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Welcome to Embrace Psychology’s Blog

I’m so happy you’re here! This blog serves as a space to share insights, current topics, and resources that resonate with the experiences of my clients and readers alike. While many posts will reflect the experiences of neurodivergent individuals and people living across cultures, the content is meant to be useful to anyone curious about how the mind works and how we can better care for ourselves and each other.

To ensure transparency and support informed engagement, each blog post will include a couple references used or consulted. Interested readers can explore the research behind the ideas shared and to fact-check or deepen their understanding of specific topics. For those extra curious, feel free to email me for additional sources or questions.

To help you get the most out of future posts, this first entry offers a glossary. It includes key terms you’re likely to encounter. These definitions are written in clear, inclusive language, from both psychological research and real-world experience. 

This glossary will grow as the blog develops. If you have suggestions for new terms or topics, I’d love to hear from you.

Glossary of Psychology Terms

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy): Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is an empirically supported psychotherapy. It proposes that pain, grief, disappointment, illness, and anxiety are inevitable features of human life. In this way, its therapeutic goal is to help individuals productively adapt to these types of challenges. For this, the therapy emphasises psychological flexibility rather than engaging in counterproductive attempts to eliminate or suppress undesirable experiences.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): A neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that interfere with functioning or development.

Avoidance: A coping strategy involving the deliberate evasion of distressing thoughts, feelings, or situations. Although it can provide short-term relief, it often exacerbates anxiety and stress over time.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): A neurodevelopmental condition that affects social interaction, communication, and behavior. Experiences vary widely from person to person.

Boundaries: Limits that a person sets to protect their own well-being and integrity.

Burnout: Burn-out is a syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions.
1- Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
2- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
3- Reduced professional efficacy

Cognition: All forms of knowing and awareness, such as perceiving, conceiving, remembering, reasoning, judging, imagining, and problem solving. Along with affect (feeling) and conation (doing), it is one of the three traditionally identified components of the mind.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): A structured, time-limited form of psychotherapy that helps individuals identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.

Cognitive Distortions: Cognitive distortions are biased or unhelpful ways of thinking that can negatively affect how we feel and act. They’re often automatic, meaning we don’t even realize we’re doing them. While common in everyone at times, these thinking patterns are expecially strong in people experiencing anxiety, depression, or burnout. 

Cognitive Load: The total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory; the relative demand imposed by a particular task, in terms of mental resources required. 

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy): A form of 3rd wave cognitive-behavioral therapy. It emphasizes the development of emotional regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness skills.

Dysregulation: Any excessive or otherwise poorly managed mechanism or response. For example, emotional dysregulation is an extreme or inappropriate emotional response to a situation (e.g., temper outbursts, deliberate self-harm)

Emotional Regulation: The ability to monitor, evaluate, and modify emotional reactions in a way that’s socially acceptable and flexible to achieve one’s goals.

Executive Functions: Concept that groups all higher level cognitive processes. This includes:
– decision making
– problem solving
– action sequencing
– task assignment and organization
– effortful and persistent goal pursuit
– inhibition of competing impulses
– flexibility in goal selection
– goal-conflict resolution.

Grounding Techniques: Strategies helpful in managing anxiety, dissociation, or distress. They turn attention away from thoughts, memories, or worries, and refocus them on the present moment.

Hyperfocus: A state of heightened, intense focus of any duration which most likely occurs during activities related to one’s school, hobbies, or “screen time” (i.e., television, computer use, etc.); this state may include the following qualities: timelessness, failure to attend to the world, ignoring personal needs, difficulty stopping and switching tasks, feelings of total engrossment in the task, and feeling “stuck” on small details. 

Inner Critic: The internal voice that judges or criticizes oneself. It is often structured around five main process clusters: a past history of rejection, restriction and neglect; negative self-schemes; information processing deficits; self-protective behaviours; and interpersonal problems.

Internalized Ableism: The internalization of negative societal beliefs and stereotypes about disability, leading individuals to devalue themselves and their abilities.

Masking: The act of monitoring and modifying one’s natural personality or behaviors to conform to social norms. It often leads to stress and exhaustion, particularly common in neurodivergent individuals.

MCT (Metacognitive Therapy): A structured therapy approach that focuses on modifying unhelpful patterns of thinking and beliefs about thinking itself. Often, it targets worry and rumination.

Meltdown: An intense response to an overwhelming situation. It happens when someone becomes completely overwhelmed by their current situation and temporarily loses control of their behaviour. This loss of control can be expressed:
– verbally (eg shouting, screaming, crying)
– physically (eg kicking, lashing out, biting)
– both ways 
Meltdowns are the only way for  individuals to express feeling overwhelmed as they may also refuse to interact, withdrawing from situations they find challenging or avoiding them altogether.

Mindfulness: The practice of being fully present and aware of your body, thoughts, feelings, and surroundings, while accepting them calmly and without judgment.

Neurodivergent individual: A non-medical term describing individuals whose neurological development and functioning differ from what is considered typical, including conditions like autism, ADHD, tourettes and dyslexia.

Neurodiversity: A concept that recognises and respects neurological differences as natural variations of the human genome, promoting inclusion and acceptance of all individuals.

Organization Skills: Organizational skills are a set of techniques used by an individual to facilitate the efficiency of future-oriented learning, problem-solving, and task completion.

Perfectionism: A personality trait characterized by striving for flawlessness and setting high performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns about others’ evaluations.

Procrastination: The voluntary and unnecessary delay in the start or completion of important and intended tasks despite recognising there will be harmful consequences for oneself and others for doing so

Psychoeducation: The process of providing individuals with information about mental health conditions and coping strategies to empower them in managing symptoms.

Rumination: Rumination is a repetitive thinking style comprised of excessive, recurrent thoughts or themes of previous stressful life events, current difficulties, and anticipated future difficulties, which restricts other types of mental activity 

Safety Behaviors: Actions that reduce anxiety or prevent feared outcomes from occurring, often maintaining anxiety disorders by preventing the disconfirmation of negative beliefs.

Schema Therapy: A therapeutic approach that integrates the techniques of cognitive behavior therapy with the depth-oriented and emotion-focused strategies of other approaches. Therefore resulting in schema change. In other words, individuals derive patterns of belief about themselves, others and situations from early experiences. These early experiences interfere with their current cognitive, emotional and behavioral functioning. To alter these, they can opt to undergo schema therapy.

Self-Compassion: A construct derived from Buddhist thought and entailing a noncritical stance toward one’s inadequacies and failures. It has been suggested that self-criticism leads to negative emotions. Thus, self-compassion aims to do the opposite. In other words, self-compassion tries to promote well-being by protecting one from the negative emotional implications of one’s perceived failings.

Sensory Overload: A state in which one’s senses are overwhelmed with stimuli, to the point that one is unable to process or respond to all of them.

Stimming: Repetitive self-stimulatory behavior (movements or sounds such as hand-flapping or humming), commonly used by some individuals on the spectrum to self-soothe or communicate intense emotions or thoughts.

Trigger: An external or internal stimulus that evokes a strong reaction, often related to past trauma or stress.

Working Memory: A cognitive system responsible for temporarily holding information available while performing complex tasks such as reasoning comprehension and learning.

Thanks for reading, and I’m glad you’re here.

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