Content Note And Grounding

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Before we begin, a brief content note. This episode discusses coercive control, family violence and abuse, including specific tactics used by perpetrators. If you are in a difficult or an unsafe situation, please take this episode at the pace and the time that works for you or perhaps come back to it when you've got the support around you to engage with it well. If you need support, 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 is available 24-7 across Australia. I'd like to invite you to take a deep breath, to hold it for a moment, and then to release it slowly. To bring your shoulders up to your ears and then let them drop. To feel some of the tension start to ease, even if just a little bit. Consider stretching other parts of your body, unclenching your hands, your jaw, anywhere else where you're feeling tension to stretch if it's safe for you to do so while you're listening.

Why Coercive Control Needs Precision

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Welcome back to the Post Separation Abuse Podcast. I'm your host for this episode, Danielle Black. Today's episode is a conversation that I've been thinking about for a while, a conversation that I've wanted to have here on the podcast for some time, and I've taken the time to think about it carefully because I want to have the conversation well. The conversation is about what coercive control actually is and just as importantly what it's not. Coercive control is something that in recent years has entered the public vocabulary in a way that I wasn't sure that I would ever see. For decades the people experiencing it have not had a name for what was happening to them. They might have known that on some level that something was deeply wrong. They might have felt that a relationship was eating them alive. They knew they were afraid in ways that they just couldn't articulate, but the language that they had, the language that I had, the language that we all had, really wasn't sufficient. There were words for physical abuse. There were words for verbal abuse. There were not until recently widely understood words for the pattern that was actually happening. Then came the work of Evan Stark and others, and the phrase coercive control entered the conversation. Slowly at first, then increasingly. And now in the last few years it's moved into the mainstream and also in legislation. It's also in the headlines. It's also at the dinner table conversations. This is on balance a very good thing. It's also in some ways a problem. Because the term has become so widely used it's also become loosely used. People who have experienced something difficult and lots of things in relationships genuinely are difficult can reach for the term coercive control to describe their experience in ways that don't quite fit the term. And I do want to be clear about something before we go any further. This is not about debating whose experience is real and whose isn't. Every experience of difficulty, control, hurt or fear in a relationship is real. This is not about minimizing anyone or anyone's experience. But what I'm interested here is precision. Because the people for whom coercive control is the actual technical, accurate description of what they've lived through deserve a term that means something specific. And if everything is coercive control, then nothing is. And the people whose experience genuinely fit the term lose that linguistic precision that helps them to be believed, supported, and protected. So today we're going to walk through what coercive control actually is, what it actually isn't, and why that difference matters for everyone.

A Clear Definition And Key Features

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Let's start with the definition. Coercive control is a pattern of behavior, deliberately enacted by one person against another, designed to dominate them, intimidate them, strip away their autonomy, and create in them a state of fear and compliance. Let's go through that again because every word in that definition is doing some work, some heavy lifting. Coercive control is a pattern of behavior, deliberately enacted by one person against another, designed to dominate, intimidate, strip away autonomy, and create a state of fear and compliance. Coercive control is a pattern. It's not a single incident. Coercive control is deliberate, it's not accidental, it's not the byproduct of someone having a bad day. It is designed to achieve a particular outcome, domination, intimidation, control, and it produces a specific set of effects in the person on the receiving end. Fear, compliance, loss of agency and autonomy. So let's unpack each of those things. The pattern. Coercive control is by its very definition patterned. It is not one bad argument, it is not one moment of someone being an arsehole. It's a sustained, repeated, sometimes years or decades long campaign of behavior. The pattern is the thing. Individual incidents within that pattern may, taken alone, seem pretty minor and perhaps difficult to explain, but when seen together across weeks, months, years, they start to form a clear shape. Coercive control is deliberate. This means it's strategic. The person doing it knows on some level what they are doing. They might not call it coercive control in their own minds. They might tell themselves that they're protecting or correcting or loving in their own way, but the behavior is purposeful. It's aimed at getting a result. It is designed to dominate. The result the behavior is aimed at is power. Power over the other person's choices, movements, finances, relationships, body, speech, thoughts, and in the post separation space, increasingly over the children. Power in coercive control is the goal. There's fear. This is the experience of the person on the receiving end. They are afraid. They may not always know what they're afraid of exactly. They may not be able to name the specific consequence that they are anticipating if they were asked. But the fear is present. Fear of what will happen if they don't comply. Fear of what their partner or former partner will do if they speak up or leave or push back. Compliance. The person on the receiving end changes their behavior often dramatically to manage the threat. This can look like them not seeing particular people anymore. They can stop saying particular things, they can stop wanting particular things. They stop being themselves. It can affect their very identity gradually and in ways that they may not consciously realize until they are at the other side. There is a loss of autonomy. Their life narrows, their choices contract, their sense of themselves as an independent adult with choices, with genuine choices, and with their own opinions, preferences, friendships and futures, the sense of all of that erodes. They become increasingly the version of themselves that the person perpetrating the coercive control permits them to be. Those are the features of coercive control.

