Glossary

You run into a term, you look it up, and the top result gives you three lines that leave you exactly where you started. That's what this glossary is for.

These are the words that keep showing up once you start looking at yourself in writing. What a pattern means in psychology. What shadow work is and where Jung got it. What rumination is and how it differs from thinking something through. Projection, cognitive distortions, metacognition and the thought record. Attachment style and its three familiar shapes, anxious, avoidant and secure. Triggers, self-sabotage, reflective writing, AI journaling.

Every entry opens with the short definition, the one you can read once and keep. Then it opens up: where the term comes from, what it looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, an example, how it shows up in what you write, and where the concept stops. None of it is a diagnosis. At the end you get the lessons and the exercises where the term does real work.

You don't have to read it front to back. Look up the word that's been circling and start there. If you're new, pattern work is the entry that holds up most of the others.