Have you ever been told what to wear by an intimate partner?

Or maybe you haven’t. Maybe you are used to carefully curating an outfit that exudes confidence, reflects your style, your identity. What a privilege, what a freedom! This is just one of the many freedoms that are taken away from people experiencing coercive control.

I have found that coercive control is imprisonment in your own mind. It’s something that occurs after a lot of conditioning, where there’s been a power imbalance in the relationship. The good news is, there is a way out! The key is – awareness and self connection.

Research tells us that coercive control in intimate partner relationships is greater now than ever before. With 1,023 Australian women recently took part in a study who had experienced coercive control with a current or former partner. They reported the most frequent behaviours:

• Jealousy;
• Constant insults;
• Monitoring movements;
• Financial abuse.

Of these women, 54% also experienced physical abuse. Only the women who had also experienced physical abuse were more likely to seek help. What about the rest?

What is the meaning of coercive control?

“Coercive control is a pattern of controlling and manipulative behaviours within a relationship“

Relationships Australia, Victoria

There are many signs of coercive control, these can include:

1. Isolating you from your support system. An abusive partner will cut you off from friends and family, or limit your contact with them so you don’t receive the support you need.
2. Monitoring your activity throughout the day.
3. Denying you freedom and autonomy. A person exerting coercive control may try to limit your freedom and independence. For example, not allowing you to go to work or school, restricting your access to transportation, stalking your every move when you’re out, taking your phone and changing passwords, etc.
4. Gaslighting, where the abuser makes you doubt your own truth, experience and sanity, by insisting that they are always right, and instils their narrative of a situation, even if the evidence points against this. Gaslighting in essence, is based on lies and manipulation of the truth.
5. Name-calling and severe criticism, as well as malicious put-downs which are all extreme forms of bullying.
6. Limiting access to money and controlling finances. This is a way of restricting your freedom and ability to leave the relationship. Financial abuse is listed above as a specific form of abuse but, within the context of coercive control, financial control is a tactic to keep a person disempowered, by utilising strategies such as:
   • placing you on a strict budget that barely covers the essentials such as food or clothes
   • limiting your access to bank accounts
   • hiding financial resources from you
   • preventing you from having a credit card
   • rigorously monitoring what you spend.
7. Coercing you, to take care of all the domestic duties such as cleaning, cooking and childcare without sharing the responsibility and tasks involved to undertake these duties.
8. Turning your children against you. If you have children either with the abuser or someone else, they may try to weaponise the children against you by making comments that are critical of you, belittling you in front of the children, or telling them that you’re a bad parent. Sometimes the techniques are very subtle and insidious, involving slow drip-feeding of a narrative that regards you as abnormal.
9. Controlling aspects of your health and your body. The abuser will monitor and control how much you eat, sleep, exercise, or how much time you spend in the bathroom. They may also control where you go for medical help, and the medications you take.
10. Making jealous accusations about the time you spend with family or friends, either in person or online, as a way of phasing out all your contact with the external world, except for them.
11. Regulating your sexual relationship, for example making demands about the amount of times you engage in sex each day or week, and the kinds of activities you perform.
12. Threatening your children or pets as an extreme form of intimidation. When physical, emotional, or financial threats do not work for the abuser as desired, they may make threats against others such as your loved ones, children and pets, who are also beloved members of the household.

Hill, J. (2020). See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse. Black Inc.

How does coercive control happen in the first place?

First of all, let me share with you a bit about my experience with coercive control.

In August 2011, I met my now ex husband. I naively spent the first 6 months being love bombed, until we relocated interstate. Little did I know that the isolation wasn’t just physical, it was psychological too. It started with the little things, so I would second guess myself like

“Why didn’t you pay that bill?! Great! Now we will have a late fee!”

I remember thinking to myself ‘but he never asked me to pay that bill?!’ or did he, he had so much conviction when he was yelling at me, maybe he did ask me to pay it. Oh, now I feel bad.

He continued to wear me down until I was unrecognisable, he made me doubt my own perceptions, like everything was my fault. I felt trapped inside my head and I couldn’t escape, I felt like I had NO CHOICE.

The coercive control increased when he dictated not only what to eat but how much. He also laid my clothes out on the bed for me to wear. Coercive control can be hard for people to see and therefore difficult to understand or even believe. Some may even trivialize it by saying

“Ahh simple, just choose your own clothes”

I quickly lost any independence and identity when he gained access and control over my phone and bank accounts, he claimed he was ‘helping me out’. He would quickly grab my phone when a SMS came through and said “it’s OK, I’ve got this”. Reinforcing that my thoughts and opinions didn’t matter, I felt so insignificant, like I didn’t even exist. This paved the way for a further 10 years of domestic violence.

The escape

Physically, my escape was when we lost the house and he went to rehab. However, my psychological escape wasn’t for another 3 years later when I started to heal the deep rooted trauma. This was evident when my eyes physically changed, my best friend commented how clear they were! I had discovered the ultimate power of self connection.

There are essentially 3 stages of coercive control

1. Love bomb – they shower you affection
2. Isolate – they take you away from anyone who would help you to untangle the mind games
3. Control – where you become their prisoner.

So no, I didn’t have the simple freedom of choosing my own clothes.

To combat coercive control you need to empower your self worth, understand your values and boundaries then reinforce these so the power imbalance does not occur. I urge you to be aware of coercive control, for you and for others. If you feel like the penny has dropped and the deep realisation has sunk in, please know that you are not alone. Talk to someone who understands, talk to me About Us Where you can experience transformation through my foundational healing program, Live Free. Or just follow me Contact Us for more educational and empowering posts.