I never initiate recommending self-help books to clients but sometimes they ask for suggestions. And when that happens, my safest pick is always Brené Brown. Her books are insightful, there are lots of takeaway messages, and she includes stuff that you can act on immediately (if that’s your thing). In summary, her books are accessible, broadly applicable, and most importantly, don’t contain stuff that is likely to be triggering, or catch people off-guard.

If there was such a thing as a ‘therapy coffee table book’, Atlas of the Heart is it. I would also describe it as Brené Brown’s Greatest Hits Collection.

It is essentially an examination of ‘…eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human‘. Brown draws on numerous sources – academic studies, poetry, art, other therapists – to describe each emotion. Some of the ones that she has spent her career working on, such as shame, vulnerability and empathy, get a bit more air-time than some of the lesser-known – for example, freudenfreude (the enjoyment of another’s success).

Brown breaks up the emotions into thirteen categories, from ‘Places we go when we feel wronged’ (anger, contempt, disgust, dehumanization, hate, self-righteousness) to ‘Places we go when life is good’ (joy, happiness, calm, contentment, gratitude, foreboding joy, relief, tranquility). For each emotion, she provides a definition and examples.

Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other – it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out. Comparison says, ‘Be like everyone else, but better.’

I read this book cover-to-cover but it doesn’t have to be read that way – you could pick and choose what interests you, or what’s relevant.

I enjoyed the ‘atlas’ approach, although there are no actual maps. Instead, in the introduction, Brown says that she discussed the idea for the book with a friend, who is cartographer –

He helped me understand that while different maps may use different layers, the one things that all maps do is provide readers with orientation. But map-making is not as easy as simply stacking data on top of data. There’s an art and science to how cartographers prioritize and integrate the data. And, according to Kirk, 50 to 60 percent of the challenge of mapmaking is labeling the map in a way that appropriately prioritizes the right information.

This is helpful to know because, if you were reading sections of the book at random, you might think the layout is a little busy! Instead, Brown has created hierarchies within the text, and the careful placement of illustrations and pull-out quotes helps emphasise the key messages.

Lastly, I was amazed to see a painting included in the book that regular visitors to the National Gallery of Victoria would be familiar with – it’s August Friedrich Schenck’s painting of a ewe standing over her dead lamb as a murder of crows closes in (see what Liam Pieper says about it here). Brown uses it in the section on anguish, which she defines as –

Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief and powerlessness.

I have been transfixed by this painting every time I have come across it at the Gallery – it’s the powerlessness and inevitability of what’s ahead part that gets me every time.

4/5

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 25): Belfast 9°-16° and Melbourne 14°-23°.