Module 04. Glossary
Terms of the module
- Boundaries (14 principles)
- Counter-dependency
- Defense formulas (7 formulas)
- Emotional dependency
- Financial thinking (4 components)
- Gaslighting
- Healthy attraction
- “I don’t want → What matters to me”
- Manipulation (38 tactics)
- Mature love (three-component model)
- Neurotic love
- Open questions (20 mistakes)
- Sales (an honest definition)
- Six components of addiction
- Star of trust
- The Virtual and the Real (model)
- Time levers
- Transparency square
- Wheel of relationships (12 principles)
Boundaries (14 principles)
A boundary is not a wall against people but a clear sense of “where I end and not-I begins”; in the course this is the first principle — a circle with me inside and everything else outside, and Winnicott considered the discovery of the “not-I” one of the main events of childhood. Then: I love myself more than my partner, because I am the person closest to myself; my state of mind means more to me than the most important relationship; I distinguish needs, a constant quantity, from relationships, a variable one; I alone am responsible for the consequences of my actions — but only for my own choice; the best way to keep boundaries is to build them honestly from the very first days; I set boundaries only on my own territory; boundaries are a way not to punish a partner but to improve the relationship; setting them is possible only where there is communication, and shouting and resentment are not communication; one episode — one boundary; a boundary is set in response to specific words and actions, and “I need more care” is not a boundary; I don’t bargain over boundaries; I leave the door open for someone who changes their behavior; boundary violations are two-sided — if mine are being violated, it means I am violating someone else’s somewhere too. In family therapy Salvador Minuchin described the same scale: boundaries can be diffuse, rigid or clear, and only the last are healthy.
In essence these are the principles of agreements (module 1) turned toward protecting yourself: marking out your frame calmly and in advance, not in an explosion once your patience has snapped. The paradox of boundaries is that they are set not for the sake of distance but for the sake of closeness: you can’t come to an agreement with a person who has no boundaries, and so you can’t become close either. The defense formulas (7 formulas) from this same module give you ready-made language for difficult situations.
Counter-dependency
A way of protecting yourself from pain once experienced in close relationships: having met with cruelty or neglect in childhood, the child draws the rule “trust no one, keep your distance — then they can’t hurt you.” The adult looks independent and closed off, tries not to depend on anyone and, as closeness grows, pulls away, devalues the partner, finds reasons to leave: “I don’t need anyone.” The signs: boundaries “set far out”; coldness and reserve; emphatic independence, cynicism, devaluing love, family, relationships; blaming others and asserting yourself at their expense; secretiveness; intellectualization, sarcasm, passive aggression; avoiding any attempt at getting close. Fairbairn described this pattern as schizoid withdrawal: a person hides love because it once turned out to be destructive, and Winnicott added that “I’ll manage on my own” can be a false self — a mask behind which lives the same needy child.
Behind the outward self-sufficiency hides the same fear as in the dependent person — the fear of pain and of losing yourself in closeness, only the opposite defense has been chosen: not to cling but to keep your distance; the dependent and the counter-dependent often find each other and play out a chase for years. Like dependency, it is a step away from healthy attraction; in module 9 it is the anxious-avoidant attachment style.
Defense formulas (7 formulas)
Seven ready-made verbal formulas for defending boundaries, arranged in order of increasing firmness: gentle defense — making your feelings known; a clarifying question that strikes at the intention and names what is happening; naming what is happening plus focusing the other person’s attention on it; naming plus stopping communication in this format; naming plus my feelings plus a request to stop; naming plus stopping plus my feelings toward this person plus “even if X, I…”; and the seventh — a blunt stop, when appeals to reason and requests haven’t worked. They give you language for the moment when tension makes you lose your words: there is a phrase prepared in advance, and you don’t have to search for it frantically. This is the practice of assertive behavior that behavior therapy has been developing since the middle of the last century — a third path between aggression and giving in; the secret of the formulas is that they name what is happening out loud: a manipulation that has been named loses half its power, like a magic trick announced in advance.
The formulas begin with what is respectful and gentle, stepping up only as needed, and this rule matters: someone who starts right away with the seventh formula looks like the aggressor, someone who starts with the first looks like a person who gave every chance. They develop both defense systems from the first module — the internal one (ABC→DEF) and the external one (“Fire — Water — Earth — Air”); their firm register becomes the “Fierce” negotiation strategy in module 9.
