About

WiseWOMAN Studio is an independent educational platform focused on understanding how harm is produced, normalised, and sustained within relationships, institutions, and culture; and how women reclaim autonomy through clarity and critical understanding.

The purpose of WiseWOMAN Studio is to offer evidence-informed language, tools, and resources that support increased understanding and recognition of coercive and abusive dynamics that, when not identifiable, lead to significant psychological, emotional, financial, or physical harm.

WiseWOMAN Studio was founded by Donna-Marie Donaldson (Dee), a Clinical Psychologist, former police officer, author, educator, and researcher whose work examines harm, power, voice, and agency across a lifetime.

Dee’s perspective is informed by decades of work inside systems tasked with care, control, and protection; including policing, justice, and clinical psychology, as well as by her own lived experience.

This background provides a practical, evidence-based lens on how harmful and controlling relational and institutional dynamics form, how they shape identities and perceptions, and why confusion, self-blame, and moral injury are predictable outcomes rather than personal failings.

The work published through WiseWOMAN Studio is educational, not therapeutic by design. It has been intentionally developed to increase understanding, not to ‘treat’ or to ‘diagnose’. Rather than to ‘fix’; the resources and tools support building your own innate ability for independent thought and agency.

Bringing together her clinical research background, therapeutic work with women experiencing harmful relationships, and training as a police officer, Dee has developed a non-pathologising and trauma-informed model for understanding, educating, and mitigating coercive control in relationship contexts: the evidence-informed Relationship Coercion Mapping Framework™ comprised of:

  • the Coercive Control Screener (RACCS) - a screening tool designed for women to understand and map patterns of harm experienced within a current or past relationship

  • the Relationship Clarity Mapping program - a structured self-paced online program to support women to understand their experience of psychological abuse and coercive control that builds on protective pattern recognition, and

  • Specialist consultancy services and training delivered to teams, agencies, organisations and institutions across all sectors in which coercive control and psychological risk are operationally relevant.

Dee is also the author of Patterns of Control: Understanding, Recognising and Tracking Coercive Control in Relationships (available HERE)

WiseWOMAN Studio offers resources dedicated to supporting people who have experienced coercive control or sustained psychological abuse to rebuild confidence, reconnect with their internal voice, and move toward a life shaped by choice rather than circumstance. The focus is on supporting those who have been harmed by patterns of coercive control, as their own ‘experts’, with research-based evidence, analysis, and with intellectual honesty, even when the conclusions are uncomfortable (but often necessary to move forward).

Unsure whether you've experienced psychological or coercive harm in your relationship?

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