Imagine finally finding the courage to turn to the ‘justice’ system, seeking protection and accountability for the abuse you have endured, only to have a judge tell you that you are too intelligent and educated to have been abused in the first place.

That is exactly what many women have reported experiencing in both family court and criminal court. In one UK case, that was later raised in the House of Lords, a woman described what she’d been told by the judge:

“I was too educated and knowledgeable to allow DV to happen to me.”

The judge also reportedly considered her not “scared enough” to fit the expected image of a domestic abuse victim.

In Ireland, another woman described a similarly appalling experience. In research published by Women’s Aid in 2025, she recalled a family law assessor telling her:

“You don’t present like a victim. You don’t look like one. You’re intelligent; you’re college-educated; you’re too forthright and resilient. You’re not a victim.”

And these are far from isolated attitudes. In 2025, the UK Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s report Shifting the Scales documented accounts from survivors about comments made by judges in criminal courts. One woman reported that a judge dismissed the possibility that she was a victim because she had a “good job”. Another described a judge questioning her usefulness as a witness because she was “so articulate”. A third was told that she did not “look like a victim” and that the trial had been a waste of time.

These were women who had turned to the justice system for protection and accountability, only to encounter professionals who believed that intelligence, education or professional success made them less likely to have been victimised.

For the past two years that I’ve been writing about domestic abuse and coercive control, I’ve heard numerous personal accounts from policewomen, therapists, doctors, CEOs, psychologists, psychiatrists and solicitors who have been trapped in relationships with abusers.

These are women who have built successful careers, earned advanced qualifications and spent years developing professional expertise. Some work in professions where recognising manipulation or protecting vulnerable people is part of their everyday work. Yet in their own homes, they were subjected to coercive control by the very people they trusted.

Their experiences would not surprise those who understand how abusive dynamics works. Yet the myth persists that intelligent women should somehow be able to recognise an abuser immediately, resist their manipulation and walk away before any serious harm occurs.

It is an extraordinarily misguided belief, and when it comes from people in positions of authority, it can have devastating consequences.

Intelligence Is No Defence Against Someone Determined to Control You

Intelligence can help you evaluate information, solve complex problems and make sound decisions. It cannot prevent another person from deliberately deceiving you or using your emotional attachment to them as a means of control.

When you enter a relationship, you bring your intelligence with you, along with your capacity to love and trust another person. You assume that your partner has your interests at heart, particularly when they have spent months or years demonstrating affection and commitment.

An abuser takes advantage of that trust. They may initially present themselves as loving and supportive, then gradually introduce demands and restrictions. They may undermine your confidence while convincing you that their criticism is intended to help you. When you challenge their behaviour, they manipulate the conversation until you find yourself defending your reaction rather than addressing what they did.

You can be highly educated and still believe someone who repeatedly assures you that they love you. You can have exceptional critical thinking skills and still struggle to recognise manipulation when the person responsible is someone you trust and have built your life around.

There is also a fundamental difference between analysing someone else’s behaviour from a distance and recognising what is happening while you are emotionally involved.

A psychologist might immediately recognise coercive control in a client’s account while struggling to identify the same pattern in their own marriage. A police officer might understand the warning signs of domestic abuse professionally while finding reasons to excuse her husband’s behaviour. The personal relationship changes the context in which those behaviours are experienced and interpreted.

And abusers are capable of adapting their methods to the person they are controlling. They learn what matters to you, what you fear losing and which forms of pressure are most effective. They may exploit your empathy or use your sense of responsibility against you. If you are someone who believes problems can be solved through communication and effort, an abuser will keep you working endlessly to repair a relationship that they are deliberately damaging.

Your intelligence remains intact throughout this process. What the abuser changes is the environment in which you are trying to use it.

Understanding the Abuse Doesn’t Mean You Can Escape It

A key assumption behind this myth is that recognising abuse should automatically enable someone to leave.

Many victims come to know exactly what their partner is doing. They recognise the manipulation and understand that their partner is deliberately controlling them. They may even have extensive professional knowledge of domestic abuse.

But understanding your circumstances and having the freedom to change them are two very different things.

An abuser may have threatened to take your children if you leave. They may have demonstrated that they are willing to destroy your reputation or interfere with your career. They may monitor your communications or retaliate whenever you attempt to assert independence.

You might have a good salary and your own bank account, yet still face the prospect of losing your home, becoming embroiled in expensive legal proceedings or having your children drawn into a prolonged custody battle.

The question of leaving becomes a calculation of consequences, and those consequences may be severe.

An intelligent woman can assess those risks perfectly accurately and conclude that leaving immediately would place her or her children in greater danger. She may need months or years to make arrangements or wait until a safer opportunity presents itself.

Yet people who understand nothing about her circumstances still feel entitled to judge the victim’s intelligence because she stayed.

Why People Want to Believe Intelligent Women Can’t be Abused

There is something psychologically comforting about believing that domestic abuse only happens to people who lack intelligence or good judgement. It allows people to create a reassuring distinction between themselves and victims.

They imagine that they would recognise the warning signs immediately. They would never tolerate controlling behaviour. They would leave the first time someone mistreated them. And if they consider themselves intelligent and independent, they may then believe they are protected.

This is closely related to what psychologists call the just-world belief, the tendency to assume that people generally get what they deserve and that bad outcomes can be explained by something they did or failed to do.

If a woman experienced years of abuse, people search for something about her that might explain it. Perhaps she was naive or ignored obvious warning signs. Perhaps she lacked confidence or was too dependent on her partner. By finding fault with the victim, they can reassure themselves that they would have made better choices and avoided the same fate.

The alternative is much more uncomfortable. It requires accepting that a capable and intelligent person can be deliberately manipulated by someone they trust, and that none of us can guarantee another person’s behaviour. So the myth survives because it offers people a sense of control over something frightening.

Unfortunately, that reassurance comes at the victim’s expense.

Education Can Become Another Source of Shame

One of the consequences of this myth is that educated women may turn it against themselves. They question how they failed to recognise the abuse and feel ashamed that someone with their knowledge or professional experience could have been manipulated.

A 2021 UK study involving 21 female doctors who had been subjected to domestic abuse found that many struggled with the belief that doctors should be too intelligent and capable to be abused. Some feared that disclosure would undermine their professional credibility. Their education and professional status had become additional barriers to seeking help.

For a woman whose abuser has already spent years undermining her confidence, the belief that she should have known better adds another layer of self-blame and shame.

Intelligence is Used to Discredit Victims

As the court examples demonstrate, intelligence and confidence can actually work against a victim’s credibility. A woman who speaks clearly, challenges accusations or maintains a successful career may be judged as insufficiently vulnerable to have experienced abuse.

This creates an impossible expectation that victims must somehow appear helpless to be believed. Yet many women have spent years developing the resilience and resourcefulness needed to survive coercive control while continuing to function in their everyday lives.

When judges and other professionals mistake that resilience for evidence that abuse never occurred, the consequences extend far beyond disbelief, potentially affecting decisions about protection and children’s safety.

The Myth Shifts Blame Away from Abusers

Suggesting that a woman was too intelligent to have been abused implies that she should have been capable of preventing it. Attention turns to her judgement, how long she stayed and why she failed to recognise or resist the manipulation.

Meanwhile, the abuser’s deliberate actions escape the same scrutiny. He was the one who exploited her trust, established control and made resistance dangerous.

We would never suggest that someone was too intelligent to be assaulted or too educated to become a victim of theft. We recognise that another person made a decision to cause harm. Yet with domestic abuse, people continue to examine the victim’s supposed shortcomings instead of holding the person who harmed her accountable.

Intelligence Was Never the Issue

A woman’s intelligence or education cannot fully protect her from another person’s deliberate decision to abuse her. She may recognise the manipulation long before she can safely leave, or it may take years to understand what is happening. Neither experience reflects her intelligence or capabilities.

And there is a particularly irony in judges, assessors and other professionals making judgements connected to a victim’s intelligence while demonstrating such a profound lack of education about the abuse they are supposed to recognise.

The ignorance lies with those perpetuating this myth, yet it is victims who are made to pay the price.

You might also like to read:

What You’ll Find in This Clarity Series Post

• How raising a concern becomes a conversation about what you did wrong

• The excuses abusers use to make harmful behaviour sound reasonable

• How an emotional apology can leave the abuse itself unacknowledged

• What abusers protect when they refuse to take responsibility

• How repeated blame draws you into trying harder to explain yourself

• A downloadable checklist of 75 ways abusers avoid accountability

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How My Husband Made His Behaviour My Responsibility

During my marriage, my ex-husband gave me a code word to use when he was starting to lose his temper. He expected me to recognise when he was becoming angry and say the word so he could remember to control himself. If I forgot to use it, he blamed his resulting rage on me.

He expected me to monitor his anger and intervene before he became abusive. If I missed the warning signs, he used that omission to blame me for what he did next.

He used the same reasoning when I told him how his behaviour affected me. He said that if I noticed him in a bad mood, I needed to do what was necessary to help him out of it.

At other times, he told me I was responsible for how I felt and reacted. If his words or actions hurt me, he claimed that my distress revealed something I needed to work on within myself, making my response the problem, not his behaviour.

These explanations placed responsibility with me at every stage. I was supposed to prevent his outbursts and manage their impact afterwards, while he swept aside his own actions.

Many people recognise this experience when they begin looking closely at how an abuser responds to being challenged. You raise something they did, yet somehow end up discussing what you should have done differently.

How Abusers Move the Focus Away From Their Behaviour

When you raise a concern, an abuser may respond by denying what happened or arguing that you have exaggerated it. They may introduce a grievance about you, leaving you defending yourself while they abandon the issue you raised.

You might begin by explaining that they humiliated you in front of friends. They focus on your tone or accuse you of trying to make them look bad. Before long, you are explaining your intentions and trying to establish that you have a reasonable concern. The abuser has redirected the conversation towards your right to challenge them.

They may use several tactics within the same exchange. When denial fails, they offer an excuse. When you challenge the excuse, they accuse you of being unfair. Each shift gives you another argument to answer and moves them further away from addressing their actions.

Read more

This week I’m pleased to share a guest article by journalist , exploring economic abuse, coerced debt, and the barriers survivors face when trying to rebuild their financial independence. Lauren writes extensively about domestic violence, trauma, and mental health, with work published in The Washington Post, Women’s Health, USA Today, and other major publications. She is also the author of The Ties That Harm: Understanding Sibling Abuse and Finding a Path Forward, which examines the often-overlooked issue of sibling abuse. You can find more of her writing on her Substack page.

Years ago, when I began reporting on domestic violence, one statistic seized my attention: nearly three in four survivors postpone leaving their abuser – or go back to them, sometimes for years – due to financial struggles. The most common barriers are the inability to support themselves and their children, and no place to go.

I don’t know why this surprised me. I’d only been able to leave myself when an acquaintance, one of the few connections I had after moving to a new city, offered me a spare bedroom in her home. I paid her around $400 a month, an unheard-of, charitable amount. Still, I racked up thousands of dollars in debt due to moving expenses.

When I interviewed a dozen or so survivors on the cost of domestic violence, I realized I was relatively lucky. One woman only got out after selling her wedding ring for just enough gas to cross state lines. Another was still in debt and living in unsafe housing after her ex secretly destroyed her credit. Surviving domestic violence isn’t just physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually taxing – for many, it’s also financially devastating.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Insidious Nature of Economic Abuse

Economic abuse happens when an abuser exploits a survivor (taking their paycheck, making them work overtime), sabotages them (disrupting them at work or school, or coercing them into quitting), or takes control of their financial life in other ways (providing a limited allowance, surveilling every expenditure, stealing their identity, lying about finances).

Economic abuse is a hidden risk factor for domestic violence homicide and a nearly ubiquitous form of coercive control (tactics used to take freedom away from survivors). Women who leave highly-controlling partners after living with them have a nine times higher risk of being killed by them. The abuse can also escalate after a survivor leaves, through retaliatory lawsuits, withheld child support, or stalking that makes it impossible to keep a job or stay at the same address.

What makes economic abuse unique is that it’s often invisible to survivors even when they are in the thick of it because it’s so aligned with traditional gender roles (the man controls the money), because it’s subtle (he keeps losing jobs or saying he’ll pay her back), or because it’s entirely unknown to her (he demands that she sign, so she signs). It can happen to anyone: to wealthy women with PhDs, as well as children whose parents take out loans in their name.

Women deprived of an education or career struggle to “catch up,” and life post-separation requires constant management due to poverty, diminished opportunities, and bureaucracy. The even greater cost is the inability to build wealth.

Many are also pulled down further by the anchor of coerced debt – balances an abuser runs up in a survivor’s name through fraud, pressure, or force – as well as damaged credit, which negatively impacts their ability to secure housing, a car loan, or even a job. In one study of women who called the National Domestic Violence Hotline, more than half had coerced debt and nearly just as many had damaged credit.

What Can Be Done to Support Survivors?

In 2022, Congress added economic abuse to the Violence Against Women Act’s definition of domestic violence, and coerced debt laws have passed in nine states. But initial reports from advocates suggest they’re inadequate.

In a 2025 survey of service providers, 70 percent said none of their clients had ever gotten coerced debt blocked from a credit report. Even in Maine, whose law dates to 2019, an advocate said survivors have had more success since, “but not to a sufficient level.” Since the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that would, ideally, hold credit bureaus and debt collectors accountable, the potential rule up for consideration to let survivors block coerced debt from their credit reports has dropped off.

Legal remedies seem to be the main avenue for relief, but 99 percent of support providers surveyed said survivors’ inability to access legal help stands in the way. For those who do get help, relief remains unlikely: In one Texas study, only one of about 100 women with coerced debt at divorce saw her ex-husband ordered to pay it off. Other barriers also stop survivors from even getting started, like not fitting the narrow definition for identity theft or getting a police report (a move that’s too dangerous for some due to fears of retaliation from an abuser). Survivors who most need support may have the least access to it.

Survivors (and society) are also burdened by the cost of healthcare due to injuries and trauma, plus criminal justice costs, lost productivity, and property damage – all of which cost trillions of dollars over the lifespan of survivors, according to the CDC. Victim compensation funds, which would ideally cover some costs, are also often out of reach – due to difficult forms and the police report many states still require (an automatic dead-end for those with safety concerns).

Survivors have told us what would help: credit repair, debt management, food, housing, baby wipes, childcare, money. More forms, mazes, and built-in barriers are not the answer; easy-to-access, flexible funding, on the other hand, works – and quickly. As one recipient of a low-barrier grant in a Washington, D.C. pilot put it: “Basically, I can say it saved my life.” Similar processes can be implemented to address coerced debt and credit repair, with the emphasis on simplifying the process rather than making it impossible to navigate.

