What is Coercive Control? With Dr. Christine Cocchiola | Season 2; Ep 17

No one is immune to narcissistic abuse. Their charm, charisma, and intense interest draw so many people in.

On this eye-opening episode of Navigating Narcissism, I sit down with Dr. Christine Cocciola, a therapist and social worker specializing in abusive relationships, who took decades to realize she herself was in a toxic, controlling, and abusive marriage. When Dr. Christine left after more than 30 years, the post-separation abuse began. The manipulation, gaslighting, and blame-shifting escalated from threats to slit her throat and poisoning her children's minds with lies about her, to sending her more than 3,000 harassing emails. Dr. Christine's journey is a stark reminder of just how destructive narcissistic relationships can be on us and our children, and how easy it is to justify, blame ourselves, and get stuck.

This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and/or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This episode discusses abuse, which may be triggering to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk Productions, iHeartMedia, or their employees.

Dr. Christine Cocciola, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to have you here. We met originally by email, and I remember getting your email. I get so many, and your message just stopped me. And I want to read a little bit of it, just so other folks can hear it as well. "I am reaching out as a domestic violence educator and advocate my entire life, and also a survivor of narcissistic abuse. I was in a marriage to a narcissistic abuser for over 27 years. How could I, a successful college educator and advocate on the topic of domestic violence since the age of 19, be with a man for so long and not recognize the signs of the abuse? I am prominent in the field of coercive control and appreciate the educational platform that Dr. Romney has. She literally saved my life, and I found her on YouTube in 2018, deciding to leave the abuser." And where your email made such a strong impact on me is, I think that the myth out there is that, oh, this just happens to people who don't understand it, who don't get it. And you, a survivor. I'm a survivor. Many other people who are trained in this are survivors. And so many people feel foolish. It humanizes it when professionals like you and I have gone through it. No one is immune. The red flags are not this big, obvious thing. Your story is so powerful, not just for your lived experience, but for all that you know about coercive control.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored, beyond honored, to be here. So thank you.

So let's just start at the beginning of your story. How did you meet your husband?

I was only 16 years old. He lived around the corner from me, and I used to run, and he would make remarks about me and say, "Hey, you, I want to date you." A little bit about my family history, my mom and dad have been married 63 years this October. They met when they were in seventh and eighth grade. They have the most endearing love. And I didn't grow up in an abusive home. I didn't grow up with a narcissist. And but we did grow up in a culture of of Catholicism. I have 12 years of Catholic schooling, and we were always taught to be kind, forgiving. My mom and dad are always accommodating to people and do go above and beyond to give to other people. I wasn't allowed to date before the age of 16. And now I had this young man interested in me who was kind of cute, and I just fell into the trap that I didn't know it was a trap.

What were the early days of this relationship like?

Intense. He was madly in love with me. He actually told me that when he saw me running, he pointed and told his mother, "I'm going to marry that girl someday." He was 15 and a half, and, uh, yeah, so very intense. I became his world. It was all-consuming. I would have to sneak to talk to him, meet him someplace. There were just ways that he would say, "I miss you so much, we need to talk," or "I need to see you." So there was always this very intense desire to be with me and to spend time with me, even if it meant sneaking around and not being honest about it. I just thought that he loved me, and that's what I was supposed to do.

So you were young. 16's young. What was your emotional experience like of him being so intense, so obsessive?

I think that it vacillated. I think sometimes I almost became addicted to it. That it felt so good to be so adored by someone. There was also this understanding that there weren't guys at high school who liked me. It felt intensely good, but it also sometimes felt overwhelming. There were times where I broke up with him. Once I broke up with him several times. But one time, and he literally got on his hands and knees and begged me not to leave him. He said he couldn't live without me. Another time that I broke up with him when I was in college, there was a young man interested in me at college, and I didn't want to cheat, so I decided to break up with my ex. And he basically said he was going to hurt himself if I left him. So it was very intense. That's, I mean, there's intense. It goes beyond intense when somebody is threatening to harm themselves or or their lives because you're not going to do what they want. That starts going into the realm of manipulative. But when you're so young and somebody is saying that to you, if you, and this, if you don't want to be with me, I'm going to end my life.

How did you manage that?

I remember a particular situation where I begged him not to talk that way. I remember one time that I actually did call the ambulance because I recognized somewhere in my logical brain that if he actually intended to do it, I needed to keep him safe. And if I called an ambulance, maybe he would never threaten me again like that. And that is exactly what happened. He never threatened me like that after I called an ambulance. So it did work. But I was in a fog, I would say. I was constantly wondering what was, what was real, what was healthy, what wasn't healthy. But it wasn't enough for me to leave. Or there was also this fear or worry that if I left, that he would become more intense. I guess the word I would call it would be, um, persistent. Persistent to talk to me regularly. Of course, before cell phones, so sneaking a phone call in the middle of the night on the family phone when my parents were in the next room. And and like, why would I even do that? I did it because I felt like I, I had to.

There was a coercion. You said you felt like you had to. If you didn't, then what?

I would disappoint him. I would let him down. He would ask me, "How come I didn't love him as much as he loved me? How come I wasn't willing to prove it to him?" "If you have another boyfriend, is this why you can't be around me as much?" There was no understanding that we each were supposed to be growing up as humans individually, healthy, instead of becoming mutually exclusive. It was, there was no mutuality at all.

It's interesting, your use of language on that one. You said he was persistent. The other word that was coming to mind to me is intrusive. It went into this really violating space of constantly encroaching. But you're also noting, and I think it's really important you shared this, "I was afraid I would disappoint him." And I think a lot of survivors of these relationships, no matter what age, get the idea of disappointing someone is really overwhelming and uncomfortable. So people will say, "I don't want to disappoint someone." And in fact, there's many things about this person I really like. I want to understand. Christine, was this all happening before you got married?

Yes.

Okay. I think it's also important to point out that I had a curfew, and I would get dropped off at home, and then he would go out with and be with friends. I realized now that he had a whole other life outside of me.

So you got married. Can you give us a little sort of insight into how you got to that place?

Sure. So I was in love. I was in love with him, regardless of the negative experiences. I thought he was a good man. He was part of our family. I dated him for seven years. He couldn't wait to get married. He was very much a romantic and romanticized our wedding and everything that we were going to have as a life together. And, you know, the week before the wedding was his stag, and he never came home from it. So, you know, these are like examples of like, wow, why did I marry this man? But, but this was a man who cried down the altar. First of all, let's just put a finer point on that. He didn't come home from his bachelor party. Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with her work, is Dr. Jennifer Fried, who talks about betrayal blindness? That has that flair to it, right? I'm about to marry this man. I think he's a good man. I'm in love with him. He didn't come home from his bachelor party. Where she's gonna, you know, that one off. And we all do it. I've done it. I could be the patron saint of betrayal blindness. And her framework is that now people could say, "This isn't me being ridiculous and overlooking red flags just to get married. It's a real mechanism. It's almost like a trauma mechanism that you, you can't afford to look over there." Basically, you don't want to disappoint him. You weren't not going to have that wedding.

