Glossary

 A living resource for navigating high-conflict dynamics, abuse patterns, and emotionally safe parenting. 

Abuse
Any behavior—emotional, physical, verbal, sexual, or financial—that seeks to control, harm, or overpower another person. Abuse can be overt or covert, visible or invisible.

Arrogance
An inflated sense of superiority or self-importance, often used to dismiss others' thoughts, needs, or boundaries.

Co-Parenting
Two separated or divorced adults working together to raise shared children. Healthy co-parenting includes respectful communication, shared decision-making, and child-centered consistency.

Co-Parenting Abuse
Post-separation abuse in which a parent uses legal agreements, communication tools, custody exchanges, or the child’s needs as a weapon to manipulate, control, or destabilize the other parent.

Codependency
A pattern of people-pleasing or self-neglect rooted in trauma or survival, where one's identity becomes tied to managing another person’s needs, emotions, or dysfunction.

Controlling
Attempts to dominate or dictate another person’s behavior, feelings, or choices—often through manipulation, guilt, threats, or withholding.

Corrupt
Twisting systems, values, or relationships away from fairness, honesty, or empathy for personal gain or power.

Cycles (of Behavior)
Recurring patterns such as idealization → devaluation → discard → hoovering. These cycles keep targets emotionally unstable and disoriented.

DARVO

A manipulation tactic: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Used to avoid accountability by flipping the narrative and portraying the abuser as the victim.

Devaluation
The shift from admiration to criticism. After building someone up (often via love-bombing), they’re suddenly treated as unworthy or "too much."

Delusional
Persisting in false beliefs despite clear evidence. Often used to rewrite reality, deflect responsibility, or maintain control.

Discipline
Intentional teaching, boundaries, and guidance rooted in respect. Discipline helps children learn—not through fear, but connection.

Disregard
Persistent dismissal of someone’s feelings, needs, or boundaries—leaving them feeling invisible or unimportant.

Disrespect
Words or actions that dishonor someone’s value—mocking, interrupting, shaming, or invalidating.

Ego
The part of the psyche concerned with identity, status, or image. A fragile ego can cause defensiveness, projection, or grandiosity.

Emotional Abuse
Tactics like gaslighting, name-calling, guilt-tripping, or withholding love used to control, confuse, or hurt another person without physical force.

Emotional Regulation
The ability to manage your own emotions in healthy ways. Critical for parenting, healing, and breaking harmful generational patterns.

Evasive Communication
Avoiding responsibility by being vague, changing the subject, or refusing to answer directly.

Flying Monkeys
People recruited—knowingly or unknowingly—to carry out or support the abuser’s manipulation, often under the guise of "helping" or "just being concerned."

Gaslighting
Deliberately making someone question their memory, emotions, or reality to gain control or escape accountability.

Grandiose Behaviors
Over-the-top displays of self-importance or entitlement used to seek admiration or mask deep insecurity.

Grey Rock / Grey Rocking
A strategy to protect yourself from manipulation by becoming emotionally unreactive and uninteresting. It involves giving minimal response, avoiding emotional engagement, and offering no new information.

Harmful
Any action or pattern that damages someone’s emotional, physical, or mental well-being—whether intentional or not.

Hoovering
Attempts to suck someone back into a toxic dynamic using guilt, charm, fake apologies, or false promises.

Impression Management
Curating a false image to appear charming, stable, or admirable in public while acting harmfully in private. A common trait of covert abusers.

Invalidate
To reject, minimize, or ignore someone’s experience or emotions, often as a way to assert control or superiority.

Love-Bombing
Overwhelming someone with affection, praise, or gifts to create quick emotional dependence. Often the first stage in an abuse cycle.

Manipulation
Using deceptive or coercive tactics to influence someone’s actions, emotions, or choices without their informed consent.

Mental Abuse
Also called psychological abuse—includes blame-shifting, threats, shaming, and emotional coercion that causes mental distress.

Mind-Rape (also called “psychological violation” or "mental violation")
A deeply invasive form of emotional and mental harm where one’s thoughts or identity are systematically attacked, usually through extreme gaslighting or coercive control.

Narcissist
Someone who shows a pattern of entitlement, lack of empathy, and emotional exploitation—often needing constant admiration and control.

Parallel Parenting

A co-parenting structure used when communication or cooperation is not safe. Each parent parents separately with strict boundaries and minimal contact.

Parental Alienation
When one parent actively damages the child’s relationship with the other parent through manipulation, lies, or coercion. Note: Sometimes falsely claimed by abusive parents to discredit legitimate concerns.

Passive-Aggressive
Indirect expressions of anger—like sarcasm, stonewalling, or backhanded comments—rather than clear, honest communication.

Passive Avoidance
Refusing to engage with conflict, responsibility, or emotional needs by pretending they don’t exist.

Patterns (of Behavior)
Consistent behaviors repeated over time that reveal the emotional safety—or danger—of a relationship.

Physical Abuse
Harm through bodily force—hitting, pushing, restraining, threatening physical violence, etc.

Projection
Blaming someone else for traits or behaviors the accuser is actually displaying themselves. A deflection strategy.

Psychopath
A clinical term for someone with extreme emotional detachment, charm without empathy, and manipulative, often calculated behaviors.

Punishment
A control-based response meant to cause discomfort or shame. Unlike discipline, it doesn’t teach or support healthy behavior change.

Sociopath
A person with antisocial tendencies, impulsivity, and disregard for others’ rights or emotions. Less calculated than psychopaths but often more reactive and unstable.

Stonewalling
Shutting down conversation or refusing to respond, often during conflict. Used to avoid accountability or punish through silence.

Trauma Bonding
A powerful emotional attachment to someone harmful, formed through repeated cycles of abuse, emotional highs/lows, and manipulation.

Victim
A person who has been harmed—emotionally, physically, or psychologically—by another person or system.

Victimizing
Portraying oneself as the victim to gain sympathy, avoid accountability, or manipulate others—often while causing harm.

Willful Ignorance
Choosing not to see, know, or understand something—because doing so would require change, action, or accountability.