Survivors are burdened by debt that they did not choose to take on. When asked about it, most of their fellow citizens believe they shouldn’t be held responsible for it – they should be supported in rebuilding.

Survivors Deserve More Support

It took about five years to pay off my credit card debt, but I’ve since been able to build a career that allows me to thrive. I’m safe at home and no longer living on the edge. What I’ve enjoyed most is simple: buying flowers every once in a while, for myself – or to surprise a friend. For so long – years, really – that felt like too much of a luxury.

Many survivors heal in time with support and the same resolve that allowed them to break free. Greater investment in survivors’ futures – their safety, their freedom, and their potential – could save lives and enrich communities. What survivors are asking for isn’t the world, or even flowers. As one survivor told researchers, “I fantasize about having a well-furnished, cozy home for my children and me…the ability to provide. I want a cozy, happy life so bad it hurts.”

Have you been impacted by economic abuse? Share your story (anonymously is fine) to support future reporting on the issue: lekrouse@gmail.com.

About the Author

Lauren Krouse is a journalist who covers domestic violence, trauma, and mental health. She’s the author of The Ties That Harm: Understanding Sibling Abuse and Finding a Path Forward, an investigation into sibling abuse, the most common yet least recognized form of family violence. Part reporting, part guide, it draws on her own story, survivor accounts, and expert research to help readers name what they endured, understand how it was allowed to persist, and finally begin to heal.

Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Women’s Health, SELF Magazine, USA Today, Parents, Medscape, and elsewhere. Throughout her career, she’s reported on supporting survivors during the pandemic, coercive control legislation, economic abuse, domestic violence in healthcare workers, and the future of trauma therapy. She writes and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.

You can follow Lauren’s work on Substack and learn more at laurenkrouse.com.

When my former husband broke his ankle, he spent much of his recovery stretched out on the sofa, watching television and playing video games. Whenever he wanted something, he would call out to me. Sometimes it was a glass of water, sometimes his phone or something to eat. Whatever he wanted, I would stop what I was doing and bring it to him.

I took care of him while continuing to work, look after our young son and manage the household. He was injured and needed help, so I adjusted my responsibilities to accommodate him. His recovery became another responsibility I took on, and I did my best to make things easier for him.

Six months later, I injured my own foot and found myself on crutches.

I was in considerable pain and struggling to move around, but he continued expecting me to work, care for our son and manage the house. He made the same demands of me, regardless of how difficult they had become. There was no television or relaxation for me!

As I struggled to keep up, he grew increasingly angry.

“Why haven’t you cleaned our son’s room? Don’t you care about him?”

He demanded that I come and rearrange the shelves. I explained that I physically couldn’t manage it on crutches and would take care of it when my foot healed.

He refused to accept that.

“You just don’t care at all, do you? I’m going to tell him you don’t care enough about him to keep his room tidy.”

He knew how much I loved our son. He deliberately used that love against me, threatening to undermine me in our child’s eyes because I was physically unable to meet his demands.

When my husband was injured, he expected me to look after him. When I was injured, he still expected me to look after him.

And if I couldn’t, he made me pay for it.

The Abuser’s Double Standard

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When most people think of a cult leader, they usually picture someone who manipulates followers, demands unquestioning loyalty, controls their lives and makes it extraordinarily difficult to leave. What many don’t realise is how closely these behaviours resemble those of a domestic abuser.

Cults are not exclusively religious. Cult leaders can be the head of a political party, they may run a self-help movement, or lead a group built around a particular ideology or cause. What defines them is how they exercise power and control. At the core of both cult leadership and domestic abuse is the same pattern of domination, in which one person or group systematically undermines another person’s independence, restricts their freedom and increasingly takes authority over their decisions and everyday life.

I spent ten years in a destructive cult, and eleven more in a coercive, abusive marriage.

In the cult, I had to follow strict rules, like what to wear, what to eat, how to spend my time, and who I should be in a relationship with. In my marriage, it was the same - rules about parenting, cooking, socialising, and behaving.

Both the cult and my marriage isolated me. In the cult, outside relationships were discouraged - they were seen as threats to our “spiritual growth.” In my marriage, my ex-husband cut me off from family, criticising them and making sure we kept moving so I could never settle or find support.

Both environments crushed my self-worth. The cult leader called me a glutton, a parasite, and worthless. My ex-husband called me crazy, stupid, and lazy.

When I left the cult, I was defamed, harassed, and intimidated. When I left my husband, I was stalked, monitored, bullied, and threatened.

Living in a controlling marriage is like being trapped in a micro-cult. You’re indoctrinated to accept their reality. You’re manipulated and coerced until you no longer trust yourself. You defend your abuser, just like cult followers defend their leader. You don’t see the way out because your world has become built around them.

Understanding these similarities helps explain how a smart and capable person can find themselves living under someone else’s authority, following rules they would once have rejected and struggling to imagine a life outside that person’s control.

Here are 15 ways a domestic abuser behaves like a cult leader.

1. They Draw You In With Love, Attention and Promises

Cult leaders often attract followers by offering something deeply appealing, such as belonging, purpose or the promise of a better life. They shower newcomers with affection and make them feel they have found a special community or a higher purpose.

Domestic abusers ofter use a remarkably similar approach. They may overwhelm you with love and attention, appear intensely interested in everything about you and make promises about the future you will share. They create a powerful emotional connection and encourage you to see them as someone exceptional.

2. They Gradually Isolate You From Outside Influences

Cult leaders understand that outside relationships and alternative perspectives can threaten their authority. Some restrict contact with family, discourage members from reading critical information or portray outsiders as spiritually or politically dangerous.

Domestic abusers also work to isolate you and reduce the influence of people who might challenge their control. Your partner may criticise your friends, create conflict around family visits, or accuse loved ones of interfering in your relationship. They may make socialising so difficult that staying home eventually feels easier.

3. They Establish Themselves as the Ultimate Authority

Within a cult, the leader may claim exceptional wisdom or connection with a higher power and expect followers to accept their decisions. They often position themselves as someone whose judgement deserves greater trust than anyone else’s, including the follower’s own.

A domestic abuser can establish a similar hierarchy within a relationship. They may insist that they know what is best for you, dismiss your opinions as irrational. or treat their preferences as rules that you must follow. They may also present themselves as more intelligent, more capable, more experienced, or more emotionally stable, using these supposed advantages to justify making decisions on your behalf.

4. They Control the Smallest Details of Your Daily Life

Cult leaders may regulate how followers dress, what they eat or how they spend their time. These rules can extend into the smallest aspects of daily life, leaving little room for individual choice.

Abusers often exercise the same kind of microregulation over their partner’s life. They may dictate how you complete household tasks, what you wear or how quickly you respond to their messages. Even the way you speak or arrange things in your home may become subject to their approval.

5. They Manipulate Your Perception of Reality

Cult leaders teach followers to distrust information that contradicts the group’s beliefs. They may interpret coincidences as divine signs or stage apparent miracles. They may reinterpret events to protect their authority and insist that followers accept the group’s explanation, even when it conflicts with their own experiences.

Domestic abusers can do something very similar through gaslighting. They may deny conversations you clearly remember, distort what happened during an argument, or repeatedly insist that you are misunderstanding their intentions.

6. They Make Questioning or Disagreeing Dangerous

Cult leaders often demand obedience and treat disagreement as disloyalty. Followers may face humiliation, sanctions, or exclusion when they challenge the leader’s authority, teaching others that compliance is the safest option.

A domestic abuser may respond to disagreement with anger, threats, violence, silent treatment, or withdrawing affection. They may punish you in ways that make expressing an independent opinion increasingly difficult.

7. They Use Guilt and Shame to Enforce Obedience

Cult leaders may teach followers that their doubts reflect personal weakness or a failure of commitment. Some demand impossible standards of spiritual purity, financial contribution, or labour, leaving members feeling perpetually inadequate.

Abusers use guilt and shame in much the same way. They may accuse you of being selfish when you express a need or insist that your boundaries demonstrate a lack of love. They repeatedly criticise you and point out where you are ‘falling short’, making you feel that you must work harder to become the partner they expect you to be.

8. They Exploit Your Vulnerabilities and Personal Disclosures

Some cults encourage members to reveal deeply personal experiences through public confessions or intensive group discussions. Members may be required to disclose their sexual histories or past mistakes, which leaders later use to humiliate them or increase their influence over them.

Domestic abusers can exploit the same vulnerability that comes with trusting another person. During the early stages of a relationship, you may share painful experiences or personal insecurities because you believe your partner cares about you. Later, the abuser may weaponise that information to hurt or control you. They might bring up a childhood experience to explain why you supposedly cannot trust your judgement, or use a private fear to threaten you.

9. They Alternate Affection With Punishment

Cult leaders may alternate praise and approval with criticism or rejection. A follower who has been humiliated or excluded may feel enormous relief when the leader finally offers acceptance again.

Abusers create a similar emotional cycle. After a period of cruelty or intimidation, they may become affectionate, apologise or behave like the loving partner you remember, only to repeat the pattern again and again.

10. They Create an “Us Against the World” Mentality

Cult leaders frequently portray the outside world as hostile or dangerous. Some teach that their followers are God’s chosen people, while outsiders are spiritually corrupt or conspiring against the group. They may tell followers that outsiders want to undermine the group, encouraging members to view loyalty to the leader as essential for their safety and belonging.

A domestic abuser may create a similar division between your relationship and everyone outside it. They might insist that your family wants to break you apart or claim that nobody else truly understands you like they do. They may describe ordinary concerns from friends as attacks on your relationship and pressure you to prove your loyalty by rejecting those concerns.

11. They Make You Responsible for Their Needs and Goals

Cult leaders may demand extraordinary sacrifices from followers in the name of a supposedly greater purpose. Members are expected to give their time or money and place the leader’s needs above their own.

Domestic abusers may establish a similar expectation of sacrifice. Your partner might demand that you abandon personal ambitions to support their career or take responsibility for managing their emotional wellbeing. They may frame these demands as evidence of what a loving partner should willingly do. When you become exhausted or express your own needs, they accuse you of failing them.

12. They Gradually Replace Your Identity With the One They Want You to Have

Cult leaders often encourage followers to abandon aspects of their former identities and adopt the beliefs and expectations of the group. Some require members to change their names, follow strict dress codes or give up personal ambitions to serve the group. Members may come to define themselves primarily through their role within the cult.

Abusers also reshape how you see yourself. They may repeatedly criticise qualities they dislike, discourage interests that give you independence or tell you who you are and what you are capable of. They may ridicule your ambitions until you stop pursuing them or insist that your role is to meet their needs. Eventually, you may struggle to recognise the person you were before the relationship.

13. They Manufacture Dependency and Restrict Your Choices

Cult leaders may make followers dependent on the group for their practical needs or sense of belonging. They can restrict access to money or outside opportunities, making independent life increasingly difficult to imagine.

Domestic abusers may deliberately create similar dependencies. They might control household finances, interfere with your employment, or discourage you from developing skills that would allow you to support yourself. They can also undermine your confidence until you begin believing that you are incapable of managing without them.

14. They Make Leaving Seem Dangerous or Impossible

Cult leaders may warn followers that leaving will lead to terrible consequences. Some threaten eternal punishment in hell, while others use ostracism and ‘shunning’, requiring members to cut off contact with anyone who leaves, even their own family.

Domestic abusers will also use threats to prevent separation. They may tell you that you will lose your children, face financial ruin or never manage on your own. Some threaten violence or retaliation if you attempt to leave. They may also convince you that nobody will believe you or help you.

15. Their Control Can Continue Long After You Leave

Some cult leaders continue trying to control former members long after they leave. They may encourage followers to shun them, spread damaging rumours about them or threaten to expose private information they disclosed while in the group. Some even harass former members or attempt to intimidate them into returning or remaining silent.

Survivors who leave domestic abusers can experience something remarkably similar. They may launch smear campaigns to discredit you, harass you through repeated messages or threaten you for refusing to comply with their demands. When children are involved, they may use parenting arrangements or legal proceedings as opportunities to continue exercising control.

The Same Pattern of Control

One of the most striking similarities between cult leaders and domestic abusers is the way they gradually establish control. They begin by gaining your trust and creating a strong emotional connection, then progressively increase their authority until behaviours that would once have seemed unacceptable become part of everyday life. By the time the control becomes obvious, you may have already lost so much of your independence, along with the outside support that could help you to challenge it.

Whether it’s fear of divine punishment or fear of your partner’s rage, the impact is the same: your sense of self disappears. You slowly adopt their beliefs and opinions just to stay safe. Your world becomes smaller until all that’s left is survival.

But mere survival isn’t where the story is meant to end. No relationship, authority figure, or belief system should ever hold the power to diminish your spirit or dictate your life. Freedom begins with reclaiming the understanding that your voice, your choices, and your life belong to you.

You might also like to read:

What You’ll Find in This Article

• How we can take responsibility for understanding ourselves, healing, learning from our choices and repairing harm we may have caused, without accepting blame for another person’s abuse.

• Why self-examination can feel unsafe after years of being blamed by an abuser.

• How our personal histories, experiences and learned patterns can influence our choices and behaviour in relationships.

• How to untangle what genuinely belongs to us, including our choices, vulnerabilities, survival responses and mistakes, from what belongs to the abuser.

• How honest self-understanding can help us heal, recognise patterns we want to change and make more informed choices in the future.

• A downloadable Untangling Responsibility After Abuse Guide to help distinguish our own responsibilities from those of the person who abused us.

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At nineteen, I joined a New Age group that promised spiritual growth through meditation and self-awareness. It turned out to be a destructive cult. Over the ten years I spent there, its leader gradually took control of almost every aspect of my life: what I believed, where I lived, whom I could see, what I wore and where I worked. Eventually, I was expelled after refusing to become his mistress.

Suddenly, the authority and structure that had governed so much of my life were gone. I felt lost, unanchored and uncertain of my place in the world.

It was during that period that I became involved with the man who would become my husband. His confidence and decisiveness felt reassuring when so much of my life had lost its shape. He seemed to know what he wanted and was comfortable taking charge. I felt drawn to the stability he appeared to offer.

We married, and my husband gradually became more controlling. He isolated me and subjected me to a systematic pattern of verbal, emotional and psychological abuse. He manipulated and intimidated me. He controlled our finances, monitored my movements and imposed increasingly restrictive rules, using threats to enforce his demands. Yet for much of our eleven years together, I did not recognise what I was experiencing as abuse.

After I recognised the abuse and left, my anger gradually emerged. He had presented himself as a loving and kind partner, only revealing his abusive and controlling nature once I was isolated, dependent, and pregnant with our child. I was furious at how thoroughly he had deceived and manipulated me.

