Definitions & Glossary

An approach that stops fighting difficult thoughts and feelings and puts the effort into acting on your values instead. Useful when years of trying to think your way out of something has not worked.

The template for closeness you learned early on — how safe it feels to depend on someone and to be depended on. It shows up in adult relationships as a pattern rather than a choice, which is why naming it changes things.

Anything you do to reduce anxiety in the short term: cancelling, delaying, distracting, over-preparing, drinking. It works immediately and makes the fear bigger over time, which is why it is a target of treatment rather than a symptom to manage.

Doing small, scheduled, valued things before you feel like doing them, so mood follows action rather than waiting to lead it. One of the most reliably effective parts of work with depression.

A clear statement of what you will and will not do, held consistently. A boundary describes your own behaviour rather than imposing a rule on someone else, which is exactly what makes it enforceable.

Exhaustion, cynicism and reduced capability caused by sustained demand without adequate recovery. It is a load problem rather than a character flaw, and it needs rest as well as skills.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Working the loop between what you think, how you feel and what you then do — testing thoughts against evidence and changing the behaviours that keep the problem alive.

A predictable thinking error: all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophising, mind-reading, discounting the positive. Everyone uses them; distress makes them louder and more believable.

The result of repeated or prolonged harm, often in childhood and often within relationships you could not leave. It affects identity and relating as much as memory, so the work is slower and stabilisation matters more.

What you say in session stays in session. The narrow exceptions are your own written permission, a court subpoena, or a serious and immediate risk to someone’s safety.

Settling your nervous system in the presence of a calm other person. It is why being genuinely heard lowers distress before anything has been solved.

Counselling tends to focus on a present difficulty and practical change; psychotherapy works on longer-standing patterns, beliefs and relational history. Most real work, including here, blends the two.

More than sadness: flattened motivation, interest and energy, usually with harsh self-criticism attached. It reliably uses its own symptoms as evidence against you, which is the loop treatment interrupts.

Disconnecting from the present moment, your body or your emotions — spacing out, feeling unreal, losing time. Common under threat and in trauma; it once served a purpose and can be gently reversed.

The ability to feel something strongly and still choose what you do next. It is a set of learnable skills, not a personality trait you either have or lack.

Facing an avoided situation in agreed, manageable steps until the fear response falls on its own. Never a single leap, and never without consent.

The point in an argument where the body takes over: heart racing, thinking narrowed, nothing going in. Nothing useful is said after this point, which is why couples work builds in a pause.

Persistently undermining someone’s account of reality so they stop trusting their own perception. Distinct from disagreement, and a pattern worth naming precisely rather than loosely.

The response to any significant loss — death, separation, diagnosis, estrangement, redundancy, migration. It changes shape rather than ending, and there is no correct timetable.

Grief that has become stuck in a way that is closing life down: unable to function months or years on, or unable to feel it at all. Often complicated by trauma or by a difficult relationship with the person lost.

Practical techniques that return attention to the present — breath, senses, contact with the floor. Used to interrupt panic, flashbacks and spirals in under two minutes.

A nervous system that stays scanning for danger long after the danger has passed. Exhausting, physically expensive, and highly responsive to trauma-informed work.

Unwanted thoughts or images that arrive uninvited and feel alien. Having them is normal and says nothing about your character; the distress comes from treating them as meaningful.

Fight, flight, freeze and shutdown are automatic protective states, not decisions. Recognising which one you are in tells you what will help — movement, grounding, or contact with someone calm.

A sudden surge of physical alarm — chest, breath, dizziness, a sense of catastrophe — that peaks within minutes and cannot harm you. Fear of the next attack is usually what keeps the cycle going.

Being told plainly how the thing you are dealing with actually works. It sounds minor and is often the point at which people stop believing something is fundamentally wrong with them.

Post-traumatic stress disorder: flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance and avoidance persisting well after an event. It is a nervous-system injury, and it responds to structured treatment.

Repetitive thinking that feels like problem-solving and produces no decisions. The tell is that you finish where you started, only more tired.

A deep, early-formed belief about yourself or others — "I am not enough", "people leave" — that quietly filters new evidence. Identifying it explains why the same situation keeps landing the same way.

Self-esteem rises and falls with performance; self-worth is the baseline sense that you count regardless of output. Sustainable change works on the second one.

Of the body. Somatic work uses physical sensation, posture and breath as information and as a route to change, on the basis that distress lives in the body as much as in thought.

Shutting down and withdrawing mid-conflict. Usually a flooded nervous system protecting itself rather than contempt, though it lands as contempt — which is why the repair is a stated pause, not silence.

The working relationship between you and your counsellor. It is the single strongest predictor of outcome across all modalities, which is why fit matters more than credentials.

Working in a way that assumes trauma may be present: prioritising safety, choice and pacing, and never pushing a client past what their nervous system can hold.

A cue — sound, smell, tone of voice, date — that sets off a disproportionate reaction because it resembles something from the past. Mapping triggers precisely is what makes them manageable.

The Richards Trauma Process. A structured four-part process that resolves the emotional charge of an event and files it as memory rather than a live threat, without requiring you to retell the detail.

The zone where you can feel emotion and still think clearly. Above it you are overwhelmed, below it you are shut down. Much of therapy is widening this window.