The attachment & relationship psychology glossary

Attachment patterns & behaviors

Limerence & obsessive attraction

Attachment styles & foundations

Nervous system & regulation

  • Co-Regulation: borrowing calm from someone whose body isn't worked up right now.
  • Dysregulation: when the feeling is way bigger than the moment, and you can't dial it down.
  • Emotional Flooding: being so overwhelmed mid-argument that the words stop going in.
  • Fawn Response: making everyone happy because that was the safest move your body ever learned.
  • Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn: the four automatic moves your body makes when it thinks something's wrong.
  • Functional Freeze: doing all the things while feeling almost nothing, like life is on autopilot.
  • Grounding Techniques: small ways to get out of your head and back into the room you're actually in.
  • Hypervigilance: your radar for danger stuck in the on position, even on the good days.
  • Nervous System Regulation: your body's ability to come back down after something sets it off.
  • Polyvagal Theory: a map of the three gears your nervous system shifts between: connected, alarmed, shut down.
  • Self-Soothing: being the calm voice you keep waiting for someone else to be.
  • Somatic Therapy: therapy that starts with what your body is doing, not just what your mind is saying.
  • Window of Tolerance: the zone where your feelings and your thinking brain can both stay online.

Codependency, boundaries & burnout

  • Anxious High-Achiever: everyone thinks you're crushing it, and you're mostly just scared to stop.
  • Boundaries: what you'll do to take care of yourself, not rules for other people.
  • Burnout: running on empty for so long that you stopped caring, and that scares you.
  • Codependency: earning your place in someone's life by disappearing from your own.
  • Emotional Exhaustion: the tank is empty and someone is still asking you for one more thing.
  • Emotional Labor: keeping everyone comfortable is a job, and you've been doing it for free.
  • Enmeshment: when their feelings are your feelings and you can't tell where you end.
  • Inner Child: the younger you who still takes over when something feels like back then.
  • Overfunctioning & Underfunctioning: one of you does everything, the other does less and less, and both are stuck.
  • Parentification: you were the responsible one before you were old enough to be anything.
  • People-Pleasing: saying yes with your mouth while your whole body is saying no.
  • Reparenting: learning to treat yourself the way you needed to be treated back then.
  • Shadow Work: getting honest about the parts of you that you'd rather not have.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) & parts work

  • Exiles (IFS): the young hurt parts of you that got locked away so you could keep going.
  • Firefighters (IFS): the parts that grab wine, your phone, or their number the second the old pain gets loose.
  • Inner Critic: the voice in your head that talks to you in a way you'd never let anyone talk to a friend.
  • Internal Family Systems (IFS): the idea that your mind is a family of parts, and there's a calm you underneath running none of the drama.
  • Managers (IFS): the parts of you that plan, perfect, and please so the old pain never gets a chance to surface.
  • Parts Work: noticing the different voices in you and actually talking with them instead of being bossed around by them.
  • Self-Energy (IFS): the calm, curious you that's still there under all the noise, even when you can't feel it.
  • Unblending (IFS): stepping back far enough from a feeling that you can look at it instead of looking out from inside it.

Not sure where to start? Take the attachment style quiz and start with the terms for your style.