But as I began to process what had happened, my anger started turning inward. How could I have missed the red flags? Why had I chosen him? How could I have been so naïve and stupid not to realise it was abuse?

That inward turn is where this article begins: with the difficult question of what patterns belong to us, and what belongs to the person who harmed us.

Making Sense of Our Choices

As we begin to make sense of what happened to us, it can be difficult to untangle our own choices and behaviour from the ways an abuser manipulated and controlled us.

We all bring our histories and learned patterns into relationships, and these can influence whom we choose and how we behave. In my case, years of living under strong authority in a cult had made control feel familiar, even comforting. I also had a tendency to accommodate and please others, which made it easier for my husband to dominate decisions.

But survivors may also blame themselves for behaviours that developed in response to abuse: complying with demands, avoiding confrontation, or becoming hypervigilant because an abuser repeatedly punished resistance. There may also be choices we regret, or ways we genuinely behaved badly, that deserve honest reflection.

Making sense of these different influences matters. We can take responsibility for understanding ourselves, healing the parts of us that need care, repairing harm we may have caused and making different choices in the future, without taking responsibility for another person’s choice to abuse us.

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Setting boundaries is presented as an essential part of healthy relationships. We are encouraged to communicate our needs clearly, stand up for ourselves, and be firm about what we are willing to accept. But in a relationship with an abuser, even a reasonable boundary can be treated as an act of defiance and met with retaliation.

An abuser can punish you in various ways, from withdrawing affection to deliberately making your life more difficult. The retaliation might begin the moment you express your wishes, or come later, after you’ve followed through on your boundary.

To show how this works, imagine that your partner has a habit of interrupting your time with friends through repeated calls and messages. Controlling partners often use this behaviour to monitor where you are or interfere with your social connections. You have become frustrated by the interruptions, so you decide to set a boundary.

You explain that you would like a few uninterrupted hours with your friend and ask your partner to call only if there is a genuine emergency.

It is a reasonable request. Yet a controlling partner can interpret your wish for independence as a challenge to their authority.

The following examples show eight ways an abuser can punish you for asserting that boundary. These are different possible responses to the same situation, rather than eight behaviours that necessarily occur together. Some abusers use several tactics, while others rely heavily on one or two.

Although this example focuses on a social outing, these strategies can appear whenever you set boundaries around privacy, finances, parenting decisions, physical autonomy, or any other area of your life.

1. They Withdraw Affection or Communication

The moment you explain that you’d like uninterrupted time with your friend, your partner may become cold and distant. They stop engaging with you, give curt answers, or refuse to acknowledge you. You can sense their displeasure, and the atmosphere at home becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

Or perhaps everything seems fine until you return home. You walk through the door feeling lighter after seeing your friend, only to find that your partner is barely speaking to you. Every attempt at conversation is met with silence or a dismissive response, as though you’ve committed some serious offence.

2. They Bombard You With Arguments and Accusations

As soon as you explain your plans to see your friend, your partner launches into an argument. They demand to know why you need time without them contacting you and insist that your request is unreasonable. You try to explain yourself, but every answer leads to another accusation.

Even if you manage to go out, the interrogation can begin again when you return. Your partner demands to know exactly where you went and who was there. They accuse you of hiding something, perhaps suggesting that your desire for uninterrupted time means you must be cheating.

The argument drags on for hours, sometimes late into the night, until you’re emotionally exhausted and desperate for it to end. They make asserting yourself so draining that surrendering the boundary starts to feel easier.

3. They Try to Make You Feel Selfish or Guilty

Your request for a few uninterrupted hours might be met with accusations that you care more about your friends than your relationship. Your partner tells you that someone who truly loved them would always be available, making your desire for time to yourself sound like a personal rejection.

They might also claim to have been feeling particularly low that day and needed your support. Now, instead of looking forward to seeing your friend, you’re left feeling responsible for their distress.

If you have children, the accusations can become even more hurtful. Your partner suggests that you’re neglecting your family or putting your own enjoyment ahead of your responsibilities as a parent.

This tactic exploits your care for others and your desire to be a good partner or parent. They reframe your reasonable need for independence as a moral failing, making it feel cruel to maintain your boundary.

4. They Deliberately Interfere With Your Plans

The interference can start before you’ve even left the house. Just as you’re getting ready, your partner finds a way to delay you. They may ‘accidentally’ spill a drink on your outfit or suddenly insist that something urgent needs doing, making it difficult for you to leave without appearing inconsiderate.

Once you’re out, your phone starts ringing despite your request. You ignore the calls, but then an alarming message arrives suggesting that something serious has happened at home. Worried, you interrupt your time with your friend to respond, only to discover that the supposed emergency was trivial or entirely fabricated.

By manufacturing reasons to interrupt you, they demonstrate that your time remains subject to their demands. They also exploit your sense of responsibility, knowing you may feel compelled to respond whenever there is a possibility of a genuine emergency.

5. They Deliberately Embarrass or Humiliate You

Before you leave, your partner may threaten to turn up and embarrass you if you ignore their calls. You know they’re capable of following through, so the threat stays in the back of your mind throughout the outing.

Or they actually appear at the café where you’re meeting your friend. At first, they act as though they’ve simply stopped by to say hello. Then come the sarcastic remarks about how much time you spend socialising, or a humiliating joke about something personal you’ve shared with them in confidence.

They can even appear perfectly charming throughout the encounter, leaving your friend unaware of the intention behind their remarks.

This kind of punishment targets your dignity and your social relationships. The abuser uses their knowledge of what embarrasses or upsets you to make socialising feel uncomfortable.

6. They Involve Other People in Punishing You

Your partner may take their complaints about your boundary to family members or mutual friends, portraying you as selfish and inconsiderate. They tell others that you’ve abandoned them and the children to go out drinking or exaggerate how often you leave them alone, creating a distorted picture of your behaviour.

Sometimes they go directly to the friend you’re meeting, suggesting that your friendship is causing problems at home. Your friend is then placed in an uncomfortable position, and you find yourself having to explain or defend what should have been an ordinary social arrangement.

When children are involved, an abuser can also draw them into the conflict by telling them that you’d rather spend time with friends than with your family. This can be especially painful when the children repeat those accusations back to you.

By involving other people, the abuser extends the consequences of your boundary beyond the relationship itself. You’re now dealing with other people’s reactions as well as your partner’s, which adds further pressure to give in.

7. They Withdraw Practical or Financial Support

Perhaps your partner had agreed to care for the children while you met your friend. But after you explain that you’d prefer not to be interrupted, they announce that they won’t look after them after all. You’re left scrambling to arrange childcare, and your plans are suddenly in jeopardy.

In another situation, they wait until you return before declaring that they’ll never help with childcare again because you supposedly took advantage of them. What should have been a shared parenting responsibility becomes something they can withdraw whenever you displease them.

Financial retaliation can work in a similar way. Your partner withholds access to the car or restricts money you need, claiming that if you can afford to socialise, you should be able to manage without their contribution.

These punishments create practical obstacles to your independence. They make it increasingly difficult for you to exercise ordinary freedoms by controlling the resources you depend on.

8. They Escalate to Threats or Intimidation

For some victims, the consequences of asserting a boundary are frightening. When you insist on going to see your friend, your partner threatens to stop you from leaving, blocks the doorway, or becomes physically aggressive.

They could threaten to destroy your belongings or harm someone you care about if you refuse to answer their calls. The message is clear: exercising your independence could have serious consequences.

Sometimes the intimidation is less direct. Your partner slams doors or smashes an object during an argument about your plans. You recognise the aggression as a warning of what could happen if you continue to resist.

A single frightening incident can have a lasting impact. Once an abuser has demonstrated their willingness to intimidate or harm you, the possibility of it happening again can be enough to influence your behaviour, even without another explicit threat.

How Punishing Boundaries Becomes a Form of Control

At the heart of these behaviours is the abuser’s sense of entitlement to control aspects of your life. They believe they have the right to decide where you go, who you spend time with, and how available you should be to them. When you assert a boundary, you challenge that assumed authority by making a decision that belongs to you.

An abuser often understands exactly what you’re asking for. The problem is that respecting your boundary would require them to accept that they have no authority over that part of your life. Retaliation becomes a way of reasserting control by making independence come at a cost.

The pattern is powerful because people learn from consequences. When expressing a need repeatedly leads to hostility or punishment, you begin anticipating the abuser’s reaction and adjusting your behaviour to avoid it. Eventually, you might stop making plans with friends or expressing your preferences because you’ve learned what happens when you do. The abuser no longer has to explicitly forbid you from doing something because you’ve begun restricting yourself to avoid the consequences.

Some abusers use these tactics deliberately, knowing that making resistance unpleasant encourages compliance. Others act from deeply entrenched attitudes of entitlement and control. Either way, the repeated pattern can restrict your freedom as you organise your decisions around avoiding their retaliation.

This is why the usual advice to set firm boundaries can be dangerous in a relationship with an abuser. When someone repeatedly punishes you for asserting yourself, standing your ground can expose you to further harm.

Sometimes complying or avoiding confrontation is the safest available option. Protecting yourself may mean focusing on decisions that increase your safety, rather than repeatedly trying to persuade the abuser to respect your wishes. Careful wording and gentle explanation cannot make someone respect a boundary they are determined to violate. Your safety matters more than convincing an abuser that you have the right to make decisions about your own life.

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What you’ll find in this article:

• Why reaching physical safety does not necessarily mean you immediately feel safe

• How coercive control can affect self-trust and keep the nervous system alert to danger

• How trauma can affect both psychological and physical wellbeing

• The role movement can play in reconnecting with your body and rebuilding a sense of agency

• What resilience really looks like during recovery from abuse

• How survivors can begin rebuilding stability, self-compassion, and hope through small steps

Welcome back to Expert Insights, where I feature conversations with psychologists, researchers, advocates, and other professionals whose work helps us better understand domestic abuse, coercive control, and survivor recovery.

In this conversation, I interview , a psychologist with more than 35 years of experience in the field. Dr DiBlasio is also a 5th-degree black belt in kempo karate, and has brought these two areas of expertise together to develop an integrated mind-body approach to trauma recovery for survivors of physical and sexual violence, domestic violence, stalking, kidnapping, emotional abuse, and other forms of interpersonal trauma.

Dr DiBlasio co-founded a large mental health practice as well as The Safety Team, a nonprofit focused on preventing violence, fostering resilience, healing trauma, and building safer communities. Her work earned her recognition as USA Today’s Vermont Woman of the Year. She also writes the Substack publication Unsilenced, For Good, where she explores trauma, resilience, mind-body healing, wellbeing, and hope.

At the heart of Dr DiBlasio’s work is a belief that healing is possible, that safety and empowerment matter, and that people are often capable of far more than they realise.

In this conversation, we explore the psychological and physical impact of prolonged abuse, including how living with coercive control can change a person’s sense of safety, erode trust in their own perceptions, and leave the nervous system primed to detect danger even after they have left. Dr DiBlasio also explains why trauma can show up in the body and why calm itself can sometimes feel unfamiliar after years of hypervigilance.

From there, we turn to recovery, including rebuilding self-trust, reconnecting with the body through movement, and developing new experiences of safety. We also explore resilience, which Dr DiBlasio describes as an active, ongoing process that can exist alongside fear, anxiety, anger, and struggle. Rather than something a survivor either has or lacks, resilience can be present in the difficult work of healing itself.

Finally, Dr DiBlasio shares how small actions, moments of joy or calm, patience, self-compassion, and recognising your own progress can support recovery and help cultivate hope. Her perspective throughout is grounded in something she has witnessed across decades of working with survivors: healing takes time, and healing is possible.

We begin with what years of coercive control, fear, criticism, and unpredictability can do to a person’s sense of safety.

1. You’ve worked as a psychologist for more than 30 years and write extensively about trauma. When someone has lived for years with coercive control, fear, criticism, or unpredictability, what can that prolonged experience do to their sense of safety?

It can profoundly affect one’s sense of safety. Survivors may learn that safety is temporary, elusive, easily removed, unpredictable, and conditional. They may learn that, in order to feel any sense of safety, they must remain hypervigilant and on guard, often focused more on cues about the abuser’s emotional state than on their own internal cues.

All of this may leave someone feeling unsure of their own perceptions. They may question their reactions and interpretations because their behavior, responses, and statements are constantly challenged, questioned, or manipulated by their abuser.

A person may also develop a strong startle or heightened threat response. Relatively minor events may produce intense physiological reactions because the nervous system has learned to respond quickly to potential threats. This is a natural and sometimes adaptive response to prolonged coercive control and abuse.

2. Many survivors expect to feel better once they leave an abuser, yet some find that anxiety, hypervigilance, or other trauma responses continue, or even become more noticeable. Why can reaching physical safety feel so different from actually feeling safe?

Our nervous systems and psychological well-being take time to recover. This recovery happens gradually, with experiences of safety and, generally, with the support of others. Our bodies and nervous systems can retain the effects of previous trauma, often through cues that are associated with past danger. Memories of trauma and the corresponding trauma responses may remain or become activated as the nervous system continues to respond in an effort to keep us safe. That is one of its primary jobs. Anything that in some way reminds us of previous trauma may set off our “alarm system.” Sounds, smells, sights, or situations may serve as trauma cues—all in an effort to keep us safe.

Being physically safe does not necessarily mean that the nervous system immediately recognizes that we are safe. After prolonged, repeated, or episodic trauma, safety may need to be experienced repeatedly before safety begins to feel trustworthy. Over time, consistent experiences of safety, predictability, supportive relationships, and having one’s perceptions and boundaries respected can provide new evidence to the nervous system that the danger has passed.

This isn’t easy.

This is one reason recovery can take time. The goal is not simply to tell yourself that you are safe, but to give your mind and body repeated experiences of safety from which a new sense of safety can gradually develop.

3. People who have lived with an abuser often become highly attuned to another person’s moods, facial expressions, tone of voice, or movements. What can help survivors gradually stop living as though they always need to anticipate danger?

As noted above, we need prolonged experiences of safety to help calm our nervous system. This, paired with dedicated work to heal from trauma, can help us gradually recognize when we are actually safe—and with whom, in what circumstances, and at what times.

As we develop greater confidence in our ability to recognize safety and respond to danger when it is present, we can begin to relax our vigilance. Our nervous system can gradually shift from a state of hypervigilance toward a more relaxed state, at least some of the time.

Living in a constant state of hypervigilance is exhausting, both psychologically and physiologically. When we no longer have to continually scan for signs of danger, our bodies and minds have an opportunity to recover.