All of those things. Can I ask you though, while you were together before you got married, were you seeing patterns like entitlement and, uh, variable empathy and grandiosity and arrogance? The stuff, if you will, of narcissism? Was any of that popping up in those seven years you were dating?

He's a musician, and I would say that he really enjoyed the attention that he received for playing his music. He is talented, but he sometimes tried to play humble and, you know, "I don't like all this attention," or "Maybe I'm not that good." So, I mean, I look back now, and of course, it's very clear to me. But during it, no. During it, no. Even, even his not coming home the week before the wedding was more like, "I must be crazy for overreacting. I was crazy for being upset about it. There was something wrong with me for not trusting him." And it wasn't until years later, of course, he fully disclosed. So, yeah, I just think that I was young, naive, and definitely dealing with cognitive dissonance. But one would argue it's, it's cognitive dissonance. You know, that idea of wanting to make the pieces fit. It was probably the front end of trauma bonding, though. After seven years, we could call it full-on trauma bonding. Somebody who threatens to end their life because you're not doing what they want to do is actually a traumatic experience. I don't think there's any way to soft-pedal that, right? There's a terror and a fear. I'm sure you've worked with clients with this. I have worked with dozens of clients who have gone through this in relationships, and they'll say, "I'm stuck and frozen because I can't live with the idea that someone would end their life." I would argue you weren't naive. I would say, I don't care if you were 18 or 78. I think people would have had actually a similar experience to to what you did. And I want to go back to the one other thing here. Patterns. You're describing this sort of humility, if you will, like, "I'm not so great." And, you know, as well as the abandonment stuff, "Don't leave me." That's actually more in line with vulnerable narcissism than grandiose narcissism. That's the pattern everyone misses. We don't, we don't see the big, preening, pretentious, "look at me." It's very much this "woe is me." But then there's still the manipulation of, "You're overreacting," which is gaslighting.

So you get married. What was the day-to-day, in and out, daily stuff of marriage like with him?

I would say that overall, it seemed pretty smooth before children. Except that I look back now, and I recall he would go out and then not come home until very, very late when he was out with friends. And he would be, I would be worried about him, ready to call the State Police and say, "Where is he? It's 3:00 in the morning." And he would say, "I was overreacting." I would say that he, um, definitely, I mean, I ended up finding out that he had a porn addiction. And and still stayed. I think that that's like, probably the pattern that I would find out something, and then I would eventually forgive and move on. I appreciate you reframing that naivety because I think you're right. Beyond naivety, it is this desire just to make everything be okay, to make the relationship okay. So I would say anytime there was a major event, whether it was getting to the airport or traveling to go somewhere, there would always be some kind of drama. There was always some kind of an argument or something. There were definitely arguments around birthdays. It was a pattern of something being ruined. Narcissistic people ruin special events. I have seen this pattern repeated for years in working with clients. It's almost as though these special events either make the narcissistic person uncomfortable because they're not the center of attention, or because there's a certain loss of control when that person isn't in charge of the emotional agenda for the day. We tend to minimize the actual harm done by this dysregulated behavior and often blame the person whose birthday is being ruined by labeling them a child for caring so much about their event not going as planned. Things didn't always go smoothly, but there was, I would say that there was enough good that I was able to forget the bad.

Right there, you just sort of defined the trauma bond bingo. That's it, right? The, "there was enough good that I could forget the bad." And it's amazing how little good a person needs in one of these relationships to forget the bad. Yeah. I mean, I feel like he almost got worse with time. Mother's Day would always be disrupted in some way. There was never, uh, just an opportunity to have a wonderful, peaceful day. Holidays, you know, "What time do we have to be to your parents?" And then we would always, it would always be me waiting for him to be ready to go to an event. Let's say socializing with friends. There was always some problem with it. It was either, "It wasn't the right weekend." And one time I had a party at my house, and he knew about it, and he came home. And I was getting the house ready. I'm running around, getting, you know, the yard ready. It was kind of an outside, inside party, doing everything to get everything ready. He said, "You know what? I don't really remember saying that it was okay to have this party, and I can't believe that you're having any left." He left when guests were arriving, and then he came back at about 9:00 PM, showed up, and pretended that everything was okay. It felt like I was constantly being punished. Living in it, I didn't see it as punishment, but now I see it as punishment. I lived in a life where there was so much to manage because I had to always, it was eggshells all the time.

This is somebody who was entitled. Not, not communicating with a spouse or partner when you're coming home at 3:00 AM, and then your concern was worry, and then being gaslighted. That's abusive. The whole par, things like the party, leaving in a petulant sort of tantrum, and then rolling back in as if nothing happened. It's as though that's like the, like page three out of the vulnerable narcissistic person's handbook right there. That that's exactly the kind of play we'd see. That sort of sullen, "I'm not staying. I didn't say you could have this party." And then showing up, however he sort of regulated himself in those hours, coming back like nothing happened. The "nothing happened" part also gaslighting.

So this was difficult, and then you had kids. What happened then?

So what I realized when we had children, I realized that I was replaced very quickly. So I went from being his everything, his queen, to being now the children replaced me. And it's a beautiful thing. I go try to tell another mother, "Your husband is giving your children way too much attention. He doesn't want to spend any time with you." What does another mother say? "You're lucky. You're so lucky. He's so good with the children." And the reality is is that we no longer did anything together anymore. They actually started to fill a greater void for him, and I was just there for maintenance. I was the one who drove them everywhere. I did all the school meetings. I went alone to all of these things because he was too busy to take to do any of these tasks. I think for that, I'm grateful because it created this space where my kids and I always had this connection. Because little did I know, by the time my children were nine and 10, he was starting to indoctrinate them against me. I mean, I would make dinner and say, in front of the kids, "Did you cook this? This is disgusting. I'm not eating this." In front of the children.

It's interesting for the so-called devoted father. You would think that he'd want to go to the school meetings. He would want to sort of be that devoted father and learn about school and all of that. What I'm hearing is that the kids were a better source of narcissistic supply.

