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Shame often links trauma, attachment threat, avoidance, concealment, anger, self-criticism, and disengagement from care.
Rumination may feel like problem-solving but often maintains low mood, shame, threat, and cognitive inflexibility.
Attachment avoidance may appear as self-sufficiency, emotional distance, minimisation of need, or disengagement under relational stress.
Avoidance reduces distress in the short term but commonly maintains anxiety, trauma responses, functional impairment, and interpersonal narrowing.
Dissociation can reduce overwhelming distress during threat but may later impair memory integration, presence, agency, and relational engagement.
Emotional dysregulation is a transdiagnostic formulation mechanism that can amplify impulsivity, interpersonal rupture, avoidance, and risk.
Negative core beliefs bias attention and meaning-making, often linking early experience to current automatic thoughts, affect, and behaviour.
Perfectionism can drive achievement but may maintain anxiety, depression, shame, procrastination, avoidance, and burnout.
Projection can protect against shame or conflict but may create suspicion, blame, and interpersonal escalation.
Biological, social and cultural material that belongs in the formulation but is not a psychological mechanism. A factor needs case evidence before it explains anything.