I have found that not only does it take time for this to occur, but it can also be “an acquired taste.” Survivors often report that a state of calm is uncomfortable at first because calm previously signaled “the calm before the storm.” Be patient with yourself. Healing is possible.

4. Coercive control can erode a person’s trust in their own perceptions, decisions, and instincts. From a psychological perspective, how can survivors begin rebuilding that relationship with themselves and learning to trust their own judgment again?

This, too, takes time.

Healing takes time, energy, courage, and persistence.

Our sense of self can erode over time, and through the gradual process of healing, we begin to restore our sense of ourselves as capable.

What helps? Support from trusted people and professionals, stability, and real safety.

As we begin to heal, we can take small, manageable risks and make decisions for ourselves. Each experience gives us an opportunity to remember—and prove to ourselves—that we have the skills, knowledge, judgment, and ability to make decisions that reflect our wishes and allow us to take care of ourselves.

Over time, these experiences can help rebuild confidence in our own perceptions, choices, and instincts. We begin to learn, through experience, “I can trust myself. I can make decisions. I can take care of myself.”

5. You write about the inseparable nature of physical and mental health. What are some of the ways prolonged psychological stress and trauma can show up in the body, and why is it important that survivors understand this connection?

We often think of the mind and body as separate, but what impacts one has significance for the other. The mind-body connection is powerful.

Stress and trauma can have many physical and psychological impacts, including:

• increased muscle tension, headaches, and other forms of physical pain

• sleep difficulties, including trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or feeling rested

• changes in appetite, digestion, and gastrointestinal functioning

• fatigue and low energy

• decreased self-esteem and self-confidence

• psychological distress (depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc.)

• irritability and emotional numbness

• feelings of loneliness and social isolation

• increased heart rate, blood pressure, and other signs of physiological activation

• difficulty concentrating, thinking clearly, or remembering

• increased vulnerability to illness, changes in immune functioning, and changes in the body’s ability to recover from illness or stress

This is not an exhaustive list.

Healing involves caring for the whole person—the mind and the body together.

6. You have a long background in martial arts and are a strong advocate for physical exercise. What role can movement play in trauma recovery for someone who has spent years feeling disconnected from, or uncomfortable in, their own body?

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October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and much of the conversation rightly focuses on helping people recognise abuse. That awareness is enormously important and can be life-changing for those who have yet to understand what they are experiencing. But awareness needs to go much further than this. We need to give far more attention to what happens after survivors manage to leave, particularly the ongoing abuse they may face, and the difficulties they encounter when seeking protection and justice.

We need greater awareness of the systems survivors turn to, and what happens when those systems disbelieve them, minimise their experiences, fail to recognise abuse, or even create opportunities for the abuse to continue.

This is something I feel very strongly about because I am still living with post-separation abuse myself.

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Why I Have Never Reported My Abusive Ex-Husband

Here in Ireland, more than 65,000 domestic abuse-related incidents were recorded by the Gardaí (police) in 2024 alone. In the same year, only 639 people were convicted of domestic abuse offences.

When we look specifically at coercive control, the figures are just as concerning. Ireland criminalised coercive control in January 2019 and, since the law came into effect, only 25 convictions have been recorded. Of those, only two involved a conviction on a standalone charge of coercive control. Two!

Meanwhile, in 2025 alone, Women’s Aid recorded 11,147 disclosures of abuse involving coercive control through its services. And that is just one organisation among many across Ireland receiving disclosures of domestic abuse.

I am one of the women who has disclosed coercive control to Women’s Aid.

But I have never reported my abuser to the police. And at this point, I doubt I ever will.

That is a difficult thing to say, particularly when I believe so strongly that perpetrators should be held accountable. I want to live in a country where survivors can report coercive control with confidence that they will be understood, protected, and taken seriously.

But I also have to consider what making a report could mean for my safety and my child’s wellbeing.

People have asked me why I don’t report him anyway and hope for the best.

The answer is that, in a relationship with an abuser, challenging their control can carry serious consequences.

An abuser who continues exercising control after separation are likely to interpret a police report as another challenge to their authority. For some perpetrators, retaliation becomes a way of punishing the survivor for speaking out.

When children are involved, there are many ways an abuser can continue causing harm. They may undermine the child’s relationship with the other parent, tell the child frightening or damaging things about them, create loyalty conflicts, pressure the child to keep secrets, or use contact arrangements and legal proceedings to maintain control. They may present themselves as the reasonable, concerned parent, while portraying the survivor as unstable, vindictive or unwilling to cooperate.

The survivor then has to manage the consequences, often while trying to protect their child from understanding the full extent of what is happening.

These are among the risks I have to consider.

A criminal investigation can take time, and there may be a lengthy period before a case reaches court, if it reaches court at all. During that time, the survivor may still have to communicate with the perpetrator, manage parenting arrangements, and navigate family court proceedings.

For someone facing ongoing post-separation abuse, that can mean years of additional vulnerability.

The Difficulties of Proving Coercive Control

There is another enormous challenge.

Coercive control is often extremely difficult for outsiders to recognise, particularly when it occurs without physical violence.

My marriage did not involve physical violence. The abuse was psychological, emotional and controlling. Much of it happened through everyday interactions, carefully chosen words, threats, intimidation and patterns of behaviour that would have made little sense to someone seeing only an isolated incident.

An abuser can make a threat without explicitly stating it. They can intimidate their partner through a look, a gesture or a reference to something only the two of them understand. They can disguise demands as concern, punishment as disappointment, and control as an attempt to help.

The victim understands the meaning because they know the history behind it.

But how do you explain that history to someone who has never experienced coercive control? How do you demonstrate the cumulative impact of hundreds of seemingly small incidents, particularly when so much of the abuse happened behind closed doors? And what happens when the professional assessing your situation has little understanding of the dynamics involved?

A survivor may spend years adapting their behaviour to avoid an abuser’s reactions. They may struggle to recall events chronologically, have gaps in their memory, or find it difficult to explain why something that sounds relatively harmless was actually terrifying.

Meanwhile, the abuser may present as calm, articulate and entirely reasonable.

Without sufficient training and understanding, professionals can miss the pattern of control and interpret the situation as ordinary relationship conflict.

When Systems Become Another Source of Harm

For survivors who share children with an abuser, the family court system can introduce another layer of difficulty.

An abuser may use legal proceedings to prolong conflict, make allegations against the survivor, challenge their parenting, or repeatedly force them to defend themselves. When professionals treat the situation as a disagreement between two equally responsible parents, they can overlook the underlying power imbalance and the perpetrator’s ongoing behaviour.

Courts may order shared parenting arrangements or therapeutic interventions without adequately recognising how the abuser could use those arrangements to continue exercising control.

Joint family therapy is one example that particularly concerns me. When one parent has subjected the other to coercive control, bringing them together and expecting open communication can create opportunities for further intimidation, manipulation and retaliation. In Ireland, family court judges can order victims of domestic abuse to participate in family therapy alongside their abuser, potentially exposing them to further manipulation, intimidation and control. In these circumstances, therapy can become another means through which the abuser continues to exert power over the victim.

And when an abuser undermines the child’s relationship with the survivor, then presents themselves as the parent trying to repair the damage, the situation can become extraordinarily difficult for professionals to untangle.

None of this means that every professional gets it wrong or that every survivor who seeks help will have a negative experience. There are dedicated police officers, advocates, lawyers and other professionals who understand coercive control and work hard to protect victims.

But the consequences when the system fails to recognise the abuse can be devastating.

We Need to Make Reporting Safer for Survivors

I want to be very clear about something. My decision not to report my abuser is based on my own circumstances and my assessment of the risks I face. I would never want another survivor to interpret my experience as a reason they shouldn’t report.

Reporting can be an important step towards protection, accountability and justice. Survivors deserve access to specialist support that helps them understand their options and make informed decisions about their safety.

But we also need to recognise why some survivors are very reluctant to take that step, even when they desperately want their abuser to be held accountable.

For someone experiencing ongoing post-separation abuse, reporting can mean confronting a perpetrator who still has access to their life, their finances or their children. It can mean facing further intimidation, retaliation or prolonged legal proceedings. And it can mean having to explain years of psychological abuse to professionals who may struggle to recognise the patterns involved.

These concerns deserve to be taken seriously. They should inform how our systems respond to victims and how we protect them throughout the process.

I want police officers, legal professionals, judges, social workers and family therapists to understand coercive control well enough to recognise it even when the perpetrator is charming, articulate and apparently cooperative.

I want systems to recognise post-separation abuse and understand how perpetrators can use children and legal processes to continue controlling their former partners.

I want survivors to receive meaningful protection against retaliation, with proper risk assessments, safeguards that reflect the realities of coercive control, and professionals who understand how dangerous challenging an abuser’s control can be. And I want children to be protected from being drawn deeper into the abuser’s web of control.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month is an opportunity to talk about all of this. Awareness helped me recognise what was happening in my marriage, and eventually helped me leave. That knowledge changed my life.

But recognising abuse is only the beginning. We also need to address what happens when survivors seek help, how professionals respond, and whether the systems designed to protect them actually make them safer.

We cannot keep asking survivors to come forward, speak out and report their abusers while leaving them to shoulder the risks of doing so.

If we genuinely want more victims to report coercive control, we need to make reporting safer. We need systems that understand the abuse, recognise the dangers of retaliation, and provide protection throughout the process.

Survivors have already carried enough of the consequences of their abusers’ behaviour. They should not have to carry the consequences of seeking justice alone.

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If you are in a relationship with an abuser, or you have already left and are still managing the aftermath, someone you love may offer to help and you know they mean it. Perhaps your parents have offered you somewhere to stay, or a friend wants to take something off your hands. You trust them and appreciate their concern, yet you may find yourself refusing their help and explaining that you can manage.

You might feel glad to have received the offer but ashamed of needing it at the same time. You may worry about the effort involved for them, even while feeling close to exhaustion yourself. Sometimes you turn down help before you have given yourself a chance to even consider accepting it.

An abuser can change how you experience having needs. When they punish requests for support or repeatedly leave you to cope alone, you may carry those experiences into your relationships with people who genuinely do care.

This can affect you while you are still with the abuser and continue after you leave. Understanding what makes receiving help difficult can give you more room to decide what you need and who you might feel comfortable turning to.

1. You Have Become Accustomed to Carrying Everything Alone

Many abusers will completely overload their partners. They might expect you to work, take care of the children, manage the house, as well as cater to their every need, until you are left completely worn out and depleted. If you ask them to contribute, they are likely to refuse or make the resulting argument so exhausting that doing the task yourself feels easier.

If they have also isolated you from people who care about you, your opportunities to receive help may already be limited. So you become used to carrying everything alone. You get things done and carry on because it feels like there is no other way. You get so much practice holding all the responsibility that you keep reaching for it automatically, even when someone reliable offers to step in.

One survivor described how that expectation continued after leaving and how she had to actively remind herself that it was ok to stop:

“Even now after it’s over, when I’m sick, I still feel the need to do everything. Then I remember that I don’t have someone yelling at me or belittling me for being sick and it is ok to just rest.”

A trusted person’s offer can give you an opportunity to share something you have carried yourself for years. But becoming comfortable with that may take practice, especially if the abuser has told you that you are lazy or selfish for needing rest.

2. Help Has Previously Come at a Cost

The abuser may have treated every favour as something to hold over you. They might agree to help you with something and then criticise you for it later, or bring up what they had done for you again and again as though you now owe them a debt. If so, you would have learned to consider the cost of ‘help’ before you ever ask for it.

One survivor explained:

“I used to ask myself, ‘What is this going to cost me?’ If I went out with friends or needed him to help me do something, I would know that I was going to pay heavily for it, so I just prepared myself. Sometimes I knew that I didn’t have the energy to deal with the cost, so I just didn’t do what I wanted. It was a miserable way to live.”

When you have repeatedly experienced help coming with a cost or a debt to repay, your body and mind learn to treat every offer as a transaction. A friend may have shown you many times that they don’t expect anything in return, yet receiving a favour from them can still bring an urge to repay it immediately. You might feel uncomfortable until you have balanced the exchange.

When someone safe shows you a different approach, it gives you something solid to hold onto. When they help without later using it against you, that creates a new experience. Over time, that new experience can make receiving support feel safer and more natural.

3. You Struggle to Believe You Deserve the Help

An abuser who repeatedly treats your needs as unimportant can leave you questioning your entitlement to care. You may be quick to help other people who are in need while holding yourself to a much harsher standard.

Perhaps you believe that you shouldn’t accept someone else’s help when you are “the one that got into this mess”. You might feel that you should have recognised the abuse sooner. You may blame yourself for staying or feel responsible for difficulties the abuser created. The abuser shaped these beliefs by framing your suffering as your own fault.

None of this makes you less deserving of support. You are never responsible for the abuse you were subjected to. Even if you brought your own vulnerabilities into the relationship or made your own mistakes, you are still deserving of care and kindness from others.

The problem arises when the belief that you are at fault, or partially at fault, for the abuse follows you into a conversation with someone who wants to help. That belief can make their generosity feel like more than you deserve.

One woman who was still with her abuser knew that her parents had offered her somewhere to stay. She described the conflict she felt:

“I’d love to break free from this situation. I know there is somewhere I can stay if I need to leave, and lots of help and love waiting for me. I cannot understand why I am stuck here. Perhaps somewhere, deep down, I believe his lies.”

These words show what many people subjected to abuse experience. You can know that support exists and still feel unable to reach for it. The abuser has worked hard to make you doubt your own judgement, dismiss your needs, and believe that leaving is impossible or undeserved.

It can be helpful to remember that we do not need to have everything resolved before we accept help. We can start with one thing that would make today easier, even while we are still untangling the beliefs left behind by the abuser.

4. You Worry About Becoming a Burden

You may trust someone completely and still feel distressed at the thought of adding to their responsibilities. You know they have difficulties of their own, and you begin calculating what helping you would require of them.

The same woman spoke about the support her parents had offered:

“My parents truly are a big source of support. But they are in their 80s now, and I would absolutely hate for them to deal with this problem with me. I understand that they want to do it out of love, but I feel like such a failure for making them go through this.”

Her concern for her parents is understandable. Their age matters, and any arrangement would need to take their circumstances into account. Alongside that concern, she describes feeling that needing their support makes her a failure.

If the abuser accused you of selfishness whenever you needed something, you may still feel guilty about asking anyone to make an effort for you. You might decline before the other person has explained what they can comfortably offer.

A conversation about their capacity gives both of you a say. They can decide what they are able to do, and you can consider what feels manageable to accept.

5. Accepting Help Means Letting Someone See That You Are Struggling

You may have worked hard to appear capable throughout the relationship. Keeping things going might have helped you preserve some privacy or avoid conversations you felt unable to have.

