The Psychology of Threats to Kill and Coercive Control, with Dr Lisa Warren

[Music] Welcome back to Beyond the Crime, the podcast that takes you into the minds of criminals with your hosts, Dr. Lars Madson, Sheay Addison, and Dr. Rob Brockman.

[Music] Welcome back for another episode of Beyond the Crime, the podcast where we try to analyze forensic issues and challenges from a schema perspective. But today we're going to be talking to Lisa Warren. Um, and Dr. Delisa Warren is a highly regarded Australian forensic and clinical psychologist who is renowned for her expertise in threat management, violence, risk assessment and the psychological dynamics of harmful behaviors. She holds the endorsements of a clinical and forensic psychology from the APS and is the clinical director of Code Black Psychology, a specialized service that she co-founded in Melbourne which focuses on assessing and managing complex threats including family violence, stalking and coercive control. Welcome, Lisa, to the podcast and it's great to have you here and I know that um I've known you for a few years and we've been sort of interacting online. So, it's great to be able to to have you here and I guess have an opportunity to really talk about your research and the significance of it and and the value that it that it brings to the not just to the community but obviously to other practitioners in terms of understanding issues around threat assessment and coercive control and that type of thing.

Thanks, LZ. It's really good to be here. Yeah, it might be useful for us to start with, I guess, maybe having you describe a little bit about how you ended up becoming interested in this topic and a little bit about your I guess just to sort of put you in the story of of what we're going to be talking about like um a little bit about how did you end up here and uh and and why was this such a compelling area for you to sort of research and and I guess work in as well?

Sure. So, I started my career in public forensic mental health in an outpatient clinic where we did a lot of work having referrals from courts, from corrections, and from police. And as part of the referrals I was receiving, I I had a group of young women in particular who liked making threats to kill or bomb hoaxes particularly to the police. And it was quite a puzzling behavior. And while there was a a kind of general sense that the risk that these young women posed to either killing people or making a successful bomb was relatively low, the disruption and the expense and the fear around these kinds of behaviors that that that police and the courts were compelled to respond to was causing the system quite a lot of frustration. So in my work, I did what I what we all do in in our field is I I went to the literature and I looked up what is it about threatening to kill and making bomb hoaxes and bomb threats. And as a as a clinician, how do we understand the psychology? And more important, how do we inspire some behavior change? And the more I read, the more frustrated I became because the the kind of the literature back in the day was that there was a reasonable amount of research and clinical practice guidelines on what to do if somebody says that they're going to kill themselves, but there was very little around that described how we go about working with someone who says they're going to kill somebody else. Um, so I approached a then clinical director at the time, Professor Paul Mullen, and said, "I have this problem. I've got these referrals. I've gone to the literature to try and understand this this behavior and the and the psychology and the thinking that might drive this behavior and the kinds of needs it might be meeting, but I'm really not coming up with a lot." And his response was, "Well, you're not finding much because there isn't much to find. Let's do some research." And that's where it all started.

>> Wow. So that's so um before we dive into sort of uh what what you might have found found, just to kind of recap to or paraphrase, you found a cohort of of people that you were consistently evaluating who were repeatedly making these death threats, these threats to kill, but they weren't they weren't legitimate threats. And is is that what you're saying that they were um they were improbable threats to kill? It was it was something about making these kinds of the drama of it.

>> They were designed, we thought, to draw attention to another situation, not to signal that this was the the behavior or the intention was to actually do what the person said they were going to do.

>> Okay. Okay. So what would ordinarily back then in the role that you were at when someone made a threat like that? What would what would typically happen and and how would the system respond to it?

>> So threatening to kill is a crime in Victoria as it is in a number of jurisdictions and it was considered criminal because it was what we call an incoate offense. So it was an offense that was considered to predate another offense usually violence. So you had some liability associated with causing people fear for their personal safety. Regardless of whether that fear was created deliberately like there is a number of people that say that they're going to kill you because they want to frighten you. They're very deliberate in that action. There are others though that say the most dramatic and scary thing that comes into their mind because they're trying to give you a sense of this is how annoyed and upset I am about this particular situation and how worried that made you was something that they were quite reckless about. They were more interested in giving you a sense of hey, this is what's going on for me. So the kind of the ordinary course of events is that the people that I saw are people that had been charged often convicted for the offense of threat to kill. There were a number of occasions where people were also convicted of stalking or stalking related offenses because this was a behavior that had happened many times. Um, so we saw people threatening to kill the person that was their person of interest. With the the young women that I was kind of part of my very original cohort in this research, there was a couple of them in particular that were issuing threats to kill the police up to about 30 times a day.

>> Making these threats 30 individual times?

>> Each day. So that you can imagine the the expense and the disruption that was that was caused by having to respond. And that was another part of the the kind of liability that it was almost like the police were really annoyed that it was kind of like it was wasting police time.

>> To hear this. And and at the time I I heard people say things like, "Oh, well, you know, they don't mean it. They're just saying it. They're just getting attention." All of which for me felt really inadequate as a psychologist whose job and whose responsibility was to understand what's driving this behavior? Is this behavior likely to be repeated? And the and the bigger and more important question of course is what is the risk of this person actually escalating to physical violence and what are the factors that would make physical violence more or less likely?

>> Okay. Okay. So back then when when these so these would be clients that would be referred to you, right? Is that that's right? And you would you would have to assess them and evaluate them but also gives them therapy. Was that your role as well?