Emotional dependency
A painful attachment to the object of love in which a person is constantly afraid of losing the relationship, feels helpless without the other and demands confirmation of their own significance: the other’s mood is your weather for the whole day. The roots lie in childhood experience, when a significant adult broke off contact or was unavailable; this is how the feeling “I don’t deserve care” takes shape, and any threat of losing closeness throws the adult back into the state of a helpless child. Ronald Fairbairn called this infantile dependence — the need to merge — as distinct from mature dependence, which is possible only between two separate people; Karen Horney described its fuel, basic anxiety: a feeling of being alone and helpless in a world that seems hostile. The signs: blurred boundaries and a focus on the other, a need for constant approval, powerlessness to change anything. The course distinguishes four types of dependent relationships: becoming a guiding star for the other, dissolving in the other, gaining complete power over them, using them as a mirror to confirm your self-esteem.
This is the same logic as codependency (module 2), seen from the angle of romantic relationships: the stronger the fear of losing, the more control, and control is exactly what destroys what you wanted to hold on to. The opposite is healthy attraction; later all of this is systematized in attachment styles (module 9), where dependency has a name — the anxious-resistant type.
Financial thinking (4 components)
A self-diagnosis of your relationship with money through four skills — earning, saving, spending, investing. It often turns out that the difficulty is not the size of the income but an imbalance: I know how to earn but not how to save, or the other way round. The course’s additional models: what you need money for — your desired monthly and yearly spending; key words — what professionalism, respect, gratitude and well-being mean to you; “I don’t want → What matters to me”; money as a matter of emotions and beliefs about yourself, others and the world; treating the incoming and outgoing flow with gratitude; the transparency square; summing up and first steps. Psychoanalysis has long known that money is not only numbers: Freud linked our attitude toward it with the earliest experiences of control and shame, and the belief “money is dirty” is heard in the consulting room more often than you might think.
The tool brings to light the beliefs and emotions around money (“money is dirty,” “I’ll never save anything anyway,” “rich people are dishonest”) and points to areas for growth; limiting beliefs about money are challenged separately in module 7. It works together with time levers and the model “The Virtual and the Real.”
Gaslighting
A form of manipulation in which a person is made to doubt their own perception, memory and sanity: “you imagined it,” “you made it all up,” “that never happened,” “you’re too sensitive.” The word comes from a late-1930s play and the 1940s films in which a husband dimmed the gas lamps in the house in the evenings and assured his wife that the light hadn’t changed, until she stopped believing her own eyes. Psychoanalysis described the mechanism long before the term appeared: Ferenczi noticed how an adult who denies what a child went through splits the child’s trust in themselves, and Racamier showed that depriving another person of the right to their own perception is the core of narcissistic perversion. With systematic repetition a person stops trusting themselves and leans more and more on the manipulator — and that was exactly the aim.
This is one of the most destructive tactics; to recognize it means to regain trust in yourself and in your own facts, and records of events help here: a journal with dates is an external memory that no one can argue you out of. It appears in the catalog of 38 tactics as denying facts, denying abuse and disputing your feelings, and it continues the theme of myth-making from the third module.
Healthy attraction
Attraction based on mutual respect, safety, freedom of choice and genuine interest: people are attached but keep their autonomy, and strong feelings become a source of strength rather than of being swallowed up. Its formula is “I can live without you, but I choose to be with you”; Fromm expressed the same difference in two phrases: immature love says “I love you because I need you,” mature love says “I need you because I love you.” The course describes five stages of maturing: liking — a response to the “outer shell”; being in love — tied to an image or a role that you try on yourself and on your partner; attachment — reliability and support over the long run; intimacy — the ability to share what is deeply personal; love — a sustained mutual connection with two-way interaction that includes everything before it.
This is the direct opposite both of dependency (I cling out of fear) and of counter-dependency (I run from closeness out of the same fear). Winnicott described the condition for such attraction: the capacity to be alone in the presence of another — someone who isn’t afraid to be alone with themselves has no need either to cling or to run away. Healthy attraction is the reference point of mature relationships and the basis of the secure attachment style (module 9).
