What These Mental Health Buzzwords Actually Mean

Clear, honest definitions for the misunderstood mental health terms we hear everywhere.

by Sherry Chua, Board Certified Mental Health Coach and founder of Safe Steps Consulting.

I talk about mental health and faith a lot, in rooms full of people and one-on-one, and these words come up again and again. So I made this as a simple reference you can come back to whenever you need it. If you heard me speak on any of this, welcome back. If you just found this page looking for plain answers, you’re just as welcome.

I kept noticing how easily these words get used without a clear sense of what they actually mean. These terms are everywhere now, from our phones to our shows, and that’s not all bad. A generation ago people suffered in silence, so I’m grateful we have the words at all. But a fuzzy word can do real damage. It can make you beat yourself up for something that was never your fault, or let you slide past something you needed to face. My aim is simply to give you clear, honest language for what you’re feeling.

A quick but important note: this page is for understanding, not diagnosis. Only a licensed professional can evaluate or diagnose. If something here resonates, let it be a starting point for a conversation with someone who can help.

First, What Mental Health Actually Is

Before we get to any single word, let’s clear up the biggest one. When a lot of us hear “mental health,” we picture mental illness, something diagnosable, something that happens to other people. But those are two different things. The American Psychological Association describes mental health as a state of emotional well-being, the capacity to form good relationships, and the ability to cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life. It’s more than the absence of illness; it’s an essential part of being a whole, healthy person.

Mental health isn’t a category some people fall into, and others don’t. You have it the same way you have physical health. Just as your body has stronger and weaker days, your mind does too, and both can be cared for, strengthened, and sometimes injured. Mental illness, by contrast, refers to specific, diagnosable conditions, the kind a licensed professional identifies and treats.

Just like physical health, this is something every one of us is tending right now, in better and harder seasons. Learning these words is part of tending it well.

The Buzzwords for What Goes On Inside Us

Guilt and Shame

If you remember only one thing from this whole page, I hope it’s this one, because untangling these two has been a turning point for so many of the people I’ve coached. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says, I am bad. Clinical psychologist Dr. June Tangney, who has studied these emotions for over thirty years, puts it exactly that way: guilt is a focus on a specific behavior, and shame is a focus on the whole self.

Scripture gives us a deeper read on this, and the research echoes it. Guilt, the ache that points at something specific you did, is meant to be answered by conviction, which is the work of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said the Spirit would come to convict the world concerning sin (John 16:8), and that conviction is God-led and good: Paul writes that godly sorrow “brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Conviction is specific, it tells you the truth, and it always leaves a door open to come home.

Shame is the other voice. It doesn’t point at something you did; it attacks who you are, and it says, don’t even bother going to God, look at you.This is exactly where the research lines up with Scripture. Tangney’s studies have found that because shame attacks the whole self, it tends to make people want to hide or shut down, and it’s linked to some of the heaviest things people carry. The Bible names the way out of that hiding directly: “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Learning to tell the convicting voice from the condemning one has been a quiet kind of freedom for many of the people I’ve coached.

Self-Compassion

If this is one you find hard to practice, you’re in good company. Self-compassion simply means treating yourself with the same kindness you’d give a good friend who was hurting, drawing from God's own deep well of compassion. Dr. Kristin Neff, who has spent her career studying this, describes it as three things working together: being kind to yourself instead of harsh, remembering that failing and struggling are part of being human and not proof you’re uniquely broken, and facing the hard feelings honestly instead of being swallowed by them.

A lot of us hear “self-compassion” and worry it means going soft, making excuses, letting ourselves off the hook. It doesn’t. Neff’s own research shows the opposite, that self-compassion actually grows your resilience, because shame freezes you in place while kindness frees you to look honestly at the thing. And there’s a deeper layer here. You’re made in God’s image, and you’re someone Jesus chose to love. Talking to yourself with contempt was never humility. It’s just arguing with how God already sees you.

