The Dangers of Hidden Coercive Control
“Maybe I’m overreacting…?”
Most women who've experienced a controlling or antagonistic relationship know this thought intimately. It hits hard, often before the original interaction has even finished. Something happens. A comment, a dismissal, a silence, a reaction that doesn't fit the situation. Before she's named what she just experienced, the counter-thought is already there. Maybe it's me. Maybe I just expect too much. Maybe I'm too much.
I'm calling enough on that. Let's name it for what it is: coercive control.
Across history and culture, women's emotional responses have been labelled, diagnosed, pathologised, and repeatedly identified as the problem. As a clinical psychologist, I’ve received referrals for women whose presentations had been relegated to being 'emotional dysregulation'. They were too anxious, too moody. Men, conversely, would present, usually reluctantly and often at the insistence or mandate of a third party, with a referral for 'anger management'.
The Norms of Gendered Coercion
With twenty-five years of working with people who harm or have been harmed now in my rear-view mirror, initially as a police officer and for the last decade as a psychologist, I've come to see the gendered framing of women 'internalising' emotions and men 'externalising' them as being particularly harmful. The binary carries an embedded message: when a woman expresses emotion, the problem is located inside her; when a man expresses emotion as externalised behaviour, the cause is attributed to some external factor outside him; often to a 'her'. That framing doesn't just describe a problematic relational pattern. It pathologises women's distress as biological weakness requiring treatment: suppression through medication or, in the not-so-distant past, institutionalisation. The message: suppress your emotions = no longer ‘the’ problem. Men’s distress, on the other hand, is explained as having been caused by factors outside his control; work stressors, financial pressures, a demanding partner. The preferred treatment: behavioural. Go to the gym, fishing, out with mates, play more golf, increased rest and relaxation, change jobs. The message: control your environment = reduce distress. Yes, I recognise this is reductive, however, humour me for the moment.
As a therapist, I was trained to work with clients to regulate emotions deemed undesirable. In my experience, for many women, that was often: how do I manage my anxiety or my irritability so I don't snap at my partner? For men, it was: how do I stop doing [insert harmful behaviour] before I lose access to my partner, my job, my freedom? Women’s therapeutic goals would often focus on ‘fixing’ emotions their partners found objectionable. Whilst many men who were using violent verbal or physical behaviour wanted strategies to protect their access to resources. The asymmetry is neither subtle nor coincidental. The behaviour contributing to women's fear and stress was sitting in the room, frequently referred by the same system, and largely unremarked upon. Therapeutic silence has long been framed as productive, said to generate insight in the client. What it also generates, though, are conditions for coercive control to go unnamed.
As I write this, I’m acutely aware of those same fearful thoughts arising in me: the instinct to hedge, qualify, and soften. If I sit beneath the 'maybe I'm overreacting' narrative for a moment, what I find is palpable fear. Fear of being ostracised by a discipline I value. Fear of expressing opinion without data thick enough to absorb the response. And deeper still, something older, an evolutionary terror about the cost of non-compliance. That fear is not unfounded or delusional. It’s the inherent conditioning through reinforcement across one woman's lifetime, echoed in some form across anyone who has lived inside systems structured to maintain power through enforcing strict rules of social compliance.
Systemic vs Relational Control Structures
Coercive control dynamics can also emerge within broader social and institutional, which may reinforce coercive relational patterns as they each seek to maintain order by extracting compliance and generating consequences for those who question it. We see the same patterned behaviours in workplaces, friendship groups, medical clinics, family courts, police watch houses, and places of worship. The mechanisms of control are often relatively mundane: a casual dismissal, a criticism buried beneath plausible deniability, an unnecessary description of a victim’s clothing choices, a mother’s choice to work or not, a diagnostic description on an Instagram post, or a referral coded as pathology to access health funding rebates. Women are increasingly recognising these patterns, naming them, and choosing differently. Concerningly, as that recognition has grown, so too have the familiar counter-responses: the erosion of women's rights across multiple jurisdictions, escalating violence against women, and louder narratives attributing the problem to women's expectations being too high, too demanding, too much. These are not new arguments. They are the familiar pattern of coercive control applied at scale; relationally and systemically. Whilst coercive control may indeed maintain the power status quo for a time, it comes at great cost, not only to the one being harmed, but to the structure that demands compliance. Relationships deteriorate. Workplace attrition increases. Governments implode. Systems disintegrate. Power is illusory. Coercion erodes the very thing it seeks to maintain: the essential human connection required for a relationship or system to function.
Relationally, most women genuinely want intimate partnership. That hasn’t changed. What is changing is their willingness to accept, tolerate or to remain in relationships that generate sustained harm. Given an honest choice between harm and no relationship, or between harm and a relationship that was healthy, the calculus isn’t complicated. It’s a reasonable informed decision once the costs of compliance become evident. Women are not walking away from men. They are walking away from harm. That distinction matters and its one that needs to be spoken. Repeatedly.
What Changes when Coercive Control is Named
Understanding how the psychological mechanisms of coercive control operate does something that gaslighting, reality distortion, blame shifting, narrative control, and feigned reassurance can’t undo. It reduces the access those mechanisms depend on. For women, recognising these patterns creates an opening to step out of a partner’s cycles of behavioural harm, to reclaim her sense of self, her identity, her competence, and her autonomy.
Perhaps most significantly, recognising patterns of coercive control provides women with the information and tools to discern what a healthy relationship could look like, rather than remaining responsible for repairing one that is harming her.
This article was written by Dee Donaldson, Clinical Psychologist. Dee has developed an evidence-informed framework to help women recognise and map coercive control within their intimate partner relationships, Relationship Clarity Mapping, along with a screening tool for identifying patterns of coercive control. The self-paced online program comprises 8 modules and launches in June 2026. Subscribers to WiseWOMAN Studio will be first to gain access. For further information, visit wisewomanstudio.com