Tactics That Create Fear

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The tactics used to achieve all of this are very well documented. They include monitoring and surveillance, tracking the person's location, their phone, their messages, their movements, demanding constant updates, demanding to know where they are, who they're with, what they're doing. There's isolation, cutting someone off from their family, friends, colleagues, support networks, often slowly, often by making contact with those people difficult, costly, unpleasant or inconvenient. It's not always obvious. There's gaslighting. Telling the other person that their perception of reality is wrong, that they're remembering things incorrectly, that they're imagining things, that they're too sensitive, too dramatic, too irrational to be trusted with their own opinions or conclusions. There can be threats, sometimes explicit, such as if you leave me I will but sometimes also implicit. There's looks, there's silences, the threat made by a closed fist without anything else needing to be said. There can be the micromanagement of clothing, food, behavior, speech, friendships, work, parenting. There can be financial control, restricting access to money, sabotaging the target person's ability to earn or to save, essentially to create dependency. There can be the weaponization of children, of using the children to control the partner, of threatening to take the children, of influencing the children, withholding time with the children if the partner doesn't comply with something. There can be sexual control, coerced sex, pressured sex, sex as a transaction or as a tool of dominance. Any and all of these tactics can appear in a relationship as a one-off behaviour and may not constitute coercive control. Coercive control is the patterned, deliberate, sustained deployment of these tactics across time with the cumulative effect of dominating the person on the receiving end. The single most accurate description of what it feels like to be inside a coercive control dynamic to be the target of that behaviour comes from my own lived experience and also from clients who have experienced similar things, and that is that it's like feeling trapped in your own life. That phrase, trapped in your own life, captures something that technical definitions can't really reach. It's the experience of waking up in your own bed, in your own house, with your own partner, and not actually feeling that you have any choice, not actually feeling that you are free to make a choice. That is coercive control.

Controlling Behaviour Is Not Coercive Control

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Now let's talk about controlling. Controlling is a word that we use in many contexts. We might say that a friend is controlling because they dictate where we're going to meet up for dinner. We might say a parent is controlling because they have rigid parenting rules. We might say a partner is controlling because they get upset when the other partner in the relationship makes plans without first consulting with them. All of these uses of the word controlling describe real behavior, and in some cases that behaviour is genuinely harmful or at the very least unhealthy. It can be exhausting to be in a relationship with those dynamics, and it can be a sign of other underlying issues. But being controlling is not the same as perpetrating coercive control. The difference is the difference between a behavior and a pattern, between an incident and a campaign, between annoying and frightening, between someone trying to influence the outcome of a single situation and someone systematically dominating another human being's existence. Some more examples. A husband who insists on choosing the holiday destination every single year and overrides his partner's preferences is being controlling. But in and of itself that is not coercive control. A mother who tells her adult daughter what to wear to a family wedding is being controlling. She's not coercively controlling her. A friend who guilt trips you for not coming to her birthday is being manipulative and controlling in that moment. But she's not coercively controlling you. A partner or former partner who during one specific argument becomes domineering and intimidating is in that moment being controlling, even abusive. But if that's a one off in a relationship that doesn't otherwise meet the criteria, it's not coercive control. Now I'm not saying that any of those behaviours are fine, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't be taking them seriously. I'm not saying that they're healthy, I'm not saying that they're not a sign of bigger problems. They can be all those things. Rather, what I'm saying is that when we call every instance of controlling behaviour coercive control, we erase the specific meaning of the term. And the specific meaning matters. It matters because there are people whose lives have been completely dominated by a sustained campaign of behaviour of this kind, and they need the language to describe what happened to them with precision and credibility. If everyone who is annoyed by someone who's doing something controlling says that they're being coercively controlled, then the woman who has spent fifteen years inside a deliberate, surveilling, isolating, gaslighting, threatening campaign of domination has nothing left to call what's happened to her. That is the cost of imprecision.

