Parenting with a Coercive Controller

I was in a restaurant recently and noticed a family of four sitting down for a meal. They looked like an ordinary family.

As the daughter and son perused the menu, the mom said hesitantly, “The fettuccine alfredo might be good.” I noticed the husband roll his eyes. “There she goes with her fake Italian accent,” he sneered. The son smiled sheepishly, and the tweenish daughter raised her menu higher in front of her face like a shield.

To many people, this moment might have seemed insignificant. All families tease each other, right? Maybe. But these kinds of moments can be indicative of a larger, destructive dynamic known as coercive control, a term coined in 1982 by social worker Susan Schechter, one of the first to acknowledge the intersection of child abuse and domestic abuse. In 2007, the term was propelled into the cultural lexicon by sociologist and forensic social worker Evan Stark with his seminal book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Though he defined it as a gendered oppression that plays out due to patriarchal norms, men can certainly be victims, as can anyone who identifies as male or nonbinary. On a societal level, coercive control underlies the oppressive dynamics used against all marginalized populations, like LGBTQ+ folks and people of color. But on an individual level, behind closed doors, current research shows that women and children suffer in coercively controlled relationships most often.

How can coercive control be such a big issue to address today, when so many people value and seek to form healthy, equitable partnerships? Because it’s like a slow, insidious burn you can’t see coming. A pattern of devaluation that takes place over time, in various forms, it’s often minimized, dismissed, or even normalized as a common relationship challenge. The truth is, coercive controllers don’t wear signs that say, “Hi, I’m an abuser.” They’re ordinary neighbors, plumbers, artists, coworkers, community activists, counselors, legislators, CEOs, lawyers, movie buffs, musicians, government officials, and teachers. Many even call themselves feminists.

The common thread is that at their core, coercive controllers can’t stand feeling vulnerable. Sadly, most didn’t grow up with a secure attachment to a primary caretaker and feel deeply insecure. They’re burdened with intense shame, often due to their own childhood trauma, and work diligently to hide their shortcomings by ensuring they’re more powerful than those around them—which is easily accomplished by diminishing others. While they can perpetrate this dynamic anywhere, it plays out most often in their intimate relationships, where they can be most powerful and don’t have to perform up to society’s standards, either overtly or covertly.

In countless, subtle ways, they inflict psychological abuse through intimidation, gaslighting, and isolation. Sometimes financial, legal, and sexual abuse come into play. At times—but not always—there may be physical violence. But to me, having worked my entire career helping victims of domestic abuse, it’s most heartbreaking when coercive controllers use children as weapons against mothers, damaging a parent–child bond to harm a partner.

Coercive controllers are drawn to people who are unwittingly easier to exploit than others, no matter how confident and secure they may be: I call them “perfect prey.” These people tend to score high in agreeableness and conscientiousness on the Big Five personality test. They’re often willing to accommodate other people—something coercive controllers use to their advantage. They’re loyal and forgiving. They have a hard time believing someone they love and trust, or raised children with, could have malicious intent. Unfortunately, many institutions don’t believe it either. Research shows that when victims present their experiences of abuse to family courts, they’re disbelieved up to 55 percent of the time, and when they disclose abuse of their children by a coercive controller, they’re disbelieved 73 percent of the time for physical abuse and 85 percent of the time for sexual abuse.

I’ve advocated for victims of coercive control—also known as domestic abuse—for decades, beginning at age 19, when I volunteered in an agency focused on helping domestic abuse and sexual assault victims. At 23, I began working in child welfare and saw how often domestic abuse and child abuse intersect. Even so, I didn’t recognize the gaslighting, manipulation, isolation, and intimidation in my own partnership as domestic abuse, because I was still gauging what was and wasn’t abuse by the parameters of the violent-incident model. Now, I understand that coercive control is the underpinning of all abuse, physical or not—it’s about exerting power and control over another.

When I finally got out of my 27-year marriage, I started a long process of healing myself as a person and a parent, one that led me to create a trauma-informed program to support protective parents—adult victims of coercive control striving to shield their children from harm as they work toward clarity and freedom. Since it started, in 2022, hundreds of protective parents from all over the world have sought me out, including therapists who either need my help or want to be of help—sometimes both.

I Was His Everything

I was raised in a tight-knit family with traditional values. My parents were life partners who modeled kindness and love toward one another, and as a result, I didn’t even know what abuse looked like. My parents believed that only “bad” people did “bad” things—something I grew up believing, too. But the reality is, the world is full of people who are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and one day, when I went for a jog with my brother at age 16, I met one of them. A young man waved at us as we ran past his porch, and I was intrigued. A few days later, I saw him again. “I’ve been watching you run by,” he called out. “Will you go out with me?” I’d never been pursued by a boy before, and it felt good.

