Back Cover Blurb of Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown
In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through 87 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances — a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection.
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.
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
I typically love just about anything Brené Brown writes. I had a psychology minor in college and I love the insights that data can provide about why humans do what they do. Brené Brown writes this book to help us go from our glad-sad-mad view of emotions to a world of nuance and color, like upgrading from the box of 8 crayola crayons to the 64 box with the sharpener in the back. But I struggled with this book. I’ve found other reviewers that have complained that it reads like a text book. This may be a case of Professor Brown’s past performance setting the bar so high. She is a college professor, so it is reasonable that she would write things that sound like text books. I am so grateful that she took her teammates’ suggestion to group the emotions by topic, as that made it more readable. However, I think the book needed 2 more structural shifts to reach the perfection that I associate with a Brené Brown Book.
First, she introduces that Buddhist concept of near and far enemies in chapter 7 and I would have benefited from having that as a guiding concept from the beginning. I like it so much, I will add a second quote from the book so you can have a taste:
“The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, “I will love this person (because I need something from them).” Or, “I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.” This isn’t the fullness of love. Instead there is attachment—there is clinging and fear. True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
I have a friend who once pointed out to me that the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Here, we were also playing with this idea that it is not always or maybe even usually that the obvious opposite is what undermines a desired human emotion, but one that can look very similar on the surface. I needed this guiding principle earlier to trudge through a list of 87 emotions with fine differences. I understood that they had restrained themselves from the original list of 150 emotions that therapists find that naming helps people process, but until I understood the insidiousness of mixing up envy and jealousy, I found it a bit hard to care the people frequently mix them up. Language commonly changes with usage, but here it matters because not differentiating can coat good things in an icky feeling and vice versa or make it unclear how to remedy the feeling or situation.
The second structural thing I would do differently in subsequent editions is arrange the emotion clusters in a Hero’s Journey. As it is right now, there is not much to pull me through the negative emotions, and I would set the book down for long breaks when I hit Regret or Despair. If these emotions were arranged in the order we are used to experiencing them in narrative, this might feel more like a story and better carry us through the dark emotions.
I recommend you read it with these two caveats in mind, and hopefully you will get even more joy than I did from these pages.