Domestic Violence Awareness Month is an occasion to look beyond the forms of abuse most readily recognized — physical violence — toward a pattern that is equally serious but considerably harder to identify from the outside, and sometimes even from within the relationship itself: coercive control.
What Coercive Control Actually Involves
Coercive control describes a pattern in which one partner systematically restricts another’s freedom and autonomy through a combination of tactics that may include isolating the person from friends and family, monitoring their communications or movements, controlling access to money, undermining their confidence in their own perceptions through persistent contradiction and denial, and enforcing rules about dress, behavior, or daily activity that the controlled partner must follow to avoid conflict or punishment. No single tactic, viewed in isolation, may seem severe; the cumulative, systematic pattern is what constitutes coercive control.
Why This Pattern Is Often Missed
Because coercive control frequently lacks the visible markers most people associate with abuse — bruises, police reports, dramatic incidents — it can go unrecognized by friends, family, and sometimes by the person experiencing it, who may sense that something is deeply wrong without being able to name it in terms that match their understanding of what “abuse” looks like. The isolating tactics that are part of the pattern itself often specifically reduce a person’s access to outside perspectives that might otherwise help them recognize what is happening.
Why Isolation Is Often the First and Most Important Tactic
Reduced contact with friends, family, and other sources of outside perspective tends to be an early and foundational element of coercive control, since it removes the checks that would otherwise help a person recognize the pattern and access support. This isolation is often introduced gradually and with plausible justification — concerns about specific friends, framing time together as more important than outside relationships — making it difficult to identify as part of a larger pattern until it has already substantially progressed.
The Effect on a Person’s Sense of Reality
Sustained coercive control, particularly when it includes persistent contradiction of a person’s memory or perception, can produce a genuine erosion of confidence in one’s own judgment — a person subjected to this pattern over time may begin to doubt their own read of situations that they would have assessed accurately and confidently before the relationship began. This effect is a recognized consequence of the pattern itself, not a preexisting vulnerability that made the person susceptible to it.
Why This Is Taken as Seriously as Physical Violence
Coercive control is now recognized, including in some jurisdictions’ legal frameworks, as a serious form of abuse in its own right, independent of whether physical violence is also present, because the pattern itself produces substantial psychological harm and because it frequently precedes or co-occurs with physical violence when it does escalate. Treating it as a lesser concern than physical abuse significantly underestimates its actual impact and risk.
What to Do With This Information
Recognizing this pattern, whether in one’s own relationship or in a friend or family member’s, is a critical first step, and reaching out to a domestic violence resource or a trauma-informed therapist for guidance on next steps is a reasonable and safe way to begin addressing it. Safety planning with a knowledgeable resource, rather than acting alone, is generally the wiser path when leaving a controlling relationship is being considered.
R. M. Andrews & Associates provides trauma-informed therapy in Portland for individuals navigating current or past experiences of coercive control. If you are currently in an unsafe situation, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233.