>> Yes.

>> Okay. All right. And still is. I still I still see um a number of um people who are issuing threats to people who have either disgruntled them in some way. So it's it's almost a little bit like what I'm seeing in some of the referrals nowadays is that it's a resentment behavior.

>> You caused me fear and annoyance. I'm going to cause you fear and annoyance by making you worry about your safety. So, I'm going to say that I'm going to kill you in horrible ways.

>> These would be email threats, phone threats, uh text messages, that type of thing. And it would be clear that it wouldn't be something that they would try to disguise. It would be a be clearly this is me communicating with you. You can recognize and identify me.

>> Technology has certainly made threatening a lot easier.

>> There are so many ways that I can send you a threat.

>> Okay. There's also some relatively easy ways that I can disguise my identity. Um, I mean, take Google Mail, just as an example. I can make a Gmail address out of whatever name that I want. And routing it back to me and figuring out who sent the email can be a surprisingly complex matter. And there's a lot of police forces now that have got particular e-crime units. And part of that work is actually even if it's my email address that a threat was sent from, that doesn't actually prove that it was me that sent it because it's quite easy to hack into people's emails these days. So while technology makes it easier, it doesn't always make accountability easier.

>> I see. I see. So these these uh clients that you would end up seeing would be folks who may or may not have attempted to disguise who they are, but they somehow have been found out. So, I guess that I I guess that there's I'm thinking back about a podcast we did on on fire setting where one of the motivations for fire setting seem to also be around getting that attention, getting recognition, right, which seems to be maybe similar to perhaps some of the motivations that may have been relevant for the clients that you're describing. Them being involved in it in some kind of way was an important part of actually doing it so that they could for conceivably sort of communicate the distress that they were experiencing or the problems that they were having without without doing so.

Okay. So you started your research on this with with Paul Mullen. He was your supervisor, right? Fantastic. So tell us a little bit about your research. What did you find and uh um and what was the significance of it?

So we did two studies. Um, one was looking at a cohort of people who had been through the magistrate's courts for the offense of threat to kill and then we followed them up over a a 10 and then 15 year period to see well, what do they do next? Is this a behavior that should be considered a particular marker of violence risk? And one of the reasons we did that study was prior to that threats were often really inconsistently defined in the literature as being in some definitions it was considered to be an act of violence. In other definitions it wasn't. And in a lot of the research on violence we saw people saying that their definition was that someone had committed an act of physical violence or threatened physical violence. And it was all studied in together. So there was no sense of okay, let's pull this apart and take a longitudinal view and see if I say it, am I going to do it?

>> And that's what we wanted to have a look at next. And the finding from that research was was quite remarkable for two reasons. One is that we found that the public are generally speaking very good at figuring out who to send off to the police and sometimes health services for making a threat or for uttering a threat. Because if your threat is scary enough and provable enough that a conviction is secured, we found that nearly half of those people would go on to commit some sort of act of physical violence.

>> Okay. Okay.

>> And we also found that nearly 4% of them would go on and commit a homicide.

>> 4%?

>> Right. And compared to the rate of homicide in the general public, we found that that was about 183 times more likely to commit a homicide than a member of the general public.

>> Right?

>> So, this was a group that was being selected, we think, based on people are pretty good at figuring out what's scary and what's a throwaway statement. Oh, I'm so upset I could kill him. Like just one of those kind of throwaway statements. You don't get charged for that. You certainly don't get convicted of it in the same way.

>> Okay.

>> What we also found when we we looked at that study though is something we were not quite expecting and that is that if you are going to be at risk, the person that the threatener is most at risk of harming actually turns out to be themselves.

>> All right.

>> Like in what way?

>> They end up killing themselves.

>> Okay. So.

>> So our our suicide rate um was like quite a lot higher than what you would see in the general population. We had up to about 11% of people um in that kind of 15 year mark um who had actually harmed or harmed and killed themselves. And the the best research that I found at the time was actually a really old study from the 1960s where a psychiatrist um in the US had studied a group had all been admitted to a psychiatric ward for behaviors that included threat to kill. So we had this threatener study and he actually found the same thing. So a a kind of wisdom that came out of that is that if I say I'm going to kill you, there is every chance that if I'm going to commit a fatal act, it's actually going to be against myself rather than anybody else. So we built into that our clinical practice of every time you look at a violence risk assessment that stems from a threat to kill as standard practice we include a suicide risk assessment.

>> Okay. So well that seems like a little bit of a surprising finding that that that would be the case. But you mentioned also that that this cohort that were at higher risk of acting out violently also were much more likely to have been violent towards other people, is that is that the case? Like how how were these people violent?

>> Most of the the violence that happened that we saw? We looked at violent charges that happened with that group afterwards. Most of the time it was an assault charge.

>> Yeah. Um, and it's it's a little bit difficult to always to get victim data, but the best we could discover of the assault charges is that it didn't necessarily relate to the person who was threatened. So, these are people that are using violence and aggression. Often, we had people who had been in court for groups of charges, you know, 8 n 10 times. So this is a a behavior that we see that people use to navigate their social situations quite often and and threats we found in a lot of ways that made sense and the it's a behavior that actually helps the person gain some control over a situation.