I think so. In our relationship, I ended up working at least one full-time job all the time, and one part-time job, if not more. I was the one who was contributing most to the family income, to the family finances. And so when I was working nights, he would be home with the kids and enjoying them. He was the fun dad. He was not the person creating structure, but he would get them to bed on time, and and he just loved the attention. They adored him. So he was all about the kids.

You're working one and a half jobs. How did he view your career and your accomplishments?

So it's interesting that you asked that because he really minimized what I did. My daughter had actually at one point mentioned wanting to be a social worker, and he said, "Oh, you never want to do that. That's not a good job," right in front of me. Those are the types of minimizing conversations that would happen in our home. And so, uh, yeah, I just was meant to go to work and not necessarily talk about it. I was creating programming in the early '90s on regarding child sexual abuse trainings for the state of Connecticut, and he was not at all interested. Did not care what I was doing.

Were you the primary breadwinner?

He works full-time too. He's actually a school guidance counselor and he's been doing that for years. But I was the one contributing more to the family finances, and I was the reason why we were able to go on nice vacations. I was the reason why we were able to buy that car. So it was financial abuse. But different people don't think about financial abuse as being. My brother would often say, "I was, I was the cash cow."

Well, it's interesting. I see where you're going with that is that when we think of financial abuse, we think of a narcissistic person or a controlling person having all the money and then isolating that person financially, taking away credit cards, monitoring their spending, making it so that they don't have any discretionary income. In your particular case, it was really exploitative.

Yeah. So even though I was working extra and saving more, I was also like, never allowed to get my hair done professionally or get a manicure. Then, as the marriage was was going on, I'm hearing the themes like the gaslighting. As the kids are getting older, he's actually now sharing with them things that would really put a wedge in your relationship with them. Were there any other things happening that would shed light on how toxic, how unhealthy it was?

There was infidelity. And I thought it was only one time. The issue with the infidelity is that it was with someone that we were friends with, that worked at our children's school. And then said, "We would get better, and we were going to go to therapy." And it was always this thing. Whenever we talked about going to therapy, it would be like, "Well, I can't go every week." He would commit to every other week, or he would show up late, or he would say, "I didn't tell him about the appointment." There was always that type of manipulation going on. And I'd be running around saying, "Here, I show, let me show you. You know, I, let me show you I did tell you about this appointment, and that's why I'm here waiting for you." And I have to say, that was always interesting because it felt like the therapists really weren't always picking up on the fact that he was abusive and that the relationship really probably couldn't get healthy. So when he did have this affair, is we would have to go to the school and see this woman, and she was a theater person. And so my children were in theater, and a very small school system, by the way, so very intimate community. And he would be looking at her. And it would be like a year later, and I was just like, "What is going on? Why is he saying that he's going to go to therapy, not always showing up?" And so there started to be this connection of the dots. And then we had an event at a school for, for the school, some, an event. And I ended up going with friends in the car rather than going with him because I was just really frustrated by how he had behaved. And when I got home, he had locked me out of the house. I had to decide what to do in that moment because I could call the police, but I didn't want to call it a domestic abuse. I didn't want to get my husband in trouble. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to call my father. It was 1:00 in the morning. So I did end up calling the police and just saying, "I'm locked out of my house." And the police knocked on the door, and when he opened the door, he told the police officer that I was drunk, that I had been using medication, mixing medication and alcohol, and that he, they could check my car because there were open bottles in the car. Now, it was a BYOB, and we did bring home a bottle of wine in the back of the car. And so this is the, this was an example of things that were happening that weren't shocking enough for me. And then when I left, and I went to the police officer said, "I think you should just leave tonight and go to your parents' house." And I went to my parents' house. The next day, I picked up my children, and it was that evening that, um, when I came, and when he begged me to come home, intermittently accusing me of kidnapping my children, "I love you, you're my soulmate, we'll go get therapy." When I did decide to go home on Monday, and I went to my night class to teach, that is the day that he began telling my children that I was the cheater. That my daughter remembers the exact day. "I was the cheater. I, um, I am the one who has mental health issues. That I am not to be trusted." She was nine, my son was 10. And I didn't leave him until she, they were 17 and 19. And she told me when she was 17. So for nine years, eight or nine years, he indoctrinated them. Unbeknownst to me. I, I knew something was wrong in the home. I believe that when he realized I couldn't forgive him for the infidelity, and he knew I was pulling away, that's when he needed to exert more control. He started doing it in other ways, more insidious ways, including harming my children by coercively, I'm going to use the word coercively controlling my children.

What, what did that look like? What did the coercive control of your children look like?

My daughter really just wouldn't connect with me. It started to really change around age 12. This started when she was nine. So imagine it's happening, 9, 10, 11. By age 12, you know, puberty, all of those things. It just became where she started to, you know, "I don't have to listen to you. You can't tell me what to do." Some of this, you could say, "Okay, wait, this is typical teen, like, tough teen stuff." But when it really became evident to me was he would come home from work, and I remember, like, I'm a cookie maker. I would make cookies for the family. And I would make, like, in an attempt to make him happy, I made like homemade biscotti with pistachios. And he came in the door. The biscotti's on the counter. I said, "I made you some biscotti." And he said, he walked past me, walked directly to her and said, "How's the most beautiful woman in the world?" to my child. So this is deeply, deeply, deeply inappropriate. I mean, there's no other, there's no other word for that. It's, it's deeply inappropriate. It's triangulated, and it really was meant to create the power struggle.

That sounds like an incredible event. You can feel the potency of it. How did all of this together, these three years of indoctrination, how did all of this affect your relationship with your daughter?

It was challenging, and I was distraught. I was filled with anxiety. I just always was wondering what I was doing wrong. I was either doing something wrong with him or her. Over the course of those eight years, it began to feel like it was three people against one. And it would be often times in the form of mockery. It would be like, "Oh, you can't take a joke?" And of course, the lowest level of humor is mockery, right? So there would be just, I couldn't listen to my own music in the home. I couldn't actually, like, you know, turn on the music and and dance in my own home. I couldn't choose a TV show in my own home. I was really beginning to see clearly what was going on and recognizing that the longer I stayed, I was afraid I was going to lose my daughter entirely. Yeah. Yeah, because she was aligned. And my son was away at college at that point. And, um, and so then I tried. I stayed in the home, but in a spare room. And then when I did do that, um, that's when the emails started to ensue. About 3,000 harassing, threatening emails over the course of 13 months. Intermittent. Thankfully, I knew enough by then because of listening to people like you not to respond. But there were about 10 a month that were, "You're my soulmate, please don't leave us, please don't leave our family." And then the other 200 some odd emails were, "You're unlovable. No one will, everyone will know who you are. Your children will never love you." And he knew that if he talked with me about my children, that that would be the most heartbreaking. I had, of course, shared with him my concerns about my daughter and why we weren't close and what was wrong with our relationship. And now I know he used that against me to harm me.