Rumination

You know that feeling when a thought just will not stop circling? You replay the conversation, the mistake, the worst thing that could happen, over and over, and it never lands anywhere. That’s rumination. The American Psychological Association describes it as going over the same thought or problem again and again without finishing it. The simple way to tell it apart from healthy reflection is this: reflection moves toward something, an insight, a decision, some peace, while rumination just keeps spinning the same wheel in the same mud. Naming it for what it is helps you stop mistaking it for productive thinking.

Anxiety and Ordinary Worry

Worry is the ordinary, passing unease we feel about things that might go wrong. It’s common, and it comes naturally to most of us, especially in uncertainty, but Scripture doesn’t tell us to make peace with it. Again and again it calls us the other way: “do not be anxious about anything” (Philippians 4:6), “cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). Worry isn’t something to embrace; it’s something God invites us to hand to him.

But there’s a difference between that everyday worry and anxiety in the clinical sense. The American Psychological Association describes anxiety as an emotion marked by tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes, and notes that an anxiety disorder involves worry that keeps coming back and interferes with daily life. That kind of anxiety isn’t a willpower problem, and telling someone who has it to simply worry less is like telling someone with a broken leg to walk it off. Bringing our worries to God and seeking professional help are not opposites. For many people, healing comes through both.

Depression

Like worry and sadness, “depressed” gets used for a passing mood, a gray afternoon, a hard week. Clinically, depression (major depressive disorder) is more than that. The American Psychiatric Association describes it as a persistent low mood and a loss of interest or pleasure in things you used to enjoy, lasting at least two weeks and interfering with daily life, often along with changes in sleep, appetite, energy, and concentration. The keywords are persistent and pervasive. It isn’t a bad day you can shake off, and it isn’t the same as ordinary sadness or grief, which move and lift in a way depression doesn’t.

This matters deeply in faith spaces, because depression is too often treated as a spiritual failure, as though enough faith or joy should make it lift. But some of the most faithful people in Scripture knew real darkness. David poured out despair through the Psalms; Elijah, right after a mountaintop victory, told God he wanted to die. Their honesty is in the Bible, not edited out of it.

Struggling like this is not a sign of weak faith. Some things are just so heavy to carry alone. God meets us in the dark, and very often the way he brings healing includes other people: a doctor, a counselor, sometimes medication. If you’re in a dark place right now, please don’t carry it by yourself. Reach out to someone you trust today if you can.

Trauma

Of all the words here, this might be the one we get wrong most often. The most widely used definition comes from SAMHSA, the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which defines trauma as resulting from “an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” SAMHSA explains it through three E’s: an Event, your Experience of it, and the Effects that linger long after.

So trauma isn’t really about what happened to you. It’s about how you perceived and made meaning of an overwhelming event. Two people can go through the very same thing and not both walk away with trauma. Think of it like a physical injury: trauma is a sustained wound to your emotional and mental wellbeing, and just like the body, how deeply it wounds depends partly on your protective factors, the support, stability, and people you had around you at the time. That’s also why reaching for support sooner rather than later tends to lessen the lasting effects.

That’s also why not every hard thing is trauma. A rough week, a painful disappointment, a bad day, those are real, but they aren’t the same. When we stretch the word to cover everything, two people get hurt: the one who now feels permanently broken by ordinary life, and the one carrying real trauma who suddenly feels unseen.

And healing from trauma takes time. It usually doesn’t lift after a single prayer, the same way a broken bone won’t set itself. God is so near in it, but healing tends to be a road rather than a moment, walked a step at a time and rarely alone. It makes a big difference to have someone steady walk part of it with you, which is much of what trauma-informed coaching offers: trained, faith-rooted guidance as you move forward at your own pace.

Triggers

This one walks right beside trauma. A trigger is something in the here and now, a smell, a song, a tone of voice, a certain hallway, that your body ties to an old wound and reacts to as if it were all happening again. It often really is your body that reacts first. The heart pounds, the breath goes shallow, you want to disappear, all before your thinking mind has caught up to say you’re safe. That’s not someone being fragile or dramatic. It’s an old alarm, doing the only thing it knows how to do. Those alarms can be retrained. The nervous system that learned to brace can slowly learn safety again, with time, support, and often the kind of steady, attuned work I walk through with clients. Triggers can lose their grip.

