Note: These are not to be an all inclusive definition but rather a short and brief description.
Abandoner – Someone who starts a relationship but cannot finish it. Afraid of real intimacy, abandoners choose shallow acquaintances.
Abandonment – Someone connecting, and then leaving. A form of separation: whatever the reason or situation, a person leaves either physically or emotionally and is no longer present.
Abilities - Talent, special skills, capacity, or aptitudes acquired from practice and training or naturally gifted.
Abuse - Violations that destroy trust. These negative experiences cause us to recoil, withdraw emotionally and do not let love in.
Acceptance – Loving someone (including yourself), regardless of his or her situation or condition. Acceptance is also living in reality: a step or stage of processing often through the loss of something or someone.
Addiction – A compulsion for something that someone thinks they need to survive. The driving force of many addictions, but not all, is the lack of healthy relationships.
Affirmation – Affectionate and endearing words of praise, appreciation, and encouragement.
Aggressive Control - Someone hurting us if we say no. (see Boundary)
Anger – An intense feeling caused by a real or perceived injustice or injury. A sudden, violent displeasure accompanied by an impulse to retaliate. Rage: uncontrollable anger. Fury: over the top rage that resembles insanity.
Anxiety - A fearful concern or interest. Painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind usually over an impending or anticipated ill. An abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension and fear often marked by physiological signs (as sweating, tension, and increased pulse), by doubt concerning the reality and nature of the threat, and by self-doubt about one's capacity to cope with it.
Attachment – Two people bonding with each other and sharing their deepest thoughts, dreams, feelings, and needs without fear of rejection from the other person.
Attacks – Someone deliberately criticizing, being abusive, and hurtful of others for having needs. Projecting their self-hatred, having contempt, sadistic and gaining pleasure from causing pain.
Attributes – A quality, character, characteristic, or property belong to a person including their body, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, actions, behavior, abilities, desires, motives, limits, and choices.
Behavior – The manner and activity of the way one conducts them selves. It is the action or reaction to a situation or circumstance.
Bondage – Allowing someone to control and manipulate you. Un-forgiveness keeps you in bondage.
Bonding – Relational development: an attachment and connection to others. Saying yes to relationship by building trust and intimacy.
Boundary – Maintaining our limits and respecting the limits of others: learning to disagree, want something different, or spend time apart from someone and still remain connected. (Also see separateness). Here are some ways our boundaries can be disrupted and injured: Aggressive Control: Someone hurting us if we say no. Passive Control: Someone leaving us if we say no. Regressive Control: Guilt messages if we say no. Limitlessness: Someone never saying no to us. Just as the person with broken bonds cannot take love in, the person without boundaries cannot keep love in. First people without boundaries tend to feel abandoned when there is distance. Because they’ve often been punished by abandonment, they don’t have the ability to stand apart, to be alone and to hold firm in conflict. People without boundaries tend to isolate themselves as their only limit.
Cause and Effect – An act or movement that produces a result: principle of sowing and reaping.
Character – The moral qualities and ethical standards that make up the inner nature of a person.
Characterize – To describe or attribute to someone’s personal behavior, disposition or trait.
Choices – It is the opportunity to choose freely. Making a good or wise decision. Carefully selected: worthy, excellent, superior. Alternative: choosing only one of a limited possibility.
Codependency – It’s the need to be needed: the tendency to take responsibility for someone else’s life, unhappiness, problems, or character immaturity. On the other hand, it is taking on the burden of others results in rescuing or enabling other’s behavior.
Confrontation – Speaking the truth in love through the practice of boundaries, setting limits, and giving consequences. It is being direct and open about addressing conflict.
Connecting – Establishing an attachment, bond and relationship with another person.
Controller - Someone who does not limit their feelings, thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, abilities, desires, and choices, and project them onto others. Controlling people think they are the only ones that matter. See manipulation.
Consequences – Establishing importance and significance to someone’s inappropriate behavior. Setting limits with others when our boundaries or separateness is not respected.
Critics – They are more concerned with confronting errors than building connections. Critical people talk “down” to everyone they know. See unsafe person.
Criticism -Judgment, condemnation, and attacks upon our needy aspects.
Crossed Boundaries – Violating your space and property: trying to own what belongs to another person. Giving in: allowing someone to own what belongs to you.
Defensive devaluation - A protective device (see Abuse) that buries the need for love, deep inside so we can no longer be hurt. Inability to bond.
Denial – Not wanting to face or deal with one’s own reality. Part of the grieving process.
