Empathy — The ability to understand and share another person's emotional state. Cognitive and affective empathy are distinguished.
Manipulation tactics — Coercive interpersonal strategies used to control, confuse, or subjugate another person. Include DARVO, gaslighting, love bombing, triangulation, and others.
DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. A tactic of perpetrators who deny the abuse, attack the victim, and reverse roles, presenting themselves as victims.
Gaslighting — A form of psychological manipulation that makes the victim doubt their own perception, memory, and judgment. Named after the play 'Gas Light' (1938).
Family/Systemic Therapy — Therapeutic approach that addresses psychological problems in the context of the family system, focusing on interaction patterns, communication, and relational structure.
Group Therapy — Therapeutic modality in which one or more therapists work simultaneously with several patients, leveraging group dynamics as an instrument of change.
Nonviolent Communication — A model of empathic communication developed by Marshall Rosenberg based on observations, feelings, needs, and requests.
Rationality — The capacity to think and act according to reason, distinguishing epistemic rationality (believing true things) from instrumental rationality (achieving goals).
Cognitive Biases — Systematic tendencies in human thinking that deviate judgment from rational norms. Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics and biases program.
Effective Altruism — A philosophical and social movement that applies evidence-based reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others.
The Dark Triad — Three socially aversive yet subclinical personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.
Psychological Boundaries — Personal limits that define where one individual ends and another begins, regulating closeness and distance in relationships.
Provocative Therapy — A therapeutic approach that uses humor, exaggeration, and provocation to challenge the client's self-defeating beliefs.
Attack Therapy — An abusive pseudotherapeutic practice of aggressive verbal group confrontation, condemned by all major professional organizations.
Emotional Intelligence — The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use one's own and others' emotions to guide thinking and action.
Codependency — A relational pattern in which a person excessively subordinates their own needs to those of another, often in the context of addiction or dysfunction.
Shame — A painful self-conscious emotion involving a global negative evaluation of the self, as distinct from guilt which focuses on a specific behaviour.
Love Bombing — A manipulative tactic involving overwhelming a victim with excessive attention, affection, and gifts early in a relationship to establish emotional control.
Triangulation — A relational dynamic in which a third person is drawn into a dyadic conflict, either as a systemic mechanism or as a deliberate manipulation tactic.
Scapegoating — A process by which an individual or group is unjustly blamed for the problems of others, serving as a repository for collective tensions and aggression.
Trauma Bonding — An intense emotional bond that forms between a victim and their abuser as a result of repeated cycles of mistreatment followed by intermittent reinforcement.
Cognitive Dissonance — Psychological discomfort caused by simultaneously holding two or more contradictory cognitions, motivating the person to reduce the inconsistency by modifying beliefs or behaviors.
Conformity & Obedience — Psychological tendencies to adjust behavior or beliefs to align with group norms (conformity) or authority commands (obedience).
Bystander Effect — A phenomenon whereby the likelihood that a person will intervene in an emergency decreases as the number of bystanders present increases.