Being triggered isn’t the same as being annoyed, or offended, or uncomfortable with an opinion you don’t share. The internet turned “triggered” into a punchline, and somewhere in the joke we lost the real meaning. A true trigger reaches back and reopens pain that never fully healed. When we keep the word honest, we leave room for the people who are actually hurting, and that matters to me.

Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation is the set of processes we use to influence which emotions we feel, how strongly we feel them, and how we express them. In plainer terms, it's the pause between what you feel and what you do next. Let's say a comment stings; regulation is what lets you notice the flash of hurt, take a breath, and choose your response instead of snapping back on instinct. It isn't stuffing the emotion down or pretending you're fine, and it isn't white-knuckling your way to calm. It's staying steady enough to choose. And here's the hopeful part: research finds it's a skill, not a fixed trait, one that tends to strengthen over the course of life. Wherever you're starting from, it can grow

The Buzzwords for What Goes On Between Us

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is a real and damaging thing, so it’s worth examining the nuance. It’s a pattern where someone manipulates you into doubting your own memory, your own perception, even your own sanity. The American Psychological Association describes it as manipulating another person into questioning their own understanding of what’s happening. It sounds like “that never happened” or “you’re being crazy,” said enough times that you stop trusting yourself. What it’s not is someone simply disagreeing with you, or remembering a moment differently than you do. The keyword is that it's a deliberate, repeated effort to shake your grip on reality.

Narcissist

Here’s another one we reach for quickly. Clinically, narcissistic personality disorder is a real and specific diagnosis: the American Psychiatric Association describes it as a lasting pattern of grandiosity, a deep need for admiration, and a genuine lack of empathy, affecting only about one percent of people. What it is not is anyone who is selfish, vain, or self-focused in a given moment. We all have self-centered days; that doesn’t make someone a narcissist. Using the word loosely flattens a serious condition into an insult, and makes it harder to recognize the real pattern when you do meet it. If you suspect someone in your life truly fits it, that’s worth exploring with a professional rather than settling with a label.

“Toxic”

“Toxic” isn’t actually a clinical diagnosis, which is part of why it gets stretched so thin. It started as a strong word for a relationship that genuinely, repeatedly damages you, and now we hang it on just about anyone who frustrates us. The trouble is, once everyone difficult becomes “toxic,” the only move we have left is to cut them off. Some relationships really are harmful and really do need distance, and that’s exactly where the word earns its place. But most difficult people aren’t toxic. They’re just difficult, the same way any of us can be difficult to someone else. Reaching for the strongest word first lets us skip the harder, more faithful work of patience, and that’s work worth doing.

If there’s one thing I hope you carry out of all of this, it’s that the right words help you tell the truth, and telling the truth is where healing starts. You do not have to be fine to be loved by God. And you were never meant to sort all of this out alone, in the quiet of your own head. If something here named a weight you’ve been carrying, that’s worth saying out loud to one person you trust.

And if you’d like a steady, faith-rooted person to walk part of that road with you, that’s the heart of what we do at Safe Steps Consulting. You’re always welcome to learn more about coaching or simply reach out and say hello.

I also wrote a companion piece on boundaries, and loving people without losing yourself, if that’s a word you’ve been wrestling with too.

REFERENCES

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA dictionary of psychology. Retrieved from https://dictionary.apa.org

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309032

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach (HHS Publication No. SMA 14-4884). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and guilt. Guilford Press.

Tangney, J. P., Stuewig, J., & Martinez, A. G. (2014). Two faces of shame: The roles of shame and guilt in predicting recidivism. Psychological Science, 25(3), 799–805. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797613508790

Scripture references: John 16:8; 2 Corinthians 7:10; Romans 8:1; Philippians 4:6; 1 Peter 5:7; Psalms (42, 88); 1 Kings 19 (Elijah).

Safe Steps Consulting offers faith-integrated, non-clinical mental health coaching. This article is educational and is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a licensed professional.