“I don’t want → What matters to me”
A reframing technique: people often don’t know what they want but know very well what they don’t want — and you can use that as a starting point. Instead of speaking from negation (“I don’t want to,” “I won’t,” “I’m sick of it”), name the value that stands behind it (“it matters to me that I’m consulted”); negation provokes an argument, a named value — a dialogue. Freud noticed that “no” is the most honest way of speaking about what matters: negation lets out exactly what a person isn’t ready to admit directly, and so every “I don’t want” already contains an “I want.” Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication turns this into a method — look for the need behind the feeling.
The technique turns resistance into calm self-assertion and at the same time makes clear to you yourself what really stands behind your “no”: “I don’t want to go to your parents’ place,” translated, sounds like “it matters to me that our weekends are ours.” It is one of the additional models of financial thinking and echoes the value markers (module 3): behind a strong “I don’t want” there is almost always an important value hidden.
Manipulation (38 tactics)
A catalog of the tactics with which a person tries to “sell themselves for more and buy the other for less.” Verbal humiliation: labeling, humiliating pet names, “always-isms” (“you always do everything wrong”), shouting, a patronizing tone, public embarrassment, devaluing, sarcasm as a disguised attack, criticizing your appearance, belittling your achievements and interests. Control: threats and blackmail, monitoring your whereabouts, digital spying, one-sided decision-making, financial control, “lecturing,” issuing commands, treating you like a child. Emotional games: feigned helplessness, unpredictability, disappearing just when you are waiting for help, appeals to “public opinion,” jealousy, shifting the blame, denying facts, pressing on your sense of duty, denying abuse, accusing you of manipulating, tears, demanding respect, the silent treatment, isolating you from people, the “closer-further” game, turning others against you, interrupting, disputing your feelings, demanding proof of love. Racamier described many of them as the habits of narcissistic perversion: the manipulator gets rid of their own shame and guilt by placing them in the other, and that is why they so often accuse the victim of exactly what they themselves are doing.
Knowing them “by sight” is the first step toward noticing pressure in time and not reacting on autopilot; the common sign is that after the conversation you feel guilty, stupid or obliged without understanding at what moment that happened. This is a fuller analysis of what you began to study as myth-making and the cycle of abuse (module 3). The goal is not to become a manipulator yourself but to recognize the tactics and defend yourself; the levers they press are the vulnerability buttons (module 6), and the most insidious tactics, disguised as care, are collected separately in rescuer hooks (module 8).
Mature love (three-component model)
Love as a combination of three components: intimacy (warmth, trust), passion (attraction) and a conscious decision-commitment (the choice to be together and to invest). The model was proposed by Robert Sternberg: the three points of the triangle give different forms — intimacy alone is liking and friendly feelings, passion alone is passionate love “at first sight,” commitment alone is formal love with neither warmth nor attraction, and complete love is all three at once. Maturity, though, is measured not by the number of points but by what a person does with the feeling: Fromm named four signs of mature love — care, responsibility, respect and knowledge of the other — and the course adds a fifth: exclusivity, the uniqueness of a relationship in which there is no one to compare your partner with and no outside norms. Responsibility here means refusing to decide for the other even for the sake of the highest goals; respect means believing in their right to their own path, even if their choice seems unjustified.
Unlike neurotic love, mature love includes choice and care for the other’s growth, not just a need for them; in it each person keeps their wholeness and autonomy. The model helps you see calmly what the relationship lacks and what can be grown, instead of chalking everything up to “the feelings are gone”: passion without intimacy is remedied by conversation, intimacy without commitment — by a decision.
Neurotic love
A relationship driven not by mature choice but by deficit, anxiety and the need to fill an inner emptiness with another person. Neurotic love is indiscriminate, insatiable and compulsive: indiscriminate — you want everyone to love you, whereas mature love expects recognition only from those it values itself; insatiable — constant proof of your significance is needed in word and deed, although normally “voicing” feelings is required only at the start of a relationship or in a crisis, and for the sake of attention any means are justified, up to provocations and scenes; compulsive — the drive to stay special to your partner at any cost. Karen Horney called this the neurotic need for love and noticed its main paradox: the more such a person receives, the more they need, because what they are feeding is not the feeling but the anxiety.
There is a lot of passion and drama here, but little peace: the seesaw of “I can’t live without you — I can’t live with you,” and a quarrel is often started for the sake of making up, which alone gives a brief certainty of being loved. This is the opposite of mature love and a close relative of emotional dependency. Becoming aware of the neurotic pattern means ceasing to mistake the intensity of experiences for the depth of feeling and beginning to build relationships out of choice, not out of need.
