The Self-Doubt Arrives Before the Thought can Confirm Coercion

WiseWOMAN Studio

Dee Donaldson | Clinical Psychologist | Founder, WiseWOMAN Studio

A woman rehearses what she's going to say to her sister for two days before she says it. By the time the words come out, they’ve already been through several drafts, and each draft is smaller than the last. What starts as “he went through my phone and read every message, then told me I was overreacting when I said something” becomes, “we had a bit of a disagreement about privacy, it’s probably nothing.” She hasn’t lied. She’s edited. And the editing happened before anyone else arrived in the room.

It’s worth pausing here, because most explanations of coercive control focus on what happens when the story finally reaches an audience: a GP, a friend, a police officer, or in front of a court. Less attention is paid to what happens before that, inside the woman’s lived-experience, while it’s still hers alone. By the time coercive control becomes visible to anyone else, it has often successfully indoctrinated the one witness who was there for all of it. Her.

A second narrator, running underneath

Coercive control doesn’t announce itself as being ‘control’. It arrives much more insidiously. Often as a correction: “You’re remembering that wrong.” “You always blow things out of proportion.” “I never said that. You’re twisting it, like you always do.” Delivered once, this is a disagreement about facts. A plausible misunderstanding. Delivered as a pattern, over months or years, it becomes something else: a second narrator installed inside her own head, running underneath her own account of events, correcting it in real time before she’s even finished forming the memory.

I’m not using this metaphorically to describe low self-esteem (although there’s not doubt that those months or years of coercive control have eroded it). It’s much closer to a training process. Each correction that goes unchallenged, each argument that ends with her apologising for how she reacted rather than what provoked it, adds weight to the second internalised narrator and it collects evidence from the first. Over enough repetitions, she stops needing him in the room to correct her recollection of events or her preferences. She does it herself, automatically, the way any well-rehearsed skill eventually runs on autopilot without conscious effort.

The end-result is a woman who, when asked directly what’s wrong, genuinely doesn’t know where to start, however it’s not because nothing has happened, but because so much of what happened has already been minimised, qualified, or reassigned to the pre-determined internalised narrative before it reaches her mouth. “Maybe I’m too sensitive.” “Maybe I did overreact.” “It’s probably not as bad as it sounds.” The memory issues, the hesitation to speak, the word difficulties; each are the residue of those thousands of small corrections about her opinions, her choices and her small daily routines; most of which she can no longer recall with the confidence she had prior to the relationship.

Why she can't trust the record inside her head to hold the line

There is a further complication, and it’s physiological rather than psychological. Chronic exposure to an unpredictable, high-stress or antagonistic relationship degrades the systems the brain relies on to consolidate memory and hold a steady, sequenced account of events. This is well established in trauma research generally. A study published this year by Goodman-Williams and colleagues, examining 655 women who sought medical forensic care after sexual assault, found that women with complete memory loss were substantially less likely to report the assault to police than women with intact recall.[1] That research concerned a single, acute incident rather than a sustained relationship, so it should be read by analogy rather than as a direct finding about coercive control. However, it would be reasonable to hypothesise that the underlying mechanism travels: when a woman’s account of the harm that has been inflicted on her is fragmented, uncertain, or incomplete, she is less likely to act on it, and also much less likely to trust it herself. Why would she? She’s been repeatedly told, whether explicitly or by inference,  by the person that claims to care for her that she’s wrong, incompetent, unreliable, or broken in some way.

Put those two things together: the second internalised narrator trained to discount her own account combined with a memory system less able to hold a clear, sequenced record of what happened. The outcome isn’t surprising. It’s close to inevitable. A woman living with coercive control isn’t failing to see or to recall her experiences of coercive abuse clearly because she lacks insight or resilience. She’s contending with a deliberately degraded internal record, reviewed by the internal editor her partner has trained to minimise it.

Memory difficulties are evidence of the psychological trauma inflicted

None of this reflects any deficiency in the women it happens to. Those same women who struggle to explain to friends, police, or therapists that they are experiencing psychological coercion. The same mechanism would produce the same outcome in anyone subjected to the same pattern of correction over the same span of time. Over the duration of a relationship a coercively controlling partner frames her confusion, her self-doubt, or memory difficulties as evidence that she is “too sensitive”, “dramatic” or “unstable”. When those who she turns to for support fail to recognise the indicators of relationship trauma and coercive control may unintentionally reinforce the very error the coercive control was designed to induce. It takes the intended effect of the harm and files it as being further evidence against the woman who was harmed. And she’s very likely to internalise those messages further.

The more accurate framing, and the one this article seeks to reiterate, is to treat the confusion, the memory difficulties, the stumbling over her words as being data about the relationship rather than data about the woman. A clear, confident, linear account is not a natural baseline that some people have and others lack. It’s what tends to be available to people whose account of their own life has not been under sustained pressure to shrink in order to survive within a harmful relationship.

What can change once she's able to shift the account of her experiences out of the grip of the internalised narrator

This is one of the specific intentions of the Relationship Clarity Mapping (RCM) method in providing her with the tools to recognise and track a partner’s coercive control behaviours directly to her experiences. To connect the dots. If the internal record is what is being degraded and edited, then the answer isn’t to try harder to remember accurately under the same conditions that are degrading the memory. The answer is to keep the record somewhere the second narrator can’t reach it: written down, dated, connected to what came before and what followed, at the time it happens rather than reconstructed later under pressure.

Once an incident exists outside her own head, in her own words, on the day it happened, it no longer depends on whether she trusts her memory of it a fortnight later. It doesn’t need to survive an internal argument about whether she is overreacting. It simply exists, the way it existed. Over weeks, the accumulated ‘maps’ starts to do something the internal editor was specifically built to prevent: it shows the pattern, rather than one isolated, arguable incident at a time. A single conversation about phone privacy might be dismissed as a disagreement. Twelve of them, dated and connected to what happened next each time, are a pattern; and patterns are considerably harder for an internal editor to talk a person out of ‘seeing’.

The written record doesn’t decide anything on her behalf. It doesn’t tell her to leave, to confront, or to report. What it does is return her access to her own account, intact, so that whatever she decides to do next, she is deciding based on what actually happened rather than on the edited version that made it out loud.

If the description of an internal editor taking up residence, one that minimises and excuses the impact of a partner’s behaviour on you sounds familiar, the new book ‘Patterns of Control: Understanding, Recognising and Tracking Coercive Control in Relationships’ will guide you through an evidence-informed step-by-step method that will give you an initial read on the patterns in your own relationship . . . separate from whatever your own account may be trying to argue you out of.

Available at the WiseWOMAN Studio website or at Amazon (Released 3rd August 2026).

WiseWOMAN Studio is an educational resource for adult women aged 18 and over. It is not a clinical service, not therapy, and not a domestic violence crisis service. If you are in immediate danger, please contact emergency services or your local DV support service.

Note: All client details are de-identified and generalised across a case composite of the many women I have worked with over the last 25 years across policing and as a clinical psychologist. Any resemblance to any individual is coincidental only.

© Dee Donaldson | WiseWOMAN Studio

[1]Goodman-Williams, R., Smith, S., Volz, J., & Hanna, A. (2026). Police reporting after sexual assault: Victim and assault characteristics that predict reporting among victims who seek medical forensic care. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Advance online publication.