>> At the same time as actually avoiding physical violence. And when I inter our other study was um I interviewed about 150 people through the clinic all of whom had come through for offenses that included threat to kill. And that was one of the common themes that they described on you know when I asked them the question why why did you say that? Like what was what was the kind of reaction that you would hope might have been the outcome of saying that you were going to kill this person or um and a lot of them said I didn't know what else or you know variations of I didn't really know what else to do. I didn't know how else to be taken seriously.

>> It's a very dramatic and effective way to get people to stop and pay attention.

>> Um, and I didn't really want to hurt anybody but But I didn't know what else to do. And what we found and and perhaps from a schema perspective is what do you do when you are when you feel so disempowered that you don't know how to state strongly, I'm really upset about this situation. I don't like that I've lost my job, that my partner's left me, that I'm defaulting on my home loan in in my, you know, in in the bank. So, choosing a style of communicating that is about as dramatic as you get starts to be reflective of the level of distress that the person has.

>> It also starts to reflect their perhaps their social and communication skills. You know, whereas you and I might be able to say, "This is a deeply distressing situation for me where I can't just tolerate being in it as it is. I need to try and force some sort of change here."

>> I want an explanation. I want a different outcome. I want to negotiate what we're doing differently. Whatever it happens to be, it's hard to scale it.

>> I want people to understand how how much overwhelmed I feel.

Okay. So these the cohort of individuals who ended up being much more likely to sort of go down this pathway. They strike me as they you know were you able to do any analysis on their characteristics? Are they in terms of personality in terms of mental health issues in terms of presentations and and that kind of thing?

We did. We looked. We were able to to match a lot of the rec of the records of the court cohort to the public mental health records and then of course we um with the 150 or so that we interviewed we were able to do full diagnostic interviews with everybody.

>> Yeah.

>> And what did you find?

>> And what we found is that there's a there's a particular presentation that we see frequently and that we worry about the most. So people who are suffering particularly a mood disorder ended up being at kind of that higher risk of non-fatal violence. So we saw them progressing to like they're the assault charges and things like that. And that actually gets played out that finding gets played out in a number of different studies across the literature that that shows that that kind of emotional disregulation and the emotional intensity that goes on with a mood disorder. You see that being intolerable for a sufferer where their the kind of risk of big dramatic harmful behavior is in keeping with kind of the level of distress. Which is why, you know, when we're doing treatment, things like distress tolerance, emotional regulation, communication, and the capacity to actually describe what's going on are such critical skills because it means that that person's capacity to cope with the kind of the bigness of a mood disorder emotion is something that they they feel like they've got some some control and and a command over. It's okay even if it feels big because I know how to describe and get my needs met in far more functional ways than disregulating to violence and threats.

We also found that psychosis, particularly acute psychosis, was the the diagnosis that was more likely to be associated with fatal violence. And again, that finding plays out in a number of different studies as well. Um, and part of the explanation for that is the I think is twofold is one what it must be like for somebody who is suffering from an acute psychosis particularly a paranoid psychosis where the beliefs that their mind is telling them is true is just so appalling doing nothing about it becomes really difficult. For example, if I worked with one man that threatened to kill his wife and then he did go on and kill his wife and his psychosis was that he believed his wife had become an impostor. So he thought that this person in his home was not really his wife, but an impostor had taken over her body and if he killed the impostor, then he would get his wife back.

>> Okay?

>> And we see that kind of thing play out in in psychosis. So when we talked about the threatening statements um that had happened, we got him after the homicide. We talked about threats before the homicide. It was this kind of desperate attempt not to hurt someone because hurting someone felt morally reprehensible. So if you scared off the impostor maybe they would go away and maybe he would get his wife back. He used it as a strategy, as a way of trying to uh solve I guess it's the delusion that he was having at the moment that his wife was in fact not who she presented as.

>> Who she claimed to be.

>> Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, so um uh so psychosis, mood disorders, I mean they sound like these would be chronic problems for people. Are they did was personality disorder also considered in some of the evaluations that you did?

>> Yes. And we found higher rates in some of our groups of the kind of the typical two. So antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. And the BPD in particular is always a diagnosis that makes me want to think more deeply because it is a diagnosis that can be very stigmatizing in our health system. Um, and often it's a diagnosis that emerges out of people who have experienced multiple traumas themselves where what we we did see and what I've seen in the kind of in the years since in in working in this area clinically is that often when these people threaten to kill the motive rather than being anger is typically fear and we see what we what we call if you like a shielding behavior. So the only way I feel like I can have some say in this situation is to make you so frightened and so reactive that you might actually do what I want you to do. So it's a it's a strategy to try and keep keep themselves safe.

>> From perceived threats and perceived disempowerment and and you know emerging out of a childhood where being incredibly vigilant.

>> Was actually a really helpful coping strategy. M.

>> Part of what we often see in personality disorders that the particular or or trauma disorders as well where coping strategies that that were useful while under threat continue on even though the threat has passed. Because the brain kind of organizes itself to see what's going on around you as a something that is putting your personal safety and and your identity and your relationships and your sense of yourself at risk.