Open questions (20 mistakes)
An analysis of twenty typical mistakes made by someone who leads a conversation through questions — a manager, a consultant, a mentor: acting the know-it-all and showing superiority; criticizing, considering yourself better; instilling guilt about the past (“you should have done it sooner”); talking down (“come on, it’s all obvious, kiddo”); rushing to a solution; asking questions with false assumptions (“why didn’t you notice the problem?”); exaggerating the scale; using the meeting to meet your own needs; talking a lot instead of listening; solving everything in a single meeting; giving direct advice; taking credit for the results (“it’s all thanks to me”); working only tactically, without strategy; ignoring the emotional state; imposing your values; underestimating rapport; not recognizing the uniqueness of the situation; using jargon without explanation; working without flexibility, “only by my own method”; and the twentieth — a mistake you have noticed in yourself. The form of a question is there, but the trust and the use are not. Michael Balint, who worked with doctors, called the most common of them the apostolic function — the quiet certainty of a specialist that they know how the patient ought to live, and Bion required the analyst to enter the consulting room without memory and desire, so that the analyst’s own needs would not replace the patient’s.
The goal is to polish the tool mastered in the first module, so that a question really opens the other person up rather than shutting them down; people unerringly pick up on a question with a hidden piece of advice (“have you thought about just…?”), even if they can’t explain why it felt unpleasant. It is useful to check yourself against this list if you work with people a lot: coaches, doctors, teachers, negotiators.
Sales (an honest definition)
Sales is the process of increasing the amount of information in your client’s head about a service or product in such a way that the deal becomes inevitable. The main tool is the number of questions you ask the client: by answering them, the person increases their own star of trust. Neil Rackham’s research showed the same across thousands of deals: big sales are won not by those who speak more persuasively but by those who ask more precisely; Fromm, for his part, described the opposite, “marketing” orientation, in which a person sells not usefulness but themselves, and therefore fears every “no.”
Here, for the first time, the course clearly draws its running dividing line: honest influence, backed by real value, versus manipulation, backed by emptiness. If there is real benefit behind the offer, selling means helping a person make a decision that is good for them; the test of honesty is a readiness to talk someone out of a purchase they don’t need. This line develops in “Three circles” (module 6), the sales funnel and the professional’s thinking (module 7).
Six components of addiction
Six universal components of any addiction — from substances to relationships: salience, when the object eclipses all other sides of life; euphoria — the anticipation and experience of pleasure; growing tolerance — habituation that requires raising the dose or intensifying the behavior; withdrawal — anxiety, insomnia, obsessive thoughts in the absence of the object, when the “drug” is needed no longer for pleasure but to escape displeasure; conflict with others and with yourself; relapses — going back to the old ways even after abstinence. The model was formulated in this form by Mark Griffiths, who showed that by these signs gambling, work and love are structured the same way as alcohol; Joyce McDougall added a psychoanalytic explanation: addiction is an attempt to discharge an unbearable feeling through action, because the person cannot think it.
By these signs an addiction is recognized by its structure, not by the strength of the feeling: the fourth component is the most honest test — if without the person or the activity things become not sad but unbearable, it is no longer about love. The model lets you see the common mechanism behind love addiction and tell it apart from healthy attachment. Understanding the structure removes shame and moves the conversation onto practical ground: what exactly can be changed here.
Star of trust
A model of five components on which trust is built in relationships and at work — not “I trust or I don’t,” but a quantity that can be measured and increased. Five points, each with its own nominal unit: transactions between me and the other — “by the piece,” the more frequent and better the interactions, the higher the involvement; the past that unites us — “in kilobytes” of shared experience; physical distance — in meters, the closer, the faster the contact; chemical processes in the body — “in milligrams of hormones,” a positive mood strengthens the bond; harmony at the level of values — “in lumens,” the light of shared values. Social psychology confirms each point separately — from the mere exposure effect to the power of proximity — and Erik Erikson showed that the very ability to trust is laid down in the first year of life by the reliability of the person nearby; the star is a way for an adult to assemble that reliability by hand.
The working question: “Does what I am about to do or not do in relation to this person make the star bigger or smaller?” The loyalty graduates feel at graduation dissolves into indifference precisely because the transactions fade; marriages fall apart when the star is small enough for that, and the other way round. It rests on the skill of dialogue through open questions and is used directly in self-presentation (module 5): first trust, then the offer. How to keep the star going — the wheel of relationships.