Three Common Grey Areas

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There are of course behaviours that can sit in a space that's a bit more complicated, and I want to talk about three of them in particular. And again, because this is the post separation abuse podcast, they are going to have a post separation flavour to them. The first is withholding contact with children. In coercive control, withholding contact with children is one tactic among many used to dominate and punish a partner. It's part of a broader pattern. The contact is leveraged, the children are leveraged, the fear of losing them is leveraged. It is a weapon in a long deployed arsenal. But withholding contact with children by itself is not necessarily coercive control. A protective parent who limits contact between a child and an unsafe other parent is exercising protection, not perpetrating coercive control. A parent who is angry post separation and withholds contact vindictively is being punitive, and that can absolutely be harmful, but on its own, in isolation of a broader pattern of control, it's not coercive control. The distinction matters because these three things coercive control, protective parenting and punitive parenting require different responses from professionals, from the system, and from the people in the situation. And confusing them can produce bad outcomes for everyone. The second is post-separation behaviour. A common claim is quote, we've separated, now my former partner is doing XYZ fill in the blank. They're coercively controlling me. Now, sometimes this is accurate. Coercive control can intensify post-separation. Abusers who believe that they're losing control do often escalate their tactics, weaponize legal proceedings, weaponize the children, and continue the campaign of coercive control in new forms. This is post-separation abuse and it's real. But sometimes what's being described post separation is simply my former partner is being difficult, unpleasant, unhelpful, or hostile. Now that's not pleasant to experience. But it's also not always coercive control. The test again is the same. Is there a pattern of behaviour designed to dominate, intimidate, and strip autonomy? Or is there a former partner who's being a difficult, perhaps abusive human being in a difficult situation? The third is sometimes a victim of coercive control can respond to that control with behavior that in isolation from the outside can look controlling. Maybe they snap, they yell, maybe they make ultimatums, they might behave in ways that they never would have behaved before the coercive control started. Now that is not coercive control by the victim, it's a reactive response by someone whose nervous system has been pushed past its capacity by years of being dominated. The pattern isn't theirs, the campaign isn't theirs, the intent isn't theirs. Now this matters because abusers will often use this reactive behaviour as evidence that they are the real victim. They'll document the moments when their partner, quote unquote, lost it, while saying nothing about the years of control that led to those moments. Professionals need to know how to read that pattern, and so do the people inside it.

Gender Neutral Framework And Gendered Data

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I now want to address something that comes up whenever this topic is discussed. Coercive control occurs across all kinds of relationships. It occurs in heterosexual romantic relationships, it occurs in same sex romantic relationships, it occurs in relationships that are not romantic at all between parents and children, including between parents and adult children, between siblings, including adult siblings, between employers and employees in some workplaces, the framework of coercive control is in that sense gender neutral. The dynamics, the pattern, deliberation, domination, fear, compliance, loss of autonomy can be perpetrated by anyone against anyone. And yes, there is an and the statistics on intimate partner coercive control in Australia and internationally consistently show the same pattern. Coercive control in intimate romantic relationships is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women. That is the empirical statistical reality repeatedly documented across decades of research by many organisations, including the Australian Institute of Criminology and equivalent research bodies internationally. This is not me making a moral statement. It is a statistical statement. Yes, men can absolutely be victims of coercive control. That happens. Those experiences deserve support. And the data is clear. In intimate relationships the gendered pattern is overwhelming. And that is true whether we look at homicide statistics, family violence statistics, mental health outcomes, or the specific tactics that constitute. Coercive control. Now I'm not getting specific about this to exclude anyone. As I said before, anyone can be a perpetrator of coercive control, anyone can be a victim of coercive control. But I think getting specific about what the research tells us is important because precision does matter. Pretending the data is something other than what it is helps no one. Least of all the women whose experience is statistically dominant in this space, and least of all the male victims whose experience deserves to be understood in its actual frequency rather than being artificially inflated to make some kind of moral point about parity. The fact that coercive control is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women does not erase male victims. But it does help us to better understand the shape of this phenomenon.