>> Absolutely. And I think from a schema perspective, it kind of makes sense. Like I I can almost um thinking of some clients that I've had where they had that volatility and from they would have uh I mean we would we would do a mode map and and an aspect of some of their vulnerable modes would be this angry enraged child mode which is which is actually a vulnerable mode and it usually gets activated and triggered by a sense of unfairness. If they've been treated poorly, you know, something is unfair in in some kind of way. So the anger there's typically a a grain of truth to the anger and it's justified in some way. It's just that it's so big. Um, and and in that situation it's like clients will lash out from from these modes and say and do things that they later kind of once that emotion has passed they they end up um, you know, saying well, I was I was really upset. I was really angry. It was the only way I could communicate how I was really really feeling inside.

>> And uh this was sort of where it was sort of coming from. I'm intrigued about the idea of threats of kill. I'm wondering if they if you were able to kind of look at was there with these with these clients who get to this position and and and that's what that's the strategy that they're they they're using. Was there an escalation over time? Was there sort of like a was there a way of kind of being able to track or make sense of how did the trajectory get to threats of kill? Cuz it seems like that's maybe like somewhere down the line of a of a of a you know like a I guess a pathway a coping strategy pathway. Did you see that? Is that what's was seen?

>> We haven't studied that point particularly but but just sort of reflecting on my clinical experience of that you certainly see an element of what you might call learned behavior. In other words, the number of people who use very colorful threats to kill. So, it's not just I'm going to kill you, but there's things like, you know, there's there's gory detail and and lots of um kind of nonverbal posturing that goes along with it. All in an attempt to be taken seriously. And then when we reflect on that, you see how the way in which they were threatened starts to be reflected in the way that they choose to communicate because they've got that sort of visceral lift experience of when someone said they were going to hurt me in a particular way or kill me in a particular way, this is how that made me feel. If I can make another person feel like that, then I can start to.

>> I can turn the table.

>> Navigate this situation so I can get out of it what I need from it.

>> That that's interesting. A phenomena that that that I've observed with clients who struggle with violent fantasies is often that they will retreat to violent fantasies in times of feeling vulnerable. And those violent fantasies will in a sense sometimes be, you know, sadistically attacking, hurting, punishing people who they perceive have have treated them poorly. And an aspect of their experience of these thoughts and fantasies is through a process of of cultivating almost the fantasies in their mind. So so sort of reveling in them or playing them through in their mind. And when you when I've asked them, you know, like what's that experience like? And and many will report that it feels well, they they're distressed. There's an element of distress to it, but there's also an element of comfort to these thoughts, an element of feeling in control. There's an element of taking the power back. It's an element of writing a wrong, of delivering justice of sorts. Um, so I'm wondering if if that is a similar kind of thing that you think that you've perhaps have noticed or or think might be relevant as well.

Absolutely. And the cognitive dissonance between this is actually pretty effective fear management thinking about I'm not this powerless person but I'm going to do all of these you know being violent to somebody else in that moment there's just this absolute control that goes along with it. I'm in charge of this situation. Thinking about that means you don't feel scared, vulnerable, weak, all of those things while thinking that stuff. So there's the kind of there's that side of it.

>> But then the dissonance comes along when people that that kind of really challenges that person's sense of self. I'm not a bad person. I'm not a violent person. I'm I I'm not someone that wants to hurt somebody else. I actually want them to to love me and like me and get along with me and take me seriously and want to include me and you know all of those sorts of very human attachment and belonging needs. But the um the psychology of being ignored or rejected or laughed at or hurt yourself is just so intolerable to sit with some people that it's almost like it's one extreme or the other.

>> Yeah. And those these these kind of two lots of thoughts butt up against each other and you see that that really horrible mental space that that that some people live in. Um, and and I think that starts to speak to particularly in the family violence area where if you have a you know and it is a little bit gendered a man who's left by a woman and he doesn't know how to process that rejection that how do I take control and not be rejected? You see, I I speak to men who take the most extreme stance on things. Well, if I control her, if I frighten her, if I physically move her to whatever spot that I want, then she's not going to do that thing that I can't tolerate, which is get on with life and have me as someone who is entirely irrelevant to what's going on. And when we work in stalking, the idea of being relevant is kind of the holy grail of stalking. Yeah. Even as a stalker, even if I can only find a third party way to have you think about me, then kind of I'm still in a relationship with you. So if I can't communicate with you directly, I I work with a number of people that use things like court processes to force contact. So if I take out an intervention order against you, you've got to respond to that. If I take out if I take you for harassment or unfair dismissal or I've got one case at the moment where man has got three different legal actions in three different jurisdictions against his ex-wife. And when we we sat and spoke about it, I said to him, well, what keeps you going? You know, it's it's it's very expensive. It's very time consuming. And he said, "Yeah, but then she's thinking about me and then maybe I get to be in a room with her and and and and I love her and I I'd go home if I could."

>> And you just you realize what an absolute deficit there was in this person being able to process, I'm not wanted by this person anymore, and I have to be okay with that.

>> It's intolerable. Too much.

>> That's um it's it's interesting, isn't it? You just you're sort of describing this sense where on the one hand they they have these sides of themselves where that are bullies that are uh coercive controllers. And at the same time, there's this very quick link to this vulnerable in intensely vulnerable side that's actually around wanting to be accepted and loved.

Absolutely. And the the work of the a forensic social worker in the United States, professor, Professor Evan Stark, who sadly passed away recently, his thinking around coercive control was just so sophisticated. Um, and he really talked about this idea that it is a sense of have to subjugate my partner to my wants and needs because that's the only way that I can guarantee I'm not at kind of at risk of or exposed to not being thought of, not being a part of this person's life, not being, you know, getting out of this relationship what I expect and what I believe I am entitled to.

