My hope for this book is that together we can learn more about the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. I want this book to be at atlas for all of us, because I believe that with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves. Even when we don’t know where we are. 

When we stop numbing and start feeling and learning again, we have to reevaluate everything, especially how to choose loving ourselves over making other people comfortable. 

Trying to outrun and outsmart vulnerability and pain is choosing a life defined by suffering and exhaustion. 

When you hold someone accountable for hurtful behaviors and they feel shame, that’s not the same thing as shaming someone. I am responsible for holding you accountable in a respectful and productive way. I’m not responsible for your emotional reaction to that accountability. 

You have to let the people you love experience the consequences of their own behavior. 

People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power.

Very few people can handle being accountable without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down. 

If we don’t have a sufficient emotional vocabulary, it is difficult to communicate our needs and to get the support that we need from others. 

80% of emotion experts now agree that there are universal voice and facial expression signals that reflect our emotional experience. 

Two restaurant terms that my team and I often use today: “in the weeds” and “blown”. 

If someone said they were in the weeds- the response would then be, “What do you need?”

If you said “I’m blown”- that’s completely different. When you’re blown, you have 10 minutes. But in the 10 minutes there is a complete takeover. Stressed is being in the weeds; Overwhelmed is being blown. 

We feel stressed when demand is beyond our ability to cope successfully. This includes unpredictability, uncontrollability, and feeling overloaded. Chronic exposure to stressors can be detrimental to health. High levels of perceived stress have been shown to correlate with more rapid aging, decreased immune function, greater inflammatory processes, less sleep, and poorer health behaviors. 

Overwhelmed means an extreme level of stress, an emotional and/or cognitive intensity to the point of feeling unable to function. I love this definition of “overwhelmed” from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary: “completely overcome or overpowered by thought or feeling”. We all know the feeling that washes over us and leaves us completely unsure of what to do next. Even when people ask “How can I help?” or “What needs to be done?”- responding with organized thoughts feels impossible. 

Feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed seem to be related to our perception of how we are coping with our current situation and our ability to handle the accompanying emotions. Jon Kabat-Zinn describes overwhelm as the all-too-common feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well”. Kabat-Zinn suggests mindful play, or no-agenda, non-doing time, is the cure for overwhelm. 

Our anxiety often leads to one of two coping mechanisms: worry or avoidance. Worry is described as a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future. Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. 

Anxiety and excitement feel the same, but how we interpret and label them can determine how we experience them. Similar sensations are labeled “anxiety” when we perceive them negatively and “excitement” when we perceive them positively. Both our anxiety and our fear need to be understood and respected, perhaps even befriended. We need to pull up a chair and sit with them, understand why they’re showing up, and ask ourselves what there is to learn. 

Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Vulnerability is not oversharing, it’s sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage. 

Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger, “better than”, and/or hidden envy related to perceived unfairness or injustice. It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react. When I start to feel resentful, I think “What do I need but am afraid to ask for?” 

Schadenfreude is a compound of the German words schaden, meaning harm, and freude, meaning joy. It’s pronounced sha-din-froy-da. It simply means pleasure or joy from someone else’s suffering or misfortune. More recently the term made a guest appearance of Ted Lasso when one of the characters was rejoicing in another character’s misfortune until Ted Lasso declared the office a “schadenfreude-free zone”. It’s an emotion typically born out of inferiority rather than superiority. Schadenfreude is also born out of fear, powerlessness, and/or sense of deservedness. 

Good friends aren’t afraid of your light. They never blow out your flame and you don’t blow out theirs.  

Boredom is the uncomfortable state of wanting to engage in satisfying activity, but being unable to do it. 

Disappointment is unmet expectations. The more significant the expectations, the more significant the disappointment. With disappointment, it always starts with expectations. Two categories of expectations: expectations that are unexamined and unexpressed (aka stealth expectations) and examined and expressed expectations. 

When we develop expectations, we paint a picture in our head of how things are going to be and how they’re going to look. Our expectations are often set on outcomes totally beyond our control. It can be great to ask each other, “What do you want this weekend to look like?” We also often ask ourselves “What’s this about? What are you not saying?”

Communicating our expectations is brave and vulnerable; and it builds meaningful connection. Sometimes our expectations are realistic, clearly communicated, and self-aware. When we are intentional and thoughtful about our explanations and things don’t turn out how we thought they would, disappointment still hurts. 

With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or actions. 90% of regrets fall into 1 of 6 categories: education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure. 

In our work, we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary. 

