Atlas of the Heart

Atlas of the Heart — Brené Brown

When Three Words Are All You've Got

For five years Brené Brown ran a workshop exercise where she asked people to list every emotion they could recognize and name in themselves in real time. More than seven thousand adults went through it. The average answer came back to three: happy, sad, angry. That is the working emotional vocabulary most of us are carrying around. Three words to describe everything that happens between our ribcage and our throat in the course of a day. Brown thinks this is roughly why so many of us feel stuck, lonely, or quietly furious without knowing why.

Atlas of the Heart is her attempt to fix that. The book is a map of eighty-seven emotions and experiences, grouped into thirteen places we go — places like uncertainty, comparison, hurt, falling short, an open heart, feeling wronged. Each chapter draws careful lines between feelings we tend to mash together. Shame and guilt. Envy and jealousy. Empathy and sympathy. Joy and happiness. Embarrassment and humiliation. The argument under the whole project is that naming what you feel with more precision does not give the feeling more power over you. It gives you more power over the feeling. You can't process, regulate, or communicate something you can't name. You can't ask for help with a feeling you have mislabeled as fine.

Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston who has spent twenty years studying shame, vulnerability, courage, and connection. Her earlier books — Daring Greatly, Rising Strong, Braving the Wilderness, Dare to Lead — built a vocabulary for one corner of emotional life. This one is the reference grammar. She borrows a phrase from Harvard psychologist Susan David and calls the skill emotional granularity. People who can tell the difference between a wide range of emotions, David's research shows, manage ordinary life noticeably better than people who treat the whole inner world as either fine or terrible. Brown quotes Wittgenstein on the first page of her introduction for the same reason: the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.