>> Yeah.

>> Because of course, these behaviors, they don't happen once. It's about the pattern of them. And threats are a very effective way to not only create fear for personal safety, but to create uncertainty. And when I I I speak to women who are survivors of coercive control, it's such a common thing to hear them talk about, you know, when he says he's going to kill me, then I've got to kind of go through all of these calculations in my mind of how do I stay safe for the next few days? How do I not annoy him when this has happened? Because I know that that kind of ratchets things up.

Wow. Now that we talk about coercive control, that that's different to threats to kill, right? Can you are you able to sort of give us a definition of when when you describe coercive control, what does that mean? How can we understand it? How can we recognize it?

>> I'd really like Evan Stark's definition of it, and that's one I always go back to. So he kind of first coined this term back in about 2007 and and he talks about this idea of a a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to kind of an alien will of their own. So they're not doing what they want in their day-to-day life. And they do that by violating their their kind of their physical integrity. So that's the physical violence by denying them respect and autonomy. That's the kind of intimidation element of it. By depriving women of social connectedness. If you keep somebody isolated, it's way easier to control them. And then the control is kind of denying them access to the resources that would give them back a sense of agency and personhood and autonomy and um and even citizenship.

>> As I said, I'm in this I'm in this place. And threats are a way to really create a sense of that kind of not just fear but uncertainty. So the difference between the two is that threat describes a particular form of communication behavior. Coercive control. I describe it as it's like architecture.

>> Okay.

>> It's the architecture of subjugation. How do I moment by moment by moment wear down your belief that you've got any say you've got any um choice?

>> And that you've got any input into how things run on a day-to-day basis.

>> Wow. Okay. So it's like a it's like a suite of strategies around um that are some are obvious and some are less obvious.

>> There's um Stark recognized which I thought was absolutely incredible that the the behaviors that he saw of coercive controllers was really reminiscent of some research done back in the 1950s um on prisoners of war in Korea. And what he realized is that that the kind of these American Air Force prisoners of war were being controlled as prisoners of war. Those behaviors that really broke down that person's sense of free will looked very very similar to what he was seeing reported in cases of family violence.

>> Wow.

>> Which is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it that how we see behaviors play out as well when you start looking at cults.

>> Yeah.

>> Looks really similar. Um, and it's it works because it's not obvious at the start. Um, I mean, it's not like anyone's ever woken up and gone, "Oh, I'm going to join a cult today."

What is the hook that keeps people in for cults, for instance? Cuz I imagine that there's an element of of things love bombing or you know like there's a moment where things kind of maybe feel like oh this is this is doable or this is okay right or I can I can bear this out or this will be different like you often hear of the experience of you know something might happen in a relationship there will be you know um control or punishment or or violence perhaps and then suddenly there will be a moment of I'm sorry and I'll do better next time and and this is not who I am and then that seems seems to be an element of of how this process seems to sometimes work for folks because then they perhaps feel trapped back in it because there's a sense of well maybe hope and uh perhaps also anxiety that if they if they don't go along with it then bad things will happen as well.

>> Which is where threats are very reinforcing of exactly that but to the the kind of the love bombing idea I often sort of describe and suggest that if you've got in like intensity at the very very beginning of a relationship. It's a red flag because in most relationships be they professional or personal when they develop in a really functional way things like trust and knowledge of each other and all those sort of things they build mutually and gradually. That's kind of the the typical course of kind of the healthy building of relationships. And when conflict happens, because you don't really ever want to be in a relationship where you're kind of endlessly agreeing with somebody, conflict resolution is a really respectful process where disagreeing with each other means that there's there's still equal voice. In these sorts of relationships, the kind of the the love bombing and the intensity, and you see this in cults as well, is really targeted at a person's vulnerabilities.

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>> Lonely people, it can be quite intoxicating to all of a sudden have someone who wants to text you 15 times a day.

>> Yeah. But the kind of the gradual building of as I said trust and knowledge of each other you know starts as a gradual thing not a really intense thing and then where do you go to from intensity? How do you go back to a really moderate equal partnership when one has been so intense with the other? So, it kind of sets up this impossible conundrum right from the beginning. Um, even though something like a prisoner of war begins in such a different set of circumstances because one person is forcibly captured and into that situation, the fact that that Stark and others have seen that that the we call them the vitamins eight. So there's eight different sorts of strategies with threats being one of them that are used to really break down your sense of autonomy one by one by one. And one of the other of the of the eight is what is what we call occasional indulgences. And an apology is an indulgence because it makes you seem really reasonable. Oh, I'm sorry. I went a bit over the top there and.

>> I kind of lost my temper and I'm really sorry. I won't do that again. It can it can feel like, okay, well, you know, perhaps this person is reasonable, and that was a bit of a one-off.

>> But it isn't in and of itself. It can actually be a a quite a controlling strategy.

What are the other eight? What are the eight?

>> So, one of them is isolation. And the effect of isolating is that if you remove all social supports, you foster dependency.

>> Because humans are, you know, we're kind of hardwired to rely on each other. And if I've only got one person I can rely on.

>> Because my social media accounts have been shut down. You're holding my ATM card. I worked with one lady who said that um her partner would make her sleep in the car, but he would have the keys under the pillow in the bed in the bedroom.

>> Right?