The sheer amount of confusion, right? Because you didn't know he was talking badly to your kids about you. You didn't know this. So it had to have been one of the most confusing, destabilizing experiences. The day my daughter told me, she was 17. He had been arrested because when I used to try to leave the home, he would turn off the electricity so I couldn't leave, couldn't pull the car out of the garage. She was going to her part-time job at my sister's house as a dog sitter. And he hated that she had anything to do with my sister. He, one day, he turned off the electricity in the garage so she couldn't go to work to my sister's house. And she's texting me, "Help, help, I call the police. I don't know what to do." I call the police. Uh, and the police come, and he gets arrested for, uh, disorderly conduct. He had actually, uh, physically pushed her and threw her to the floor because she wanted to leave to go to her job. So the next day, we're in the car, and I said, "When did this start?" And that's when she tells me, "The day you went to work when I was nine years old, and we had gone to Nana and Papa's for the weekend, Dad said you were the cheater." So that was, she tells me the exact day and time that it happened. And so that was the day that I literally couldn't, could not believe what he had been doing all of those years. Here I was thinking that he was a decent human being, a good father, a good father. Absolutely not. That's almost a decade. For almost 10 years, he was in essence filling your children's heads with lies. It is such a cruel form of abuse, and you had no idea this was happening.

How was your daughter treating you throughout all of this? How do you think she even felt about you during this 10, almost 10-year period?

I would say the word is contempt. There was just contempt. And I didn't know why. And I would often ask, "What's wrong? Why are you so upset?" But how could she even know it if it was being done so insidiously to her? No, how could she even really know it? And so, and, and this was someone who, by the way, was fun, and, you know, let her do basically whatever she wanted. So for all the moms out there listening, right, our children are so harmed by these abusers. It's totally never their fault. They are psychologically traumatized. They are basically turned against the one parent who will love them unconditionally. When I think about who was harmed the most in all of this, it's a little vulnerable child.

Yeah, absolutely. It was. And, and it really sounds like a lot of what you're talking about is triangulation. It's two or three people in a family system coming after one. And again, children are eminently recruitable, right? If somebody sets their mind to do something that cruel, it's very, very doable. A child's tendency is to trust a parent. Their first place to go is not like, "Oh, they're trying to trick me and say this." He's sharing these things with them. You're not. So he must be speaking truth because you're not telling them anything. They take that in for again, for the better part of 10 years. In essence, you became scapegoated in this family system. It's what happens in all narcissistic family systems. And he was also very fun, and he wasn't the one working all the time. I think that we underestimate how much power a parent has to fill a child's head with that kind of a narrative. And, and, and patently untrue, saying that you were unfaithful in a relationship where you were not, and allowing that lie to maintain for not. Absolutely. And, and there was this belief system that, you know, "Mom has a bad temper." Or when I would go outside to mow the lawn when I was upset, that was considered a bad temper. I would leave the house and say, "I'm gonna go mow the lawn right now," and that was considered a bad temper. To tell you one more really insidious thing, I found out after I was leaving him that he had a gun in the home for two years, unbeknownst to me. The kids had gone out in the backyard, we had some acreage, and they had gone out in the backyard and done shooting. They were told not to tell Mom about the gun because "Mom, I'm not sure I trust her knowing about a gun in the house." After I had left him, I actually came into the house to get some items out of my closet, and he knew I was coming. And when I entered into the bedroom, on my desk were were bullets on the desk. And, yeah, to me, it felt like a sign. I felt like he was trying to threaten me. It's that manipulative, that awful. And, you know, you also made a point earlier, Christine, that I want to put a finer point on. The mockery and the making jokes at your expense, that is also a form of gaslighting, meant to sort of unbraid, undo another person. And the deception. I mean, it's all here, right? Infidelity, deception, manipulation, triangulation. It's absolute and utter cruelty. Gaslighting. Every time you turned around.

What was that penny drop moment in your marriage when you thought, "Oh my goodness, I am living what I'm teaching about in these programs on coercive control"?

The vernacular of coercive control didn't come in until after I left him. But I was teaching on the power and control wheel and the post-separation abuse wheel every semester in my social work classes. And I did have a moment where, when I was looking at it, and I said, "Oh my gosh, like, is that counter-parenting that's happening in my home? Am I being diminished? Is this financial abuse because I can't, like, go get my hair done, even though I'm work, I'm the one working extra hours?" I did have that moment. The Duluth Power and Control Wheel is a visual tool used by domestic violence specialists to explain the types of behaviors abusers utilize to maintain power and control and the tactics used to keep someone in a relationship. The inner wheel has subtle behaviors like threatening to take their own life and humiliating her, while the outer ring represents physical and sexual violence. But I have to say, he was so good at coming back to being nice. The intermittent reinforcement was so, so evident, so incredible. The moment that he thought I had a foot out the door, he was on task. He was going to therapy, even if it was only every other week. He was making dinner. He was coming home with flowers. There was just this, you know, "Come on in here, let's watch TV with the kids." You know, versus, versus the day before, it was, "Let your mother do the dishes. Come in here and sit with me." In other words, there was a diminishing of me the night before that we don't all help each other with the dinner table, cleaning up and everything like that. And then the next day, it was, "Come on in here and sit with us." So there was this push-pull all of the time. I really couldn't see clearly at all. So there was that moment when I did finally, in finally leave and and and go up to the spare bedroom. What was going on was the water was being turned off in the house after he went to work, so that I couldn't shower and I couldn't do laundry. The coffee beans were gone from the coffee maker. I ordered more coffee beans, they disappeared. And then I was locked out of the garage during an entire year when I was up in that spare room before I finally filed. Because I, I said I, I wanted to file, but I, I was worried. I mean, uh, not having the coffee means, you know, him buying new sheets for the master bedroom when we had sheets. And now I know, of course, that he had been involved with another woman for at least eight or longer years, and that she was coming into my home when I was leaving on the weekends to go to my parents' house so I wouldn't have to be around him. So.

