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Glossary of Healing Terms
An A–Z guide to the language of emotional healing, trauma recovery, and nervous system regulation.
Healing introduces us to new words - words that name what we’ve felt for years but never knew how to describe.
Unless you’ve worked with a trauma-informed therapist, many of these terms can sound pathologising, clinical, or even judgemental - as if they imply something is wrong with you.
This glossary reclaims those words. It’s here to help you understand the language of transformation - to see these terms not as diagnoses, but as doorways to self-understanding.
Each entry is written in plain English, with links to explore deeper reflections and practical tools in my blog.
You don’t need to memorise these words - only to recognise yourself in them. 🌿
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
Abandonment Wound
The abandonment wound forms when love feels inconsistent or conditional. It creates a deep fear of being left, unseen, or replaced. In adulthood, it can show up as clinginess, people-pleasing, or shutting down to avoid rejection. Healing involves re-parenting the inner child and learning to feel safe in connection and solitude.
Learn more:
🧠 What Is The Father Wound?
Read more:
Boundaries
Boundaries are not walls — they are the edges of self-respect.
They define where you end and another begins.
Healthy boundaries protect your peace, clarify your needs, and invite mutual honouring.
Without them, love turns into obligation; with them, love breathes.
Learn more:
🧠 Emotional Recalibration Therapy provides a safe space to gently redefine and sustain healthy boundaries.
Read more:
👉 Explore further: What Is Toxic Empathy?
Co-Regulation
Co-regulation is the nervous system’s natural way of borrowing calm from another.
It’s how safety, steadiness, and presence are transmitted between people — often before words are even spoken.
When someone sits beside you with genuine care, your body receives the message: You’re safe now.
Healing through co-regulation teaches us that safety is not solitude — it’s shared rhythm.
Learn more:
🧠 Inner Child Work is all about re-learning things like co-regulation
Read more:
👉 Explore further in What Is a Highly Sensitive Person?
💫 Cortisol Imbalance
A physiological marker of prolonged survival stress. When the body remains in fight, flight, or freeze, cortisol — the stress hormone — loses its natural rhythm, flooding the system or dropping too low. This creates cycles of fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, and emotional volatility.
In Stella’s work, cortisol imbalance is viewed as the body’s call for recalibration — an invitation to slow down, restore safety, and rebuild trust through nervous system repair, breathwork, nourishment, and somatic awareness.
Learn more:
🧠 What Is Emotional Recalibration Therapy?
Read more:
👉 Explore Why Rejection Reactivates Old Wounds
👉 Explore What Is the Vagus Nerve?
Dissociation
Dissociation is the body’s intelligent way of stepping back from overwhelm.
It’s not weakness — it’s protection. You may feel foggy, distant, or as if life is happening behind glass.
These sensations are signs of a nervous system that has learned to survive unbearable moments by leaving the room.
Healing means teaching your body that it’s safe to stay — gently, slowly, without force.
Learn more:
🧠 Why Your Inner Child Is Protecting You
Read more:
👉 What Is Functional Freeze - The Invisible Shutdown That Keeps High Achievers Numb, Detached, and Still Performing
👉 Explore further in Childhood Trauma Alters Brain Development
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is the practice of returning to centre when life pulls you off balance.
It’s how we soothe without suppressing, feel without flooding, and respond rather than react.
Through breath, grounding, and self-attunement, the nervous system learns: I can be with what I feel — and still be safe.
🧠 Learn More: about Emotional Regulation through Emotional Recalibration Therapy
🧸 Try This: Inner Child Healing Exercise to Soothe and Regulate the Nervous System
Father Wound
The Father Wound refers to the emotional and psychological imprint left when a father is absent — whether physically, emotionally, or energetically.
It often arises from a lack of consistent protection, validation, or guidance during childhood, shaping how we relate to safety, love, and authority as adults.
Unhealed, it can manifest as people-pleasing, over-achieving, distrust in men or masculine energy, or attraction to emotionally unavailable partners.
Through Inner Child Healing and Emotional Recalibration Therapy, the nervous system learns that love and safety are no longer conditional — they can be felt, received, and lived now.
👉 Read the full reflection:
What Is the Father Wound?
Fawn Response
The fawn response is a trauma survival pattern where we appease to stay safe — saying yes when our body means no.
It forms in relationships where love or safety felt conditional, teaching us that peace must be earned through self-abandonment.
Healing the fawn means reclaiming the right to disappoint others rather than betray yourself — learning that harmony without honesty is not peace.
Learn more:
🧸 Discover the Origins of Your Responses Through Inner Child Healing
Read more:
🧠 Explore futher in What Is Functional Freeze?
👉 Explore further in What Is Toxic Empathy?