Disappointed: It didn’t work out how I wanted, and I believe the outcome was outside my control. 

Regretful: It didn’t work out how I wanted, and the outcome was caused by my decisions, actions, or failure to act. 

Discouraged: I’m losing my confidence and enthusiasm about any future effort- I’ve lost the motivation and confidence to persist. 

Frustrated: Something that feels out of my control is preventing me from achieving my desired outcome. 

It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but how often do we observe people (and ourselves) dismissing new data or information that challenges our ideas, in order to avoid confusion or the risk of being wrong? If you ask me, stopping to think, engaging in careful deliberation, and revising old thinking are rare and courageous actions. And they require dealing with a healthy dose of confusion. And that’s uncomfortable.

Comfortable learning environments rarely lead to deep learning.

 Curiosity seems to be both a trait and a state. Interest is more of a state (“interested” is not who we are but how we are at a specific time). 

Curiosity is recognizing a gap in our knowledge about something that interests us, and becoming emotionally and cognitively invested in closing that gap through exploration and learning. Curiosity often starts with interest and can range from mild curiosity to passionate investigation. 

Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty. We have to ask questions, admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn’t be asking, and, sometimes, make discoveries that lead to discomfort. 

Surprise as an interruption caused by information that doesn’t fit with our current understanding or expectation. It causes us to reevaluate. 

“A bridge between cognition and emotions”. Surprise is the shortest-duration emotion, rarely lasting more than a few seconds. 

There’s a strong relationship between surprise and unexpectedness. Use “surprise” for experiences that link quickly to unexpectedness. Use “surprise” for experiences that link quickly to emotion. The term “unexpected”, the experience starts with thinking, but it often stays cognitive rather than bridging to emotion. 

Acknowledging uncertainty is a function of grounded confidence, and it feels like humility to me. The definition of amusement that aligns with our research is “pleasurable, relaxed excitation”. Amusement differs from happiness in that happiness is a general sense of pleasure, whereas amusement appeals specifically to one’s sense of humor. 

The bittersweet side of appreciating life’s most precious moments is the unbearable awareness that those moments are passing. Bittersweet is a mixed feeling of happiness and sadness. 

Worry is focused on the future, while rumination focuses on the past or on things about ourselves that we’re stuck on. Rumination is a strong predictor of depression. It makes us more likely to pay attention to negative things, and zaps our motivation to do things that would improve how we feel. The combination of rumination and nostalgia emerged from our research as destructive and disconnecting. 

Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs when a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent with each other. 

When we’re faced with information that challenges what we believe, our first instinct is to make the discomfort, irritation, and vulnerability go away by resolving the dissonance. We might do this by rejecting the new information, decreasing its importance, or avoiding it altogether. There’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. 

Sarcasm is a particular type of irony in which the underlying message is normally meant to ridicule, tease, or criticize. The word “sarcasm” comes from a Greek word meaning “to tear flesh”. 

What emerged from my work is that anguish is an emotion and an experience that is singular and must be understood and named, especially for those of us who have experienced it, will experience it, or may bear witness to it. Anguish is an almost unbearable and traumatic swirl of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness. Shock and incredulity can take our breath away, and grief and powerlessness often come for our hearts and our minds. But anguish, the combination of these experiences, not only takes away our ability to breathe, feel, and think- it comes from our bones. Anguish often causes us to physically crumple in on ourselves, literally bringing us to our knees or forcing us all the way to the ground. The element of powerlessness is what makes anguish traumatic. We are unable to change, reverse, or negotiate what has happened. Anguish always finds its way back to us. After going through such things; your bones are slightly different than they were before. 

What we think is a familiar grief- a grief we’ve come to know and understand and even integrate into our lives- can surprise us again and again, often in the form of anguish. It’s often hard to find our way back into our bodies after experiencing anguish. This is why so much effective trauma work today is not only about reclaiming our breath, our feelings, and our thinking, but also getting our bones back and returning to our bodies. 

To learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, consistency, and support. They’ve been given the opportunity to struggle, and in doing that they learn how to believe in themselves and their abilities. “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child”. 

Hopelessness arises out of a combination of negative life events and negative thoughts patterns, particularly self-blame and the perceived inability to change our circumstances. Hopelessness stems from not being able to set realistic goals (we don’t know what we want), and even if we can identify realistic goals, we can’t figure out how to achieve them. The experiences of hopelessness are strongly and specifically related to suicidality. 

Despair is a sense of hopelessness about a person’s entire life and future. When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair. Despair was once defined as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today”. 