Oh, there's so much here. There's so much here, right? But some of these patterns, the turning the water off, the turning the electric off, the removing the coffee beans, this is textbook coercive control. It's the manipulation. It was basically, "I'll show you who's boss. You're not taking a shower. You're not making coffee. You're not leaving this house." It was controlling these kinds of mechanisms. This is what coercive control looks like. The examples you give are so in your face. There's two other big things you're talking about. First of all, 3,000 emails in a year, that's 10 a day, right? Sounds like lots of them are bad, and every so often there'd be some that were good and welcoming. And that was his behavior. Everything you're talking about, Christine, is all trauma bond, right? This is why people get stuck. You use the term intermittent reinforcement, and for everyone listening to this, if you've ever played a slot machine, you know what intermittent reinforcement is. You stand there and you keep putting money in, something with the idea that it will pay you out from time to time, and maybe, maybe someday, if you're lucky, you'll get the jackpot. That slot machine reward schedule. This intermittent reinforcement is this, what we call the stickiest reinforcement schedule. It's the hardest to break away from. It's when somebody's giving you those little bits of good sprinkled in lots of bads. You just keep pulling the slot machine handle. And that right there is the origin of the trauma bond. It's the back and forth tendency to self-blame. "Maybe it's going to be okay after today." Justify, justify having the same arguments going around the merry-go-round over and over again, not being able to articulate what's going on. This is the trauma bond. I don't think we can describe it enough times so people can fully understand what's happening in these relationships and above all else, not feel foolish. Because when you have children, and you have a family, and you have a home, and you have a life, you're going to fight to keep it together. And that's what that, that fight can be kept in place by these, these little sprinklings of, "Hey, why don't you watch TV with us?"

So I wanted to jump to a point where there's a very specific part of your story I want to highlight, which is, can you tell me what happened after you went out to dinner with an old friend?

Uh, so I went out to dinner with a high school friend who had reached out to me, and everything was transparent in my Facebook messaging. I didn't know that my ex had access to it. This was when we were together. But when he came home from a school trip, he went on to supposedly look at his pictures from the trip, and he went onto my Facebook, and he saw the messages. And in those messages, I clearly say, "Happy to go out for a cocktail with you, but I'm not interested. I have, I'm married. I would never cheat on my husband. I'm totally platonic." And he said, "Absolutely, that's fine." And so I went out for this drink with this friend. And then when my ex came home from this trip and saw it, he, uh, basically left me a message at work. He said, "You, I'm gonna slit your throat." Okay. And, yeah. And, and I, and I went to the police. And the police, of course, made me leave the home with my children. And he had thrown all of my personal items out of the house. When I went into the house to get some of my items, the police were helping me put them back in to get some personal items to take with me to my parents' house. And when I went in there, there was actually an altar in my master closet where he had set up my jewelry box with candles and pictures and our, his wedding ring, and a note to this person going out for the drink with that was basically a note from me imploring my love to this person, and how much, how much I loved this person. That was what I saw in my closet. Nothing else in my closet. Everything else gone out and out in the yard or being pushed back into the bathroom. I mean, yeah.

That's terrifying in every way. The shrine. It's more of the obsessiveness. What's interesting is the very obsessiveness you saw as a 16-year-old girl is showing up in this. And then you come home and you see this, which almost feels like a horror film to come home and see that. Emotionally, Christine, what was happening for you?

I think there is this, I don't know what it is, but it's a problem really believing that someone could be that evil. I stayed with him after that. He begged me. We went to therapy. I stayed with him for about four more years. So what is it? You know, I, I tell my story because I don't want victims to feel shame. But the reality is is I feel a little bit like, "What the heck? What else did he have to do for me to actually leave?" The post, as we all know, right, the post-separation abuse intensifies. And we know that about coercive control. 90% of victims of coercive control have an intensification of that coercive control when they leave. I think in general, I want to believe the best in people. I didn't want to believe he was a horrible person or that he could be a horrible husband or horrible father, but he really is.

I don't think anyone's going to disagree with you. If we were to be very clinical about this and take apart what was happening here, this was a person who was incapable of not being. For him, a relationship was fully about control. It's about dominance. It was about power. It was about validation. And it was about entitlement. That's what a relationship was for him. That's it. However, he's also very, very thin-skinned. And that thin-skinned quality becoming really reactive when there's any perception here. This is a guy who's cheating on you with somebody in your small community, right? No problem there for him. But he perceives you as doing one thing, and it is this completely disregulated reaction. Again, that's that thin-skinned nature of this. I think every time somebody has an experience like this, "Is this evil? What is this?" It's really these dynamics. And they simply don't work in a human relationship. They don't. It's that simple. We don't even have to, we don't have to dismiss the person entirely, saying, "Whatever it is you are, you can't be in a relationship with another human being." Is you don't have the apparatus for it. Because relationships aren't about power and control. They're supposed to be about collaboration and respect.

What I want you to do, though, because we've been floating this term around a lot, I just want to make sure everyone's clear on it. Could you please define, Christine, coercive control?

Yes. So coercive control, I think a simple way to define it is to say when one person has power over another person in a relationship. And it's a pattern of one person having power over another in a relationship. The goal of the person, the coercive controller, is to diminish another person's autonomy, their agency. The tactics they use are psychological abuse, like gaslighting, manipulation, intimidation, isolation, legal abuse, financial abuse, certainly could be sexual abuse, and use of the children as weapons. You can correct me if I'm wrong here, Dr. Romney, but because these people only feel okay in life if they have control, they need to have power over others in order to feel secure in themselves. So coercive control, I see it as the foundation of of all oppression. When we think about judicial systems, when we think about criminal justice systems, when we think about racism, genderism, all of these things. But in an intimate relationship, if anyone treated me this way outside of my home, that person would have been immediately seen as as someone who is harmful to society. Yet, because it happened in my home over and over again, I had therapists diminish it. I had police diminish it. I had a judge, you know, basically reprimand me for going back to get the title of my car because my ex had my car tracked. The reality is is that it's an oppression that we see happening in all systems. And and our most vulnerable. My area of interest is the impact on children. Because Child Protective Services doesn't really look beyond a physical, a violent incident model, right? Or maybe a sexual abuse of a child discloses. But the reality is is all of these abuses are based on power and control. And it is a psychological manipulation that is so harmful to the developing brain. So I was an adult when this happened to me. I was a relatively well-adjusted.

Human being, imagine children when this happens to them. That's how harmful this is. That no system is recognizing this. I don't even have words to the level of, of, of, I guess, rage, sadness, whatever it is, that the systems don't recognize how harmful this is to children. Until we begin to recognize that coercive control is inflicted on everyone in the family system. Thank you for also elevating coercive control to understand larger dynamics in a society. Because I've always sort of simply understood coercive control as using menace and fear and isolation to control another person in a relationship and rob them of any autonomy in that relationship. Basically, they cannot leave.

