A FOCUSED COMBINATION OF COACHING, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND EMDR FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE FACED A PARTICULAR KIND OF ORDEAL.

"Coercive control is the perpetrator establishing in the mind of the victim the price of her resistance" Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life

I work with people who have faced such issues as financial control, smear campaigns and character assassination, legal abuse, post-separation abuse, shunning, moral injury and betrayal trauma.

It is an astonishing fact that post-separation coercive control was only criminalised in April 2023. The relationship between suicide and domestic abuse is just starting to be taken seriously in law. It is still not easy to find therapists with a deep understanding of these subjects.

Recognising emotional abuse is not a standard part of therapeutic training — and it can be a complex hall of mirrors. It is, for example, so common as to be a hallmark of emotional abuse in relationships that the perpetrator will accuse the victim of having a serious psychiatric condition in order to invalidate her voice and to cast himself in a victim narrative.

“He told everyone I was mentally ill and used formal sounding terminology. No one believed anything I said after that.”

Even experienced couples therapists can fail to perceive this in the therapy room. As a practitioner it is crucial to know the extent to which the victim, whatever her outward appearance suggests, may have come to believe she is essentially worthless, and to understand that this renders her unable to advocate for herself. High-functioning abusers will have an artfully constructed social persona which can add enormously to the victim’s confusion and self-blame.

“Some of his abuse was so covert it only showed up in my life as self-doubt. This made me vulnerable to long-term financial control.”

Some of the best descriptions of this kind of mental subjugation is found in work on abuse in cults. Sadly, in the absence of a real depth of understanding, a misguided therapeutic response can compound the abuse. That this ever happens in the context of couples therapy is especially sad because it effectively gaslights the victim in a clinical setting and authenticates ongoing abuse.

Many of the key therapeutic and academic voices on these subjects belong to people who have endured such experiences themselves. This only serves to emphasise the fact that coercive control happens to intelligent, insightful people at every level of society.

My understanding of all of these issues is greatly influenced by the insights of Dr Jennifer Freyd and Evan Stark among many other experts on these subjects.

— SEE MORE ON THIS KIND OF ABUSE BELOW —