My parents didn’t approve of my new romantic interest—they thought we were getting too close too fast and preferred I not date at all—but they never imagined the relationship had the potential to become abusive. Neither did I. Back then, I thought the intense, exciting highs and lows I experienced with this young man were what true love felt like. I now know the extreme declarations of affection he interspersed between more coercive behaviors were his version of love bombing, a common way abusers gain more control by confusing victims.

My partner often told me I meant everything to him, that I was his soulmate. Sometimes he became angry if I was too busy to see him or had plans with friends. He’d claim he was worried about me and missed me; then he’d grill me with questions. Had anyone hit on me? Who did I sit next to in the movie theater? Had I seen any old friends at the reunion?

Eventually, we married and had two children. The arrival of children in a coercively controlling relationship adds a complicated abuse accelerant. Many coercive controllers resent the children for funneling attention away from them and end up ramping up the abuse of their partner because of it. Abusers become authoritarian parents. Their omnipotence is felt throughout the home, leaving everyone unable to express their fear because there’s no room for negotiation. Some abusers, like my partner, aren’t overtly authoritarian: they’re permissive and even work hard to portray themselves as family heroes. Either way, the children always know who holds the power.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Most people thought my partner was an amazing father. He was enamored of our children and became laser-focused on receiving their love and affection. His role was to have fun with the kids. In turn, I was relegated, in his eyes, to the role of homemaker and caretaker.

It was hard to explain to people what was happening as I became marginalized. He has no time for me didn’t quite capture it. Neither did He won’t go on a date with me. When I tried to explain what was happening to a concerned friend or relative, it felt like I was complaining. He told me I was selfish for wanting time with him and being focused on improving our relationship. But he wasn’t the only one gaslighting me. Following his lead, I gaslit myself into believing I was the problem.

As with many victims of coercive control, my sense of isolation grew as my vulnerabilities were repeatedly used against me. At first, my partner criticized my friends and family subtly, but later, he did so more aggressively. I saw them less and less. Part of me was afraid that if I shared how unhappy I was with people close to me, I’d be told I was making a big deal over nothing or that it was my fault. I learned it was best to fit in my time with friends and family when he wasn’t around, since it created less tension between us. Now, I see his criticism and judgment of them functioned as an isolation tactic. He was undermining my support network.

In public, my husband would bring things up I’d shared with him in private—my feelings of anxiety, or the fact that one of my children didn’t want to go to the movies with me. “Well, Christine and our daughter have a rough relationship,” he’d tell people. All the while he was the one indoctrinating our children to view me as unstable and unsafe. I liken it to being in a cult where children align with their oppressor.

He used our children to fulfill his needs. They were his children. He felt possessive of them and shrouded his competitiveness in humor and mockery. “You know mom, she’s way too serious,” he’d laugh, or he’d nudge them and say, “Mom likes weird books and music, right?” It was hard to speak up because then I was told I was overly sensitive. I felt powerless to create boundaries in the home, particularly as the children grew older. He was permissive, leaving me alone to encourage responsibility, set limits, and enforce consequences when tasks and schoolwork weren’t completed. He was the indulgent, fun parent—the one who allowed them to have endless screen time and junk food. All he asked for in return was that they like him better than me and make their preference clear.

Sure, our children adored him, but when they were up at night because they were scared or ill, I was the one who took care of them. He was always too tired. He grew easily frustrated if I asked for support or pointed out his counterparenting. I learned that saying nothing was easier than confronting him. Silencing me empowered him. I’d always conceived of abuse through the violent-incident model, and because I didn’t have cuts or bruises, I believed I was the problem. But in coercively controlling dynamics, abuse is often a death by a thousand cuts.

I felt the destructive impact of our family situation most with my children. By the time they were tweens, they’d figured out that their father would provide them with as much freedom as they wanted and require significantly less accountability than I did. Many coercive controllers use this strategy, before and after separation. They lure their children in just as they did their adult victim. The trauma bond occurs with everyone in the family system. My children learned I was disempowered in my own home, aligned with the parent who had more power, and gave him what he wanted. His conditional love left them in a compromised state, confused and torn.

In the Wolf’s Den

Children align with an abusive parent because they don’t want to lose that parent’s conditional love, and they’ve seen how the protective parent is treated when expectations aren’t met. When they’re also told that the protective parent isn’t safe or trustworthy, they question that parent’s love, too. It’s a betrayal trauma that few speak of or understand, one that leaves them in a similar state as the protective parent: walking on eggshells, feeling insecure, and unable to be their authentic selves. Sadly, protective parents are often so overwrought from the psychological warfare in their home that this dynamic isn’t clear to them, even when it’s happening under their own noses.

