Antifragile: someone who becomes stronger from stressors

Attunement: a harmonious connection where one person tunes into the emotional state of another, fostering understanding and emotional regulation. Reflecting back emotion to someone’s words involves empathic engagement, creating a connection that allows for emotional responsiveness and understanding of others.

Core Character Traits: these form the foundation of our personality, influencing our thoughts, choices, and emotions. Addressing people’s challenges involves delving deep into their CCTs rather than merely addressing surface-level thoughts and behaviors. There are four abilities (see below) – attachment, separation, integration or adulthood – that together enable someone to successfully meet the demands of living in the “real” world. 

• Attachment: the emotional bond formed between two people, especially between a child and caregiver, which significantly influences an individual’s sense of security and relationship patterns throughout life. An attached adult experiences and enjoys the full range of emotions and relational needs, and is aware of how they are experienced in the body. This person also manages multiple affective states without feeling engulfed or impinged, trusts relationships as a secure place to process emotions and have needs met.
• Separation: the developmental process where an individual becomes distinct and independent from others, especially from their primary attachment figures, that is essential for allowing individuals to establish their own identity and independence. This person knows their core self and enjoys being different from others, maintains boundaries and can say “no.” This person also is aware of their aggressive part of self, expresses anger, and tolerates another person’s anger, disappointment, or rejection. They also take the initiative, isn’t  passive nor plays the victim role. 
• Integration: the ability to realize limitations and losses (e.g., mistakes, failure, sin, weakness, mediocrity, sadness) and still feel lovable, desired, good enough, and competent. Also able to see the “negative realities” in the world along with the negative  (e.g., loss, imperfection, and negative impulses like sex, anger, and envy) and the good in others. This person does not idealize self or others nor is overly optimistic or pessimistic.
• Adulthood/Authority: the ability to have authority over their life (i.e., being in charge) and feel a sense of power to be stronger than what life throws at them. They desire more responsibility and take the initiative to obtain it. They have an assertive “voice” to influence others, give commands, hold others accountable, express opinions to authority, take action, and make decisions without needing approval from authority or others. Yet in their freedom, they also submit to the accountability of others and to serve them, and not control them. They experience mutuality (not 1-down, 1-up, or rebellious) in having equal standing with other people, authority figures, and institutions.

Core character trait deficit: A lack of a specific character trait—attachment, separation, integration, authority—that needs to be developed.

Corrective Relational Experiences (CRE): emotional encounters that provide individuals with new, healthier relational interactions that contradict and disconfirm past painful experiences. These experiences help rewire the brain, creating new neural pathways and promoting healing. They are evidence-based interventions aimed at transforming negative core character traits (CCTs) and emotional responses by facilitating positive relational experiences, providing a structured yet flexible framework for deep emotional and relational healing. By providing new, positive relational interactions, these experiences can heal past traumas and develop healthier patterns of relating. They are essential for fostering deep, lasting emotional and psychological change, offering a path to overcome deeply ingrained negative behaviors and emotional responses.

Implicit Core Emotional Learnings: Unconscious beliefs and emotional patterns about one’s self and one’s world formed in early childhood.

Internal critic/judge: Negative self-talk or critical language used towards oneself.

Internalization: Observing how the person begins to feel differently and integrating these new relational experiences into their sense of self and future interactions

Memory Reconsolidation: process of updating existing memories with new relational or emotional context. When someone recalls a memory and can feel its deep emotion, their brain and the original memories become moldable and subject to change. As the person experiences the original emotions in a safe relationship that provides a different or novel relational experience, the emotions connected to the original memory update. This essentially deletes the neural pathway. In other words, it reconsolidates the memory and changes your experience of this memory. It also changes the Core Emotional Learnings (the frameworks or blueprints that shape how we perceive and interpret information in our everyday lives and influence every aspect of our cognitive processes, from memory to decision-making).

Meta-Processing: involves discussing and reflecting on the current relational experience within therapy or coaching to deepen someone’s understanding and integration of new relational patterns.

Micro-Ability: A small, specific skill or step to grow a core character trait.

NeuroChange: involves using neuroscience principles to create lasting changes in the brain’s neural pathways through methods like corrective relational experiences. It includes techniques to facilitate emotional and cognitive change by forming new pathways and eliminating dysfunctional ones. This approach helps individuals alter their emotional and cognitive patterns and decrease symptoms by addressing root causes. It is a method for character development that leverages neuroplasticity and integrates elements of faith.

NeuroChange Community: our network of people who support each other in their NeuroChange journeys. We use our community platform as a hub for engaging with one another.

Process Growth Group: A supportive group setting where individuals can practice NeuroChange skills that promote personal growth as well as a safe space for exploration and corrective relational experiences.

Rewiring the brain: A metaphorical term for creating new neural connections through relational and emotional experiences.