What was really nefarious about what you went through, though, was your coercive control was paired with these good days. And that's when it's the most toxic because you do it, sort of, it keeps, it keeps skin in the game, really. You connected coercive control with post-separation abuse. Could you share with us how you sort of define or how you conceptualize post-separation abuse?

Sure. So, I think it's really important that language matters, right? And that I think we have to look at coercive control as the umbrella term. So under coercive control is post-separation abuse. Post-separation abuse isn't separate, it's under it. Coercive control is inflicted in a variety of ways. And the reality is, is that it happens pre-separation and it certainly happens post-separation. And it actually intensifies. Oftentimes, when a victim leaves, she's more at risk of harm, and so are her children. Because this is about, "How do I continue to retain control?" And if I can't have control of you in my home, I'm going to figure out another way to have control. And so, to your listeners, anyone who thinks they're being tracked, you are being tracked. Because the reality is, is that is a way to control. And it's so easy to do today. So this post-separation abuse is really a further infliction of coercive control, but by creating it in a space where it's no longer just in our home.

And I would say that, you know, just as a little aside, when my children came home because of COVID, everybody came home, and they had to go between my little apartment and the beautiful home we had built up the road a few miles away. And he couldn't stand that they were coming here. And so what he would do was hide the keys, turn off the electricity in the garage because he did not want them spending time with me. That's post-separation abuse. That's a further infliction of coercive control on the children to harm me. And so really, the end goal is to harm me. But who is he harming in the interim? Of course, the children.

I really like what you're saying here about coercive control that it's an umbrella. I want to share with you how impactful you've been in my work because I've been someone who has been guilty of using that term, "high conflict," "high conflict divorce," "high conflict relationship." And I absolutely thank you for shifting my use of that language. And I was actually giving a talk over the weekend to a large group of therapists and I said, "Everyone, we're going to tip our hat to Dr. Cocciola." You framed it so beautifully when you said that when we call it high conflict, we're sort of pathologizing the other individual who's actually not behaving in a conflictual or abusive way at all. They're being abused. And putting the entire relationship under that frame is pathology. It's almost as though, "Well, we can feel better about this if we say they're both a mess." And you said, "No, this is post-separation abuse to recognize the directionality." So I think language does matter. And so by calling it post-separation abuse and not using the term high conflict, that that's actually a really, really important distinction to make.

But Christine, what I keep hearing is that we do not, people do not want to consider emotional abuse. Even therapists. Listen, if cops don't want to get it, I get it. They don't get trained as therapists. Judges weren't trained as therapists. But people who were trained as therapists and in theory on trauma, who are not willing to see emotional abuse in a relationship for what it is. And in fact, there are some real finger-wagging therapists out there saying, "Be careful about using the word toxic." Really? So shame a client who has lost all sense of agency, autonomy, and control in their lives and chastise them for these dynamics in their relationship. This work is so important. The work you're doing is so important.

You actually mentioned that COVID helped your relationship between you and your children. How did that work and how are they doing now?

Thank you. Thank you. COVID was so awful for so many people, but for me, it brought my children back home to me. I was able to, what I realized, Dr. Romney, is that I could not be their mom in this home anymore. I had to be a therapist. I literally had to create a space where even if there was contempt or there was a snide remark. I mean, I would have someone come home say, "Dad called you a sociopath again," or "You're, you know, are you sure you never cheated on Dad because he says you always cheated on him." And so I would just, I learned to respond to them in a way that was calm and attuned to them and would, would basically acknowledge what they heard, but also be like, "I'm sorry you heard that. That's not true." And be really clear about what was true and wasn't true, but not be defensive. And that was super hard as a trauma victim, by the way. Here I was, literally reeling from this, financially decimated, he had taken everything from me, including the home, and now trying to ensure that my children had a safe place to come home to. And so what ended up happening is that he so badly did not want them around me that he started to coercively control them during COVID. And eventually, they started to see it clearly. Unfortunately, we never got access to many of our personal items in the home. My children, I mean, their toys, my sons' "Tank Engines," my daughters' Barbies, all of these very precious things that I had boxed up and labeled. He took everything. He had eight cameras up in the home. Eight cameras up in the home while I was living there at the end. And he kept them up when the children were living there because he said, "Your mom might break in and steal things. I don't trust your mom." So my children were living in a home that, when I said to my son, "Can you go into your sister's room with a black garbage bag and just grab as much as you can?" My son got a call from his father, "Put the bag down." We have to really look through the lens of children and understand that their experiences are like ours. To expect our child to say, "I never want to talk to Dad again. I'm never going to have a relationship with this person," or to expect them to do that at their young, vulnerable age is a huge ask because they're children. And we couldn't do it. I was with this man for how long? So, so my children now, thankfully, are doing well and are growing. And I think it's post-traumatic growth, right? It's about this idea of being able to grow through the trauma. "We're okay, Mom. We're okay," is what I hear. And in my heart, I really, it's hard for me to believe they're okay, but I have to hope and continue to help them grow. The worst thing that could happen to a parent is to have a child that lives down the road that you don't have a relationship with, that has been turned against you. And so I'm grateful that my children did begin to see clearly. And I truly believe that's because they always had a strong attachment to me when they were little. And I always tell my protective moms that your child will always have that attachment to you. And the goal is to reignite it or to foster growth in it as much as you can because he is working all the time to harm that and work so hard to harm it. And what he's, he's working so hard also to just constantly protect his fragile ego and remain in control. And I think that what's shattering, as a co-parent of someone like that, is to recognize that their other parent would be so willing to sacrifice them, sacrifice their mental health, sacrifice their sense of well-being in the name of their fragile egos and never seek out the help. Because if the pushback I'll always get is like, "Well, that's a broken person." I'm like, "Really? Because that broken person is getting through the world just fine. They're able to organize extramarital affairs and music gigs and go to work. So that seems functional to me." And if a person's that functional, they can pick up a damn phone and call a therapist. But no, no, no, no, no. Lest the fragile person do the work, let's just destroy everyone else in our wake. That's how they do it. And it is absolutely not okay. Because you know this from doing the work you do. I know this from doing the work I do. This stays with children. Who grow up with this? Are your children? And are you seeing it in your kids?

