Attachment Style
The blueprint we unconsciously follow in relationships, formed in early childhood, that shapes how we connect, fear, and seek closeness or space.
Disorganised Attachment
A confusing push-pull pattern in relationships. Wanting intimacy, fearing it, and often sabotaging closeness even while craving it.
Anxious Attachment
A heightened sensitivity to disconnection. Feeling deeply afraid of being left, even when the bond seems secure.
Avoidant Attachment
The instinct to retreat when things get too close. Prefers space to vulnerability, self-reliance over emotional messiness.
Co-Regulation
When two people emotionally tune into each other. It’s what helps you feel safe, grounded, and seen in a healthy relationship.
Emotional Labor
The invisible effort one person often makes to manage the emotional atmosphere of a relationship: soothing, explaining, keeping the peace.
Emotional Bargaining
Believing love must be earned by being patient, understanding, or “good enough”, especially with someone emotionally unavailable.

Performative Intimacy
When someone talks about feelings or vulnerability, but it’s more about being perceived as deep than actually connecting.
Emotional Flooding
When feelings (yours or someone else’s) become too overwhelming to process, leaving you shut down or reactive.
Stonewalling
The silent treatment’s more polished cousin. Emotionally checking out instead of dealing with discomfort or conflict.
Spinning the Facts
A dismissive way to reject someone’s emotional truth by reframing it as manipulation or distortion. Often a deflection.
Unfinished Business
Emotional leftovers from past relationships that spill into new ones: unresolved feelings, lingering attachments, or unprocessed hurt.
Translation Trap
When you find yourself constantly rewording, repackaging, or softening what you say just to be understood, or tolerated.

Boundary Blur
When the lines between what’s yours and theirs get fuzzy: feelings, decisions, space, time. Especially common in early infatuation or co-dependency.
Emotional Enmeshment
When closeness becomes too close. There's little space for individuality because the relationship becomes identity.
Emotional Availability
The ability to be present, responsive, and real in connection. It’s not about how much someone shares, but how much they stay.
Projection
When someone assigns you feelings or intentions that are actually their own, often as a defense.
Gaslighting
Undermining your perception of reality, often subtly. Makes you question what happened or how you felt.

Love Bombing
An overwhelming flood of affection and attention early on that often masks control, insecurity, or instability.
Slow Erosion
When something doesn’t explode, it just wears down. Trust. Joy. Safety. Bit by bit, under the weight of small dismissals or unresolved patterns.
The Waiting Room
A term used in Unfinished Business to describe being in a relationship with someone emotionally elsewhere, waiting to be fully chosen.
False Hope Loop
The cycle of being pulled in with kind words or gestures, only to be left uncertain or distant again soon after.
Emotional Substitution
When someone uses a new relationship to fill a void left by an old one, without doing the actual healing.

Somatic Clue
A body signal - tight chest, sinking stomach, holding breath - that often tells the truth before your brain catches up.