"It Crushed Me Inside": How Abusive Men Attack Your Sense of Who You Are
Why coercive control victims'-survivors' identities are undermined - and how they can recover
Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts in her area of research — how coercive control impacts on children and young people.
Emma specializes in the harms caused by father-perpetrated coercive control, as well as children’s and mothers’ resistance and recovery. Read more in her book Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press.
Welcome
This post is about the impacts of, and agendas behind, how domestic abuse perpetrators use emotional and psychological abuse to undermine the entire identity and selfhood of victims-survivors.
This is a devastating phenomenon. But talk to people about a situation like this, and you might get responses that minimize its significance:
“Well at least he didn’t hit you”
“Every relationship has its problems”
“It could have been worse”
Comments like these unfortunately show a deep lack of awareness. Many people really don’t understand how coercive control – and the kinds of emotional and psychological abuse that happen as part of coercive control – can wound from the inside out, causing profound and disabling injuries to self-identity, throwing lives horribly off course.
Indeed, our cultures are geared towards making non-violent forms of abuse seem less serious or severe than abuse that involves physical violence. Don’t get me wrong, abuse involving physical violence is horrific. But it’s not the only kind of abuse that is horrific.
Awareness raising campaigns around domestic abuse often feature black eyes and bruises. Most people and countries agree that physical violence against a partner or former partner is a crime of some kind. There is far less consensus on this when it comes to repeated coercive control that involves severe emotional and psychological abuse and violations of human rights.
Coercive control can wound from the inside out, throwing lives horribly off course.
The impacts of perpetrators’ emotional and psychological abuse
Coercive control is emotionally devastating for victims-survivors.
I want to push back against the idea that coercive control and emotional and psychological abuse are some kind of second-class problem.
And, more particularly, I want to provide crucial insights into:
What precisely is it that coercively controlling abusers are doing that is having these devastating impacts;
Why it is that emotional and psychological abuse plays such a big role in perpetrators’ tactics; and
How these harms can be lessened over time.
To deliver this, we will look at the findings of what I consider to be two of the top research studies in the area.
Examining these studies – and adding my own expert analysis along the way – will help us to better understand the impacts of perpetrators’ abuse. The studies also include testimonies from victims-survivors themselves. These will be used towards the end of the post to give insights into the recovery process and how it can be assisted.