In our saddest moments, we want to be held by or feel connected to someone who has known the same ache, even if what caused it is completely different. We don’t want our sadness overlooked or diminished by someone who can’t tolerate what we’re feeling because they’re unwilling or unable to own their own sadness. 

Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Almost all of the recent research actually refutes the idea that grief progresses in predictable, sequenced stages. 

The Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia is another tremendous resource along with Robert A. Neimeyer who is a psychology professor at the University of Memphis and a clinician. He is one of the world’s most prolific grief researchers. 

Imagine a world in which we honor that place in ourselves and other rather than hiding it, ignoring it, or pretending it doesn’t exist because of fear or shame.

David Kessler said “each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining. ” 

Professor Neimeyer’s says “most people who struggle with complicating loss feel a great press to ‘tell the story’, to find someone willing to hear what others cannot, and who can join them in making sense of the death without withdrawing into awkward silence or offering trite and superficial advice regarding the questions it poses.” 

Acute grief- occurs in the initial period after a loss. It almost always includes strong feelings of yearning, longing, and sadness along with anxiety, bitterness, anger, remorse, guilt, and/or shame. Thoughts are mostly focused on the person who died and it can be difficult to concentrate on anything else. Acute grief dominates a person’s life. 

Integrated grief is the result of adaptation to the loss. When a person adapts to a loss grief is not over. Instead, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors related to their loss are integrated in ways that allow them to remember and honor the person who died. Grief finds a place in their life.

Complicated grief occurs when something interferes with adaptation. When this happens, acute grief can persist for very long periods of time. A person with complicated grief feels intense emotional pain. They can’t stop feeling that their loved one might somehow reappear and they don’t see a pathway forward. A future without their loved one seems forever dismal and unappealing…Grief dominates their thoughts and feelings with no respite in sight. Relationships with family and friends flounder. Life can seem purposeless, as if nothing matters without their loved one. Others begin to feel frustrated, helpless, and discouraged. Even professionals may be uncertain about how to help. People often think this is depression, but complicated grief and depression are not the same thing. 

(Based on the research of Tashel Bordere) Disenfranchised grief is a less-studied form of grief: grief that “is not openly acknowledged or publicly supported through mourning practices or rituals because the experience is not valued or counted {by others} as a loss.” The grief can also be invisible or hard to see by others. Examples of disenfranchised grief include loss of a partner or parent due to divorce, loss of an unborn child and/or infertility, the multitude of losses experienced by a survivor of sexual assault, and loss of a loved one to suicide. As an illustrative example of disenfranchised grief, Tashel Bordere explains that sexual assault survivors suffer from numerous losses, many of which are invisible to others. Some of these losses include loss of one’s prior worldview, loss of trust, loss of self-identity and self-esteem, loss of freedom and independence, loss of a sense of safety and security, and loss of sexual interest. 

There are significant differences between compassion and empathy that are vital to understand if we want to cultivate connection with others. There are also different definitions and types of empathy. 

The relationship between compassion and empathy

Compassion is a daily practice and empathy is a skill set that is one of the most powerful tools of compassion. Compassion is the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering. Compassion is fueled by understanding and accepting that we’re all made of strength and struggle- no one is immune to pain or suffering. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. 

Pity is the near enemy of compassion. Pity sees them as different from ourselves. It sets up a separation between ourselves and others, a sense of distance and remoteness from the suffering of others that is affirming and gratifying to the self. Compassion, on the other hand, recognizes the suffering of another as a reflection of our own pain: “I understand this; I suffer in the same way”. It is empathic, a mutual connection with the pain and sorrow of life. Compassion is shared suffering. 

There’s nothing worse than feeling pitied, and we have the research to show us why it feels so isolating. Pity involves four elements: a belief that the suffering person is inferior; a passive, self-focused reaction that does not include providing help; a desire to maintain emotional distance; and avoidance of sharing in the other person’s suffering. 

Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding. Most researchers agree that there are at least 2 elements to empathy: cognitive empathy and affective empathy.  Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotions. Affective empathy, often called experience sharing, is one’s own emotional attunement with another person’s experience. 

