Relationship text-analysis terms should describe evidence, not hide weak claims.
The report should make sense without a statistics degree. Look up the terms here, see what each measure counts and check what it cannot tell you. A technical name does not make a finding more certain.
A descriptive measure of how initiation, replies, repair, planning, and follow-through are distributed. It does not decide what each person owed the relationship.
Repair attempt
A message or sequence that attempts to de-escalate, clarify, take responsibility, reconnect, or restore workable conversation after tension.
Emotional drift
A sustained within-thread change in warmth, responsiveness, reciprocity, or tone across comparable periods, reported with coverage and alternative context.
Thread structure and effort terms
Initiation balance: the share of conversation starts attributed to each participant under the report's session-boundary rules. It describes who starts contact in the supplied history; it does not explain schedules, preferences, or agreements outside the thread.
Effort balance: a combined view of observable work such as initiating, asking questions, following up, planning, and carrying repair. A skew can be meaningful, but the metric cannot decide whether the division was voluntary, resented, or appropriate.
Reciprocity: the degree to which one participant's bids, questions, affection, or repair attempts receive a related response. Reciprocity is about exchange structure, not equal word counts in every conversation.
Response rhythm: the distribution and change of reply gaps across the available timeline. A timing shift can support an observation about communication cadence, but it does not prove withdrawal or loss of interest.
Repair, rupture, and conflict terms
Rupture: a sequence where connection or cooperation breaks down through conflict, dismissal, withdrawal, or another observable change. The label identifies a communication event, not who caused the relationship problem.
Repair attempt: a move toward de-escalation, clarification, accountability, reassurance, or renewed contact after tension. Repair success asks whether the exchange becomes workable afterward and whether the same issue immediately returns.
Escalation cluster: a concentrated sequence in which intensity, accusation, contempt-like language, pressure, or rapid hostile turns increase. The evidence window should include what preceded the escalation and how the exchange ended.
Invalidation: wording that dismisses, minimizes, or denies the other participant's stated experience instead of engaging with it. One ambiguous phrase is weaker evidence than a repeated pattern across comparable exchanges.
Warmth, pressure, and emotional-language terms
Positivity reciprocity: how often warm, appreciative, humorous, curious, or reassuring communication is returned. It is a within-thread balance, not a universal relationship-health score.
Coercive pressure: language that corners, threatens, guilts, repeatedly rushes, or makes connection conditional on compliance. Automated analysis can surface the wording and recurrence; it cannot issue a legal or clinical determination.
Emotional tone: the mix and movement of affective language across windows, including warmth, defensiveness, frustration, reassurance, or flatness. Tone classification is vulnerable to sarcasm, dialect, inside jokes, and missing nonverbal cues.
Emotional drift: a sustained change in tone, responsiveness, or reciprocal engagement across comparable periods. Drift names a direction in the record, not the private reason for that direction.
Pattern and trajectory terms
Pattern recurrence: repeated evidence of a similar exchange structure across separate windows. Recurrence gives a finding more support than one isolated example, provided the examples are not duplicates from the export.
Trajectory: the direction of a metric or pattern across time, such as improving repair, lengthening post-conflict gaps, or declining mutual initiation. A trajectory needs comparable coverage and should not be extrapolated into a prediction.
Turning point: a period where several related signals change together and remain changed long enough to warrant review. A turning point can organize the timeline without proving which offline event caused it.
Pattern memory: connects recurring themes, repeated sequences, and evidence references across the completed thread. It supports report continuity; it is not a memory of facts outside the uploaded conversation.
Evidence and uncertainty terms
Evidence window: the relevant message range and surrounding turns used to support a finding. A useful window preserves enough before-and-after context for the user to inspect the classification.
Metric driver: the observable input that moved a result, such as more one-sided starts, longer post-conflict gaps, fewer acknowledged repairs, or a sustained change in warmth language.
Confidence label: a statement about support in the available record, based on recurrence, distribution, attribution quality, timestamp coverage, and agreement across related signals. It is not a probability that an interpretation is true in real life.
Alternative context: another explanation consistent with the same messages, such as work, illness, travel, a platform change, or missing off-thread communication. Naming alternatives keeps an observation from hardening into mind reading.
Attachment language and report boundaries
Anxious-looking, avoidant-looking, or secure-looking describe message sequences that resemble familiar attachment-related communication patterns. They should remain behavioral adjectives, not diagnoses or fixed identities assigned to a participant.
Grey Mirror is a consumer relationship text-analysis product. Its terms organize the supplied conversation and help a user inspect evidence; they do not provide therapy, legal analysis, professional evaluation, or proof of abuse, intent, compatibility, or future outcomes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why publish a glossary?
Because a user should be able to inspect exactly what a report term claims and where that claim stops. Clear definitions make metrics easier to challenge and reduce the risk that technical language sounds more certain than the evidence.
Does a high-confidence pattern reveal someone's motive?
No. High confidence means the pattern is well supported in the supplied message record. Motive still requires context the thread may not contain.
Why do Grey Mirror findings include alternative context?
Because the same observable change can have several explanations. Alternatives help the user compare the report with known offline events instead of treating one interpretation as fact.
Read the page’s specific meaning for a pattern or metric instead of assuming every tool uses the same term.
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Evidence
Check the wording, sequence or measured inputs that can support that term.
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Boundary
Notice what the term cannot establish, including intent, diagnosis and relationship outcomes.
Conceptual reading guide. This diagram explains what to inspect; it is not a customer report, diagnostic test or measured relationship score.Use this guide on the question you came with
Use the glossary while reading a specific finding. Knowing a label is not the same as having enough evidence to apply it.