>> So, she was in this kind of impossible dilemma and completely alone cuz of course he had the phone. So, isolation is one of them and there's a whole lot of ways that that gets done. Another is kind of monopolizing somebody's perception. So, and we see this a lot in coercive controllers where they put they put so much effort into controlling the immediate environment to create what you know like a preoccupying predicament. So, in prisoners of war, you see that that the people get locked into very small, very barren rooms and they only get given very restricted amounts of food and water. So, their their perception is kind of monopolized right down to the immediate. So, you're literally focused on how do I survive the next five minutes?

>> We see that in our cohesive controllers who do things like um as I said, you can have the phone, but you can't have the SIM card. You can't um well, I'll give you your key ring, but I'll hold on to your keys. You can only use the ATM card when I go with you or someone that I nominate goes with you.

>> So, you you're constantly thinking about how do I not annoy them? How do I not escalate it? How do I keep myself safe?

>> I will drive you. I'm thinking of a client who who um was stuck on a rural property and the the partner who was very controlling and punitive would would control her money, but also only whenever she needed to go, even though she could drive, would drive her to appointments or to shopping or to wherever she needed to get to. So there was always this lingering element of control through every aspect of her of her day almost.

>> Y.

>> And no way of easily escaping.

>> Oh abs. And that's another one of the the the tactics is kind of demonstrating that omnipresence everywhere.

>> Demanding passwords is another example of that. And the psychology behind that is that I'm showing you that resistance is absolutely futile. You can't tell the GP what's going on at home because I'm sitting in the room with you.

>> At worst, I'll sit at the door. So that I'm everywhere. I'm watching what you're doing is, you know, it's it's someone taking complete control over somebody else's fate.

>> Wow. Another tactic is inducing debilitation and exhaustion. So if I can make you tired, you're easier to control. If I can erode your kind of physical and mental ability to resist, I'll do that. So I worked with another client where she was not actually ever allowed to sleep in the bed. She had to sleep on the floor next to the bed.

>> And if she challenged it, of course, then she risked about of his rage and just trying to figure out a way to get comfortable on the floor was actually safer. But of course, she spent her time like she was exhausted because her sleep was so poor.

>> Imagine that with food as well. Like that would be an element, isn't it?

>> Food and work and tasks and responsibilities.

>> Why haven't you done this? Why haven't you done that?

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Absolutely. Um, and then the kind of the last of the eight is this idea of just enforcing really trivial demands. Um, because the more you do any little thing that comes to my imagination, the more I can just continually check in that I've got complete compliance for you. So, how you leave your toothbrush on the bathroom bench.

>> How you um fold my socks.

>> How you um stack the dishwasher, whatever the trivial demand is in the prisoners of war, one of the things that they would do is that they would force them to have these really pedantic rules like you needed to stand exactly five steps from the door anytime a guard walked past and if you were four steps or six steps as according to their measurement of how big a step was be harmed and again it's just it's that demonstration of I am 100% in control here.

>> And I think that's where as we start to see this legislation rolled out in Australia it worries me a little bit when the legislation wants to define which behaviors consist of cons which you know would constitute coercive control and which would not.

>> Because in fact any behavior could have the effect of creating a sense of control and and I I wrote for insight on this a couple of years ago and the example that I used was giving flowers. In some situations giving flowers is lovely. I love when my husband does that. But in the in the situation I described, the flowers were given for canceling the family barbecue.

>> And not making a fuss about it.

>> So it was that indulgence for not arguing that being removed from and isolated from family was what needed to happen.

>> Yeah. And in that example, and this this comes from a case, the woman who received the flowers started to cry. And her tears were about just the absolute futility of her situation. Like, what on earth am I going to do? I can't even have family around anymore. And the tears enraged him. And so he grabbed the flowers and threw them in the bin and said, "God, what do I even bother trying to be nice to you? No matter what I do, you're upset with me." So the kind of the turning it around to um monopolize her perception of I've got to be so regulated and so careful with absolutely everything that I do and say.

>> Because the risk is just so high.

>> Wow.

>> You um you coined the term invisible cage in that insight article, didn't you? Was it was it was that right?

>> Yeah. Cuz that's that's a beautiful sort of metaphor. It's not a beautiful metaphor at all. It's a horrible one. But but it captures sort of something of of what we're talking about here. These these ways of trying to control someone and I guess completely disempower someone to feel that they have agency and autonomy. And yet like the underlying fear as we're talking about before for the for the for the people that do this the men in in that we've been talking about here is this fear of being irrelevant or abandoned.

>> Yeah. Is that right? I mean it's um you work with clients obviously who have victims as well as perpetrators of this type of thing.

>> Yeah. Talk us through a little bit about how how might you work with a perpetrator who has engaged in coercive control, made threats to kill perhaps as part of that. What does therapy look like with them and how does it typically sort of occur or roll out?

The work that I do tends to be with complex cases where the kind of the standard interventions things like you know men's behavior change programs and things like that have been have been tried.

>> And have perhaps gained a little bit of traction but there is this kind of ongoing sense that there really isn't the shift in thinking that we would hope for and the reduction in the likelihood of violence that we want. So people come to me for individual work and in the room the kind of the aim is taking some of the ACT principles to be able to explore in a way where it's safe enough for a man to admit I don't want want to be left. I I don't I don't want to be irrelevant. I don't want to accept that perhaps someone doesn't want to be with me because that is just so painful and so confronting and that.