Empathy is NOT sympathy. Sympathy emerged in the data as a form of disconnection. When someone says “I feel sorry for you” or “That must be terrible”, they are standing at a safe distance. Rather than conveying the powerful “me too” of empathy, it communicates “not me”, then adds, “But I do feel sorry for you”. Unwanted, superficial, pity-based response that, although well intended, is focused on the observer’s discomfort rather than on alleviating the patient’s distress. Sympathy and pity are first cousins. They’re the emotions of: We feel bad for you. From way over here where the kind of misery you’re experiencing doesn’t happen. We need to dispel the myth that empathy is “walking in someone else’s shoes”. Rather than walking in your shoes, I need to learn how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experiences. The minute I try to put myself in your place rather than try to understand the situation from your perspective, our empathic connection unravels. Either I get sucked into the vortex of my own emotional difficulties, or, because my experience doesn’t match yours, I doubt what you’re telling me. 

Compassion fatigue is a term used to refer to the emotional exhaustion or burnout that can occur among caregivers. There is compelling research that shows that compassion fatigue occurs when caregivers focus on their own personal distress reaction rather than on the experience of the person they are caring for. The more appropriate term, rather than “compassion fatigue”, might be “empathic distress fatigue”. Empathy is not relating to an experience, it’s connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience. 

Sympathy vs Empathy

“I feel sorry for you”- Sympathy= The subtext of this response is distance: These things don’t happen to me or people like me. If you want to see a shame cyclone turn deadly, throw one of these at it: “Oh, you poor thing” or “Bless your heart”. 

Minimize/Avoid

“Let’s make this go away”- We minimize and avoid when we want hard feelings to go away. Out of their own discomfort, this person refuses to acknowledge that you’re in pain and/or that you’re hurting: “You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. You rock. You’re perfect. Everyone loves you”.

Comparing/Competing

“If you think that’s bad!”= This person confuses connecting with you over shared experiences with the opportunity to one-up you. “That’s nothing. Listen to what happened to me one time!” 

Boundaries are a prerequisite for compassion and empathy. If there’s no autonomy between people, then there’s no compassion or empathy, just enmeshment. This has probably been one of the most significant, soul-shaking learnings of my career. For a couple of years, it made no sense to me at all. This research has taught me that if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their behavior. Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. 

*It’s okay to want to be able to do the things your friends are allowed to do. I totally get that. What’s not okay is breaking our rules to do them. 

*It’s okay to disagree with me, but it’s not okay to ridicule my ideas and beliefs. 

I’m a firm believer that sharing how we feel- even complaining- is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective.

New research on the connection between humiliation and violence has completely changed the way I think abut that emotion and reinforced my belief that shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. 

Shame- I am bad. The focus is on self, not behavior. The result is feeling flawed and unworthy of love, belonging, and connection. Shame in not a driver of positive change. 

Guilt- I did something bad. The focus is on behavior. Guilt is the discomfort we feel when we evaluate what we’ve done or failed to do against our values. It can drive positive change and behavior. 

Humiliation- I’ve been belittled and put down by someone. This left me feeling unworthy of connection and disgusted with myself. This was unfair and I didn’t deserve this. With shame, we believe that we deserve our sense of unworthiness. With humiliation, we don’t feel we deserve it. 

Embarrassment- I did something that made me uncomfortable, but I know I’m not alone. Everyone does these kinds of things. Embarrassment is fleeting, sometimes funny. 

Here are my shame 1-2-3s: 

1. We all have it. Shame is universal and one of the most primitive emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience it are those who lack the capacity for empathy and human connection. 
2. We’re all afraid to talk about it. Sometimes we can feel shame when we just say the word “shame”. But it’s getting easier as more people are talking about it. 
3. The less we talk about it, the more control it has over us. Shame hates being spoken. 

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection. It thrives on secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put shame into a petri dish and douse it with these 3 things, it will grow exponentially into every corner and crevice of our lives. The antidote to shame is empathy. If we reach out and share our shame experience with someone who responds with empathy, shame dissipates. Silence, secrecy, and judgment fuel shame. Shame is an ego-centric, self-involved emotion. It draws our focus inward. Our only concern with others when we are feeling shame is to wonder how others are judging us. Shame and empathy are incompatible. When feeling shame, our inward focus overrides our ability to think about another person’s experience. We become unable to offer empathy. 

 

Self-compassion is often the first step to healing shame.

Self-compassion has 3 elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness is both more difficult and more revolutionary than we think. 

Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think? 

Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance. 

Guilt is an emotion that we experience when we fall short of our own expectations or standards. 

Humiliation is the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued. But the most relevant distinction is that humiliation arises because someone else pointed out our flaws, and we don’t feel we deserved it. 