Asking for help can feel like exposing everything you have tried to keep contained. Even with a compassionate person, saying that you are struggling may bring embarrassment or a sense that you should have coped better.

One survivor described this directly:

“I felt ashamed to be in a position to have to ask friends, family, & coworkers for help & support. And I felt ashamed that I needed therapy, like somehow that meant I was weak & broken. I felt absolutely defeated.”

That shame can make an ordinary request feel like a judgment on your ability to manage your life. If the abuser repeatedly called you incapable, you may fear that needing assistance somehow confirms what they said.

You can choose how much to share when asking for support. A friend can help with a practical task while you keep parts of your experience private. You can also tell someone that discussing the details feels difficult and explain the specific help you would welcome.

6. You Find it Difficult to Identify What You Need

A caring person may ask you how they can help, and your mind may go completely blank. You know you are struggling, but turning that feeling into a specific request can be difficult.

If the abuser demanded that you organise your days around their wishes, you may have had little opportunity to consider your own. Perhaps they dismissed your discomfort so consistently that you learned to keep going until you could go no further. After years of this, you can become deeply disconnected from your own needs. When someone asks what you need, you may find that you genuinely do not know.

You might also be facing several connected problems at once, such as isolation, financial dependence, or ill health, and feel unsure where to begin. Explaining the whole situation can feel overwhelming, so you tell the person you will let them know and then the conversation drops away.

This is where the way help is offered can make a real difference. People who wish to help someone who is being abused could keep this in mind and make a more specific offer, which will be easier for them to consider. Offering to bring a meal, or to mind their children for an hour so they can get to a doctor’s appointment, gives a clear decision rather than leaving them with the work of identifying and explaining a request. A concrete, limited offer can feel far more manageable than a general invitation to ask for anything.

Allowing Someone to Help Can Take Practice

One survivor described declining her parents’ offer to travel to the country she was living in after she left her abusive husband:

“I told them No. I felt that this was my mess and not their burden to carry. I could never ask them to make such a big sacrifice because of problems that I felt at the time were my own doing.”

Her parents explained to her that there is nothing a loving parent wants more than to help, support, and protect their child, no matter their age, and they didn’t see it as a sacrifice or a burden. There is nothing they wanted more in that moment than to help.

She went on to say:

“I had never seen it from that perspective before. So I let them help and I slowly got used to asking for what I needed. Rather than feeling like a burden, it has brought us so much closer together.”

This story points to something important. An abuser works hard to convince you that your needs are a problem and that asking for help makes you a burden. Her parents’ response shows a different reality. For many people who love you, helping is not a burden at all. It is a way for them to care for you and to feel useful in a situation where they might otherwise feel helpless. Seeing help through their eyes can shift how it feels to accept it.

Given everything you have experienced, it is completely understandable that accepting help might feel difficult. But allowing someone to help can be one of the ways you begin to experience relationships differently after abuse. You get to discover that care can be freely given, that another person can choose what they are able to offer, and that allowing someone to show up for you can strengthen a relationship rather than diminish you within it.

You do not have to become comfortable with receiving help overnight. Sometimes the first step is simply noticing the automatic “No, I’m fine” and giving yourself a moment before you say it. You may find that, little by little, letting safe people be there for you becomes easier.

You might also like to read:

A week after I left my husband, he sent me a letter.

I had just moved into short-term accommodation with our child, kept my location private and had asked him not to contact me other than about essential matters relating to our child. Despite that clear request, he continued to find ways to reach me, and this letter was one of them.

I am sharing it here because it shows the multitude of tactics an abuser can use to try to draw you back after you leave. Once they lose the same access to you, they often turn to a range of strategies to exert emotional and psychological pressure in an attempt to regain it.

There is an extraordinary amount of manipulation packed into this one letter. He appeals to my love for our child, minimises the abuse, invokes memories of happier times and presents sacrifice as something that good mothers and wives should be willing to make. He describes his distress in detail, creates the appearance of accountability, and makes excuses for his behaviour. He then finishes with a veiled threat about “how bad” things will be if I choose not to try again, leaving me wondering what he plans to do next.

Leaving an abuser does not immediately end their attempts to control you. Their tactics just change form. Messages, apologies, promises and emotional appeals can all become ways of pulling you back into contact and keeping you emotionally engaged.

Those messages can sound loving or remorseful. They may invoke memories that genuinely mean something to you or touch the exact fears and vulnerabilities they already know you carry. When you have only just left and are still trying to find your footing outside their control, those words can be incredibly powerful.

The more clearly you can see the actual words and strategies abusers use, the better equipped you become to recognise them if they appear in your own life. Understanding what sits beneath the apologies, guilt, promises and emotional appeals can help you identify the manipulation and hold firmly onto your own reality.

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The Letter

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For a long time, I really didn’t understand what abuse was.

Like so many people, I thought domestic abuse meant physical violence, and that had never been my experience. I hadn’t even heard the term coercive control. I didn’t know that the exhausting pattern of behaviours I was living with, including strategic isolation, surveillance, intimidation, threats, insults, guilt-tripping, manipulation and control over everyday life, were recognised forms of abuse.

I wish I had known.

I wish I had read something that helped me put all those pieces together and recognise the pattern for what it was. Maybe I would have understood what was happening much sooner and saved myself years of confusion and suffering.

That is a huge part of why I created Shadows of Control.

I wanted to create the kind of resource I wish I had found back then. Somewhere people could learn what coercive control and domestic abuse actually look like in everyday life, recognise patterns in their own relationships, and find clear information to help them understand what they were experiencing.

But I also wanted it to be a place for those of us who have already lived through it. A place that gives words to experiences we may never have known how to describe, validates the things we were taught to minimise or doubt, and helps us understand why the impact can continue long after we leave.

Since starting this page, thousands of you have found your way here. Some are still trying to understand what is happening. Some are preparing to leave. Some left years ago and are still untangling the impact. And so many of you have told me that simply finding words for what you experienced has helped you understand your own story and begin trusting yourself again.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month Offer – 40% Off

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and I’ve been thinking about what awareness actually means to me.

For me, it goes far beyond knowing that domestic abuse exists. It means understanding what it actually looks like from the inside. The control other people don’t see. The behaviours victims gradually learn to normalise. The fear, confusion and self-doubt. The barriers that make leaving so difficult. And the work of rebuilding yourself afterwards.

So, for the first week of October, I want to make the deeper side of Shadows of Control more accessible to those of you who have been reading along but haven’t yet joined as Members.

Become a Member with 40% off

As a Member, you’ll receive a new Member-only post every week, including personal reflections drawn from my own lived experience, deeper articles exploring the psychological impact of abuse, downloadable worksheets to support reflection and recovery, Survivor Insights bringing together the voices and experiences of other survivors, and Clarity Series checklists and decoders designed to help you recognise patterns and make sense of what you experienced. You’ll also get immediate access to the entire Member archive, with more than 60 articles and resources already waiting for you and a new one added every week.

You can browse the full Member Library here: Explore the Member Library

Here is just a small selection of articles and resources in the Member Library:

• Clarity Series: 120 Signs of Emotional and Psychological Abuse

• Why It Took Me Ten Years to Realise I Was Being Abused

• Is This Coercive Control? Reflection Article and Downloadable Worksheet

• The Language of Control: 150 Examples of Verbal Abuse

• Survivor Insights: When We Finally Realise We’re Being Abused

• Letter From an Abuser: A Masterclass in Manipulation

• The Slow Fade of Self: Reflection Article + Downloadable Worksheet

• Dialogue With an Abuser: What an Online Exchange Revealed About Control Tactics

• How Do you Know If An Abuser Has Really Changed?

• The Letter I Wrote to My Abusive Husband Before I Knew It Was Abuse

• Why Every Answer I Gave My Husband Was Already Wrong

• “Mummy, I Can’t Tell You I Love You in Front of Dad”

If you’ve found Shadows of Control helpful and would like to go deeper, I’d love to welcome you into the Member community. Your membership gives you full access to everything above, while also helping me continue creating free educational resources that can reach those who may still be trying to understand what they are experiencing.

The 40% discount is available until midnight on 8 October. After that, annual membership will return to €70.

I hope to have you as part of the community.

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You may have spent years putting your partner first. You might have adjusted your plans, cared for them when they were struggling, and carried responsibilities they treated as your duty. Then the moment you ask for something yourself, your abuser calls you selfish.

You may want an evening alone, and they accuse you of neglecting them. You may make plans with a friend, and they say you care more about other people. You may spend money on something you need, and they act as though you are being wasteful. You may rest because you are ill, and they make you feel guilty for not doing enough. After everything you give and everything you sacrifice for them, they still expect you to feel ashamed for having needs.

Your abuser uses the word ‘selfish’ to make your basic needs look like moral failures. They turn your need for rest, friendship, health, privacy or happiness into evidence against you, then expect you to defend your character.

When Selfishness Becomes a Weapon

Many people who have lived with an abuser describe the same painful pattern. The abuser expects your sacrifices and efforts, then resents you for wanting something for yourself, whether that means making plans without them, pursuing work or education, taking up a hobby or simply resting.

One male survivor described what happened when he developed a migraine:

“If I had to lie in a dark room, she’d bang around, open the door, switch on the light and slam the door shut, forcing me to get up to switch it off. Then she’d do it again, all because I was ‘selfish’ for being ill.”

His partner saw that he was suffering and deliberately made his condition harder to manage, then called him selfish for needing rest.

Abusers can also communicate the accusation without saying a word. One survivor described how a look or change in mood conveyed the message:

“He didn’t even have to say out loud that I was selfish. I knew that’s what he was thinking just from his body language, facial expressions, and mood shift, like the way he’d look at me in disgust when I sat down to relax for a moment.”

Their disapproval can become enough to influence your behaviour, because you learn to anticipate their reaction.

Another survivor described how deeply that message can take hold:

“I always put him and the children first but as soon as I wanted something I was made to feel selfish and then I felt guilty! Even now 20 years on I feel guilty when I do things for me, but I make myself do these things or he wins.”

When an abuser calls you selfish often enough, you can begin to internalise the message and limit your own choices in anticipation of their response. That conditioning can remain long after you leave.

When Having a Life of Your Own Becomes Selfish

Abusers may call you selfish whenever you direct time or energy towards a life of your own. Seeing friends gives you support and perspective, while pursuing your health, interests or ambitions strengthens parts of your life that exist beyond them.

One survivor shared how her partner criticised her whenever she went out with a friend:

“When I’d come back home from seeing a friend, he’d start laying into me saying how I care about my friends more than him, how that means I’m ‘putting myself first’ and don’t consider want he wants. He made me feel selfish for having any life at all outside our relationship.”

The same accusation can extend to taking care of your health. Abusers may expect care from you while criticising you for resting, exercising or attending to your own physical needs.

One survivor described being mocked for exercising:

“When I started yoga and started to exercise, he mocked me and called me selfish. Meanwhile he’s in competitive sport where physical training is clearly required. But if I took care of my health, I was selfish.”

Work and ambition can provoke the same response:

“I taught him to drive and I supported his learning. He built a career while I was told I wasn’t allowed to as it was selfish.”

Across these examples, the pattern is remarkably similar. The abuser expects you to support their friendships, interests or ambitions while treating the time and energy you invest in yourself as something you are taking away from them.

When Leaving Them Becomes Selfish

Leaving can produce some of the harshest accusations. An abuser may call you selfish for pursuing safety or happiness after years of harm. One survivor said:

“He told me I was selfish for leaving him, as though I owed it to him to continue enduring his abuse.”

Another said:

“Even though I left him because of abuse, he told me that I was selfish and putting myself first for caring more about what I wanted than what he and the children wanted, which was to have a happy family. It didn’t matter that he was the one that made it unbearable to stay.”

After separation, abusers may repeat the same accusation to relatives, friends or professionals. One survivor said that when she filed for divorce, her former partner told everyone that she was selfish and unloving. By presenting your decision as a character flaw, the abuser shifts attention away from the behaviour that led you to leave.

The Reasons Why Your Abuser Sees You As Selfish

The accusation of selfishness makes sense when you understand the abusive beliefs and attitudes behind their behaviour. In my article on the abusive mindset, I use the COERCES framework to describe seven connected beliefs: Control, Ownership, Entitlement, Righteousness, Competitiveness, Enmeshment and Superiority.

These beliefs help explain how an abuser can accept years of sacrifice from you and still genuinely position you as selfish when you start making choices for yourself.

Control

At the centre of the abusive mindset is the belief that control is necessary and justified. Decisions are something they expect to manage rather than share.

This deep-rooted belief in the right to control means they feel entitled to determine where you go, who you speak to, how you spend your time, what you wear, and even how you think. They see freedom as disobedience, autonomy as a threat, and compromise as weakness.

When you make a choice for yourself instead of following what they want, calling you selfish gives them a way to frame your independence as wrongdoing and pressure you back into compliance.

Ownership

Abusers will treat the relationship as a claim over your life. They expect access to your time, attention and resources because they experience these things as belonging to them.

When you make plans of your own, your abuser experiences your independence as something you have taken away from them. Calling you selfish expresses that sense of ownership. In their mind, you are withholding something they believe they have a right to receive.

Entitlement

Entitlement sits at the heart of the double standard survivors describe. Abusers give greater importance to their own needs and preferences and expect you to prioritise them too.

They feel entitled to your time and energy, so when you direct either towards yourself, they experience it as withholding something they are owed. This is why they can pursue their own interests freely while calling you selfish for doing the same.

Righteousness

Righteousness allows abusers to see their behaviour as justified. They cast themselves as the neglected partner or the person who gives more, which gives them moral permission to judge your choices and punish you when you fail to meet their expectations.

Calling you selfish reinforces this position. It casts them as the person who decides what a good partner should do, while your choices become evidence that you have failed their standard.

Competitiveness

Abusers may experience your needs as competing with theirs. If you spend money on yourself, they focus on what remains available to them. If you spend time with friends, they experience another person receiving attention they believe should belong to them.

Within this mindset, caring for yourself can become something they experience as losing. After separation, this competitiveness can extend to the story of the relationship itself. Calling you selfish allows your abuser to position themselves as the person who was wronged and your decision to leave as something you did to them.

Enmeshment

Abusers struggle to recognise you as a separate person with your own needs and preferences. They expect your thoughts, feelings and choices to remain closely aligned with their own, and may experience your individuality as rejection or disloyalty.

Calling you selfish allows them to treat your separateness as a character flaw. Your own needs and preferences become acceptable when they align with what your abuser wants, while asserting a different need can become evidence, in their eyes, that you are putting yourself before the relationship.

Superiority

Underlying all of this is a belief in superiority. The abuser sees themselves as more rational, capable and deserving of control. They believe their judgement is above yours and give greater importance to their own needs.

