Book Blurb -Atlas of the Heart

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (By Brené Brown)

My new found infatuation with Brené Brown continues!

Atlas of the heart was not originally what I anticipated it to be but I feel like it was an amazing follow up to re-reading The Gifts of Imperfection, also by Brené Brown.

There are places we go when we feel a certain way, or we want to feel a certain way, and the emotions we feel to send us there, and the emotions we feel when we are there. These can vary and come with their own positive and negative connotations. But Berne Brown walks us through this in an incredibly thoughtful well paced manner.

Summary

Atlas of the heart is about connecting to and understanding the multitude of emotions that make up the human experience. It seeks to help you identify beyond the three most commonly identified emotions - sad angry happy - by reviewing 87 emotions.

This book doesn't seek to necessarily change the way you feel emotions but just to help us better recognize them which is a refreshing outlook from what is essentially a health and wellness book.

What is more refreshing is the connection that is made to how we typically end up feeling a particular emotion. So that we can trace the why behind it and better understand how it fits into our experience.

Who Should Read This Book?

You should read this book if you've already read The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown.

You should read this book if you are a human who acknowledges that they experience emotions.

You should read this book if you want to understand more deeply about how you feel different emotions and when we tend to feel these emotions.

You should read this book if you deal with other people and want to make sure you are not negatively engaging with them in a way that belittles or dismisses their emotions.

What did I learn?

I learned that the connections to shame, power and self image are more nuanced than I thought.

We tend to think of emotions as complete opposites of each other, but when we look at potentially more complicated emotions, we see that there are ones that are close to it where they're called near enemies and these near enemies can be just as detrimental to the so called positive emotion you want to feel or want to express as the ‘far enemy’ or the polar opposites can be.

It reminds me of the saying “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”! For example if we are feeling hopeful we can easily slip into blind optimism or we think we are feeling hopeful when in reality we are actually blindly optimistic.

But at the same time the vocabulary we use aroudn these emtions is equally important. Sometimes it is the popular term we use but if we were to change it and use something else, we might gain a better understanding of how it feels - and where it comes from!

Final thoughts

All in all I really enjoyed this book it was well illustrated, it was well laid out, it was thoughtful and it illustrated a very scientific, yet humanistic way of looking at human emotions.

This Book made me cry and think! Both Beautiful things!