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

by Brené Brown

Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts. Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments. Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth. We really get this wrong. More to come.

I can sum up humility with one sentence that emerged from the research that informed Dare to Lead: I’m here to get it right, not to be right.

The term “intellectual humility” refers specifically to a willingness to consider information that doesn’t fit with our current thinking. People who demonstrate intellectual humility don’t lack confidence or conviction. They may hold strong views, but they are also open to hearing other points of view. They are curious and willing to adjust their beliefs when faced with new or conflicting information. Humility allows us to admit when we are wrong—we realize that getting it right is more important than needing to “prove” that we are right.

As we leave this section, hopefully we can also leave behind the ideas that hubris is just a benign form of supersized pride, that pride is bad for us, and that humility is weakness. Pride can be good for us, hubris is dangerous, and humility is key to grounded confidence and healthy relationships.

I admire and turn to often, including Kristin Neff, Chris Germer, and Jack Kornfield, write about near enemies. To get our heads and hearts around this concept, I thought I’d share a different definition and a couple of examples. In an incredibly timely and powerful article, “The Near and Far Enemies of Fierce Compassion,” Chris Germer writes, “Near enemies are states that appear similar to the desired quality but actually undermine it. Far enemies are the opposite of what we are trying to achieve. For example, a near enemy of loving-kindness is sentimentality—similar but different. A far enemy of loving-kindness is ill will—the opposite of loving-kindness. Similarly, a near enemy of compassion is pity and a far enemy is cruelty.” Without the language of near and far enemies, and without the tools of emotional granularity and self-awareness, the difference between how we want to show up and the near enemies of these practices feels nuanced. But this type of nuance predicts the difference between wholeheartedness and brokenheartedness. Jack Kornfield explains that near enemies may seem like the qualities that we believe are important, and may even be mistaken for them, but they are different and often undermine our practices. He writes, “The near enemies depict how spirituality can be misunderstood or misused to separate us from life.” When I read that last sentence, I had to break it down and reread it about twenty times: “The near enemies depict how spirituality can be mi...

I define spirituality as the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to each other by something greater than ourselves. I have friends who are atheists who every day practice inextricable connection—they hurt when others hurt and they know that none of us are free until all of us are free. I have friends who talk endlessly about their religion and wear scripture on their T-shirts, yet demonstrate no connection to anyone’s suffering but their own and maybe that of the people in their immediate circle. I make this point because we’re not talking about religion here. We’re talking about the irrepressible human spirit. When I look at Kornfield’s sentence and think about my twenty-plus years of research on connection, my translation is: On the surface, the near enemies of emotions or experiences might look and even feel like connection, but ultimately they drive us to be disconnected from ourselves and from each other. Without awareness, near enemies become the practices that fuel separation, rather than practices that reinforce the inextricable connection of all people. This is huge.

The near enemy of equanimity is indifference or callousness. We may appear serene if we say, “I’m not attached. It doesn’t matter what happens anyway, because it’s all transitory.” We feel a certain peaceful relief because we withdraw from experience and from the energies of life. But indifference is based on fear. True equanimity is not a withdrawal; it is a balanced engagement with all aspects of life. It is opening to the whole of life with composure and ease of mind, accepting the beautiful and terrifying nature of all things.

I needed the concept of near enemies because when it comes to cultivating meaningful connection, the far enemies—the real opposites—are not what get in the way most of the time. They’re easy to recognize—we don’t get tricked into believing that everything is okay; they are up front with their disconnection. It’s the near enemies of connection—the imposters that can look and feel like cultivating closeness—that sabotage relationships and leave us feeling alone and in pain. And because they’re so stealthy, we often internalize the pain and think that something is wrong with us. Near enemies can feel like manipulation and even gaslighting. Of course the far enemies destroy connection too—but you see them coming.

I first introduced the term grounded confidence in Dare to Lead. The core learning in Dare to Lead is that it’s not fear that gets in the way of courage, it’s armor—how we self-protect when we feel uncertain or fearful. Our armoring behaviors keep us from showing up in ways that are aligned with our values. As we learn to recognize and remove our armor, we replace it with grounded confidence. The concept was in its infancy when I wrote about it several years ago. It only included three properties: the abilities to rumble with vulnerability, stay curious, and practice new skills. What you see now is a much fuller concept with more properties. And my guess is that we’ll continue to work on this for years to come.

The last skill under this category is feeling embodied and connected to self. We don’t talk enough about the importance of embodiment and what happens to us when we’re disconnected from our physical selves. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”

“Help is the sunny side of control.”

We also see controlling the path in larger cultural contexts. For example, politicians who see people suffering and rather than actually walking alongside them, make people feel like they’re understood and they’re not alone, while actually leveraging and exploiting their emotion for political gain and influence. I see your struggles and your pain. You don’t deserve it. Here’s who’s to blame and here’s how I can help you and make them pay. This near enemy is so seductive that it is often as dangerous as the far enemy: walking away.

power as the ability to achieve purpose and effect change.

