Glossary for the Overstimulated

(Or: what the therapists are saying, translated into human.)

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  • Attachment Style — the emotional blueprint your parents installed before you could talk. Determines whether you crave closeness, fear it, or oscillate wildly between the two.
  • Avoidant Attachment — when love feels like a trap. You want connection but the second someone loves you, your brain files for emotional bankruptcy.
  • Anxious Attachment — when love feels like a rollercoaster. You crave reassurance like oxygen because you were raised on emotional Wi-Fi that kept cutting out.
  • Disorganised Attachment — both of the above. A fun combo of “please love me” and “get away from me.” The nervous system equivalent of a broken fire alarm.
  • Regulation — calming your body enough to remember that not every text notification is a life-threatening event.
  • Dysregulation — when your nervous system is throwing a rave and forgot to invite serotonin.
  • Nervous System — your body’s built-in alarm and thermostat for danger, love, hunger, and bad decisions.
  • Polyvagal Theory — science’s fancy way of saying your body can only flirt, fight, or faint.
  • Neurotransmitter — the chemical gossip your brain passes around to decide if you’re happy, horny, or homicidal.
  • Dopamine — motivation juice. Too little and you can’t move; too much and you’re planning a whole rebrand at 3 a.m.
  • Serotonin — your internal mood manager. Keeps everything level… until it doesn’t.
  • Cortisol — the stress hormone. Useful for running from lions, less so for reading his WhatsApp activity.
  • Oxytocin — the cuddle chemical. Bonds you to people. Also bonds you to bad ideas.
  • Norepinephrine — the fight-or-flight switch. Great for escaping danger, terrible for dating emotionally unavailable men.
  • Trauma Response — what your body does when it’s reminded of the old nightmare while you’re trying to live the new dream.
  • Fight / Flight / Freeze / Fawn — the four panic personalities. Fight = argue. Flight = ghost. Freeze = dissociate. Fawn = apologise for existing.
  • Gaslighting — psychological vandalism. Someone convinces you that your reality is wrong so they can stay comfortable in theirs.
  • DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The abuser’s favourite magic trick: turning your pain into their pity party.
  • Cognitive Dissonance — the brain glitch when what you know and what you feel refuse to agree. (“He’s awful” vs “but maybe he’ll change.”)
  • Secondary Betrayal — when your friends or family minimise the abuse because confronting him would ruin the group chat vibes.
  • Projection — accusing you of whatever they’re secretly doing. Classic.
  • Emotional Neglect — growing up in a house where no one yelled but no one noticed you either. Leaves invisible bruises.
  • Emotional Regulation — being able to experience feelings without letting them drive the getaway car.
  • Hypervigilance — when your body’s Wi-Fi is permanently connected to potential disaster.
  • Somatic — body-based. The stuff your muscles remember even when your mind forgets.
  • Boundaries — fences for your peace. You can love someone deeply and still keep your garden locked.
  • Codependency — when your identity’s so wrapped around another person that you need their moods to know who you are.
  • Enmeshment — emotional spaghetti. No one knows where one person ends and the other begins.
  • Self-Abandonment — saying “it’s fine” when it’s absolutely not fine.
  • Cognitive Bias — the mental shortcuts that make you believe your ex might’ve changed because he posted a quote about growth.
  • Neuroplasticity — the reason therapy works. Your brain can literally re-wire itself, it just hates doing it.
  • Trauma Bond — love chemically glued together by intermittent chaos. The push-pull that feels like passion but is actually panic.
  • Moral Injury — the ache that hits when you’ve acted against your own values to survive someone else’s dysfunction.
  • Reparenting — teaching your adult self the care your childhood didn’t get. Feels weirdly parental because it is.
  • Inner Child — the emotional squatter inside you still waiting for someone to say “you’re safe now.”
  • Somatic Flashback — panic without context. Your body remembers what your mind buried.
  • Liminal Space — that surreal in-between phase after the breakdown but before the glow-up.
  • Cognitive Reframing — the gentle art of turning “I’m insane” into “Actually, that was a trauma response.”
  • Validation — the opposite of gaslighting. Saying “yeah, that happened and it sucked” so your brain can finally relax.
  • Boundary Violation — when someone treats your “no” like it’s a suggestion.
  • Emotional Labour — all the invisible fixing, soothing, and managing you do to keep other people comfortable.
  • Self-Soothing — comforting yourself like a competent adult instead of rage-texting.
  • Avoidance — the emotional version of shoving everything under the bed and calling it clean.
  • Rumination — mentally picking the scab because the wound still itches.
  • Attachment Wound — the first time you learned that love could hurt. Usually from someone who was supposed to keep you safe.
  • Derealisation / Depersonalisation — feeling detached from reality or yourself because your brain hit the “too much” button.
  • Trauma Response Loop — when your body keeps re-enacting the same disaster because it thinks that’s how you stay alive.
  • Resilience — not “being fine,” but finding yourself funny even after you’ve cried in Tesco.
  • Post-Traumatic Growth — the part where you build a life so good it makes the pain look like research.