My abuser masked his gaslighting of the children as care and worry. When the children were 9 and 10, I found out he was having an affair, and I took them to my parent’s home for the weekend. My husband begged me to come back, promising to go to therapy. His promises were interspersed with statements like, “I’ll have you arrested for kidnapping” and “The children will never stay with you again.” But I wanted to believe we could heal, so I returned. Years later, I learned from my daughter that on the day we came back, when I left to teach my college social work class, their father told them I was the cheater, not him, and that I couldn’t be trusted. “I’m worried about your mom,” he said. “If she’d just take her medication, we’d all be okay.”

As happens with so many children, mine were robbed of their sense of agency and the ability to think critically about the dynamics they were witnessing. I believe most abusers set up their relationship with children in this manner from the beginning. On my social media channels, I openly share my conviction that coercive controllers strategically sow the seeds of doubt and division between family members from day one. People who’ve never been in coercively controlling dynamics may dismiss this idea, but survivors in my parenting groups say this day-one experience aligns with what they’ve been through.

Small, innocuous comments may not seem harmful in isolation, but a pattern of diminishing one parent is a pattern of domination, which fosters a situation where children feel insecurely attached to both parents. This gives the abusive parent the ability to coerce and control the children, weaponizing them against the protective parent. My own children later shared that their father used to tell them I loved one of them more than the other, while offering examples to prove his point. These statements functioned as another tactic toward the malicious fracturing of our attachment.

In private, my partner frequently reminded me of all the ways I was incompetent. His constant criticisms became the norm. But as with most victims, I did my best to focus on his positive traits as a father. Motherhood and family mattered greatly to me—which made me vulnerable. If I was brazen enough to ask him for anything—emotionally, physically, sexually—he told me I was needy and demanding. When so little appreciation, kindness, consideration, or respect is transmitted from abuser to victim, any time something good comes along, no matter how small, the trauma bond is strengthened. The abuser’s goal is to be able to give less, and they condition victims to require less. “If you’d just relax,” he’d say, “I’d make time to be with you.”

But how could I relax when I was shouldering most of our family’s financial responsibilities? I worked a full-time job, taught extra courses on the side to maintain our standard of living, and eventually opened a private practice as a therapist, while he put less and less of his earnings into our shared bank account. Every time I raised concerns about feeling overwhelmed, he stonewalled me, or the discussion devolved into an argument. If I said I was feeling sad or hurt because of something he’d said or done, he denied wrongdoing and twisted the reality of the situation in ways that cast him as the victim of my “unstable” moods. He was adept at a common abuser’s tactic: DARVO, an acronym for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. This term was coined by psychology researcher Jennifer Freyd in 1997 to describe how abusers deflect blame.

At the time, the tactic had its desired effect. I doubted myself and tried harder. I saw four different therapists who never questioned the dynamics of my relationship. More than once, I was told to be flexible and accommodating—some of the worst advice you can give victims of coercive control, who are often overly accommodating and need help being less so. Empowering clients to have agency, even as they focus on maintaining safety, should be therapists’ number-one goal. What I really needed was someone who’d help me recognize that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, someone who’d help me recognize that I had to leave so my children could see me outside of that relationship, so I could repair my relationship with them.

When I filed for divorce for the second time, my partner threatened to separate me from the children. Perhaps sensing my resolve was stronger than usual, his pleas were interspersed with emails—over 3,000 of them—laden with verbal assaults and threats describing everything I’d lose if I left. “Your children will never want to be with you.” “Everyone will know who you really are.” A few emails told me I was his soulmate and begged me to return. Had the post-separation abuse not been so bad, I might have gone back to him.

Abusers are so overwhelmed with fear of abandonment and feelings of shame that they can’t let go of the victim. If the victim disengages, they usually become hell-bent on exacting revenge. I’ve seen this happen with surprising regularity to the protective parents I work with. Even after I left my husband, it took years for me to acknowledge the insidious abuse of being mocked, demeaned, and undermined daily by statements like, “Too bad mom likes her own family more than our family” and “I wish mom would go to more therapy so she’d be less anxious.”

Years of criticism and negative feedback can erode a person’s sense of agency and self-trust. My work with survivors, regardless of whether they stay in the relationship or try to escape, focuses first on validating their experiences so they can begin to regain trust in themselves and their own intuition. I tell them they have every right to feel anxious and overwhelmed. Then, I guide them toward understanding their trauma bond, and that which may have befallen their children.

Coercive control is as old as time. Individuals and groups in positions of power have always used their victim’s vulnerabilities against them. It’s a liberty crime. But as therapists, if we can better discern when one person has been exerting power and control over another—and have the courage to name it for what it is—we can help survivors grieve losses, heal, and fortify a fractured attachment with their children.