I certainly observe it in them. So, you know, sometimes trauma responses, as you know, are to be a perfectionist, to be an overworker, to try so hard. Or perhaps one of the things we know that happens with children, and this is specifically what I studied in my doctoral work, is that when they have been harmed, and they're not exposed to or witnesses to, they are truly victims in these circumstances. But when they've been harmed, they have significant anxiety. They are dysregulated very easily. They can certainly participate in other adverse experiences. But so, you know, anxiety for sure, that is very evident. And, you know, I have to take some of that responsibility. I was in, just in that home, I was anxious in that home. And so the good news is that they now see me not anxious. The good news is I've been able to show them that they can also grow and change from this experience. And, you know, so we have conversations. They know. They do know who their father is now. They see it clearly. And they understand what happened to them. You know, my daughter likes to be a little more, um, less, likes to talk about it perhaps. Less. My son is more open to having conversations. But he's the one who also still accepts texts from his dad because he says it helps to remind him that he is not stable. And my daughter has him totally blocked.

Dr. Christine said that her son continues to receive these text messages so he can really see it. And that's not an unusual pattern for people who may have distanced from an antagonistic or narcissistic or abusive relationship. Staying in touch because the ongoing toxic messaging is actually a tool for seeing how unhealthy it all is and a reminder to not get back into it. I have known many people who say, while they don't like seeing these messages anymore, they do help them recognize why they had to step away from someone they love.

I want to go back to something you said because I want to double that point. Is that children are experiencing this and not just witnessing it. Children are not passive observers here. They're having a very real experience. But I am going to, I am going to also call you out on something. Well, part of this was my fault. I was so anxious in this marriage. What other feeling was there? You know what I'm saying? I can't think of any other feeling one would have, you know, a real emotional experience when somebody is abusing, controlling, and in essence, like you said, relationally subjugating you. But anxiety. And you know, I know again, we see this over and over again, is that what were your choices if you saw this earlier, Christine? Again, I'm going to, again, I'm going to cite Dr. Jennifer Freed. If you saw this earlier, it was a cataclysmic thing to see. And it might have very well been a call to action of having to leave. And there is a part of you that did not want those children growing up with him without you in the house. And you grappled with something that many, many people struggle with, which is, "We're going to stay in this, and they're going to watch me enduring this." And you can only fake it so long, right? They're going to see your anxiety, especially since you didn't fully understand what you're dealing with, right? Or if you did see it, okay, come out of that betrayal blindness, as Freed would call it, and saw it clearly, it would be cataclysmic. By the time you left, they were quite a bit older, and they were both on their way sort of out the door. That's something to really focus on. And you also said something about, "I had to be a therapist almost more than a mom with them." You have the good grace of being trained as a therapist. The vast majority of people who are going through this, whether it's pre-separation abuse, post-separation abuse, the entire umbrella of coercive control, or any form of narcissistically abusive relationship, aren't trained as therapists. Are having a real experience, are having trauma responses, and may not necessarily be able to always tamp down all that emotion and be present with their kids while their own worlds are falling apart. It's quite remarkable that you were able to get yourself into that therapy headspace, especially during COVID, and create that space for your kids.

Yes. Thank you so much. I actually, I created a program. And it's just literally trying to help protective parents act, actually do the things I did. So it's all about how do you create the space in your home to respond to your child when they're behaving a certain way so that that way you're not necessarily responding as Mom or reacting as Mom, but you're responding more in a more attuned way. Because you're absolutely right, I'm fortunate I had the skill set. What I saw happening was that it was working. They were starting to see me as safe, not the untrustworthy, crazy mother that they had been told I was. They were starting to feel safer here. And that was, that was my saving grace, to be honest with you.

How can we find this program that you've created for parents?

Yeah, it's on my website. It's coercivecontrolconsulting.com. And I actually just started a foundation because I have so many moms who, who are, what happens in domestic abuse, of course, is financial decimation. I just started a foundation so that people, I'll have more money for scholarships. I've been giving away scholarships. But, you know, certainly the idea that our children are experiencing basically what we've experienced, yes. And so they're just so, so vulnerable and needing as much support as possible.

Absolutely. I would say the vast majority of survivors of childhood coercive control and narcissistic abuse, what we tend to see there is, is anxiety. Anxiety. And inaccurate self-appraisal. People who've gone through this do not see themselves clearly. They under, they undermine their own sense of ability. They are, um, they may have a higher risk of trauma-bonded relationships going forward.

I do have one other side question. I'm just curious. You said your parents were married for 63 years. They were very happy. They liked him so much in the beginning. What happened as it all started to fall apart? How did they regard this situation and what you were going through?

So, I think in the beginning, as there were all of these incidences along the way, they were willing to forgive him if I was. They just, again, wanting to keep peace, you know? But towards the end, when things were really evident and I was living out of the home most of the time, living at my mom and dad's, my mom said something pretty profound to me one time as I was laying on her lap sobbing, couldn't believe all of the horrible things he was saying about me to the kids and in emails. And she said, "The girl I know is much stronger than this. And the girl I know, she needs to leave." And that was a moment for me where I, I was, I always say to people, if the post-separation abuse hadn't been so bad, if he had not gotten so, um, and it just became so bad that it had, if it had not been so bad, I probably would still be with him. I couldn't agree more. And I think that the foreshadowing of that was there for when you were 16 years old. The very guy who said, "If you ever leave me, I'm going to end my life. I'm going to kill myself." That was already giving you that tiny seed of what would ultimately become this post-separation abuse. That's what's so, you know, extraordinary and unsettling about a story like this. And I think that the post-separation abuse landscape is something everyone needs to understand because people will often look sideways at survivors saying, "You didn't leave. Yeah, kept going back. How bad could it have been?" Not understanding that a lot of people are trying to avoid something that's catastrophic if they were to leave. And that kind of sort of bargained with the devil is one of the most difficult things that people simply do not understand. We're trying to bring awareness here, and you are too. That, and you are an expert in this, and you train and educate people about this everywhere. What are some tips you have for our listeners if they're experiencing coercive control in a relationship, either pre-separation or post-separation abuse?

I think that one of the things that helps, the word I came up with, I call it re-traumatization theory. And it's this idea that the only way that we can actually believe it's as bad as it is, is if we truly write down a list of all of the horrible things that have been done to us and look at that list. You may have to look at it daily. Every time you're thinking of responding to that person or going back or not leaving. I have a client right now who's on the fence, thinking about staying. And I asked her to write this list, which just sounds horrifying because to have to relive all of those experiences again. But honestly, it's the only way the brain is going to get the message. The brain doesn't want to hear the bad, right? Our brain's number one job is to keep us safe. Our brain doesn't want to think it's this bad. And so it was for me, me printing out all of the texts and emails that were so horrifying and putting them all in a folder and looking at the folder regularly, listening to the video because I did start videotaping, listening to the video of the horrific things he was calling me. The other thing I would say is that, is that if there's a pattern of someone trying to diminish who you are, if you are with someone who doesn't support you being in your job, whatever it is, that's a diminishment of you. If you are with someone who doesn't really want you to spend extra time with family and friends, that's a diminishment of you. Who are you? Who are you separate from this person? Because what happens is we become so enmeshed in that relationship that we don't see ourselves anymore. Ask yourself, who are you? Who are you without this person?