Three Self-Check Questions And Help

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So what do we do with all of this? If you think you might be experiencing coercive control, if what I've described today resonates with you as a pattern in your life, not just a one-off incident, if you've felt afraid for reasons that you couldn't quite explain, if you've lost yourself in the shape of someone else's demands and expectations, please get specialized support. This really is not a DIY do-it-yourself situation. The dynamics of coercive control can be sophisticated and getting out of them safely requires specialized knowledge. 1-800 respect on 1-800-737-732 is available 24-7 across Australia. They can help you to think through what you're experiencing and what your options are. If you're not sure whether what you've been experiencing fits the definition of coercive control, the three questions to ask yourself are number one, is this a pattern or an incident? The second question is, do I feel fear in this relationship? Genuine fear. Do I feel fear of consequences? Of the next outburst, of what my partner or former partner will do? And the third question is, have I lost myself? Am I still able to live as an adult with agency and autonomy with my own choices, friendships, opinions, and future? If the answer to those three questions taken together is something close to yes, yes, this is a pattern, yes I genuinely feel afraid, and yes I have lost myself, then what you're experiencing may meet the threshold of coercive control and you deserve specialist support. And if you want to understand this with further depth, not only what coercive control is, the various forms that it can take, but also what to do about it and how to rebuild your own capacity and parent protectively through it, that is the work of the blueprint. Module 17 in the blueprint is the extended treatment of coercive control itself. It's there if and when you want to go deeper. If you're concerned about someone else, a friend, a family member, a colleague who you believe might be experiencing coercive control, please don't diagnose them. Please be a steady, non-judgmental presence in their life. Please don't pressure them to leave a relationship. Please don't make them ending their relationship the price of their relationship with you. Just be there. The most single protective thing that you can do for someone in a coercively controlling relationship is to remain a person that they can stay connected with. Of course, a caveat to this is that your own safety needs to be considered in that dynamic. I want to leave you with this. Coercive control is a specific phenomenon with specific dynamics that produces specific damage in the lives of the people who experience it. The term has entered our public vocabulary because it truly deserves to be there. The people whose lives were shaped by it deserve a name for what happened. And precisely because that name is so important, we owe it to those people and to everyone who will come after them to use that term with care. Not every difficult relationship includes coercive control. Not every controlling behavior is coercive control, not every conflict is a campaign of domination. When we hold the language with precision, we make space for the people whose experience genuinely fits the term to be heard, believed, and helped. That is the work.

Holding The Language With Care

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I remember in my own situation when talking with a professional, and they first shared the term coercive control with me. Now this is going back over ten years, and it came after me talking about what I was experiencing, and also the fact that I regularly felt frightened, but couldn't always articulate what exactly I was afraid of, what exactly I thought would happen if I didn't comply, if I didn't do what I was told, if I didn't acquiesce and placate and go along with things. Understanding that term coercive control, having that applied to the dynamic was so powerful for my own situation. And again, not every act of control in a relationship fits the definition of coercive control. Not every controlling behavior is coercive control. Not every conflict is a deliberate campaign of domination. Holding that language precisely is important. Next week we're going to unpack the turning of children against a parent. Because in the public conversation that tactic has a name. Parental alienation. It's one of the most contested terms in the entire field of post separation, and what is really happening underneath it is very often precisely the coercive control that we've been talking about today. That's the conversation that we'll be having next week, and I hope you'll join me. Thank you so much for being here with me for this conversation as always. I value your time. I value the fact that you're taking the time to think about your situation, yourself, from different perspectives. That's incredibly important work. I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.