You would be no more important than the other person in the relationship is a realization that if you can get someone to accept that, like radically accept that, you have an opportunity to have that person say, "I don't like it, but I can accept it." And I can accept that that relationship is actually over.

And when I work with men who are engaging in intimate stalking, she said, "Go away. Leave me alone." Send a very clear stop message, but he's trying anyway. The rationalization that you hear time and time again is, "But I just want to understand why." If she could just explain to me why she left, then I think I'd be all right and I could leave her alone, but I just I don't understand why. In my mind, our relationship was wonderful and our marriage was perfect and the kids are better off with us together and, you know, you sort of get all these superficial platitudes.

So making it safe enough to explore psychologically what's underneath that is, I suppose, the challenge and the reward of that kind of work, including that there is no answer to that question, "Why did she leave?" that's ever going to be satisfying to that person.

No. No. No. And I wonder whether that, um, and I'm just thinking about similar clients that I've worked with who have had stalking behaviors and just thinking that that kind of question of, "Well, why? Why does she feel this way? If she can explain it to me again, if I can understand it, then it'll be okay." And in my experience, it seems that that's an acceptable thing to say to allow you to keep pursuing this.

Absolutely. Underneath that is an anxiety around, um, something sometimes around being unlovable, being, "I won't get this connection again. There is something about that this will never happen for me again. This was so special or this felt so good or this, you know." Um, in many cases, it feels sometimes for these individuals like there's an emotional deprivation trigger, which is around this experience of, "I've had this connection, it felt very powerful. Now it's jeopardized. It's gone." And because I expect that I'm not going to get close to people or feel understood by people, people being empathic or kind to me, then it's this anxiety of looking forward in your life thinking, "The rest of my life will be this bland, gray experience of relationships."

Absolutely. "I'll never experience another relationship like this" is the kind of moving forward fear. The looking back fear is maybe I've got to accept that I behaved in a way that contributed to the end of this relationship. Maybe I didn't do a good job, and I didn't really understand or feel comfortable enough in myself to be an equal. Instead, I was quite needy in the relationship. Attachment theory brought into this provides some really strong insights.

Um, I can't think of an example where I've worked with a man, particularly, who's engaged in intimate stalking where, um, you would assess their attachment style as secure. Instead, they tend to be very anxious, reassurance-seeking, somebody who really kind of defines themselves on how much the other person wants to be with them. And if they don't want to be with them, then you're going to kind of force them wanting to be with them because otherwise you're just going to miss out completely. And then you've actually got to stop and reflect on yourself. And the problem again with doing that is if you stop stalking and stop trying to get the person to think about you, you actually then have space and time to think about, "What am I going to do instead?"

"How am I actually going to front up to the fact that I'm hurt and I'm lonely, embarrassed?" And they're really hard emotions to sit with.

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you're saying that part of what happens for some men is that they flip into this subjugating, self-sacrificing, appeasing, approval-seeking kind of needy role or modes? Um, and the experience of the relationships with them is one of dissatisfaction and having to sort of look after or nurture them in some kind of way.

I often feel like stalking is really good avoidant coping. I'm avoiding coping because I'm avoiding reflecting on myself.

So, it is there is an element, isn't it? Like you're taking control. I'm in charge. I'm doing something. I'm active.

And there's cultural scripts that feed into that. You know, that for thousands of years there's been, men have been the head of the household. They've been entitled to kind of call the shots. And, you know, not feeding into those cultural scripts but just existing in the actual dynamic of the relationship between two people again is really foreign. Entitlement again enables you to say, "I can take a pretty superficial look at this. It's always been like this. I should always, I'm the one in charge. It should just always be like that." Where underneath that, the idea of, "Well, what would it be like if you weren't in charge? If you weren't forcing a relationship and you were willing to live with the risk that, hey, maybe this person doesn't want to be with me, or maybe this person doesn't like what I say, or maybe this person's got a better idea than me?"

For some, it can feel incredibly confronting. And how do we teach men to be okay with being vulnerable, with saying, "I feel really uncomfortable right now. I don't know what to do here"?

And traditionally, the whole "men don't talk about their emotions" thing really undermines that opportunity from boyhood through to manhood. When you see a family circumstance in particular where a man and boys are validated for how they feel, good, bad, and ugly, then you start to see that secure attachment developing and someone who's comfortable in their own selves and their relationships start to reflect that.

Not just this desperate clinging by force, if necessary, by psychological warfare, because I don't know what else to do, because it's the only way that I can feel safe or feel connected to someone or feel okay.

Reassured. Yeah.

Yeah. And of course, it's only ever one of the reasons why it's such persistent and repetitive behavior is that the reassurance that you get from any of those kind of eight controlling behaviors, that, "Yep, I'm in charge and I can be, I know everything's going my way." That reassurance is only ever going to last what? Seconds, minutes, hours, days.

Yeah. So temporary.