Their sense of superiority gives them the authority, in their own mind, to decide which of your needs are reasonable and which are selfish. When they call you selfish, they dismiss your reasons for making a choice and replace them with their own interpretation of your motives.

Sometimes They Know You Are Not Selfish

The COERCES framework helps explain why an abuser may genuinely believe you are selfish. But not every abuser is the same and not every accusation comes from a sincere belief that you have done something wrong. Some abusers know full well that you are not selfish and they use the word deliberately because they know it hurts you, makes you doubt yourself, or pressures you to give them what they want.

Some may also take satisfaction in the distress they cause. They may continue an accusation after they can see that you are hurt, intensify it when you become upset, or use vulnerabilities they know will affect you most deeply. In those moments, understanding whether they truly believe you are selfish becomes less important than recognising what they are doing with the accusation. They are using it to hurt you, punish you or exert power over you.

Your Needs Matter Too

After years of being called selfish, it can become difficult to separate the accusation from your own judgement of yourself. You may still feel guilty when you rest, spend money on yourself, make plans with friends or choose something simply because you want it.

If you still live with an abuser, pay attention to when the accusation appears. If “selfish” repeatedly follows moments when you express a need, set a boundary or make an independent choice, that pattern tells you something important about what your abuser expects from you.

For survivors, the guilt can continue long after the relationship ends. The survivor who said she makes herself do things for herself because otherwise “he wins” describes something many people recognise. Sometimes recovery means doing the thing anyway, even while the guilt is still there, and gradually learning that the feeling of selfishness does not mean you are being selfish.

You are a person with needs, preferences and a life of your own. You were always allowed to matter too.

You might also like to read:

What You’ll Find in This Article

• Why cross-examination can feel especially difficult when you are trying to explain domestic abuse, coercive control or concerns about your child.

• How I used AI to prepare for the pressure of cross-examination and practise responding to challenging questions.

• What practising cross-examination taught me about staying focused when difficult questions made me defensive, emotional or tempted to over-explain.

• How to use AI to practise with your own case material, including ways to make the process more manageable if it becomes overwhelming.

• A downloadable Cross-Examination Preparation Pack with four practical resources: A mock AI cross-examination, 10 Common Trap Questions, 15 Cross-Examination Tips, and Useful AI Prompts for Cross-Examination Preparation.

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Earlier this year, I had my family court hearing that represented the culmination of years of legal proceedings. Throughout that time, I had been trying to protect my son from his father and to make the court understand what was happening to our child.

By the time the hearing arrived, more than 100 legal letters had passed between the solicitors. Those letters addressed an exhausting catalogue of concerns. Two court ordered assessments had also taken place. Each assessment involved interviews with me, my former husband and our child. A child psychologist examined our circumstances and prepared recommendations about what should happen next.

After years of gathering information, responding to allegations, reading reports and trying to explain the harm, the hearing would finally decide the arrangements for my son’s contact with his father.

I felt desperate. I knew how important the hearing was. I also knew how easily a protective mother can become the focus of suspicion when she raises concerns about an abuser.

I was terrified of the cross-examination. So many women who had been through it had described it to me as brutal, triggering, overwhelming and deeply destabilising — an experience that left them feeling as though they were the ones on trial rather than the person who had harmed them.

Swimming Against the Current

I had already been warned about the family court system. My solicitor has more than forty years of experience in family law, and she was painfully honest with me from our first meeting.

She told me that very little about the family courts is fair or just. She told me that I would be swimming against the current. She promised to fight for me, yet she also wanted me to understand the environment I was entering.

Her warning stayed with me throughout the case.

I knew the research around coercive control, and how often abusers present themselves as the injured parent while portraying the protective mother as unstable, angry or unreasonable. I also knew the language commonly used to discredit women who raise concerns about their children’s safety.

During one court ordered assessment, the psychologist asked me what I wanted the father’s access to be. I wanted to scream out reactively ‘Nothing! He harms us’. But I knew better.

My solicitor had already warned me against saying that. She explained that the court could describe me as alienating or unreasonable. It could interpret my fear as evidence that I wanted to remove my son’s father from his life. She told me that I needed to present my position in language the court would recognise as reasonable, even when that language failed to capture the reality of our lives.

That is the bind protective mothers face. You try to protect your child, yet the system may interpret your protective response as the problem. You are expected to package the truth into a form that feels acceptable to the people deciding your child’s future.

Preparing for the Worst

As the hearing approached, my anxiety became overwhelming. I was terrified that I would break down in court. I feared that I would become angry. I worried that the barrister representing my former husband would ask a question that left me confused or unable to respond.

My solicitor told me to remain calm, avoid anger, and argument. She told me to keep my emotions under control and be “pleasant”.

I understood why she gave me that advice, yet it infuriated me and felt like an impossible demand. The person who had caused years of harm would sit across from me while his barrister challenged my memory and questioned my motives. I would need to describe painful experiences in a controlled voice, answer questions designed to make me defensive, and resist the instinct to argue against every accusation. The courtroom would expect me to remain composed while someone else tried to dismantle my credibility.

I had spent years surviving a relationship with an abuser. Now I had to appear calm while explaining the consequences of what he had done.

So I turned to AI for help.

Using AI to Prepare for Cross-Examination

At first, I hoped that AI might be able to offer general guidance on dealing with cross-examination in family court. And it did. But then it followed its advice with a question: “Would you like to experience the pressure of being questioned through a mock cross-examination?”

Yes, I thought. That’s exactly what I needed!

I gave the AI a summary of my case, the briefing I had prepared for my barrister, my evidence spreadsheet and the facts I had gathered throughout the proceedings. Then I asked it to act as a ruthless barrister for the opposing side.

I told it to question me as though its job was to make me look unreasonable, unstable or negligent. I asked it to use leading questions, challenge my answers, twist my words and put propositions to me that I knew were untrue. I asked it to focus particularly on the areas I was most afraid of being questioned about, and to give me feedback after each response.

I wanted to experience some of that pressure before I had to face it for real.

At the start of this process, my anxiety skyrocketed. The AI delivered questions that I had never even considered, one after another, with little time to gather my thoughts. It was overwhelming and deeply triggering. The questioning felt relentless, and I could feel myself becoming increasingly flustered as I scrambled to work out how to respond.

I had to keep reminding myself: I wasn’t in the courtroom. Nobody was judging my answers. Nothing was at stake. This was practice. And that was precisely why I could afford to struggle here.

The Hardest Part of Preparation

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Before I married my now ex-husband, I had spent 10 years in a cult. The experience affected me deeply, and for years I blamed myself. I kept asking how I could have allowed myself to be manipulated and controlled.

I then entered a relationship with someone who created much of the same dynamic. After spending a decade in a controlling environment, control had become familiar to me. When my husband began to exert the same kind of control, I did not recognise it straight away. It took another ten years, and the support of an excellent therapist, for me to understand that the intimidation, isolation, threats, gaslighting and coercion in my marriage were forms of coercive control and domestic abuse.

Once I understood what was happening, I confronted my husband. I told him that he was abusive and controlling, and that my therapist had confirmed it. In hindsight, this wasn’t the right choice and it led to further escalation and manipulation.

“Can’t you see what is happening?” he responded. “Your therapist is manipulating you just as the cult leader did. When you were in the cult, you were absolutely adamant that everything he made you believe was true, and now you are doing the same thing. You couldn’t see back then that everything he told you was a lie, and you cannot see now that everything she tells you is a lie.”

He targeted a vulnerability I had carried for years. He used my self-doubt and self-blame to shift responsibility for his behaviour onto me. He returned to the same accusation repeatedly because he knew it could make me question my own judgement.

Turning Trust Into a Weapon

Abusers often pay close attention to the painful experiences you share with them. You may tell them about something difficult because you want them to understand you. You may explain why a particular comment hurts, or share something from childhood that still affects you. They respond with apparent care, and you feel relieved that someone close to you understands a part of your life you usually keep private.

Later, during a disagreement, the abuser brings that experience back into the conversation. They use your own words to hurt you or claim that your feelings are unreliable. You recognise what you told them, yet the abuser changes its meaning and turns it against you.

When an abuser weaponises past trauma, they use what you have survived to target you with greater precision. They may repeat words that once hurt you or blame your response to their cruelty on harm you experienced before meeting them. Their apparent understanding gives them access to deeply personal parts of your life, and they choose to exploit that access.

The Appearance of Care

Early in a relationship, an abuser may show a strong interest in what you have been through. They give you time to speak and they respond with sympathy. They may present themselves as someone who will treat you with more care than people who hurt you in the past.

You may share more because their response feels reassuring. When someone appears to understand a painful experience, feeling closer to them can seem natural. You may hope that this understanding will help you build a safe relationship together.

Looking back can change how you understand those conversations. You remember feeling heard at the time, but you recognise how the abuser later selected details from them when they wanted to wound you.

As one survivor shared, “All the times he acted caring and as if he was intently listening, it was just to pinpoint what he could weaponize later.”

Another survivor described how her partner interfered with her work while presenting himself as helpful.

She reflected: “He had gathered so much information about me early on that he could use it later. It was a very confusing world to live in.”

Her experience reflects the confusion an abuser creates when they offer sympathy while also causing the difficulties that leave you needing support.

Reopening Old Wounds

An abuser who knows your history can target something that already carries pain. They may repeat an insult you heard growing up or refer to an experience you have struggled to recover from, choosing the detail most likely to unsettle you.

One survivor described how her partner used what he knew about her childhood during her first pregnancy: “He spent my first pregnancy telling me how he couldn’t imagine me having motherly instincts, because I’m such a cold person. He knew to say this because this is also exactly what my mother said to me my whole life, and he knew it disgusted me.”

He understood why those words would hurt her. He repeated them while she was becoming a parent in order to diminish her and undermine her confidence.

When more than one person uses the same insult, you may start to wonder whether they have identified something true about you. The abuser relies on that doubt and uses it to strengthen their influence.

One woman described the lasting effect of this manipulation: “The constant, low-level criticism is still a voice in my head, six years later. It sticks because he continued where my mother left off.”

Using Shame as Control

An abuser may also attach blame to an experience in which someone harmed you, or use a decision you made during a difficult period to judge your character. They take the shame you have struggled with and keep returning to it, even after you have worked to understand what happened.

One survivor wrote: “My ‘crimes’ were brought up time after time for many years. It didn’t matter that the ‘crimes’ were not even what he made them out to be.”

Abusers often control the story by using loaded words such as “crimes.” They exaggerate what happened, assign motives that serve their accusation, and force you into the exhausting position of defending yourself.

You may spend a great deal of energy explaining the circumstances or repeating what you have already acknowledged. The abuser keeps your focus on proving your character while avoiding responsibility for their own behaviour.

Their repeated accusations also allow them to claim authority. They position themselves as the person entitled to judge your character and decide whether you have done enough to make amends.

Discrediting Your Reality

An abuser can use your past to undermine your understanding of what they are doing in the present. When you describe behaviour that hurts you, they may blame your distress on an earlier experience and present your history as the explanation for everything you are raising.

Abusers often claim a superior understanding of your emotional life. Because they know what you have been through, their explanation may initially sound informed or caring. They use that apparent insight to dismiss the concern you are trying to express.

When I confronted my husband about his controlling behaviour, he told me I was simply “projecting” the control I experienced in the cult onto him. He used that accusation to move attention away from his behaviour and place the problem with me.

Exposing What You Shared

The betrayal can extend beyond conversations between the two of you. An abuser may tell other people about a private struggle or circulate personal information to support the version of you they want others to believe.

They may present themselves as concerned while sharing details that encourage others to doubt you. They use your vulnerability to build credibility for themselves and damage yours.

One survivor described how her partner accessed her journal and used it when she tried to leave: “He got hold of my journal where I wrote about some of my most embarrassing moments and things that traumatised me that I was trying to heal from, and copied some entries and filed it with the court.”

He used her private attempts to heal as material for his case against her. Abusers can select writing from a moment of distress and encourage others to judge your credibility through it while withholding the circumstances surrounding that distress and their own conduct.

Another survivor said, “I shared with my husband in complete confidence that I’d been molested as a child. He was the first person I told. When I left him, he threatened to share that information with everyone I knew, and I am aware of at least two people that he did tell.”

An abuser can use the threat of further exposure as another means of control. You may feel pressure to accommodate them when they have already shown a willingness to reveal something deeply personal.

Reclaiming Your Story

The abuser may have repeated their version of your past so often that it has shaped the way you see yourself. If they used an experience you already carried heavily, they may have used it to make you question your judgement or feel responsible for harm they caused. They took something painful and made it serve their own need for control.

For some survivors, this involves information shared in confidence. For others, the abuser may use details they noticed, discovered, or learned from someone else. They can pull an event from your past away from its context and present it as evidence that your feelings are unreliable or that their treatment of you was somehow justified.

That is a profound betrayal of your experience. The abuser may have tried to take ownership of your story, but they cannot determine its meaning. Your history is still yours, and their distortion of it does not erase what you know you lived through.

Quotes are drawn from survivor experiences shared publicly on the Shadows of Control social media pages and have been lightly edited for spelling, grammar, clarity, or length.

You might also like to read:

The Survivor Insights series brings you the voices of survivors themselves. These words come from people who have shared their experiences across my social media pages, helping others recognise what an abuser can make everyday life feel like.

When you live in a relationship with an abuser, you may find yourself responsible for keeping the whole household going. You finish your paid work and come home to another load of responsibilities, while your partner expects you to take care of them as well. Or you’ve spent the whole day caring for the children and the home, and your partner still expects you to prioritise their needs on top of that. Even when you ask directly for help, they leave the work with you and criticise how you manage it.

The abuser depends on you doing what needs doing, whether because you care or because there are consequences if you don’t. You want to make sure your children are properly taken care of, so you step in when your partner refuses to contribute or neglects their needs. Each time you have to do something they leave undone, they continue enjoying the benefit of your effort while you have less energy available for yourself.

Many survivors describe the loneliness of having someone beside them who adds to their workload and offers little care in return. The abuser may call you lazy when you sit down, then expect you to keep serving them through illness or recovery from surgery. When you reach exhaustion, they make your tiredness another reason to find fault with you.

The voices gathered here describe what it feels like to carry that responsibility, and how survivors begin to recognise just how much their partner expected from them.

When Everything Falls to You

The abuser leaves you to manage all the practical work of family life, including the responsibility for noticing what needs doing. They expect you to remember the appointments, arrange your working hours around the children, and serve their every need and demand, while treating their own time as theirs to spend as they please.

