This page collects the core terms used on MFTM, defined precisely as they are used here.
Index
Alignment · Autonomy · Boundaries · Emotional awareness · Emotional health · Emotional intelligence · Emotional regulation · Emotional resilience · Emotions · Feelings · Filters · Guilt → Integrity · Identity · Limits · Narrative · Needs · Pride · Reactions · Response · Shame → Dignity · Story · Truth · Values
The basics
Feelings
A feeling is what you become aware of when the body has already registered something. It is the subjective, lived experience of noticing an inner response — and beginning to interpret it. This is where language arrives. This is where meaning is made.
The word traces back to roots meaning to sense through touch — a feeling is a contact experience. Something outside or inside has reached something in you.
A feeling is not the same as an emotion (the physiological response that precedes it) and not the same as a reaction (what you do with it).
Emotions
An emotion is what happens in the body — the automatic physiological response that occurs before consciousness has caught up. Heart rate, muscle tension, hormones. The body knows before the mind has named anything.
The word comes from the Latin emovere — to move out, to set in motion. An emotion is the body preparing to move.
MFTM works primarily at the level of feeling. But the emotion is where the signal begins — and the body is often the most honest source of information.
Reactions
A reaction is what happens when a feeling moves without examination — the behavior the feeling produced, often automatically, often before the feeling was fully understood.
Shouting is not anger. Withdrawal is not sadness. Sarcasm is not disappointment. These are reactions.
The word comes from the Latin re (back) + agere (to be driven). A reaction is being driven back by what came in. The person reacting is often not in contact with what they actually feel — only with the urgency to do something about it.
Response
A response is also a behavior — but the source is different. A response comes from inside: a reading of what the feeling is pointing to, followed by a chosen action.
The word comes from the Latin re (back) + spondere — to commit, to give one’s word. Related to responsible and correspond. A response brings something back with intention.
Choosing silence is a response. Saying “I need time to think” is a response. What distinguishes a response from a reaction is not what you do — it is where the action comes from.
The inner map
Values
A value is not an opinion or a preference. It is what actually matters — what a person defends without thinking, moves toward when nothing is forcing them in any direction, and cannot compromise without feeling the cost.
Values are hierarchical: some carry more weight than others. And they exist in two layers — values that are genuinely a person’s own, and values absorbed from others (family, culture, religion, circumstances) that may never have been examined. Feelings respond to both layers without announcing which one they are responding to.
The word comes from the Latin valere — to be strong, to have weight. A value has force. What lacks force is a preference.
Needs
A need is what the system depends on to function. Not a want, not a demand — the fundamental thing that has to be present for a person to be okay.
Needs are not abstract. They exist at every level: physical (the body needs what it needs), psychological (the mind has its own requirements), and emotional (some things have to be present for genuine connection or meaning to be possible).
Feelings are often the first signal that a need is unmet, threatened, or being ignored.
Limits
A limit is the point beyond which something important begins to break down. Not a rule, not a preference — the actual threshold of what can be tolerated before something that matters is damaged.
Limits are internal. They exist whether or not they have been articulated or named. Feelings register when a limit is being approached — often before the mind has identified what is happening.
Boundaries
A boundary is what expresses and protects a limit. Where a limit is internal (this is the point), a boundary is the communication or action that upholds it.
Saying “I can’t do this” is a boundary. Leaving a situation is a boundary. A boundary is not a wall and not a punishment — it is what keeps a limit real in the world.
Without boundaries, limits erode. Without knowing the limits, there is nothing for a boundary to protect.
Alignment
Alignment is the degree of correspondence between how a person is living and what is actually true for them — whether the daily shape of a life is broadly consistent with what the person actually values.
When alignment is present, there is a quality of settledness. Not necessarily happiness — but a quiet coherence. Things fit.
When alignment is absent, feelings signal it before the mind has identified the problem. A persistent low-level discomfort. A sense of going through motions. An irritability without clear cause. An exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.
Alignment signals in both directions. Its presence is a feeling of its own.
Truth
Truth, in MFTM terms, is not factual accuracy. It is personal truth — what actually fits, what holds, what registers as correct from the inside.
The word traces back to roots meaning faithfulness, what can be trusted, what holds. Personal truth is what holds when everything else is removed.
It does not always arrive as a thought. It often arrives as recognition — a sense that something either fits or does not fit, regardless of what is expected or socially acceptable.
Autonomy
Autonomy is the capacity to navigate by your own map — to let your own values, needs, and limits set the direction, rather than living as a reaction to others’ expectations.
The word comes from the Greek autos (self) + nomos (law). To live autonomously is to be your own authority.
This is not independence from others. It is the capacity to know what is yours — your signal, your value, your choice — and to act from that, rather than from accumulated external pressure.