In 2003, Susan Harter and colleagues issued a report that examined the media profiles of 10 prominent school shooters between 1996 and 1999. “In every case, the shooters described how they had been ridiculed, taunted, teased, harassed, or bullied by peers. All events that led to profound humiliation”. 

Embarrassment is a fleeting feeling of self-conscious discomfort in response to a minor incident that was witnessed by others. Embarrassment does not persist for long periods of time, lasting only a few minutes instead of hours or days. We feel exposed, flustered, and clumsy, but we tend to respond to our embarrassment in nonthreatening ways like using humor. 

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are. 

Insecurity

There are 3 types of insecurity:

1. Domain-specific insecurity- when we are insecure about a specific domain or resource in life, for example: food insecurity, financial insecurity, or a lack of physical safety. Combating is about access and resources. 
2. Relationship or interpersonal insecurity- when we don’t feel we have a supportive and trusting relationship. It can happen in either a specific relationship or as an overarching feeling about all our relationships. 
3. General or personal insecurity- overly critical of our weaknesses, i.e. our body image or performance at work. 

The opposite of personal insecurity is self-security, which they define as “the open and nonjudgmental acceptance of one’s own weaknesses.” What is striking is how feelings of both personal and interpersonal insecurity might cause us to behave in ways that push others away or to pull away from others, for fear of being rejected. 

Invisibility- given that we are all here to be seen, known, and loved, invisibility is one of the most painful human experiences. Invisibility is a function of disconnection and dehumanization, where an individual or group’s humanity and relevance are unacknowledged, ignored, and/or diminished in value or importance. 

Even before the COVID pandemic, government and public health officials were calling loneliness a significant health threat. Loneliness is defined as “perceived social isolation”. We experience it when we feel disconnected. At the heart of loneliness is the absence of meaningful social interaction- an intimate relationship, friendships, family gatherings, or even community or work group connection. Loneliness and being alone are very different things. Loneliness is not just a sad condition- it’s a dangerous one. It’s not the quantity of friends but the quality of a few relationships that actually matters.

Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5%. Living with obesity- 20%. Excessive drinking-30%. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying early by 45%. 

Love is “the preoccupying and strong desire for further connection, the powerful bonds people hold with a select few and the intimacy that grows between them, the commitments to loyalty and faithfulness”. There is a debate among researchers about whether love is an emotion. Among everyone else, love is clearly thought of as an emotion. 

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can be cultivated between two people only when it exists within each one of them- we can love others only as much as we love ourselves. Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can survive these injuries only if they’re acknowledged, healed, and rare. 

The brokenhearted are the bravest among us- because they dared to love. 

7 elements of trust (acronym BRAVING)

• Boundaries
• Reliability
• Accountability
• Vault
• Integrity
• Nonjudgment
• Generosity

Betrayal is so painful because, at its core, it is a violation of trust. It happens in relationships in which trust is expected and assumed, so when it’s violated, we’re often shocked, and we can struggle to believe what’s happening. It can feel as if the ground beneath us has given way.  For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first. When we’re injured by betrayal, we can suffer high levels of anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, jealousy, decreased self-worth, embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and even trauma symptoms. 

At its core, defensiveness is a way to protect our ego and a fragile self-esteem. The opposite of a fragile self-esteem is grounded confidence. With grounded confidence, we accept our imperfections and they don’t diminish our self-worth. 

Flooding is “a sensation of feeling psychologically and physically overwhelmed during conflict, making it virtually impossible to have a productive, problem-solving discussion”. “We each have a sort of built-in meter that measures how much negativity accumulates during such interactions. When the level gets too high for you, the needs starts going haywire and flooding begins. Just how readily people become flooded is individual. Flooding is affected by how much stress you have going on in your life. The more pressure we’re under, the more likely we are to be easily flooded. 

I don’t think there’s a better wish for someone you care about than joy, happiness, and love. We need both, but how we experience them and how they affect us are different. 

Joy is sudden, unexpected, short-lasting, and high-intensity. It’s characterized by a connection with others, or with God, nature, or the universe. Joy expands our thinking and attention, and it fills us with a sense of freedom and abandon. It is an intense feeling of deep spiritual connection, pleasure, and appreciation. While experiencing joy, we don’t lose ourselves, we become more truly ourselves. 

Happiness is stable, longer-lasting, and normally the result of effort. It’s lower in intensity than joy, and more self-focused. With happiness, we feel a sense of being in control. Unlike joy, which is more internal, happiness seems more external and circumstantial. 

Contentment is the feeling of completeness, appreciation, and “enoughness” that we experience when our needs are satisfied. 