You may try explaining how much you have to do, hoping they will take a share of it. When they continue refusing, you still have a child who needs care or a bill that needs paying, so you find a way to manage. The abuser takes advantage of that commitment and leaves you carrying the full load on your own.

“My ex-husband repeatedly refused to help, to earn, to contribute in terms of effort or provision. This was despite the multiple health issues, including our daughter’s, and bereavement of family that I faced. I worked, cleaned, shopped, cooked, nursed, nurtured, did the manual jobs and all the life admin for all of us, not to maintain control but out of necessity. He refused repeatedly to help me, to share the burden, and yet criticised me, until he had drained me of everything, energy and money.”

“He expected me to earn money but never considered who would care for our children or manage medical appointments.”

“My ex-husband expected me to take full responsibility for parenting our baby, work full-time from home, and manage the house all at the same time. He’d happily spend time reading books, watching movies, or taking 2-hour long baths, while I never had a moment to myself.”

“I was doing 100% of the housework on top of working 60 hours a week and taking care of a toddler. He didn’t even help me when I was so sick I nearly died.”

“I gave up my job when I had our baby. I felt I couldn’t work and look after a child and the home as it was all on me. I lost my confidence and felt like a single mother. He sabotaged mostly everything I tried, including turning the school teachers against me. It’s hard to believe.”

“He refused to have anything to do with finances, so he could pretend he didn’t know about upcoming bills or taxes, and therefore spent every dime we earned, so I couldn’t save anything, or even afford to have dental work.”

The abuser can leave you with responsibility for everything while continuing to demand a say in how you do it. You carry the work, and they reserve the right to criticise the result.

When They Criticise the Work They Rely On

Some survivors describe working harder in response to their partner’s criticism, hoping that finishing more of the housework will finally satisfy them. The abuser encourages this by presenting each unfinished task as evidence that you should be making more effort, even while they leave their own share for you.

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Self-blame can become one of the most lasting effects of domestic abuse. An abuser may spend months or years claiming that you caused every argument or forced their cruel reactions. They may tell you that you deserved the harm they caused. When an abuser repeats these messages, their version of events can begin to feel more familiar than your own.

You may also look back with knowledge you gained later and judge choices you made while trying to stay safe. Fear, confusion and feelings for the person involved shaped those decisions. The abuser created the conditions you had to navigate, then chose the actions that caused harm. You responded to the situation they created.

Self-blame often eases gradually as you return to this truth in different ways. These ideas can help you understand how blame took hold and strengthen trust in your own perspective. Take what feels useful today and return to the rest when you feel ready.

1. Notice the Blame Message

Self-blame often arrives as a short, absolute sentence: I caused it, I allowed it, I should have known better. Pay attention to the exact sentence that appears when self-blame takes over, because putting the thought into words can make it easier to examine.

Consider how that message served the abuser during the relationship. Abusers use blame to shift attention away from the harm they chose to cause and make their partners feel responsible for preventing it. Naming the message can help you recognise where it came from and respond with a steadier thought: “This is a blame message. That does not make it the truth.”

2. Separate Regret from Responsibility

Regret reflects a wish that circumstances had been different, while responsibility belongs to the person who chose to control, intimidate, degrade or harm you.

You may regret staying, returning, trusting the abuser or responding in a particular way. You can hold compassion for choices you would make differently today while keeping responsibility in the right place. The abuser made the decisions that caused harm.

3. Question the Idea that Harm Must Have a Reason

Many people search for a personal explanation after someone harms them. The mind may look for a mistake, a flaw, or a moment that could have changed everything. This search can create the feeling that suffering must reveal something about your character.

The reality is that the abuser chose to exploit trust and cause harm. Their choices explain what happened far more clearly than any judgment you make about yourself.

4. Remember What You Knew Then

Hindsight can make past decisions appear straightforward. While you were in a relationship with an abuser, you were living with the information, resources and options available at that time. The abuser may have controlled information, created fear around resistance, or made it harder to reach support.

Looking back with fairness means recognising the circumstances you faced. Your past self made decisions while trying to cope with the reality the abuser created.

5. Recognise the Abuser’s Words

An abuser may call you selfish when you express a need. They may describe you as unstable when you speak about their behaviour, or accuse you of cruelty when you set a limit. Repeated accusations can stay in your mind long after the relationship ends.

When a harsh judgment appears, consider whether it sounds like something the abuser used to say. The abuser wanted you to doubt your own perception because doubt made control easier. You can return to the evidence of your experience and remind yourself that your response made sense within the circumstances.

6. Bring Back the Context

Self-blame often focuses on one decision while leaving out everything surrounding it. You may have agreed because the abuser threatened consequences. You may have complied because the abuser escalated whenever you challenged them. You may have returned to them because the abuser had damaged your finances or isolated you from support.

Looking at the full context shows how the abuser restricted your choices and shaped the decisions available to you. A fuller account gives your actions the fairness and understanding they deserve.

7. Understand Survival Responses

Your body responds to danger in ways that help you survive. You may have fought, fled, frozen, or tried to appease the abuser. At times, your body may have felt unable to act at all.

These responses reflect the pressure and fear the abuser created. If you froze during an assault, the abuser still chose to assault you. If you tried to appease the abuser, they still chose to create the fear that made appeasing feel necessary.

8. Make Room for Your Feelings

Anger can show where the abuser crossed a boundary. Sadness may reflect the life and future you hoped for. Confusion can reflect the mixed messages the abuser created when they moved between affection and harm.

Your feelings carry information about your experience. Giving yourself space to notice one feeling at a time, whether through writing, conversation or rest, can help you understand what you have carried.

9. Consider the Power Dynamics

Self-blame can make your choices seem separate from the power the abuser held in the relationship. Looking at the power dynamics means considering how the abuser used control, threats or punishment to shape what felt possible and safe for you.

For example, you may remember friendships fading during the relationship and blame yourself for losing contact. A fuller account may show that the abuser criticised your friends, made contact difficult or punished you for seeing them. The abuser created that pressure, and their control shaped the choices available to you.

10. Focus on the Abuser’s Choices

Choose one memory and start with what the abuser chose to do. This keeps attention on the action that caused harm, rather than on how you responded to it.

Responsibility remains with the abuser because they chose to cause harm. Your response, whether you fought back, complied, tried to calm them, decided against reporting them or made a separate mistake, does not change their responsibility for their actions.

11. Soften “should have” thoughts

The phrase “should have” can place impossible demands on your past self. It often assumes you had safety, freedom, and support when the abuser had already limited each of those things.

When this thought appears, bring yourself back to what you were managing. You may have wanted to leave while fearing the abuser’s response. You may have needed support while the abuser had cut you off from people who could help. A fairer view recognises that you were doing your best within a harmful situation.

12. Treat Your Trust with Compassion

You may blame yourself for believing the abuser’s apologies, accepting promises to change, or hoping the caring parts of the relationship would return. These responses often came from your wish to repair the relationship and believe the person you loved.

The abuser chose to use your trust to maintain control and continue causing harm. Your ability to trust reflects your capacity for closeness and connection, while responsibility remains with the abuser for exploiting that trust.

13. Use New Understanding to Revisit the Past

You may blame yourself for missing warning signs or staying after you began to recognise the abuser’s behaviour. Learning about abuse dynamics, coercive control and trauma responses can give you a clearer understanding of the circumstances you faced. It can show how the abuser used fear, isolation, financial control and periods of affection to make leaving feel dangerous or out of reach.

14. Notice How Blame from Others Has Affected You

Family members, professionals or mutual friends may have blamed you, focusing on why you stayed or how you responded. Their reactions may have echoed the abuser’s version of events and deepened your self-blame. Their judgment does not make their view accurate, especially when they did not understand the control, fear, and pressure the abuser created.

You deserved people who believed you, named the abuser’s behaviour clearly and offered practical support. When others failed to respond with care, that failure forms part of the wider context of what you experienced.

15. See Your Whole Self

Self-blame can narrow your identity until the relationship or one painful decision seems to define everything. Your experience is part of your life, and your life also contains qualities, interests and strengths that existed before the abuser entered it.

Think about something that still feels true about you. It may be your curiosity, humour, loyalty or determination. Giving that quality a real place in your life can help you reconnect with the person beyond the harm the abuser caused.

16. Rebuild Self-Trust Through Small Choices

Self-trust often grows through everyday experiences of listening to yourself. Start with choices that feel manageable, such as what to read, where to sit or how to spend part of your afternoon.

Notice your preference and act on it where you can. Each choice can remind you that your views, comfort and needs deserve space in your own life.

17. Offer Yourself the Same Compassion You Would Give Others

When you find yourself blaming yourself, pause and consider whether you would judge another survivor as harshly for making the same choices in the same circumstances. Many people offer patience, understanding and compassion to others, then apply far stricter standards to themselves.

Try viewing your actions through the same fair lens. You were responding to fear and pressure that the abuser created, and your choices deserve the same understanding you would extend to someone else.

18. Let Your Needs Matter

Self-blame can make you feel that your needs caused problems or placed too much pressure on the relationship. An abuser may reinforce this belief by treating your needs as unreasonable or dangerous, especially when you ask for rest, space, support or safety.

Recognising what you need in the present can help you challenge that message. Meeting one need, such as taking a break, seeking information or contacting someone safe, reminds you that your needs deserve care and that the abuser chose how they responded to them.

19. Separate Growth from Self-Blame

You may look at what you know now and blame yourself for choices you made while you were with the abuser. Greater awareness can show you what you would do differently today, yet it cannot change the fear, control and limited options the abuser created at the time.

Your growth reflects what you have learned since then. The abuser remained responsible for the harm they caused, and your present understanding can help you view your past self with greater fairness.

20. Choose the Story you Carry Forward

Self-blame can create a story where a personal flaw caused the abuse. A more accurate account names the abuser’s choices and recognises how you responded to the situation they created.

You can return to a simple truth when old blame messages come back: the abuser chose to cause harm, and you are learning to trust your own perspective again. Repeating a fair account can make it more available when self-blame feels strong.

Moving Forward

Self-blame may return at different times, especially when new experiences, conversations or memories bring up fresh feelings. You may understand clearly that the abuser was responsible, then find an old blame message returning during a difficult moment. This can reflect how deeply the abuser’s messages and control shaped your understanding of yourself.

Each time you recognise self-blame, you have an opportunity to return to the fuller story. Looking back with greater understanding can help you replace harsh judgment with compassion for the person who was trying to cope and survive an impossibly difficult situation.

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Years before I understood that my husband was abusive, and six years before I eventually left him, I wrote him a letter.

I was pregnant at the time, and his behaviour towards me had escalated considerably. I knew I was unhappy and that I felt isolated. I knew I was increasingly unable to communicate with him. I even recognised that he was using certain fears to force me to comply. What I did not know was that I was experiencing domestic abuse and coercive control.

I explained it to myself as ‘relationship problems’. I thought he was just anxious about the arrival of our first child. I thought we needed to communicate better. I thought that if I could explain my feelings clearly enough, calmly enough and rationally enough, he might finally understand what I was trying to tell him.

So after another confrontation, I sat down and wrote him a letter.

Reading it now, what surprises me most is how much I could already see. I described isolation, intimidation, threats and pressure to comply, but I had no framework for understanding these behaviours as coercive control.

I am sharing this letter because it offers a way to see coercive control from inside the relationship, including the ways you can begin adapting around an abuser’s behaviour. Those adaptations can reveal how much control is already shaping your life.

The Context Behind The Letter

When I wrote this letter, I was pregnant with our first child and living in a country 13,000 kilometres away from everyone I knew and loved. My husband had persuaded me to move there with the promise that we would visit my family regularly, but once we were there, that changed.

The letter concerned my father’s 70th birthday. I had not seen my family for two years, and our baby would be nine months old by the time of the celebration. I wanted my family to meet him and to be part of his life.

My husband had now decided that we would not go. He was also telling me I could only visit my family with our child once every four years. The distance he had created was becoming a powerful way to isolate me from them.

The Letter

“I have decided to write down my thoughts to you rather than to speak about it, because my last attempt to communicate didn’t turn out too well.

I have now accepted that we are not going to join my whole family for my dad’s 70th, since you won’t allow [our child] on a plane. Yesterday I was feeling so upset about this. I have been very isolated and it’s 2 years since I’ve seen my family and it would have been a chance for all of them to meet [our child], plus, it’s an important occasion for my dad.

I know something like that is not important to you, but having family together is something that is important to me. Instead of acknowledging that it must be hard for me not to go, you just belittled my feelings of being upset and called me melodramatic and crazy.

I went to watch some TV just to calm down, but you would not let me have that space, instead coming to be playful as though nothing had happened. And when I didn’t like that, you went straight into my face shouting “what is wrong with you?” over and over again, making me even more upset.

When I feel like that, I find it so hard to communicate, and that’s why I’ve said dozens of times, it is better for me not to discuss anything with you until I feel better. I find it hard to express my feelings and to think straight through all the emotion. You get so angry when I can’t immediately provide you with a logical and rational lists of reasons for my feelings and you start screaming at me, and then I get more upset, and so it always goes every single time.

I took myself off to bed to “sleep it off” so we could then have talked about it all calmly and rationally in the morning, but you just come in and force me to talk, and you push me and push me and push me until I’m ready to crack.

You begin saying things that are so hurtful, turning things completely around, and saying I mustn’t love you because I wanted to see my family, and then you storm out of the room slamming the door, until I am left an emotional mess, so upset that I could hardly breathe and I felt sick.

Then you storm in again, furious that I felt sick and blaming me for not caring about our baby, and telling me that me feeling sick will harm him and cause him permanent damage. All I had done was go to bed to relax and then I am faced with an onslaught.

Then once again, you threaten to email my family and friends to tell them personal things about me, again using a fear you know I have to force my compliance with your point of view.

One thing I want you to understand, is that me wanting to visit my family, and for my family to get to know our baby and for him to be part of their lives and them part of his, does not mean that I love you any less. I can’t even really understand how you make this connection. It just means that I don’t want to become isolated from them because they are important to me too. Why do you feel that I have to exclusively love you and not care about my family?

I am making an enormous sacrifice to agree to not living in [my home country]. The thought of not ever living there again is very hard for me. You have never acknowledged that, and now you are telling me I can only go back once every 4 years.

The reality is that our life living overseas will be much happier if I don’t feel isolated and lonely and distant from my family and if they continue to play a part in our lives, wherever we are in the world.

But it seems that you want me to be isolated, so you can just have me all to yourself.

Here is what the letter reveals about coercive control.

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Therapy can be life changing for someone experiencing abuse. A skilled therapist can help you understand what is happening, recognise patterns that have become normalised, and begin trusting your own perception again. For some victims, therapy becomes one of the first places where another person fully understands the reality they have been living in. For me, it was life-changing.