The Virtual and the Real (model)
The real is whatever corresponds to living conditions that are favorable from a biological point of view: food, sleep, rest, distance, movement, air, pleasure; the virtual is what is imposed from outside by interested parties: buying the newest phone and paying for it with three months of your life. Erich Fromm called these two ways of living “having” and “being,” and Jean Baudrillard showed how the modern market sells not things but signs — status, belonging, a self-image — and how advertising steadily lowers the value of the real in people’s eyes and raises the value of the virtual. The real grows and stays with you; the virtual gives a short flash and demands the next one.
The only point of the virtual is to extract the real from it; the test is simple — which of the things you bought over the past year still bring you pleasure or use, and which just lie there and reproach you. The model helps you, in financial and life decisions, to tell an investment in the real from spending on the virtual — and not to buy other people’s desires. It rests on the work with values (module 3); in strategy the same idea comes back as “solid and empty” (module 9).
Time levers
A look at money through time: money is a universal means of exchanging time for time; a person spends the time of their life to earn money, with which they buy other people’s time; money is time compressed into matter, and the course’s question is “time — money — time: what is my exchange rate?” Three levers from the point of view of producing money: hostage to conditions — handing out flyers, working as a promoter, your first encounter with turning time into money; sculpting from conditions — a waiter, a bartender, a driller’s assistant, where the money depends on skill and results; managing conditions as flows — a system that generates profit continuously, like a hydroelectric plant on a fast river, using the currents of the terrain. Seneca was amazed by the same thing two thousand years ago: people carefully guard their property and easily give away their time, the one thing that can’t be returned; in modern business literature the same move from employment to systems is described as the cashflow quadrants.
The levers are not objective — this is a matter of perception, of your attitude to time: the same job is being a hostage for one person and the sculpting of mastery for another. The practical effect is giving up imposed desires and spending more consciously (“this is half a day of my life”), as well as an interest in income that doesn’t require selling more and more hours. It echoes the model “The Virtual and the Real”: what am I actually exchanging my time for.
Transparency square
A tool for taking an honest look at what you have and what you want — four cells: I have it and want to have it; I have it but don’t want to have it; I don’t have it but want to have it; I don’t have it and don’t want to have it. Once you sort your possessions, obligations, habits and relationships into the cells, you come face to face with a picture you usually keep blurred: the second cell is usually full of things that are “a pity to throw away,” the third of things for which “it’s not the time yet.” Bion considered truth food for the psyche, and lies and self-deception what leaves it starving; the square feeds the mind the truth about your own life.
The working cells are the second and the third: what it is time to get rid of and what it is time to invite in, and why this still hasn’t been done. It is one of the additional models of financial thinking and continues a through-line of the course — turning the implied into the expressed (module 1) — this time in a conversation with yourself.
Wheel of relationships (12 principles)
How to keep the star of trust going: by default we have a passive culture of relationships — “it will all sort itself out” — while relationships live on actions. Twelve principles: the image of the other in my head — “what is good in the other person?”; take the first step without demanding anything in return; follow the laws of agreements; distinguish distant, middle and close relationships; make your feelings known — “I feel A when B happens, and so I ask you to C”; meet your needs — to be needed and loved, to feel protected, attention and time together, physical contact, empathy, respect, praise, care and tokens of attention; observe the laws of personal space — the right to set boundaries, to express feelings, to say “no” without guilt, to break off unwanted contact, not to let an aggressor in; clear up hidden conflicts — “I can see that something has gone wrong; I’m not arguing with you, I’m arguing together with you against what is getting in the way of our cooperation”; remember the regular small choices that determine everything; take little absurdities as a marriage tax, without demanding perfection; hug the people close to you; encourage good treatment of yourself and put a stop to bad treatment. The research of John Gottman, who observed couples for decades, confirms the wheel in numbers: stable couples keep the good outweighing the bad by roughly five to one, respond to small bids for attention and don’t allow themselves contempt.
The main idea: a relationship is not a given but a living system that is fed by concrete actions, and the first principle is the most underrated — the image of your partner in your head determines what you will notice in them tomorrow. The “wheel” is a handy way to check which principles you keep and which you have long abandoned, and where to start the repair.