Recovery gives you back safety and agency.

Experiencing ongoing abuse from a past intimate partner can cause serious injuries to your sense of self and well-being that, if not addressed, may leave you vulnerable and at risk for another potentially harmful relationship. Prioritizing recovery and taking the time to identify the nature of the abuse allows for healing that’s necessary to regain confidence in yourself and the strength to act in your own best interest.

Intimate Partner Abuse: How It Works

A partner who is out to achieve power and control in their intimate relationship uses coercive tactics that are highly effective, particularly when living under the same roof.

Often, the coercive process is subtle and insidious at first with the use of words, demeanor, and manipulation. At times, there can be periods of positive attention, making it all the more effective in confusing the recipient.

Coercive abuse affects one’s life dramatically because the abuse targets a person’s thoughts, feelings, and how they perceive things—affecting their sense of self, view of the relationship, and connection with the world surrounding them.

Until they are able to acknowledge the coercive tactics embedded in their partner’s behavior and identify the psychological injuries they sustained, they will not see themselves as a victim of abuse and will remain in a state of feeling unsafe and a loss of agency over their life.

Identifying the Coercive Tactics and the Injuries

First, it is critical to move out of “not seeing” and minimizing to identifying the specific coercive tactics at play with your partner, and second, to see the traumatic impact on yourself.

I have used Biderman’s Chart of Coercion for the past 30 years in my psychoeducational recovery groups, and it has proven extremely helpful to participants in recognizing the specific coercive tactics they endured.

Recipients of abuse can learn from the Chart of Coercion which tactics they have experienced and begin to see the impact on their psyche. The Chart of Coercion includes the strategic harm of each coercive tactic that’s intended to undermine one’s sense of well-being:

Read more on Psychology Today.

Recent study sheds light on the adverse impact of coercive control on children.

Coercive control almost always accompanies intimate partner violence (IPV), but IPV doesn’t need to accompany coercive control to effectively gain power and dominance over an intimate partner. Coercive control is increasingly recognized and now pays close attention to the traumatic impact on adult victims. Although the impact on children of IPV has been well-cited, the adverse effects of coercive control on children have begun to be examined. New data can help us make better-informed decisions about how to protect children.

A recent systematic review of 51 studies concluded that coercive control, separate from IPV, is a serious contributor to adverse child well-being outcomes (Xyrakis et al., 2023).

Coercive Control in the Home

In her well-received book, Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control, Taylor identifies that the structure of a familial environment is the most conducive for brainwashing—slowly breaking someone down in order to manipulate their thinking and beliefs to gain a powerful influence over them.

Coercive control is the descriptive term that encapsulates ongoing emotional, verbal, and psychological abuses. The essence of these types of abuse is to coerce—manipulate—with the singular focus to dominate and have control over the targeted person—in this case, an intimate partner. The coercive tactics that are embedded in behavior—sometimes seemingly “normal” behavior—including restricting access to money and financial decisions, gaslighting, statements of degradation and humiliation, isolation, using a threatening voice, etc. In a family, children are at high risk of being psychologically harmed by witnessing the over-powering abuse of a parent and becoming targets of coercion as well.

Coercive control has reached new levels of recognition. Since 2020, with reliable research regarding coercive control in intimate relationships showing that it causes devastating harm and may predict future physical violence, some states have protection laws or pending protection laws.

Read more on Psychology Today.

One controlling behavior could be a red flag to examine further.

People who meet coercive partners can become entrapped during the dating period, often unbeknownst to them. Over time, as a society, we have come to recognize more signs of coercive behaviors that are now part of our mainstream languages, such as love bombing, gaslighting, and narcissistic abuse. These coercive behaviors are tactics of emotional and psychological abuse, and often the perpetrator has narcissistic qualities. While one person is seeking a meaningful relationship, the coercive partner is looking for someone who can be influenced and eventually overpowered. Knowing what to look for in a potential partner to determine if there are lingering signs of coercive control is the best protection, and we now have more data to do just that.

Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and chief science adviser for Match.com, led a study (“Singles in America­”) researching the behavior and attitudes of single people in the United States. In 2022, Fisher was stunned by one finding that had never appeared before: Participants were looking for emotional maturity, the ability to process and grapple with their feelings (Blum, 2023). Emotional maturity is counter to coercive behavior.

Defining Coercive Control

Coercive control is subtle, hard to identify, and can be embedded in what might seem like “normal” behavior, even behavior that appears favorable. Many types of non-physical behaviors constitute “coercive control” to attain a powerful persuasion over another person. All of the coercive tactics, in one way or another, serve to avoid, defend against, or disregard feelings in oneself or the other.

Coercive Tactics

In my many years of facilitating groups for women with controlling partners, each woman unpacks her relational experience and determines which coercive tactics have been at play. The two most prominent coercive tactics identified that are also deeply harmful are love-bombing and gaslighting.

Read more on Psychology Today.

Traumatic brain injuries often go untreated in situations of domestic violence.

Recent research focusing on the experience of survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) reveals astounding numbers of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) that go unseen and untreated. Like the harm caused by psychological and emotional abuse that’s often undetected, the symptoms of a TBI are also hard to recognize unless you know what to look for.

Often, treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the primary course for domestic violence (DV) survivors; unfortunately, this may do little to help in the long run when a concurrent TBI has not been diagnosed. Recognizing symptoms of TBI in survivors of IPV and advocating for treatment in addition to trauma recovery are critical to the well-being of the survivor.

Frequency of Traumatic Brain Injuries of IPV Survivors

Eve Valera, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a leading researcher on TBIs among IPV survivors, hypothesizes that this population experiences TBIs at a significantly higher rate than other high-risk groups like athletes or soldiers. Valera estimates that each year hundreds of concussions occur in the NFL and thousands occur in the military; by comparison, she estimates that 1.6 million occur among DV survivors.

A TBI is a concussion that can result from being hit in the head with a hard object, such as a fist, or having one’s head hit against a hard object, such as the floor or wall. When confusion, memory loss around the event, and dizziness occur, there may be a TBI. Loss of consciousness can sometimes occur, but it does not happen in the majority of mild TBIs. During their time in an abusive home, survivors of IPV can experience concussions frequently.

Read more on Psychology Today.