Practicing Story Stewardship I’m going to start this section by acknowledging that I’ve been wrong about something for years. For two decades, I’ve said, “We need to understand emotion so we can recognize it in ourselves and others.” Without exaggeration, I’ve said this thousands of times and I’ve heard it from other researchers at least that much. Well, let me go on the record right now: I no longer believe that we can recognize emotion in other people, regardless of how well we understand human emotion and experience or how much language we have. Why have I stopped believing that we can recognize emotion in other people? Two reasons: Too many emotions and experiences present the exact same way. There’s no way to know through observation if your tears come from grief, despair, hopelessness, or resentment, just to name a few. Absolutely no way. While research shows that there are some universal facial expressions for a small number of emotions, how we express what we’re feeling and experiencing can be as unique as we are. So how do we know what other people are feeling? We ask them. It’s only then that we are able to connect with the grounded confidence to engage and the courage to walk alongside. When they tell us what they’re feeling, what happened, what they fear or desire, we listen and we become trusted stewards of their stories.

Story stewardship means honoring the sacred nature of story—the ones we share and the ones we hear—and knowing that we’ve been entrusted with something valuable or that we have something valuable that we should treat with respect and care. We are good stewards of the stories we tell by trusting them to people who have earned the right to hear them, and telling them only when we are ready. We are good stewards of the stories we hear by listening, being curious, affirming, and believing people when they tell us how they experienced something.

The greatest threat to story stewardship is the two near enemies of building narrative trust: narrative takeover and narrative tap-out. Rather than building trust by acknowledging, affirming, and believing, we shut people down when we experience discomfort or disinterest, or when we take over the narrative and make it about us or our perception of what happened.

Narrative tap-outs can range from subtle disinterest to complete shutdowns. If we had thought bubbles they’d say “This is too uncomfortable” or “I don’t care enough about you to care about this” or “I can’t take this on right now.” If the reason we’re tapping out is the latter, it’s so much better to say that than to diminish someone’s story. It sounds weird, but we can tap out of sharing our own stories too. Often this is about a lack of grounded confidence that our stories matter or a lack of self-trust about when and how we share them. Tapping out of stewarding someone’s story can feel like betrayal, and tapping out of sharing our own story feels like betraying ourselves.

As you review the model, you’ll see that knowing and applying the language of human experience and emotion is a key property of all of the major categories that support meaningful connection. That’s how we ended up here, together, sharing this book. When this emerged from the data, I thought, “Damn. I can’t write a book on meaningful connection without including some kind of glossary or compendium of emotion and experience words.” It was and remains weirdly shocking to me that access to and application of language are central to grounded confidence, walking alongside one another, and story stewardship. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see language emerge as core to one of these, but that it’s central to all three speaks to its power. As you can see in the graphic, the near enemy of knowing and applying language is shaping emotion and experience to fit what we know. We take nuanced experiences like despair or hopelessness and force them into whatever language we have—maybe sadness or anger. But this leaves us far less capable of sharing what we’re experiencing, getting help, or moving through our experiences productively. It’s a near enemy because we may be talking about our feelings or sharing them, but we can’t get to healing because we’re limited by our language. The far enemy is acting out, shutting down, or giving up. No access to language means we’re in pain, we feel alone, and we can’t articulate what’s happening. In the introduction, I gave an example of trying to ...

We need to know we’re not alone—especially when we’re hurting. Even in my fifties, I find myself wrestling with the same questions that left me confused as a kid: Why do we cause each other so much pain, and why do we turn away from hurt when the only way to the other side of struggle is through it? I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand—I’ve been known to run from vulnerability like someone is chasing me. Granted, not very often anymore. It just takes so much more energy and creates so much more emotional churn than having a seat and asking hurt or uncertainty to pull up a chair. Doing this research and writing this book has taught me that our emotions and experiences are layers of biology, biography, behavior, and backstory. Every single day, our feelings and experiences show up in our bodies, they’re shaped by where we come from and how we were raised, they drive how we show up, and each feeling has its own unique backstory. Understanding these emotions and experiences is our life’s work. The more we learn, the deeper we can continue to explore.

I’ve also learned something that has changed how I move through my life on a daily basis: Our connection with others can only be as deep as our connection with ourselves. If I don’t know and understand who I am and what I need, want, and believe, I can’t share myself with you. I need to be connected to myself, in my own body, and learning what makes me work. This is how I start to develop the grounded confidence I need to move through the world and cultivate meaningful connection with others. Before this work, I didn’t give enough importance to spending time and energy connecting to myself. I made that optional if I had anything left after connecting with others. It wasn’t working—and now I know why.

In this life, we will know and bear witness to incredible sorrow and anguish, and we will experience breathless love and joy. There will be boring days and exciting moments, low-grade disappointment and seething anger, wonder and confusion. The wild and ever-changing nature of emotions and experiences leaves our hearts stretch-marked and strong, worn and willing. My hope is that we find that solid ground within us, that shore that offers safe harbor when we’re feeling untethered and adrift. The more confident we are about being able to navigate to that place, the more daring our adventures, and the more connected we are to ourselves and each other. The real gift of learning language, practicing this work, and cultivating meaningful connection is being a...