Gaslighting
Stella Dove, trauma-informed Inner Child Healer, explains the psychological impact of gaslighting — how confusion is created to control perception, and how emotional recalibration restores clarity, safety, and self-trust.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that makes you question your reality.
It often begins subtly — dismissing your feelings, denying events, rewriting shared experiences — until confusion replaces self-trust.
Over time, gaslighting erodes confidence in your own perception. Healing begins by naming what happened and rebuilding your inner authority — the quiet knowing that says, I remember what I felt, and it was real.
Learn more:
🧠 Discover how Emotional Recalibration Therapy helps rebuild your sense of self after gaslighting
Read more:
👉 Explore further in What Is Gaslighting?
Highly Sensitive Person
Stella Dove, trauma-informed Inner Child Healer and founder of Emotional Recalibration Therapy, explores the psychological and physiological impact of being a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)
A Highly Sensitive Person is someone whose nervous system processes sensory and emotional information more deeply than average. This trait — known as Sensory Processing Sensitivity — is not a diagnosis or flaw, but an inherited temperament found in around 15–20% of people.
Highly sensitive people experience the world in high resolution. They feel subtleties in tone, emotion, and energy that others often miss. Their empathy runs deep, their intuition precise, and their awareness constant.
In unpredictable or emotionally dysregulated families, sensitivity can become vigilance — a body trained to anticipate danger before it arrives. What began as a gift of empathy may harden into exhaustion or self-doubt. Healing invites the nervous system back into safety, transforming overwhelm into attunement, and fragility into power.
In Healing Context:
In Emotional Recalibration Therapy, sensitivity is honoured as a form of embodied intelligence. When regulated, it becomes a compass — guiding intuition, creativity, and connection.
Mantra:
“My sensitivity isn’t a flaw. It’s my compass.”
Explore Further:
Related Terms:
Inner Child Healing
Hypervigilance
Stella Dove, trauma-informed Inner Child Healer, explains how hypervigilance develops when the amygdala remains overactive after trauma — and how Emotional Recalibration helps restore nervous-system safety.
Hypervigilance is a state of chronic alertness where the nervous system remains on guard, even when no real danger is present. It often follows childhood trauma, when the brain learns that safety is conditional.
It can look like overthinking, startle responses, tension that never settles, or emotional over-responsibility. This isn’t paranoia — it’s protection. The amygdala becomes hyperactive, keeping the body in survival mode.
Healing begins when the body learns to stand down, to feel safe in stillness, and to trust that peace can be kept. Emotional Recalibration Therapy, breathwork, and somatic awareness retrain the nervous system to recognise calm as safety.
🧠 Explore further in The Neurological Impact of Childhood Trauma
📘 Learn about Highly Sensitive People
Inner Child
Stella Dove, trauma-informed Inner Child Healer, speaks calmly about the science and soul of Inner Child Healing — explaining how somatic awareness, vagus-nerve regulation, and Emotional Recalibration Therapy help the body and mind return to safety and presence. Her tone is gentle but grounded, offering both scientific clarity and emotional reassurance for those exploring inner child therapy and nervous system healing..
Your inner child is the part of you that still holds the emotions, memories, and unmet needs of your earliest years.
It’s not a metaphor — it’s a living imprint in your nervous system, shaped by how love, safety, and belonging were once given or withheld.
When ignored, the inner child protests through anxiety, overachievement, or self-criticism.
When met with compassion, they soften — teaching you how to feel, play, and trust again.
When you begin to reconnect with your inner child, you start healing the emotional imprints that shape your adult relationships, confidence, and ability to regulate your nervous system.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in Inner Child Healing London
Judgement Detox
A Judgement Detox is the practice of releasing harsh self-criticism and shifting from punishment to understanding.
Judgement often masks fear — fear of being wrong, unworthy, or unseen.
As we detox from judgement, we replace inner attack with curiosity: What pain is this reaction protecting?
Healing begins when we witness our patterns with compassion, not condemnation.
Learn more:
🧠 Emotional Recalibration Therapy is where we open the container and being the Judgement Detox for real.
Kindness Fatigue
Kindness fatigue happens when empathy turns into overextension — when your care for others outpaces your care for yourself.
It’s common among healers, helpers, and those raised to earn love through giving.
Over time, constant giving without replenishment breeds resentment, burnout, and emotional depletion.
Healing begins by practising reciprocal compassion — remembering that your wellbeing is not optional, it’s essential.
Learn more:
🧠 Discover where all this began through compassionate Inner Child Healing
Read more:
👉 Explore further in What Is Toxic Empathy?
Love Addiction
Love addiction is not an obsession with romance — it’s an attachment to intensity that feels like home.
Born from inconsistent caregiving or emotional neglect, it confuses chaos with chemistry and abandonment with desire.
Love addiction keeps us chasing unavailable partners, replaying childhood wounds in adult bodies.
