Atlas of the Heart summary

We often say that someone who’s very sensitive to other people’s moods or reactions is walking on eggshells. In her own words, Brené felt like the eggshells were “duct-taped to the soles of her shoes.” She was hypersensitive to the world around her – so attuned to what might go wrong that it felt excruciating. 

She tried drowning out those feelings through partying, smoking, and drinking. And while all of that did succeed in numbing her, it also meant the world got blurry. She could no longer observe what was going on inside of people. She was fearful and anxious, and was so scared of feeling pain that she chased experiences that made her feel even more pain. She was, as she says, “taking the edge off” through alcohol. But taking that edge off was also muffling her magic – her superpower. 

But hang on. Is there a point to all of this? We can’t all be world renowned emotions experts like Brené, so why should the rest of us spend the time learning more about our feelings?  

Well, consider this. Imagine you have a sharp, shooting pain in your shoulder. It’s excruciating and won’t go away, and it’s starting to get in the way of your life. So, you rush to the emergency room. A kind, caring doctor comes in and tries to find out what’s wrong. As you start to tell her, something strange happens: you can’t get any words out. You can only point to the general part of your body where the pain is occurring, but you can’t pinpoint the exact location. So she can’t help you. You’re frustrated, and your shoulder continues to hurt. 

We’ve all been there, many times. Something happens that causes us to feel bad, and we usually describe the emotion we have in response as feeling sad. But what does that mean, exactly?

“Sad” is not the same as being depressed. Depression is a chronic condition, while sadness can be a fleeting feeling we experience in response to a particular situation. 

Anguish. Anguish feels shocking, unexpected, and often traumatic. And it can hit us on a primal, physical level, too. This happened to Brené one day when she got a call from a childhood friend out of the blue. The friend told her that she’d felt suicidal due to a childhood trauma Brené didn’t know about. When she heard this from her friend, she physically crumpled to the floor.

In Brené’s words, anguish “comes for the bones” – it strikes us at our core. People are resilient, and can heal from this kind of trauma. But they need support. Otherwise, they may go through the motions, while remaining internally numb or “crumpled.” Or they may respond to the pain by becoming rigidly perfectionist, shutting out all vulnerability to try and stay upright. Good support allows you to experience the pain while learning how to rebuild your life. Some of the best support comes from body-centered therapies that address the physical manifestation of trauma in the body. 

To combat hopelessness and despair, let’s start with hope. We think of hope as being a warm and fuzzy emotion. But that’s actually not true. In fact, being hopeful is a skill that you can learn. Being hopeful comes from being able to set realistic goals, figure out how to meet the goals and believe in your own abilities. Hope comes from encountering adversity, and discovering that you can be resilient in the face of it. To learn hopefulness, you need to practice setting goals that you can actually meet.

Even more important, you need to become comfortable with failure and be prepared to try new approaches if the first one doesn’t work. The best thing about learning to be hopeful is that it’s infectious. For example, researchers have shown that hopeful parents generally have hopeful children.

On the other side of the spectrum, there’s happiness. We all know what that word means, right? After all, how many love songs have been written about it? 

Well, actually, even the most expert happiness researchers – people who spend their whole lives studying the emotion – can’t agree on exactly what it means. Most research to date has been about happiness as a trait, or part of who we are, rather than as a state – something we experience at times. 

Over the course of these blinks, we’ve traveled to two emotional places: where we go when we’re hurting, and some places we go when life is treating us well. As you’ve already discovered, there’s nothing simple about this inner exploration. The seemingly neat categories of “sad” and “happy” are bursting with nuance and contradictions. 

We’ve gone over how sadness can make us feel good, and that happiness can be less rewarding than joy. We’ve discovered that emotions can lodge themselves in your body, as well as your mind. And that, to a surprising degree, you can influence how you feel by practicing skills like hopefulness.