Traditional seismic design typically dissipates seismic energy through plastic deformation of the main structure. While this design concept can effectively ensure life safety, it often results in excessive residual deformation that renders buildings inoperable, leading to substantial indirect social and economic losses. To address this challenge, structural engineering is gradually shifting from the collapse?oriented design paradigm to a functional recoverable resilience?based design paradigm. As a key component for improving seismic resilience, self?centering dampers provide structures with post?earthquake self?recovery capability by integrating recentering and energy?dissipation elements. However, the complex coupling mechanism between recentering and energy?dissipating elements within a single device has become the core bottleneck for performance optimization. Base on this background, this paper breaks through conventional classification methods and innovatively proposes a classification framework based on the combination of internal functional elements. Self?centering dampers are categorized into three typical configurations: independent, parallel, and composite types. The working mechanism, performance advantages, and research progress of each configuration are systematically elaborated. The results show that the independent damper represents a straightforward implementation of self?centering technology and can serve as an idealized model for investigating material mechanisms and coupling behaviors. The parallel damper is the most applicable engineering solution due to its excellent tunability and reliable configuration. The composite damper further integrates functions on the basis of decoupled parallel dampers, which greatly expands the performance envelope and design freedom, offering an innovative solution for complex seismic design requirements.