Healing begins when we seek peace, not drama — and learn that love built on safety, not survival, is the love that lasts.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in The Twin Flame Myth — and Why It Hurts Women
Mother Wound
The mother wound forms when our earliest bond is shaped by conditional love, emotional absence, or unmet attunement.
It’s not about blame — it’s about recognition.
This wound can echo through perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the sense that no amount of achievement earns rest or love.
Healing the mother wound means learning to re-mother the self — with tenderness, boundaries, and unconditional regard.
Begin with:
Inner Child Healing - reparenting from within - what that truly means to live fully integrated and whole.
Read more:
👉 Explore further What Is the Father Wound? — A Reflection on the Mother Within
Nervous System Regulation
Nervous system regulation is the art of returning the body to safety after stress, conflict, or emotional overwhelm.
When dysregulated, the body may fight, flee, freeze, or fawn — survival states that once kept us safe.
Regulation isn’t about control; it’s about capacity — expanding the window where life can be felt without collapse or chaos.
Through breathwork, grounding, and compassionate awareness, we teach the body that calm is no longer dangerous — it’s home.
Learn more:
🧠 Emotional Recalibration Therapy grounds us so that we can develop compassionate awareness and soothe our nervous system.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in What Is a Highly Sensitive Person?
👉Discover What Is the Vagus Nerve?
Overfunctioning
Overfunctioning is the compulsion to do more, fix more, or carry more than your share — often rooted in early environments where safety was earned through competence.
It can look like taking responsibility for others’ emotions, rushing to solve every problem, or struggling to rest without guilt.
Though praised by the world, overfunctioning drains the soul.
Healing begins when you learn to pause, trust, and let life hold you too.
Learn more:
How you might begin to heal from Overfuntioning with Emotional Recalibration Therapy
People Pleasing
People pleasing is not politeness — it’s protection.
It begins in childhood, when love felt earned through compliance or care-taking.
Over time, it becomes a reflex: meeting everyone’s needs but your own, smiling through discomfort, saying yes while your body whispers no.
Healing begins with honest boundaries and the radical act of believing that your truth will not cost you love.
Begin To Heal From People Pleasing through Inner Child Healing.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in Avoiding Uncomfortable Confrontation
Quiet Shame
Quiet shame doesn’t shout — it hums beneath perfectionism, overthinking, and self-erasure.
It’s the silent belief that you’re “too much” or “not enough,” even when no one says it aloud.
Born from moments when your authenticity was met with withdrawal or criticism, quiet shame teaches the body to hide to stay loved.
Healing begins when you bring this shame into the light — naming it, nurturing it, and remembering that worthiness was never lost, only buried.
Learn more:
Inner Child Healing will show you how much you've kept inside, and gently release the shame that was never your to carry.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in Why Do We Repeat Patterns?
👉 What Is a Highly Sensitive Person?
Reparenting
Reparenting is the process of becoming the caregiver your younger self needed.
It’s not about blame — it’s about meeting unmet needs with compassion and consistency.
Through reparenting, you replace criticism with curiosity, neglect with nurture, and chaos with calm.
It’s how we rebuild self-trust: learning to speak gently, set boundaries wisely, and stay present through every feeling.
Somatic healing
Somatic healing is the practice of listening to — and liberating — the body’s stored stories.
Trauma lives in tension, breath, posture, and movement long after the mind has “moved on.”
Through breathwork, touch, sound, and mindful awareness, we allow the body to complete what was once interrupted — trembling, sighing, releasing, softening.
Somatic healing teaches that safety is felt, not forced, and that the body itself is the bridge back home.
Learn more:
Somatic healing is foundational in Emotional Recalibration Therapy
Read more:
👉 Explore further in What Is a Highly Sensitive Person?
✨ Spiritual Superiority
A defence pattern disguised as enlightenment. It’s the impulse to transcend pain rather than tend to it — to claim clarity while quietly avoiding the chaos of feeling. This form of bypassing often arises when the nervous system equates vulnerability with danger and seeks refuge in intellect or “high vibration.”
In Stella’s work, Emotional Recalibration Therapy, spiritual superiority is understood as a trauma-adapted state — the mind’s attempt to control the uncontrollable. True spiritual maturity comes through humility, embodied compassion, and the willingness to meet the human experience as sacred, not shameful.
Read more:
Toxic Empathy
Toxic empathy is when emotional attunement becomes self-abandonment. It happens when you absorb another person’s pain instead of witnessing it, leading to emotional exhaustion, blurred boundaries, and chronic over-responsibility.
This pattern often develops in childhood through emotional neglect, parentification, or trauma that taught you safety depended on anticipating others’ feelings. While healthy empathy involves understanding and compassion with boundaries, toxic empathy dissolves those boundaries — turning care into self-erasure.
Healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy involves nervous system regulation, boundary awareness, and learning to differentiate between compassion and emotional enmeshment.
Related terms: Inner Child Healing, Highly Sensitive Person
Read more:
👉 What Is Toxic Empathy?
Trauma Bonding
A trauma bond forms when love and pain become intertwined — when moments of kindness are used to bind you to cycles of harm.
It’s the emotional tether created by intermittent reinforcement: affection followed by withdrawal, apology followed by wounding.
This bond isn’t weakness; it’s survival — your nervous system clinging to familiarity over freedom.
Healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy begins when you replace chaos with consistency, and learn that love doesn’t need to hurt to feel real.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in Childhood Trauma Alters the Development of Your Brain
Twin Flame Theory
Stella Dove, trauma-informed inner child healer explores why the twin-flame story sounds like destiny — but it’s often trauma dressed as fate. It keeps so many of us looping and lonely, turning pain into proof of connection.
Twin Flame Theory is the belief that two souls are “divine counterparts” destined to reunite. Trauma-informed psychology reveals this intensity often reflects attachment wounding and repetition compulsion — the nervous system mistaking familiar pain for destiny.
In Healing Context:
What feels cosmic can, in truth, be a trauma bond: chaos misread as chemistry, longing mistaken for love.
In Emotional Recalibration Therapy, we explore how early inconsistency and emotional neglect train the body to chase recognition. Healing begins when safety is rebuilt within, not sought through pursuit.
Common Signs:
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Magnetic attraction with unstable connection
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Break-up/return cycles reframed as “soul lessons”
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Spiritual language used to justify imbalance
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Feeling “chosen” one moment and discarded the next
Therapeutic Insight:
If love feels like obsession, waiting, or testing, it isn’t destiny — it’s a pattern.
True partnership is reciprocal, regulated, and rooted in self-respect.
Related Terms: Gaslighting · Attachment Wounding · Spiritual Gaslighting · Inner Child
Further reading - Busting The Twin Flame Myth
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Unworthiness Schema
The unworthiness schema is the deep, often unconscious belief that you are undeserving of love, rest, or success.
It’s formed in childhood when care was conditional — when attention depended on achievement, behaviour, or silence.
This schema becomes the lens through which you see yourself, filtering every compliment, opportunity, and relationship through doubt.
Healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy begins when you challenge the old evidence, reparent the inner critic, and build a body memory of being loved without performance.
Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve is the body’s built-in pathway of safety — a bridge between brain, body, and breath.
It carries messages from your organs to your heart, your gut, and your mind, shaping how calm or connected you feel.
When balanced, it helps you rest, digest, and relate. When strained, it fuels anxiety, disconnection, and shutdown.
Through breathwork, sound, and gentle somatic practice, you can tone the vagus nerve — teaching your body that safety is not a memory, but a living experience.
Learn more:
Worthiness Wound
The worthiness wound forms when love was earned, not given — when approval depended on perfection, achievement, or silence.
It teaches the body that rest is risky, joy is indulgent, and being seen is unsafe.
This wound is not a flaw; it’s a learned adaptation — a survival code written in the language of self-denial.
Healing through Emotional Reclaibration Therapy begins when you honour your inherent value — not for what you do, but for who you’ve always been beneath the striving.
Read more:
🧠 What Is Functional Freeze? The Invisible Shutdown That Keeps High Achievers Numb, Detached, and Still Performing
Xenophobia of the Self
Xenophobia of the Self describes the fear of one’s own depth — the instinct to exile emotions, desires, or truths that once felt unsafe to express.
When the body has learned that authenticity invites rejection or danger, even joy can feel foreign.
This inner estrangement is not self-sabotage — it’s self-protection.
Healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy means reintroducing yourself to your wholeness, letting the unfamiliar parts of you become family again.
Yearning for Safety
Yearning for safety is the deep, cellular longing to feel held — to exhale without fear of what comes next.
It lives beneath every anxious thought and over-functioning impulse, whispering, “Please let me rest.”
This yearning is not weakness — it’s wisdom, the body remembering what it was made for: connection, care, and calm.
Inner Child Healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy begins when safety is no longer something you chase, but something you create within and receive without apology.
Read more:
👉 Explore further in Why Rejection Reactivates Old Wounds
Zero Point of Healing
The zero point of healing is the sacred pause — the stillness between what was and what’s yet to be.
It’s the moment when the nervous system stops fighting the past or chasing the future and simply rests in now.
This is not emptiness — it’s equilibrium, where old identities dissolve and the body learns to feel safe in silence.
From this neutrality, new truths emerge, not forced by will but revealed through peace.
Learn more
about the zero point of healing through Emotional Recalibration Therapy
Read more:
👉 Explore further in The Pain and Pleasure of Healing