Trauma
Not the size of the event. The size of the gap between what happened and the support you had to make sense of it. Big or small, what didn't get processed at the time keeps trying to get processed now.
Your daughter says childhood made her anxious. You think: "She had a great childhood." Both can be true. A great childhood with no language for big feelings can still leave a person with a body that doesn't know how to rest.
Naming it isn't blame. It's a map back to the body that's still asking for help.
Triggered
When something small in the present touches something old, and the body responds as if the old thing is happening again. Not drama. A wiring memory.
Your son flinches when you raise your voice at the dog. You weren't yelling at him. His body remembers a time when raised voices meant something else.
The reaction is information, not accusation. It's the body keeping a fuller ledger than the mind.
Self-regulation
The skill of bringing your own nervous system back to baseline when it's gotten loud. Breath, slow movement, time, a familiar voice. The opposite of pushing through.
Your grandmother used to say "go splash some water on your face." She didn't have the word for it, but she had the skill. Cold water on the face activates a calming reflex.
A lot of what we call "growing up" is just learning this slowly, the hard way. Naming it makes it faster.
Co-regulation
Borrowing someone else's calm to find your own. A nervous system settles fastest near another settled nervous system.
A retired teacher sits with a fussy grandchild and just hums. The child stops crying. Nothing magical — the child's body matched hers.
This is why a quiet adult is one of the most useful things in the world. You may already be one and not know it.
Boundaries
Not walls. Information. A boundary is you telling someone how you can stay in contact, not how they have to behave.
Your adult child says "I can't talk about this at dinner." That isn't a rejection of you. It's a way for them to keep coming to dinner.
Clarity is not coldness. It's the opposite of resentment, and it makes closeness possible.
Inner child
A shorthand for the parts of us that were formed when we were small and haven't been updated since. Not a separate person. A younger version of you that still runs the program in certain moments.
A man in his sixties cries at a song he heard as a boy. He's not being silly. A small part of him just got seen.
Tenderness toward that younger part isn't weakness. It's the operation that lets the older part stop carrying everything alone.
