Shrink Connecting
Relationships, communication, trust, and belonging.
Relationships (20)
Emotional Contagion
The people around you shape your emotional climate.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Context matters more than we naturally assume.
Cognitive Empathy
Perspective improves understanding.
Co-Regulation
Co-regulation is borrowing another person's steadiness until your own returns.
Emotional Attunement
Emotional attunement is reading another person's feeling and meeting it well.
Boundaries
A boundary is a clear limit that protects your wellbeing in a relationship.
Bids for Connection
A bid for connection is a small reach that asks to be met.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the risk of being seen that makes closeness possible.
Compassion
Compassion is being moved by another's suffering toward wanting to help.
Interdependence
Interdependence is mutual reliance that keeps both people whole.
Social Reciprocity Norm
The reciprocity norm is the shared pull to pay back what we receive.
Relational Maintenance
Relationships survive on maintenance, the small repeated acts that keep them warm.
Emotional Bank Account
Small positive moments build a reserve of trust that hard moments draw down.
Love Languages
How you show care may not match how another person feels it.
Codependency
When being needed becomes the source of your sense of self.
Gaslighting
A pattern that erodes your trust in your own sense of reality.
Passionate and Companionate Love
Intense early passion tends to mellow into steady companionate love.
Social Exchange Theory
We weigh what we give and get, and compare it to our alternatives.
Equity Theory
Fairness in what each gives and gets drives relationship satisfaction.
Love Bombing
Flooding someone with affection fast, often to build control.
Communication (18)
Assertiveness
Assertiveness is stating your needs honestly without trampling or hiding.
Conflict Resolution
Conflict resolution is turning disagreement into understanding and a workable path.
Repair Attempts
A repair attempt is a small gesture that interrupts conflict and invites reconnection.
Stonewalling
Stonewalling is shutting down and withdrawing when conflict feels overwhelming.
Contempt
Contempt is disrespect that communicates you're beneath me.
Emotional Validation
Validation is treating another person's feeling as understandable.
Emotional Invalidation
Invalidation is dismissing or minimizing what another person feels.
Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal communication is the meaning we send through tone, face, and body.
Emotional Bids Response
Connection is built or lost in how we answer each other's small bids.
Gottman Four Horsemen
Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling are the recurring signs of conflict going wrong.
Defensiveness
Defensiveness protects the self at the expense of the conversation.
Criticism vs Complaint
Complaints target a behavior, criticism targets the person.
Active Constructive Responding
How you respond to someone's good news shapes the relationship as much as how you handle their bad news.
Conflict Avoidance
Conflict avoidance trades short-term calm for long-term buildup.
Mirroring
Subtly matching another's posture and rhythm signals and builds rapport.
Social Penetration Theory
Closeness grows through steady, mutual disclosure from surface to core.
Self-Disclosure
Sharing yourself, in turns and at the right pace, builds closeness.
Micro-Aggressions
Brief, subtle slights that add up and wear on the person receiving them.
Social Psychology (16)
Social Norms
Groups quietly shape behavior.
Social Learning
Observation is a powerful teacher.
Psychological Reactance
Threatened autonomy can produce resistance.
Social Identity
Identity is both personal and social.
Role Conflict
Role conflict arises when legitimate expectations compete.
Role Strain
Role strain occurs when the demands of a single role become difficult to meet.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is responding to care and effort in kind over time.
Belonging
Belonging is the felt sense of being accepted and mattering to others.
Social Support
Social support is the care and help our relationships provide when we need it.
Social Isolation
Social isolation is a lack of meaningful social contact and connection.
Rejection Sensitivity
Rejection sensitivity is anxiously expecting and overreading rejection in others.
Ostracism
Ostracism is the pain of being ignored or excluded by others.
In-Group Bias
In-group bias is favoring members of our own group over outsiders.
Out-Group Bias
Out-group bias is judging or treating those outside our group less favorably.
Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial behavior is acting in ways intended to help others.
Altruism
Altruism is helping others at a cost to yourself out of genuine concern.
Attachment (13)
Attachment
Attachment is the emotional bond that shapes how we seek and offer safety in relationships.
Secure Attachment
Secure attachment is the comfortable balance of closeness and independence in relationships.
Anxious Attachment
Anxious attachment is craving closeness while fearing its loss.
Avoidant Attachment
Avoidant attachment is prizing independence and keeping emotional closeness at a distance.
Disorganized Attachment
Disorganized attachment is being pulled toward comfort and away from it at once.
Secure Base
A secure base is the steady presence that makes exploring the world feel safe.
Safe Haven
A safe haven is the person you return to when you need to be soothed.
Healthy Dependence
Healthy dependence is relying on others in a way that strengthens, not shrinks, you.
Attachment Injury
When someone we rely on fails us when it counted, and the wound stays.
Secure Functioning
Two people agreeing to have each other's back, in public and private.
Holding Environment
A reliable presence that contains distress so a person can face it.
Good Enough Parenting
Meeting needs well enough and repairing the misses is what children need.
Trauma Bonding
Attachment to someone harmful, forged by cycles of cruelty and relief.
Trust and Repair (7)
Trust
Trust is a willingness to rely on someone who could let you down.
Trust Repair
Trust repair is rebuilding reliance through accountability and consistent change over time.
Rupture and Repair
Bonds grow strong through repeated rupture followed by real repair.
Emotional Safety
Emotional safety is knowing you can be real without being harmed for it.
Trust Calibration
Trust calibration is matching your trust to a person's demonstrated trustworthiness.
Betrayal
Betrayal is a wound that hurts precisely because it comes from someone you trusted.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness releases the grip of a hurt without erasing that it happened.
Family Systems (5)
Differentiation of Self
You can be deeply connected and still remain your own person.
Enmeshment
When togetherness leaves no space to have separate feelings or needs.
Triangulation
Two-person conflict gets detoured through a third person instead of resolved.
Parentification
When a child carries adult responsibilities and their own needs go unmet.
Scapegoating
One person is made to carry blame that belongs to the whole group.
Attraction (4)
Limerence
An intense, involuntary fixation that feels like love but is closer to obsession.
Mere Exposure Effect
Familiarity alone tends to increase liking.
Proximity Effect
Nearness and repeated contact strongly shape who we become close to.
Similarity-Attraction
Shared attitudes and values pull people together.
Social Cognition (4)
Empathic Accuracy
Empathy is caring, empathic accuracy is caring and being correct.
Mentalizing
Mentalizing is treating behavior as the visible edge of an inner world.
Theory of Mind
Theory of mind is the recognition that other minds hold their own separate contents.
Shared Reality
Shared reality is the closeness that comes from seeing the same thing together.
Social Influence (4)
Behavioral Contagion
We adopt the actions of the people around us, often without noticing.
Bystander Effect
The more witnesses there are, the less likely any one steps in.
Conformity
Going along with the group, sometimes against our own judgment.
Obedience to Authority
The powerful pull to obey a legitimate authority, even when it feels wrong.
Groups (3)
Diffusion of Responsibility
The more people share a duty, the less any one person owns it.
Social Loafing
Effort drops when individual contribution is hidden in a group.
Groupthink
The pull toward consensus that silences doubt and dissent.
Clinical Communication (2)
Shared Decision-Making
Evidence guides decisions. Values personalize them.
Motivational Interviewing
Guide motivation rather than force it.
Social Bonds (2)
Parasocial Relationship
We can feel close to media figures who have no idea we exist.
Social Baseline Theory
With trusted people near, the brain treats challenges as less costly.