Atlas of the Heart

Atlas of the Heart maps out a series of human emotions and their meaning and explores the psychology behind a human’s feelings and how they make up our lives and change our behaviors, and how to build meaningful connections by learning how to deal with them.

In her book, Brown identifies 87 human emotions that she explains in detail and uses to describe real-life situations that we all go through. Among the most common yet hurtful emotions are anger and disappointment. We all experience these feelings at some point in our life. It’s up to us to decide how we want to respond to them.

Anger is an emotion we feel when something gets in the way of our desired outcome. When we’re angry, we tend to blame everyone around us and feel wronged. However, this negative emotion holds us back from achieving inner peace, as it has the power to steal our happiness and harm our relationships. Unless we learn how to transform it into joy, compassion, love, or other positive emotions. It’ll surely haunt us and break our souls.

Disappointment occurs when we can’t meet our expectations. Setting the bar high can take us places, but sometimes it can also hold us down. When unmet goals turn into shame and anger, you know something is wrong with your emotion palette. Since you choose to prioritize the bad over the good.

Lastly, when we compare ourselves with others, we’re hurting ourselves the most. Why? Because we’re setting the highest and most unrealistic expectation of all: to become someone else. Instead of engaging in an impossible feat and creating a negative ranking system, it’s best to focus on your individual growth and see how far you’ve come, as well as what’s left to fix within yourself.

Vulnerability is often associated with being weak and emotionally exposed, but it has to do more with courage and self-awareness. Being vulnerable allows you to open up, share experiences, heal, and ultimately love someone. However, figuring out who to be vulnerable with is the real challenge, but once you find a person that earned the right to hear about your life, being vulnerable with them suddenly becomes a strength. More than that, this emotion can help us heal anger, disappointment and let go of our toxic traits. Another person can offer us a different, more positive perspective on our situations. When we allow someone else in our lives and creates bonds, our hearts open up to the good, making it harder for negative emotions to take over us. Vulnerability also opens the door for compassion, which is an emotion that helps us create even stronger bonds. It allows us to be of service to…