Yet therapy can also cause considerable harm when a therapist has little understanding of domestic abuse or coercive control. A therapist may interpret domination as ordinary relationship conflict, focus on the victim’s responses rather than the abuser’s actions, or offer advice that would make sense in a healthy relationship but becomes dangerous when one person is exerting power and control over the other.

I recently asked survivors about their experiences with therapists. Their responses ranged from therapists who helped them leave and rebuild their lives to therapists who questioned whether the abuse happened at all.

The experiences survivors shared reveal something important. Therapy itself is not the problem. The therapist’s understanding of abuse can profoundly shape whether therapy gives you greater clarity and safety, or leaves you carrying even more confusion and self-blame.

This article focuses on individual therapy for people experiencing abuse. Couples therapy should not take place when one partner is abusive, as it can obscure the power imbalance, make it harder for the survivor to speak freely, and create opportunities for the abusive partner to use disclosures or therapeutic language against them. I have written separately about why couples therapy is harmful when there is abuse in a relationship.

When a Therapist Helps You Recognise What is Happening

One of the most valuable things a therapist can offer someone experiencing abuse is an informed outside perspective.

Abusers frequently minimise their actions and shift responsibility onto their partners. After living within that environment, you may struggle to judge the seriousness of individual incidents or understand how they connect. You may recognise physical violence while overlooking coercion, intimidation or psychological abuse because these behaviours have gradually become part of everyday life.

One survivor described how her therapist helped her put those pieces together:

“Oh, mine taught me it was abuse. Things like, ‘If this was your friend in your situation, what would you say to them?’ If it wasn’t for her, I’d still be there. She showed me the pattern stemming right back from my childhood, and how I’d learned to underplay emotional and psychological abuse as I was so fixated on the physical and avoiding that, that I’d completely missed the other types of abuse.”

Another survivor’s positive experience came down to something even more fundamental:

“They listened. That was comforting to me. Someone actually listened.”

Being listened to matters enormously when an abuser has repeatedly ignored your opinions and challenged your version of events. A skilled therapist can also offer an independent, informed perspective, one that takes your account seriously, notices patterns of coercion and control, and does not allow the abuser’s explanation to become the default account of the relationship.

For some survivors, that support changes the course of their lives. One woman described her therapist as her “guardian angel” and said she would never have found the strength to separate without her help.

Another explained:

“Every therapist I had listened really well. My first therapist gave me coping strategies since I couldn’t leave the situation at that time. My next therapist was a trauma therapist. And my latest therapist has not dismissed those experiences and is helping me be stronger.”

That response also highlights something important about good therapy. Her first therapist worked with the reality she was living in. She could not leave at that point, so the therapist helped her cope and stay as safe as possible rather than treating leaving as a simple decision.

When Therapy Adds Another Layer of Disbelief

Other survivors described almost the opposite experience.

One was asked: “Did it really happen? Are you sure?”

Another therapist responded to extensive disclosures of abuse by saying: “At least he never hit you.”

Another woman spent an hour explaining the different ways her husband had abused her. At the end, her therapist responded: “Now tell me about his good qualities.”

For someone already living with an abuser who minimises their behaviour or insists that their partner is exaggerating, these responses can deepen existing self-doubt. The survivor may enter therapy hoping for help making sense of what is happening and instead find another person questioning the seriousness of it.

A therapist does not have to agree with every interpretation a client makes. Therapy can be emotionally difficult. It raises questions or invites someone to consider an experience from more than one angle. A survivor may feel overwhelmed, uncertain, angry, ashamed, or conflicted, and good therapy can involve working through those feelings.

The issue is when a therapist consistently minimises harm, overlooks power and control, blames the survivor for abuse, or pushes them toward choices that increase danger.

When Ordinary Relationship Advice Becomes Dangerous Advice

Many therapeutic approaches teach communication, negotiation and boundary setting. These skills can be extremely useful in healthy relationships, where both people can express themselves freely, respect each other’s limits, and negotiate without fear of punishment.

Abuse creates completely different conditions. Coercive control is not a communication problem or a disagreement between equal partners; it is a pattern of behaviour intended to limit another person’s freedom, independence and ability to make decisions. An abusive partner may respond to boundaries, attempts at negotiation, outside support, or plans to leave with escalation and punishment. That means advice that might be helpful in a non-abusive relationship can become dangerous when one person is using power and control.

One survivor described receiving advice from a therapist encouraging her to “negotiate” with the abuser. Another was met with a complete lack of understanding of her situation:

“Mine asked me the classic question, ‘why don’t you just leave?’ I thought at least a therapist would understand all the reasons why that felt impossible.”

Leaving can involve financial dependence, children, housing and concerns about escalation. An abuser may have spent years systematically reducing the victim’s ability to act independently. Advice has to take those circumstances seriously.

One survivor also described a therapist criticising her decision to involve lawyers:

“She told me I was lining the pockets of my solicitors. I felt like I had to defend my decision to seek legal help and that she didn’t understand that it was the only way I felt I could protect my son.”

Therapists bring expertise within their professional field. Domestic abuse, safeguarding and family law can require additional specialist knowledge. A good practitioner recognises where their expertise ends and when another professional or specialist service needs to become involved.

What Abuse-Informed Therapy Looks Like

The positive survivor accounts offer a clear picture of what effective, abuse-informed support can feel like. It is not simply about being kind or sympathetic. It is about understanding the nature of abuse, recognising the realities that may limit a survivor’s options, and helping them regain clarity and agency without placing responsibility for the abuse on them.

• Taking survivors seriously. A therapist can ask questions and assess risk without making someone feel they must prove the abuse happened.

• Understanding coercive control. A therapist looks beyond isolated incidents and considers the wider pattern of fear, intimidation, isolation, monitoring, threats, and punishment for asserting independence.

• No victim-blaming. The therapist recognises that responsibility for abuse remains solely with the person choosing to use violence, intimidation, manipulation, or control.

• Respect for constraints. Leaving may not be immediately safe or possible. Helpful therapy works with where someone is rather than treating leaving as a simple decision.

• Support for agency. Therapy should help survivors understand their choices and make their own decisions, not pressure them towards reconciliation, reporting, forgiveness, or separation.

• Appropriate referrals. A therapist recognises when specialist domestic-abuse, legal, safeguarding, housing, child-protection, or sexual-violence support is needed. They should also explain confidentiality and any safeguarding duties clearly.

• The ability to repair. If a survivor feels misunderstood, blamed, or unsafe, a skilled therapist listens and reflects rather than becoming defensive or insisting their interpretation is the only valid one.

At its best, abuse-informed therapy gives survivors a place where they are taken seriously, where coercive control is not mistaken for ordinary relationship conflict, and where they can begin to trust their own judgement again.

Questions To Ask a Potential Therapist

You are entitled to ask about a therapist’s experience before deciding whether they are the right person to support you. Useful questions include:

• What training or experience do you have in domestic abuse and coercive control?

• How do you distinguish abuse from ordinary relationship conflict?

• How do you work with someone who is currently unable or unwilling to leave?

• How do you approach safety and safeguarding concerns?

• Have you worked with survivors of psychological and coercive abuse as well as physical violence?

Their answers can tell you considerably more than simply asking whether they are “trauma informed.”

Signs a Therapist May Lack Understanding of Coercive Control

Pay attention if a therapist repeatedly treats the abuse as a communication problem or focuses heavily on what you could do differently to prevent the abuser’s behaviour. Minimising verbal, psychological, or emotional abuse because severe physical violence is absent should also raise concern.

Be cautious when a therapist pushes reconciliation, forgiveness or joint sessions without properly assessing coercion and safety. One survivor described being encouraged by an early therapist to “rekindle a relationship” with an abusive sibling, despite having explained why she did not want contact.

Similar concerns apply when the therapist assumes that setting firmer boundaries will solve the problem without considering how the abuser responds when you do assert autonomy or place a boundary.

You should also be able to talk about feeling misunderstood by your therapist. A skilled practitioner can hear that concern and examine it with you rather than becoming defensive or requiring you to accept their interpretation.

Perhaps the most encouraging message in these survivor accounts is that a poor experience with one therapist does not mean you will not receive the support you need with another.

One survivor said: “Some harmed... some helped... all therapists are not created equal.”

Others described having a negative experience with one therapist but later finding one they described as amazing, deeply supportive and instrumental in helping them understand what had happened to them.

Therapists are people, with different training and different areas of expertise. Finding someone who understands trauma does not automatically mean they understand coercive control, just as expertise in general relationship difficulties does not necessarily provide specialist knowledge of domestic abuse.

The right therapeutic relationship can offer something profoundly valuable after abuse. It can give you a place where your experiences are taken seriously and where the abuser no longer controls the interpretation of what happened. As one survivor said of the therapist who helped her finally recognise the abuse: “If it wasn’t for her, I’d still be there.”

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What You’ll Find in This Article

• The tactics abusers use to damage a child’s bond with their safe parent after separation.

• How children are affected when an abuser tries to sever their relationship with a parent.

• The impossible decisions parents face when their child rejects them.

• How to protect your relationship with your child when an abuser targets your bond.

• Why compassion for a child’s experience can exist alongside clear limits on harmful behaviour.

• How a relationship targeted by an abuser can survive, even when the harm continues.

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Six months after I left my husband, my six-year-old son told me that he could no longer say he loved me when he phoned me from his father’s home. He explained that his Dad got sad and angry when he heard it, and that he also couldn’t say he missed me.

My child was being taught that love had consequences. Warmth towards his mother would upset his father, while rudeness and hostility towards me brought approval. At six, he was already monitoring his father’s emotions and changing how he treated me to keep his father settled. He had begun hiding his love for me as though it were something dangerous.

I have written hundreds of articles about coercive control, its impact, and my journey. But this is one of the hardest pieces I have written because it reaches my deepest pain. I have spent years healing from how my ex-husband treated me, yet the harm he has caused, and continues to cause, to my relationship with my son remains a raw and open wound.

Why I Won’t Talk About ‘Parental Alienation’

Abusers targeting the bond between a child and the other parent after separation is a common and well-known behaviour. This pattern is often referred to as ‘parental alienation’, yet the term has become deeply contested and can cause further harm. For that reason, I will not use it here.

Perpetrators have hijacked the term and have used accusations of parental alienation against safe parents who raise concerns about abuse or try to protect their children. Tragically, some abusers have gained greater access or even sole custody after claiming that the protective parent turned their child against them.

Family courts have all too often ignored the fact that a child’s reluctance or refusal to spend time with a parent may reflect that parent’s harmful actions, including domestic abuse. There is a clear distinction between a child rejecting a parent that is abusive and a child who has been manipulated to reject a parent that is safe and loving.

The Cruellest Form of Post-Separation Control

Abusers do not co-parent, they counter-parent, using your bond with your child as another route to control and punish you after separation.

Out of everything an abuser does, this one cuts the deepest. Watching someone systematically damage your bond with your child, use that child as a route of control, and harm you both creates an indescribable level of pain. It violates every instinct you have to protect your child and remain connected. The abuser forces you to fight for a place in your child’s life, which should always have been secure.

The child pays an enormous price. They absorb an adult’s resentment and learn that loving one parent threatens their connection with the other. The child experiences extreme grief and confusion while trying to preserve both relationships and learns to hide part of themselves to keep themselves safe.

How Abusers Fracture the Bond

Abusers can use countless tactics to shape how a child sees the safe parent. The examples below show only some of the ways they may do this, yet each tactic carries the same underlying message: closeness with the abuser requires distance from you.

• They repeatedly speak negatively about you until the child begins to absorb the message.

• They promise a better life or a new family that places you outside the child’s imagined future.

• They involve the child in adult matters such as custody, finances and contact arrangements, then make them feel responsible for fixing the situation.

• They portray themselves as the injured parent so the child feels responsible for their sadness and resentful towards you.

• They create loyalty tests by asking where the child wants to live or which parent they agree with, then punish answers that support the safe parent.

• They create a private alliance with the child and frame every disagreement as the two of them against you.

• They use gifts, trips and rewards to compete with the security of your bond.

• They encourage secrecy and turn forbidden activities into something special that the child shares only with them.

• They show disapproval when the child expresses affection for you and reward rudeness or defiance towards you.

• They rewrite memories and events until the child doubts what they experienced with you.

• They undermine your parenting boundaries so they can present themselves as the fun parent and portray you as overly restrictive.

• They make the child feel responsible for their sadness, wellbeing or ability to cope.

How My Abusive Ex Targeted My Bond with My Son

What follows is only a small selection of the ways my ex-husband targeted my relationship with our son. The harm came through countless repeated moments, many of them small enough to appear insignificant on their own, yet together they created a systematic and sustained effort to pull our child away from me.

He repeatedly spoke negatively about me and continues to do so. He told our son that I was stupid, selfish and weak for leaving the marriage, blamed me for destroying the family, and claimed that leaving him proved I cared more about myself than our child. He also spoke badly about my family and friends, threatening our son’s connection with people who love and support him.

He positioned himself and our son as a united side, while placing me outside it. “We want this, but Mum will not allow it.” “We believe this, but Mum does not.” Each issue reinforced the idea that Mum is standing in the way of our happiness.

He told our child that the arrangement of four nights with me and three nights with him was unfair and selfish. He then made our child feel responsible for persuading me to change it.

He used excitement and permissiveness to compete with our relationship. He bought expensive gifts and arranged lavish holidays. During video calls while our son was with me, he showed him puppies, kittens and toys that were waiting at his house. My son then spent time with me anticipating his return to his father to receive them.

He undermined my parenting boundaries. He allowed our son to stay awake long after midnight, gave him access to frightening films and treated safety concerns as needless restrictions. He used those choices to portray himself as the fun parent while presenting me as the parent who prevented their enjoyment.

He created a book about our son’s life and achievements that contained nearly a hundred photographs. I appeared only in the background of one photo. He sent the book to school for my son to present to his class, reinforcing a version of his life in which I had been erased. When I commented on one of the pictures, saying how I loved that holiday, my son asked, “Oh, were you there too?” His father’s version of our family life was beginning to interfere with my son’s own memories of the time we had shared.

He also recruited people around us. He asked parents to only allow their children to play with our child at his house rather than mine. He wanted our son to feel socially fulfilled with him and lonely and isolated with me. He presented me to parents, teachers, therapists, and solicitors as crazy, unstable, and selfish. He became highly involved in school and community roles, which helped him build an image of himself as a devoted father. He then told our son that he did these things because he loved him, while suggesting that I did far less because I cared more about myself.

He promised our son a new mother and siblings, presenting this replacement family as exciting and complete while trying to weaken my place as the mother our child already had.

Watching My Child Slip Away

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