I interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post intended to cover the 5 Doubles & DARVO to make a book recommendation. Although the book Nobody's Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls was published in 2019, I didn't hear about it until this week on Twitter. And, although it doesn't refer to coercive control or coercively controlling patterns of behavior […]
I am honored to have been interviewed by the fabulous therapist and host of the Indoctrination Podcast, Rachel Bernstein! You can listen in HERE.
The second Double of the 5 Doubles & DARVO in the PsychoSocial Quicksand Model™ of Coercive Control is #DoubleBinds. #DoubleBinds are fundamental to the trap of coercive control. It is #DoubleBinds that make escape from #PsychoSocialQuicksand nearly impossible for a targeted victim to accomplish on their own. Coercive controllers, therefore, use #DoubleBinds as one of […]
I was researching to compose a blog about how coercive control harms children when I came across Dr. Emma Katz' newest Substack article entitled "The Myth That Coercive and Controlling Domestic Abusers Can Be Adequate Parents". So, rather than writing my own blog, which would have derived a huge amount of its research foundation from […]
As mentioned in my previous post, the term coercive control was coined in 1982 by Susan Schecter, and popularized by Evan Stark in his ground-breaking book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, where he recommended it as a new framework, or lens, through which to view domestic abuse. However, research on coercive control began long before Schecter […]
If you don't work in the domestic violence, cult, human trafficking or domestic abuse fields, you may not have even heard of the term coercive control. But even if you have, unless you have taken it upon yourself to get educated on coercive control, you probably don't know what it is or why it matters. (Of course, if you have survived […]
Boundaries are necessary for healthy relationships and mental and physical well-being. But that which makes a healthy relationship thrive can be dangerous or even lethal for the target of coercive control. Boundaries are impossible to set and maintain in relationships with coercive controllers, because they fly in the face of the main goal of coercive control... […]
Coercive control causes trauma, and the degree to which that trauma impacts a target of coercive control is in direct proportion to the degree and duration of the coercive control used to entrap them. I am a lifelong survivor of coercive control. Beginning just before birth, my father forced my mother to abandon her plan to […]
Have you heard the term victim blaming? You probably have, but let's talk about it anyway, because you may not be aware of one of the more subtle versions of victim blaming and the ways that victims can be additionally harmed by this gaslighting method. Victim blaming occurs when a negative, harmful behavior or crime is blamed on […]
DARVO is a popular strategy of coercive controllers and an important aspect of the PsychoSocial Quicksand Model™ of Coercive Control. DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender, and coercive controllers use it to get away with their coercive and controlling behaviors, with the added benefit of focusing all of the blame on their targeted […]
