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

“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.”

“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. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point

“highly significant positive correlation between sadness and enjoyment.” However, this association is sequential. Sadness leads to feeling moved, which in turn leads to enjoyment. “Hence sadness primarily functions as a contributor to and intensifier of the emotional state of being moved.”

Sadness moves the individual “us” toward the collective “us.”

Permanence: This one is tough, because thinking that our struggle will never end is built in to the experiences of despair and hopelessness.

Personalization: When we experience despair and hopelessness, we often believe that we are the problem and forget to think about larger issues and context. Self-blame and criticism don’t lead to increased hopefulness;

3 Ps: personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness.

despair as “the belief that tomorrow will be just like today.”

When extreme hopelessness seeps into all the corners of our lives and combines with extreme sadness, we feel despair.