The inner layers
Filters
A filter is the lens through which experience is sorted — automatically, usually below conscious awareness.
Filters form from experience, particularly early experience. The younger a person was when a pattern was established, the deeper it tends to run. A filter decides what is noticed, what feels threatening, what something means — before any deliberate thought has occurred.
The word comes from a root meaning felt — the porous material that lets some things through and holds others back. A filter shapes what reaches awareness at all.
Narrative
A narrative is the content of a filter — the story a person tells themselves about what a pattern means. People leave. I have to earn my place. Anger means danger. I am too much.
Narratives are not always articulated. They often operate as invisible assumptions — present as certainty, not as interpretation.
The feeling is always real. The narrative built around it is not always accurate.
Story
A story is the sum of all narratives — the accumulated understanding of who a person is, what they can expect, what they deserve, and how the world works.
Story becomes identity. It is what a person means when they say “that’s just how I am” — without asking whether it is actually true, or whether it was simply what was concluded a long time ago, under particular circumstances.
Identity
Identity is the stable self-image that story produces — the accumulated understanding of who I am, what is possible for me, and what I deserve. Not “true self” in any spiritual sense, but the operating assumption that filters what seems available.
Identity was built from experience. It can be questioned. Feelings are one of the few reliable ways to see it clearly enough to do so.
The self-conscious emotions
Guilt → Integrity
Guilt is a signal about behavior. It says: I did something that conflicts with something I care about.
Guilt is forward-looking — it points toward repair, toward change, toward doing differently. When it is accurate, it is useful. It is the inner system registering a gap between action and value.
The opposite of guilt is not pride. It is integrity — the quiet state of having acted in line with what you actually believe. Not loud, not outward. A still inner consistency.
The word comes from the Latin integer — whole, untouched, undamaged. To have integrity is to remain whole — to not let action split from value.
Shame → Dignity
Shame is a signal about identity. It says: I am something wrong. Not that I did something — that I am something.
Shame cannot be addressed by changing behavior, because what shame is pointing to is not a behavior — it is a belief about the self.
The opposite of shame is not pride. It is dignity — a fundamental honoring of your own value system. A quiet certainty that your map matters, that your values and limits have validity, regardless of what others think. Dignity is inward-facing. It does not depend on others’ recognition.
Imposed shame is different. It is shame used by others — deliberately or not — as a mechanism of control. The goal is compliance, not insight. That shame is not a signal from the person’s own system. It was placed there by someone else.
The question to ask is not just what am I feeling? but where is this coming from — and is it mine?
Pride
Pride is a signal about alignment. It says: something I did, created, or became is in line with what I value. It is a confirmation from inside.
When pride is genuine, it is quiet and solid — not dependent on others’ recognition. When it is compensatory (a reaction to shame or insecurity), it has a different quality: more fragile, more reliant on external validation.
Pride is not the opposite of guilt or shame. It is its own signal, with its own function.
Emotional capacities
Emotional awareness
Emotional awareness is the capacity to notice what is happening in your own inner life — accurately, and while it is actually happening.
Not to feel intensely. Not to talk openly about feelings. Not to be an emotional person. But to be able to identify what is present, distinguish between different feelings, and understand what they are pointing toward.
Awareness is seeing. It is the starting point for everything else.
Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence, as the concept was originally developed, refers to a cluster of capacities: recognizing and understanding feelings — your own and others’ — and using that understanding to navigate situations and relationships.
Awareness is seeing. Intelligence is using what you see — in interaction with others, in decisions, in communication.
MFTM works primarily with awareness as the foundation. Intelligence is what can be built on it.
Emotional health
Emotional health is about the quality of a person’s relationship with their own inner life — the capacity to notice feelings without being overwhelmed by them, to read them with reasonable accuracy, and to use them as information rather than suppressing them or letting them run unchecked.
It is not the same as mental health, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Mental health relates primarily to cognitive and behavioral functioning. A person can be mentally well by clinical standards and emotionally impoverished at the same time. And the reverse.
Emotional health is not the absence of difficulty. It is the capacity to meet difficulty without losing contact with yourself.
Emotional regulation
Emotional regulation has come to mean, in many contexts, managing feelings so they don’t interfere — holding them at a distance, keeping them under control, keeping them out of the way.
That is not regulation. That is suppression with better branding.
Real regulation is the capacity to be with a feeling without being overwhelmed by it or acting impulsively on it — to let it inform, without letting it take over. Capacity, not control.
Emotional resilience
Emotional resilience is often described as the ability to bounce back from difficulty — as if resilience means returning to exactly how things were before, as if nothing had happened.
What resilience actually involves is something more honest: the capacity to meet what is difficult, carry it without collapsing, and come through it with something intact — not necessarily unchanged, but not broken either.
Resilience is not hardness. It is flexibility under pressure.