And I would say these are brilliant suggestions. And I would even say what we should be doing with people as young as middle school, high school, college, heck, most adults should be doing this. Asking themselves that question before they ever get into a relationship. Who are you? What are you about? People don't grapple with that. It's funny, what you call re-traumatization theory is so much more elegant than what I've been having clients do for years, which is I call it the "ick list." Ick, like, ick. I will say, get together with friends, do it in supportive circumstances. I've constructed many an ick list alongside a friend and I'll say, "Whoa, whoa, you're forgetting this. You're forgetting this. Remember." I mean, to me, memories are sort of like the cloud, right? There's on a shared hard drive between many of us. We don't remember this. Someone else remembers that. Putting it in one place is very hard for people to do because it, first of all, doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel good to go back into that. I always encourage people to do that with a therapist or a coach, to do it alongside somebody who you know has your back and may have even witnessed the relationship. It is absolutely essential because you're absolutely right. Trauma bonding, cognitive dissonance, betrayal blindness, all these mechanisms tend to turn us away from that because it is, it's too destabilizing. It means we have to give up on all we know, on the status quo, and what we believe is good and safe in the world.

So I want to ask you one last question, which is, what do you hope people will learn from your story?

Coercive control can happen to anyone. And that even the most astute of us can miss the signs. If I was teaching on it, I've been a volunteer as a domestic violence sexual assault counselor since the age of 19. I've been doing this work since I was 19 years old. I missed the signs. And I'm not trying to suggest I am better than anyone, but I'm saying if I had the information and I missed it, anyone can miss it.

I want to come back behind that. Is that we keep making it about missing the signs. You were, you're doing it since you're 19, missing the signs. I'm a psychologist, missing the signs. I think it's really important that we stop talking about missing the signs and make it about understanding the processes. Because it's not about, "I missed that." Because missing it puts the responsibility on you. The process to understand you're getting sucked into something where your nervous system is taking you also on a bit of a ride. That's happening almost under the level of consciousness. That's a whole different game. So I really, you know, I cannot thank you enough for sharing a story that is so vulnerable, that is also so powerful, and reminds us, I mean, I look at you. To me, you're a peer. You're successful. You are smart. You're intelligent. You're beautiful. You're, we look at you as someone that this doesn't happen to. And that's the mistake. This can happen to any of us. And so putting yourself forth and not only sharing your story, but continuing to educate people, which can't be easy. Every day, you know, it takes you back into, into a really difficult place. And having raised two amazing children despite this, is also a story of hope, Christine. That people can go through all of this. These things do shape us. And in your case, it still led you to a back to a wonderful relationship with your children. And you just held on tight. So I think that that's also a really important thing for people who are in the middle of the storm to hear.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the ability to have this platform to talk about it. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Dr. Christine. First, we desperately want formulas who is most at risk. People from families with narcissistic parents, people with trauma histories. The answer is actually everyone. Dr. Christine had parents who were happily married for 63 years, and she grew up in a stable household and a culture of kindness and forgiveness. Subjugation in a narcissistic relationship is the idea that a person becomes overtaken by the narcissistic or antagonistic or abusive person. And in this process, your identity and sense of self get lost. Once that happens, the tendency for self-blame is magnified. Dr. Christine also said that she was afraid of disappointing someone, meaning that instead of seeing her boyfriend's behavior as intrusive and excessive, she would not push back for fear of disappointing him. That worked in her family, but it was dangerous in this relationship.

In my next takeaway, Dr. Christine raises a form of gaslighting we often do not think about, which is being told that you are overreacting because you are actually concerned about someone who, in her case, was deceiving her. When her partner did not come home and she raised concern and contacted emergency services, her partner would tell her she was overreacting. This process of painting another person as overly emotional or dramatic when they are expressing genuine concern is a manipulative game of hiding deceit and painting the concerned person as having a problem. Our conversation also revealed another often missed pattern of gaslighting, which is mockery, which can involve one parent often mocking the other parent and framing it as a joke, and even encouraging the children to join in. If there is pushback, the mocking parent will tell the other parent that they are too sensitive and can't take a joke. And all of this is very confusing for children who may even feel pressure to pile on the mockery while at the same time feeling guilty.

For my next takeaway, during post-separation abuse, one pattern we can observe is that children are having inappropriate, untrue, or hurtful information shared with them. This is called triangulation, and it is emotional abuse. This can look like teaming up against a parent, facing barriers when they try to see their other parent, or being rewarded for sharing in cruel words or actions towards the other parent. All of this can be an extraordinarily helpless and painful feeling for a parent caught in this situation. She notes that it is crucial that parents who are trying to help children through these crises be deeply attuned, create a sense of safety, don't be defensive, but answer the children's inquiries honestly. It is also important, hard as it may be, to never disparage the other parent, even when that other parent may be disparaging you. This is not easy, and even more difficult if you do not have support, access to therapy, or other resources, but it is essential.

Next, Dr. Christine's relationship had many patterns that we observe in trauma-bonded relationships. A push and pull, being treated with contempt and then being asked to join everyone for a movie night, feeling loved and then being abused. That creates confusion, justification, and fosters false hope. She talked about this as something we call intermittent reinforcement, which is a very useful way to think about this. It's much like a slot machine. More often than not, it takes your money, but sometimes it pays out, and you keep playing in hopes of the giant payout. The alternation between loss, small gains, and the hope of a big gain captures the trauma bond and maybe a way for you to understand these cycles for yourself and end some of the self-blame because when we are in these cycles, hope and sticking around are to be expected.

My next takeaway, interestingly, what Dr. Christine calls re-traumatization theory, I far less eloquently call an ick list, but both of us are coming to the same conclusion. Everything we know about trauma bonding, cognitive dissonance, betrayal blindness, and euphoric recall all point to the likelihood that you will forget about the bad things that happen in a relationship. Write them down. It's unpleasant, but it is also cathartic. Do it alone, with friends or family who witnessed it, or with your therapist. This list can be a psychological splash of cold water on your face to help you avoid getting pulled back in and repeating the same cycles again.

And finally, this interview was about one person's experience in her marriage, but these patterns of familial coercive control can and do happen in a range of situations involving co-parents of children, regardless of parental gender. It doesn't only happen to mothers. It also happens to fathers and to parents of any gender.

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