Yeah. Then you've got to do the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It becomes, and I guess as the further in you get, and within schema therapy, the way we might make sense of some of these behaviors is that they are, they would fit within an overcompensating mode, like an overcontroller mode. And this is a mode that often is activated in response to vulnerability, in response to schemas getting activated, abandonment, maybe defectiveness, emotional deprivation. And that feels very, very painful. And the way to cope with that would be to flip into a mode that actually either nullifies or avoids that feeling, numbs it in some kind of way. People use drugs and alcohol and sex in some cases as a way of trying to regulate their distress when they are activated, or they simply just detach or cut it off. But flipping into an overcompensating mode is about taking power back, taking control of a situation, which is very much like what it seems that these guys do. They flip into this mode, and then it becomes around controlling and being hypervigilant around moments of where they're going to lose control or things are going to happen, things that could hurt them, and taking action in terms of using threats of violence or bullying or physical force, or just simply like some of the strategies we've talked about today.

Yeah. Yeah. And that, for me, helps explain when we're talking about stalking behavior as well, why we see what sometimes gets called energy bursts. So stalking doesn't happen at regular intervals. It's not like at 10:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., and 6:00 p.m. I'm going to do my stalking behaviors each day. Instead, what we see is it's like you'll see this kind of flurry of activity and then nothing for a little while, and then another flurry of activity, and then nothing. And what I wonder if, because for the victim, it feels really confronting because you never know when that next burst is going to happen.

Yeah. But when you work with the stalker, there's something that triggers that.

Absolutely. And fascinating. Yeah. Prevent irrelevance. And I think that the number and duration of that kind of next burst of stalking and the number of stalking behaviors within that probably measures quite nicely against the intensity of the fear that the person has on how close are they, in their mind, willing to actually admit, "You know what, I'm irrelevant here."

And that's the painful thing. Yeah. Too much.

Too much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The trigger. Lisa, I'm just mindful that we're coming to the end of our podcast. This has been a very fascinating conversation. I have really enjoyed this. Look, it'll be lovely to try to have you on another time and maybe we can do is just talk focus specifically on the forensic schema model and try to kind of apply some of these ideas and concepts that we've discussed today to how, as a forensic psychologist, a forensic schema therapist, we could make sense of this. Because I definitely, certainly in my own practice, have found that schema therapy is very readily applicable to these concepts. Because the beauty of schema therapy is it provides a way of linking and making sense of the emotional distress. Like, I mean, a lot of the time when we hear some of these cases of men, and you rightly pointed out that a lot of men are responsible and perpetrators of this kind of stuff, of stalking and coercive control, that it's very easy to kind of see them as being almost these cold, callous, calculating psychopaths that are just blocks of ice. But really, I guess what we've been talking about today is that that's not the case at all for a lot of these individuals. They actually, the trigger to a lot of this behavior seems to be vulnerability or distress around being irrelevant or being invisible or losing an attachment. And that some of these behaviors, certainly the controlling behaviors, is all about ensuring that that attachment remains, even if it is completely, I mean, in a situation where you're in a relationship with someone that's effectively an automaton because they've been completely robbed of all agency and identity and opinion.

Yeah. Um, yeah. So, I guess that's what I'm reflecting on is that there's actually this, that at the core of it, there's actually a lot of pain and distress that seems to activate it.

Absolutely. And that if your partner becomes your tool of reassurance seeking, then I think thinking of it that way makes it, on one hand, seem cold because there's just no regard whatsoever for the lived experience of the partner. But at the same time, it highlights just how terrifying the idea is that if I don't do this, then I might have to accept that maybe I'm not very good at relationships.

Maybe there is something about me and the way that I go about things that is unlovable. Not just that it might be, but that I probably am.

And in treatment, if you can make it safe enough to admit that, and that there's nothing about the human condition that's static, and that if you can be brave enough to face those fears, you can actually do something about it.

You can actually kind of heal some of those old talk tracks and challenge some of those core schemas and actually give yourself a fighting chance of having a mutual and functional relationship. And if you can get somebody to that point where they genuinely have an opportunity of having a functional, healthy, mutual relationship, it's a game-changer. And they get their emotional needs met as well. You know, because I imagine in this situation where they're overcontrolling or appeasing, and this inherently would also be, ultimately quite unsatisfying as a relationship to be in because you're in constant anxiety and stress about the safety of the attachment.

Seeking the next few seconds of relief by doing something forceful.

Lisa, you also have organized a conference coming up here at the end of the year. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that and where people might be able to get more information and maybe come along?

Fantastic. So on Friday, the 5th of September, Dr. Nathan Brooks and myself, Nathan's also a forensic psychologist, we are running a full-day symposium on stalking. And we've got together an incredible group of speakers because we really want to look at it from all perspectives. So, we've got stalking survivors speaking. We've got a lawyer who defends stalkers in court, describing the law on stalking, where the law is working and where it's not, and what it's like to have the story of these men usually heard in court. Nathan's going to be talking about the psychology of persistence. I'm going to be talking about resentful stalking workplaces and why we see a lot of workplace stalking going on at the moment. Paul Mullen's going to be joining us as well. And we're going to have Ruby talking to us about a very specific protocol that we've put together at Codelack to support stalking victims. We call it our "Be Safe, Feel Safe" strategy. So, she'll share some of the details of that. So, we're in Melbourne. It's in person only at the Marriott. So, there's information on Nathan's website and LinkedIn page, on my LinkedIn page.

All included as well on. Yeah. Beautiful as well. So, we'll make sure that all that information is attached down below or on the YouTube website where we have it as well.

Brilliant. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much, Lisa. I'd love to have you back and talk through maybe a forensic schema roadmap approach to sort of making sense of this stuff. I think that'd be really interesting.

Thanks. It's been great.

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