Subtitle: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
Recommended to me by: Brene Brown’s other books, and picking it up at free market
For an atlas of 78 emotions, this book is surprisingly engaging. Brene Brown includes excerpts of past books, current research, and personal stories about the emotions, in a flowing, well-written way. Full page pull quotes with strongly colored backgrounds and full page illustrations add life to the book.
The emotions are collected into related groups like “Places we go when things don’t go as planned,” (boredom, disappointment, expectations, regret, discouragement, resignation, frustration) and “Places we go when the heart is open.” (love, lovelessness, heartbreak, trust, self-trust, betrayal, defensiveness, flooding, hurt).
The debate about whether anger is a primary emotion surprised me. It is a core response to boundary violations, as Karla McLaren says in The Language of Emotions. Yes, a lot of other emotions come along with boundary violations, but that doesn’t change the primal experience of anger.
I read the book in little bits for quite a while, and it lends itself well to that. I ran out of steam toward the end and didn’t finish it. The focus on “objective” research rather than experiences in the body made the book feel too abstract even when the research was interesting.
Recommended if basic information about a variety of emotions is useful to you, and if you like Brene Brown’s research-based approach.