Depression – Is an emotional feeling of being dejected and withdrawal accompanied by sadness: it is a functional state of inactivity and a general sense of dullness. Often times, people who feel depressed because they turn their anger inward at people who are controlling them.
Detachment - Someone being emotionally inaccessible to us.
Devaluation – Taking what is good and making it bad: destroys the love in our relationships by reducing the good people that could help us, into bad people.
Developmental Process – The process of emotional growth, maturity, and learning responsibility.
Disconnected – Without support: someone who has been isolated for so long and no longer feels his or her own needs. A disconnected person has a sense of hopelessness.
Dysfunction – undesirable result, consequence, or fruit: a person’s behavior, or social system that is not working, weakened, damaged, or impaired.
Dwelling – Refers to someone’s ability to connect. When you dwell with someone, you are “with him or her” emotionally, not just physically.
Emotion – Is a strong movement or agitation of feelings caused by experiencing love, hate, fear, etc.
Empathy – The ability to share in another person’s thoughts, feelings, and needs. Putting yourself in another person’s shoes and identifying with their thoughts and emotions.
Enabler - Someone is preventing another person from learning from his or her own mistake. A person trying to rescue, save or bail out an irresponsible person.
Entitlement - Entitlement is self-absorbed and grandiose. It demands special treatment instead of being grateful for ordinary resources and situations.
Envy – A person who resents another person who have something that they do not have. When we are envious, the very people who are loving, safe and generous become the bad guys in our eyes.
Family of Origin – The family and or culture that we were raised up in as a child.
Forgiveness – The removal or canceling the debit or offense to another person.
Freedom – A responsible and mature adult who owns his or her thoughts, feelings, actions and choices and who does not allow others to control them.
Feelings – To perceive something mentally or a physical sensation: including feeling healthy, energetic, lethargic, happy, satisfied, sad, depressed, angry, hostile, panic, compassionate, empathetic, sympathetic, and sensitive.
Fruit – The result, product, symptom or consequence of any action or root cause.
Guilt – Critical messages meant to control and manipulate us that we have the choice to not agree with.
Grace – Unmerited favor: getting something you cannot earn, pay back, or that you do not deserve. Grace invites you into relationship. Because of the life and the work of Jesus Christ on the cross, grace qualifies you, makes you righteous, justifies and redeemed. Grace brings relationship, forgiveness, healing, rest, mercy, freedom, favor, good success, restoration, wholeness, acceptance, deliverance, transformation, prosperity, provision, protection, and empowers you with authority from heaven. Grace gives you salvation, an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven, and everlasting life.
Grieving – The process of facing pain caused by some loss including physical death, divorce, job layoff, death of a dream, or any other significant loss. Grieving process includes denial, shock, anger, and sadness. It is normal to experience any and all of these symptoms due to loss. The point is to allow yourself or others to process and then move on into acceptance and reality.
Heart – Your own desires, dreams, goals, wants, and wishes.
Inconsistency - Someone being unstable in a loving relationship.
Impulsive – Acting without much thought to the outcome. Whatever they think, they do.
Irresponsible – People who do not take care of themselves or others. They love to blame others, lack accountability and avoid the consequences of their thoughts, feelings, actions and choices. See unsafe people.
Isolation - Separation from God and other people: lack of relationship.
Limits – Limiting others: learning to say “no” and giving consequences to others when they do not respect our “no”. Personal limits: restrictions of our own abilities, time, finances and other resources.
Limitlessness - Someone never saying no to us. (see Boundary)
Loneliness – Lack of relationship and lack of bonding to others: isolation. Detached: with out support.
Manipulation – Crossing or invading another person boundary by trying to take away their choice. The motivation is to get you to do something out of obligation or fear and guilt, instead of love, because it is right or because you want to.
Maturity – The essence of being a mature adult is being responsible for whatever you think, feel, and do. A mature person is functionally, self-sufficient but relationally dependant on others for support, encouragement, and accountability.
Merger Wish – People who try to find what they lack by identifying with someone else.
Needs – God made us to be needy. We need air to breathe, and food to nourish our bodies. Our needs require us to reach out to God and others so we can grow, change, and mature.
Obsessive-compulsive – Is an irresistible impulse and persistent preoccupation.
Ownership – Taking personal responsibility for one’s own thoughts, feelings, attitudes, desires, and choices.
Passion – A focused desire or dream that comes from the heart.
Passivity – Avoid taking action and initiative, letting life pass them by.
