Key Terms in Relationship Psychology, Plainly Defined

Attachment Style

A pattern of relating to others in close relationships, shaped largely by early experiences with caregivers. The four main styles — secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized — describe how a person tends to seek or avoid closeness and how they respond to perceived threats to a relationship.

Secure Base

A concept from attachment theory describing a person (or relationship) that provides enough safety and stability for the other person to explore the world, take risks, and return to for comfort. Healthy romantic partnerships and parent-child relationships often function as secure bases.

Codependency

A relational pattern in which one person's sense of identity, self-worth, or emotional stability becomes excessively organized around another person's needs, moods, or approval. It often involves difficulty setting limits and a compulsive focus on managing or rescuing others.

Enmeshment

A state in which the boundaries between two people — often family members — are so blurred that individual identities, feelings, and decisions become entangled. Enmeshed relationships can feel intensely close but often make it hard for individuals to develop autonomy.

Boundaries

The limits a person sets — emotionally, physically, or behaviorally — to protect their own wellbeing and define how they expect to be treated. Healthy boundaries are not walls; they're communicated expectations that allow people to stay in relationship without losing themselves.

Stonewalling

A conflict behavior in which one person withdraws from interaction, shuts down communication, or becomes unresponsive — often as a response to feeling overwhelmed. Researcher John Gottman identified stonewalling as one of the most damaging patterns in couple conflict.

Emotional Flooding

A state of intense physiological and psychological overwhelm during conflict that makes productive communication nearly impossible. When flooded, a person's heart rate and stress hormones spike, and the brain's capacity for calm reasoning is temporarily reduced.

Repair Attempt

Any gesture — verbal or nonverbal — made during or after conflict to de-escalate tension and reconnect. Repair attempts can be as simple as a touch, a joke, an apology, or an acknowledgment of the other person's feelings. Their success depends partly on the overall climate of the relationship.

Differentiation

The capacity to maintain a stable sense of self while remaining emotionally connected to others. A highly differentiated person can stay present in difficult conversations without either becoming reactive or emotionally cutting off.

Triangulation

A relational dynamic in which a third party — a person, topic, or conflict — is brought into a two-person dynamic, often to diffuse tension or shift focus. While sometimes unintentional, triangulation can prevent direct communication and sustain unresolved conflict.

Bids for Connection

Small, often subtle attempts one person makes to engage another — a question, a shared observation, a touch. Research by psychologist John Gottman suggests that how partners respond to each other's bids (turning toward, turning away, or turning against) strongly predicts long-term relationship satisfaction.

Love Languages

A popular framework, developed by Gary Chapman, describing five ways people tend to express and prefer to receive affection: words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. While not a clinical model, it's widely used to open conversations about emotional needs.