cultivating and maintaining calm that include a lot of self-questioning. The process seems to be centered on breath, perspective taking, and curiosity: 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 we match the pace of anxiety, or do we slow things down with breath and tone? Do we have all the information we need to make a decision or form a response? What do we need to ask or learn? As someone who has to work on calm as a practice rather than a trait, I’ve shortened this to 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.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, “Oh yes—I already have everything that I really need.”

Based on a summary of data we collected and the existing research, I define contentment as the feeling of completeness, appreciation, and “enoughness” that we experience when our needs are satisfied.

Several researchers categorize all emotions into one of two categories: low arousal and high arousal. Contentment is characterized as a low-arousal positive emotion, along with peace, tranquility, and satisfaction. These are comfy, old-pair-of-jeans emotions. I don’t have any data to back this up, but I bet if you asked people after 2020 how they’d feel about a life that feels content and satisfying, you’d get a lot of takers. Including me.

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. One piece of research that grabbed me by the shoulders is that on one of the instruments that measures contentment, 71 percent of the variance in life satisfaction is measured by a single item: “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?

Call me a qualitative researcher, but I’m starting to see a trend here. It appears that many of the emotions that are good for us—joy, contentment, and gratitude, to name a few—have appreciation in common. There is overwhelming evidence that gratitude is good for us physically, emotionally, and mentally. There’s research that shows that gratitude is correlated with better sleep, increased creativity, decreased entitlement, decreased hostility and aggression, increased decision-making skills, decreased blood pressure—the list goes on. The research is persuasive, and I’ve read countless research articles and books on gratitude, but I still struggled to understand exactly why it helps so much. Until I read this by Robert Emmons. Emmons is the “world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude.” He is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the founding editor in chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology. He writes, Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. 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. In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. ...

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.

Last, I want to share something that recently popped up on social media. I posted something about the importance of gratitude and someone left a comment that said they thought gratitude might be overrated as a cure for depression, trauma, and anxiety. What I would say is that gratitude is not a cure for anything and we need to be wary of any single practice or approach that’s sold as fixing or curing complex mental health issues. Gratitude is a practice that can enrich our lives in meaningful ways. In the world of mental health and social emotional learning, the term “cure” feels like snake oil to me.

When I give talks, people always seem surprised by the finding that joy is the most vulnerable human emotion. Given that I study fear and shame, people are hesitant to believe that something as positive as joy can make us squirm. Then I share what is almost certainly the most surprising finding for most people: If you’re afraid to lean into good news, wonderful moments, and joy—if you find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop—you are not alone. It’s called “foreboding joy,” and most of us experience it. This is when things get really quiet. Foreboding joy is one of those practically universal experiences that everyone thinks of as something only they do. A few people don’t experience it, but most of us do. And when it comes to parents…95 percent of the parents we interviewed experience foreboding joy with their children.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. No emotion is more frightening than joy, because we believe if we allow ourselves to feel joy, we are inviting disaster. We start dress-rehearsing tragedy in the best moments of our lives in order to stop vulnerability from beating us to the punch. We are terrified of being blindsided by pain, so we practice tragedy and trauma. But there’s a huge cost.

When we push away joy, we squander the goodness that we need to build resilience, strength, and courage. The good news? In our research we found that everyone who showed a deep capacity for joy had one thing in common: They practiced gratitude. In the midst of joy, there’s often a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability. Rather than using that as a warning sign to practice imagining the ...

Tranquility may be my new favorite emotion. Why? Check out the research definition: “Tranquility is associated with the absence of demand” and “no pressure to do anything.” No demands? No pressures? Sign me up. Or should I say “Take me away.” “Tranquil environments” provide many restorative elements that are needed to counter mental fatigue and attention depletion. Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan found that there are four essential elements of a restorative environment: a sense of getting away, a feeling of immersion, holding attention without effort, and compatibility with one’s preferences. Additional research shows that there are auditory and visual components to tranquil environments, including elements of nature and low levels of noise. Settings that induce high tranquility include fields and forests and large bodies of water; urban settings tend not to induce tranquility. Like I said. Take me away. One thing to note: There’s a difference between feeling content and feeling tranquil. With contentment, we often have the sense of having completed something; with tranquility, we relish the feeling of doing nothing.

If you look across the research, you learn that anger is an emotion that we feel when something gets in the way of a desired outcome or when we believe there’s a violation of the way things should be. When we feel anger, we believe that someone or something else is to blame for an unfair or unjust situation, and that something can be done to resolve the problem. Anger is an action emotion—we want to do something when we feel it and when we’re on the receiving end of it. Additionally, according to Charles Spielberger, an influential anger researcher, angry feelings can vary in intensity, “from mild irritation or annoyance to fury and rage.”

As I mentioned in the introduction, we asked around seventy-five hundred people to identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when they’re experiencing them. The average was three: glad, sad, and mad—or, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off. Couple this extremely limited vocabulary with the importance of emotional literacy, and you basically have a crisis. It’s this crisis that I’m trying to help address in this book.

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.”

In Braving the Wilderness, I write about pain, hate, and anger—especially as they pertain to social justice issues. I’m going to share an excerpt with you here: Sometimes owning our pain and bearing witness to struggle means getting angry. When we deny ourselves the right to be angry, we deny our pain. There are a lot of coded shame messages in the rhetoric of “Why so hostile?” “Don’t get hysterical,” “I’m sensing so much anger!” and “Don’t take it so personally.” All of these responses are normally code for Your emotion or opinion is making me uncomfortable or Suck it up and stay quiet. One response to this is “Get angry and stay angry!” I haven’t seen that advice borne out in the research. What I’ve found is that, yes, we all have the right and need to feel and own our anger. It’s an important human experience. And it’s critical to recognize that maintaining any level of rage, anger, or contempt (that favorite concoction of a little anger and a little disgust) over a long period of time is not sustainable. Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. Or sometimes anger can mask a far more difficult emotion like grief, regret, or shame, and we need to use it to dig into what we’r...

So, do I think anger is a primary emotion or not? I don’t know. There are so many competing lists of “primary emotions,” I don’t know if it matters whether anger belongs on one of those lists. Here are the three things I do know from the work I’ve done over the past twenty-plus years: Anger often masks emotions that are more difficult to name and/or more difficult to own. Just as an indicator light in our car tells us to pull over and check things out, anger is a very effective emotional indicator light that tells us to pull over and check things out. Anger, in response to experiencing or witnessing injustice, pain, and struggle, can be a powerful catalyst for change. But, by definition, a catalyst sparks change, it’s not the change.

One of the arguments of this book is that language matters. It’s the raw material of story, it changes how we feel about ourselves and others, and it’s a portal to connection. With the same amount of power, language can also be used to strip people of their dignity and humanity. With awareness about how dehumanization works comes the responsibility to call out dangerous language when we recognize it.