Passive-aggressive – It is saying no in a passive way: an indirect resistance.
Passive Control - Someone leaving us if we say no. (see Boundary)
Personal property – That which belongs to us and us only including our body, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, actions, behavior, ability, desires, and choices. See separateness.
Personality – Outer characteristics or distinctive qualities, that determine the impression that a person makes upon others.
Pride – A high opinion of one’s own self: arrogant, superior, conceit, pompous, egotism, lofty, and vanity.
Principle – God’s system of design. How things work. Sowing and reaping is a principle of cause and effect.
Procrastination – It is to delay or defer one’s actions: put off until another time.
Quality time – Doing something together with someone while sharing thoughts and feelings through quality conversation: developing a connection and being relational.
Reality – The place that we are here and now: Acceptance: it is being out of denial and is not what we want or desire.
Rebellion – A resistance or defiance to Grace and Truth and the authority of God: the absence of self-control.
Reconciliation – The process of making and living in peace.
Regeneration - The work of the Holy Spirit in salvation whereby He gives a new life and nature to the believing sinner at conversion (the moment of salvation). The new birth (John 3:1-16) is the beginning of this new nature that becomes a part of the believing sinner the instant he or she receives Christ.
Regressive Control - Guilt messages if we say no. (see Boundary)
Rejection – To be refused, cast off, and be turned away: failure to be recognized and validated. (Also see abandonment and root causes).
Relational Self-sufficiency – Avoiding needing others: the lack of attachment, connection, bonding and relationship.
Relationship – Attachment to others. Bonding: a connection to God and others for comfort, safety, acceptance, nurturing, meaning, and a general sense of belonging.
Renewing the mind – Changing your stinking thinking by getting new “maps” so you can see where you are going. Learning Godly principles and wisdom: Grace shows you how to love and is an invitation into relationship. Truth gives you direction and structure.
Responsible – The ability to respond as a mature adult: someone who takes accountability and accepts the consequences for their own thoughts, feelings, actions and choices.
Restoration – The process of becoming whole and complete.
Rescuer – Enabler: a rescuer needs an unsafe, irresponsible and immature person to “bail out and save”.
Righteousness – Walking in the Spirit of God, practicing the values of humility, grace and truth.
Root Causes – Our sin is the result from Separation from God. Root Causes include isolation, abandonment, rejection, loneliness, fear, bitterness, abuse, lust, the love of the world and generational curses or bondages.
Sanctification - “Saint”,” sanctify”, and “holy” all drive from the same Greek root word, haglazo, “to dedicate, separate, set apart, make holy.” It is the process of being set apart unto God by the Spirit to grow out of sin and more fully into Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:13, 1 Peter 1:2).
Second Family – The Body of Christ: Godly people who want to encourage you to grow, change, and mature. Christ minded people who appreciate you and offer validation.
Self- sufficiency – Someone who believes they “have it all together”. We think that the individual who doesn’t have problems is the model for maturity but God created all of us incomplete and inadequate. Our needs are a gift from God and are the cure to the sin of pride and self-sufficiency.
Separateness - Forms the basis of your own personal identity. Boundaries: an understanding of our own person apart from others: A delicate balance of being “all of who you are” without being “all that there is”.
Separation – Is being disconnected, divided, keep apart, and parting by consent or no fault of your own. It is a lack of bonding and a lack of understanding of separateness.
Sympathy – expressing your compassion for someone.
Symptom – The result, product, effect, or fruit of a deeper problem or root cause.
Time – Part of the developmental process: a nessasary element of life, combined with grace and truth gives us the ability to grow and mature. Anything worth having takes time, energy, or some type of cost. We need time to grow.
Triangulation - The involvement of a third party, instead of direction communication between two people.
Truth – Reality, principles, structure and direction. In relationships, truth implies honesty, being open, being connected and living out God’s word.
Unsafe person – Is a person who does not take responsibility for them selves. They are unwilling to accept and change their immature behavior.
Validation – Is to affirm and confirm another’s freedom to have his or her thoughts, opinions, feelings, attitude, desire, ability, and choices. Not trying to change someone else. Validation is an aspect of love, letting someone knows that they matter to you.
Victim mentality – People who give away their power of choice to someone else: this way they do not have to take responsibility for themselves. They have not learned to own their own thoughts, feelings, actions and choices.
Withdrawal – Taking a break from someone to regain separateness without isolating. Getting your relational needs met with other people instead of demanding one person to meet all of your needs.
