If you’ve never lived under someone’s coercive control, you may picture slammed doors, raised fists, bruises that explain themselves, or intense fights. But coercive control lives in the grey space of mundane moments that erode the survivor’s internal world and hijack her agency. Violence& Abuse
What Coercive Control Looks Like
Coercive control builds slowly: a partner wants to know your whereabouts “out of worry” until you share your location with them 24/7. They share negative opinions about your friends until your circle vanishes. They “kindly” manage access to money or resources until it’s gone. And they dismiss your preferences in dress, food, music, and home décor until their preferences overshadow your identity.
You learn to avoid conflict because it now lurks everywhere.
These forces don’t show up on the body; they appear inside it. The survivor becomes smaller, more apologetic, and increasingly doubtful of her intuition and memories. Gaslighting isn’t just questioning one moment — it’s eroding someone’s entire lived experience.
These are also the reasons why outsiders can’t recognize coercive control — they can explain each of the abuser’s actions through a charming, reasonable, or caring lens. This perspective further destabilizes and isolates the victim.
Coercive control hides in plain sight, leaving the survivor helpless because it steals her voice. Some abusers will strategically act warm or caring to make their victims feel like the relationship “isn’t that bad.” They reward the controlled person enough to pull them in even more. This feeds the fundamental human need for hope, building an invisible cage around the victim.
Why Women Stay
We often hear “Why didn’t she just leave?” But the better question is what makes it so hard for women to leave? VisualArt & Design
Leaving an abusive relationship is statistically the most dangerous part of the relationship. When control slips away during separation, the risk of serious violence rises sharply during. Survivors sense this escalation and sometimes stay as a rational safety measure.
Coercive control often includes financial abuse, so leaving can mean no independent income, no credit in a survivor’s name, no sense of where the survivor and her family will stay, and a well-founded fear that a custody battle will give a manipulative partner more time with the survivor than is safe.
Even if resources are available, the logistical hurdles can feel nearly impossible because daily life has become a constant, dysregulated fight-or-flight state. The abuser lurks everywhere. This takes executive functioning offline, making interactions outside of the relationship difficult. A survivor’s sense of self and judgment of reality have been reprogrammed, so she believes that she can’t trust herself. This makes entering the world feel dangerous, but the danger now lives inside her, and she will need to relearn to trust her judgment.
Survivors may also love their abusers. Abusive partners can show genuine care between episodes of violence, which makes the toxic bond even harder to sever. Hope and terror also coexist, which makes the aftermath of abuse more difficult. How can a survivor distinguish between love and abuse when the lines blur countless times? This dissonance will show up in her body long after she reclaims her life.
How to Support Abuse Survivors
Supporting survivors of coercive control should be unconditional. Believe her the first time she shares her abuse story, and stay close regardless of her behavior. Isolation is a key mechanism of coercion. Maintaining connection shows the love that the survivor needs to leave her abuse. Trust her decision because she’s the expert on the terror that she’s living. Leaving abuse is the end of a heart-wrenching process that started long before anyone could see it. Violence& Abuse
Anna Hertel is the author of Brick by Brick: A Memoir of Endurance, Healing, and Becoming, as well as a retired endurance athlete and therapist-in-training whose work explores the intersection of trauma, identity, and the healing potential of embodied experience. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her young daughter, where she continues to rebuild, reflect, and write, brick by brick.
