Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

In Atlas of the Heart, Brown explores the theme of emotional granularity. She believes emotions are nuanced and having a nuanced vocabulary for our experience helps us better understand ourselves, connect with others, and can even shape our experiences. 

First, Brown shows how emotional granularity helps us better process and understand our own experiences. Before we can hope to make connections with others or express our experience we need to know what that experience is. Brown believes that having a wide vocabulary for and understanding of the human experience helps us make meaning of our own experiences and feel more connected to ourselves. She states, ““Language is our portal to meaning-making-connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes” (xxi). For example, Brown explains how worry is repeated negative thought patterns about the future. While this can feel like we are doing something productive by envisioning all possible outcomes, it usually is just a way of avoiding the real feeling underneath our worry—fear, shame, resentment, etc. With this knowledge about what worry is, we can pause when we are stuck in negative forecasting; we can pause and examine what is going on beneath the worry.