Is this control, or am I being too sensitive?

What is coercive control when nothing one-off has happened?

Coercive control is a course of conduct rather than an event: a repeated pattern that narrows what another person is free to do. The word abuse sends you looking for an incident, and in a great many relationships there is no incident to find. What there is instead is a Tuesday evening that took 3 hours of careful handling to get through.

The injury is to liberty rather than to the body¹. It works through isolation, through going without, and through having the small particulars of your day regulated by somebody else. The older picture of abuse, a run of assaults with calm stretches in between, had the calm stretches the wrong way round: that is where the effect gathers, and that is where most of a life happens.

Let me say plainly where this article stops being the right instrument. I can describe the pattern and what it does to a person over years. Whether it describes your relationship is a judgement that needs your detail, your history and somebody in the room with you, which means individual work with a therapist. Your own reading of your life is the authority here. Mine, from a page, would be guesswork.

What does coercive control look like in an ordinary week?

It looks like a set of small rules, each of which sounds like an ordinary disagreement once it is lifted out on its own. Read what follows as description. Nothing here is a checklist and nothing here adds up to a score.

• Preference enforced as rule. What you wear, what you eat and who you see are offered as taste and then held to.
• Nothing of your own. Your phone, your messages and your accounts are treated as belonging to both of you.
• Contact that costs. Seeing family or friends becomes difficult, expensive, or not worth the evening that follows it.
• Accounting for yourself. You are expected to say where you are, and an unanswered call is met with anger.
• Money you have no sight of. You earn money you never see, or you spend money you justify afterwards.
• Made small in company. You are corrected in front of others, then told you are too sensitive to be taken seriously.
• Threat held in reserve. Your things, your work or the children get brought into an argument in order to end it.

Each line is arguable on its own, and arguing them one at a time is how years pass. Read more about walking on eggshells with your partner.

Why is it so hard to name from inside it?

Because it arrived in an order, and because the affection is real. Each arrangement was easier to accept for the one before it, so there was no point at which refusing would have looked obviously reasonable, including to you.

What I hear described most is the dread and then the relief. You feel the dread arrive before you have worked out what is wrong with the evening, somewhere between your stomach and your throat, and it lifts the moment the mood in the flat turns friendly again. Relief that large tells you how much fear was sitting underneath it. Only afterwards do the thoughts arrive, and they arrive as self-examination: you go over the argument looking for your own share of it, you check your memory of what was said against your partner’s version, and you arrive at the question of whether this is bad enough to count. The warmth in between is not a performance laid over the rest. It is the same person, which is what makes the whole thing so difficult to hold in one hand.

If an ordinary day takes managing another adult’s reactions, something in the arrangement is wrong, whatever it gets called and whatever was meant by it. Read more about gaslighting in a relationship.

Why is couples therapy the wrong room for this, at least first?

Couples therapy asks a person to be honest in a room they will then leave with the person they have been honest about. That is my clinical judgement rather than a research finding.

• Honesty that is answered for. What gets said in the session is taken up again at home, and the cost of having said it lands on one person.
• New language, old purpose. The vocabulary of therapy is learned quickly, and inside a controlling pattern it gets used to argue better.
• Even responsibility assumed. The couple format treats the load as roughly shared, and in this pattern it is not shared at all.
• Individual first, for both. Separate work gives each person one room where nobody has to be managed.

What it costs to live inside this shows up in the research. Pooling 45 studies, a review found coercive control associated with post-traumatic stress and with depression at about the strength found for psychological abuse². That is an association across populations, so it tells you what this kind of pressure does to people in general and nothing about what it has done to you.

Couples therapy is the right room for a great many hard things, including bitter and long-running ones. In my judgement this is not one of them, at least not to begin with.

Where do you start, and when is a page not enough?

You start by noticing rather than by confronting, and you start outside the relationship. Nothing here has to be settled on the day you first say it aloud, and you owe nobody proof before you take your own observation seriously.

• Notice the adjusting. For a fortnight, notice each time you change a plan, soften a sentence or leave something out because of what saying it would cost at home.
• Ask what has gone. Name what has dropped out of your life in the last 2 years: a friendship, an afternoon, a piece of work, an opinion you used to hold.
• Say it once, outside. Tell one person what an ordinary week actually looks like, for a second reading rather than for advice.
• Take back the cheapest thing. Pick one thing of yours to resume, and pick the one that costs least rather than the one that matters most.
• Start individual work. One session for yourself, where nobody has to be managed and nothing has to be decided that day.

Confronting your partner is missing from that list deliberately. In my judgement it is not a first step and not a step to take on your own, and whether it is ever the right step turns on particulars a page of text has no access to.

Those 5 are aids to noticing and not a verdict on your relationship, and they run out quickly. If every observation gets argued away at home, if you no longer trust your own account of the week, or if you are frightened of your partner, then this article is the wrong instrument and individual work with a therapist is the next step. What stays unresolved is the thing you most want settled, whether this is a relationship to stay in, and that needs closer exploration with somebody who knows your particulars than any page will ever give you.

Questions people ask

Is it worth starting therapy if I still cannot say what this is?

Yes, and not being able to name it is one of the better reasons to come. A first session is for describing what actually happens in a week, with no requirement to call it anything.

Will therapy tell me whether to leave?

No, and a therapist who tells you that is doing your thinking for you. My work is to help you see the pattern and your own reasons clearly enough that the decision is genuinely yours.

Should my partner and I come together for this?

In my judgement, not as the first move: individual work, separately, is the safer order. If couples work becomes right later, it stands on much firmer ground once each of you has had a room of your own.

What does a first session about a controlling relationship actually involve?

Mostly your account of an ordinary week in detail, and my questions about what you adjust and what the adjusting costs you. If you would rather get a sense of the fit first, there is a free 30-minute call.

How do I choose a therapist for this kind of relationship?

Look for somebody who will work with you individually and who does not push you towards either staying or leaving. Ask directly how they work with control and fear in a relationship, and notice whether the answer leaves room for your own judgement.

If you suspect you are being controlled, I offer therapy after abusive relationships as a confidential place to check your reading of things.

Sources

1. Tolmie, Smith and Wilson, Understanding intimate partner violence: why coercive control requires a social and systemic entrapment framework, Violence Against Women, 2024
2. Lohmann, Cowlishaw, Ney, O’Donnell and Felmingham, The trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 2024

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.