Glossary
Plain-English meanings for the words you'll meet across our guides and scorecards. Finding the language is often where things begin.
The lasting effects of trauma that went on for a long time, often in childhood and often from people you depended on. Alongside the usual signs of trauma, it can show up as a harsh inner critic, sudden waves of shame, and difficulty trusting people.
Read the Complex PTSD guide →Suddenly feeling as scared, small or ashamed as you did as a child, often without a clear memory attached. It can feel like it is happening now.
Read the Complex PTSD guide →Four automatic ways the body responds to threat. Fawning means keeping yourself safe by pleasing, appeasing or going along with others.
Read the Body & Nervous System guide →Your body's ability to settle after stress and return to feeling safe enough. When regulation was not learned early, people often find other ways to get there, such as food, work, scrolling or porn.
Read the Body & Nervous System guide →The zone where you can feel things and still think clearly. Above it you feel flooded or anxious; below it you feel numb or shut down.
Read the Body & Nervous System guide →A way of understanding the nervous system as having three states: safe and connected, fight or flight, and shut down. It explains why you cannot simply think your way out of a pattern that lives in the body.
Read the Body & Nervous System guide →To do with the body. Somatic work means noticing and working with sensations, breath and movement, not only thoughts.
Feeling disconnected from your body, your feelings or what is around you. A way the mind protects itself when something is too much.
Anything in the present that sets off a reaction rooted in the past. Not a weakness: a sign that your system learned to watch out for danger.
A family organised around one person's needs, moods and image, usually a parent's. Children learn that their own feelings come second.
Read the Narcissistic Family guide →A parent who may have provided for you practically but could not meet you emotionally: they struggled with your feelings, needs or independence.
Read the Childhood Needs guide →What did not happen, rather than what did: feelings not noticed, comfort not given, needs not met. Often invisible because there is nothing obvious to point to.
Read the Childhood Needs guide →The child who is praised and held up as proof the family is fine, often at the cost of being allowed to be themselves.
Read the Narcissistic Family guide →The child who is blamed for the family's problems and carries its shame.
Read the Narcissistic Family guide →When the lines between family members are blurred, so a child is responsible for a parent's feelings and does not develop a separate sense of self.
Read the Narcissistic Family guide →Being able to stay yourself while staying close to your family, holding on to your own thoughts, feelings and choices without either going along with everyone or cutting yourself off. An idea from Bowen family systems theory.
Read the Narcissistic Family guide →When a child takes on a parent's role, practically or emotionally, such as looking after siblings or being a parent's confidant.
Read the Childhood Needs guide →Learning to give yourself the care, boundaries and kindness you needed and did not get as a child.
Read the Childhood Needs guide →A way of describing the younger parts of you that still carry the feelings and needs of that age.
The harsh voice that attacks who you are, not just what you did. It often echoes how you were spoken to growing up.
Read the Inner Critic guide →A deep sense of being fundamentally wrong or not enough, rather than having done something wrong.
Read the Inner Critic guide →The patterns you developed in early relationships for staying close to people and keeping yourself safe. Commonly described as secure, anxious, avoidant or disorganised.
Read the Attachment Style guide →The lines that show where you end and others begin: what you will and will not accept.
Read the Narcissistic Relationships guide →When someone makes you doubt your own memory, perception or sanity, often by denying things that happened.
Read the Narcissistic Relationships guide →Overwhelming attention and affection early in a relationship that later turns into control or withdrawal.
Read the Narcissistic Relationships guide →A powerful attachment to someone who hurts you, built from cycles of harm and relief.
Read the Narcissistic Relationships guide →Calming your nervous system through safe connection with another person. Babies learn regulation this way first.
Read the Body & Nervous System guide →Patterns such as needing admiration, struggling with criticism, finding empathy hard in the moment, or using people to feel worthwhile. Everyone has some. They become a problem when they harm you or the people around you.
Read the Relationship Patterns guide →A clinical diagnosis that only a qualified professional can make. We are coaches and never diagnose. You do not need a label to start changing patterns.
Someone who recognises narcissistic patterns in themselves and wants to change them. Far more common, and far more hopeful, than people assume.
Read the Relationship Patterns guide →The intense hurt, anger or shame someone with narcissistic patterns feels when their image of themselves is threatened.
Read the Relationship Patterns guide →The admiration, attention or control someone relies on to feel okay about themselves.
A quieter form, where the need for admiration shows up as sensitivity, feeling unappreciated or quiet resentment rather than obvious grandiosity.
Using porn in a way that feels hard to control, often to manage stress, loneliness or difficult feelings rather than out of free choice.
Read the Men's Sexuality & Porn Recovery guide →A brain chemical tied to wanting and seeking. Porn gives a strong, fast hit, which can make ordinary pleasures feel flat by comparison.
Noticing an urge in the body and riding it out like a wave, without fighting it or acting on it. Urges rise, peak and pass.
Read the Men's Sexuality & Porn Recovery guide →Feeling bad, using porn to escape the feeling, then feeling ashamed afterwards, which leads back to the start. Breaking the shame is part of breaking the cycle.
Read the Men's Sexuality & Porn Recovery guide →Needing more, or more extreme, content to get the same effect over time.
These are everyday descriptions to help you put words to things, not clinical definitions. We are coaches, not therapists, and we never diagnose. If something here has stirred up a lot, support is here.