Gratitude is an emotion that reflects our deep appreciation for what we value, what brings meaning to our lives, and what makes us feel connected to ourselves and others. 

If you’re afraid to lean into good news, wonderful moments, and joy- if you find yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop- you are not alone. It’s called “foreboding joy”, and most of us experience it. Foreboding joy is one of those practically universal experiences that everyone thinks of as something only they can do. No emotion is more frightening than joy, because we believe if we allow ourselves to feel joy, we are inviting disaster. When we push away joy, we squander the goodness that we need to build resilience, strength, and courage. 

Tranquility is associated with the absence of demand and no pressure to do anything. With contentment, we often have the sense of having completed something; with tranquility, we relish the feelings of doing nothing. 

If you look across the research, you learn that anger is an emotion that we feel when something gets in the way of a desired outcome or when we believe there’s a violation of the way things should be. A substantial amount of research indicates that our propensity for anger and aggression is partially hereditary. 

Contempt is “perhaps the most corrosive force in marriage”. It is one of the most damaging of the 4 negative communication patterns that predict divorce. The other 3 are criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. These took on the name of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What separates contempt from criticism is the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your partner. Contempt, simply put, says “I’m better than you. And you are lesser than me”. Contempt results in distancing, ignoring, or excluding the contemptible person- they are not considered worthy of one’s time or energy. 

What really struck me as I was rereading this and looking at new research on dehumanization is that the language we use to dehumanize is effective because it actually taps into “core disgust”- we reduce people to the types of things that make us physically recoil as we do from cockroaches, rats, and “infestations”. We reduce people into the things that make us grossed out. 

Self-righteousness is the conviction that one’s beliefs and behaviors are the most correct. People see things as black and white- they tend to be closed-minded, inflexible, intolerant of ambiguity, and less likely to consider others opinions. When feeling self-righteous, we feel morally superior to others and are trying to convince ourselves or others that we are doing the right thing. 

Pride is a feeling of pleasure or celebration related to our accomplishments or efforts. Authentic pride is feeling good about what you’ve accomplished and it’s a healthy thing. 

Hubris is an inflated sense of one’s own innate abilities that is tied more to the need for dominance than to actual accomplishments. It is negatively correlated with self-esteem and positively correlated with narcissism and shame-proneness. 

Humility is openness to new learning combined with a balanced and accurate assessment of our contributions, including our strengths, imperfections, and opportunities for growth. 

Narcissism is the shame based fear of being ordinary. Narcissism is shame-based. 

I no longer believe that we can recognize emotion in other people, regardless of how well we understand human emotion and experience or how much language we have. Why have I stopped believing this?

1. Too many emotions and experiences present the exact same way. There’s no way to know through observation if your tears come from grief, despair, hopelessness, or resentment, just to name a few. Absolutely no way. 
2. While research shows that there are some universal facial expressions for a small number of emotions, how we express what we’re feeling and experiencing can be as unique as we are.

So how do we know what other people are feeling? WE ASK THEM. 

Story stewardship means honoring the sacred nature of the story- the ones we share and the ones we hear- and knowing that we’ve been entrusted with something valuable or that we have something valuable that we should treat with respect and care. The greatest threat to story stewardship is the two near enemies of building narrative trust: narrative takeover and narrative tap-out. 

A cultural example of narrative takeover is the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a life-affirming accountability movement to call attention to the violence being perpetrated against Black people. But rather than listening, learning, and believing the stories of injustice, systemic racism, and pain, groups of white people centered themselves with “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter”. There was never a narrative of “white lives and police lives don’t matter” in this movement. This was an attempt to, once again, decenter Black lives and take over the narrative. 

Like empathy, story stewardship is not walking in someone else’s shoes, it’s being curious and building narrative trust as they tell you about the experience of being in their own shoes. 

In this life, we will know and bear witness to incredible sorrow and anguish, and we will experience breathless love and joy. There will be boring days and exciting moments, low-grade disappointment and seething anger, wonder and confusion. The wild and ever-changing nature of emotions and experiences leaves our hearts stretch-marked and strong, worn and willing. 

My hope is that we find solid ground within us, that shore that offers safe harbor when we’re feeling untethered and adrift. The more confident we are about being able to navigate to that place, the more daring our adventures, and the more connected we are to ourselves and each other. The real gift of learning language, practicing this work, and cultivating meaningful connection is being able to go anywhere without the fear of getting lost. Even when we have no idea where we are or where we’re going, with the right map, we can find our way to our heart and to our truest self. 

 

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