The powerful have every interest in denial. The powerless have every interest in truth.
Before jumping in, I want to offer some definitions. While people have written many things about coercive control, I found my favorite description on the UK-based women’s aid website, which draws on Evan Stark’s work. It emphasizes how one person or group of people becomes “captive in an unreal world” created by another, whether that be an individual or a larger system. The former becomes “entrapped in a world of confusion, contradiction and fear.”
As for DARVO, it stands for defend, attack, reverse victim and offender. Jennifer Freyd coined the term, and Keystone Law, which, once again, is not based in the United States, describes the behavioral sequence as follows:
first, the perpetrator vehemently denies that any wrongdoing has occurred
next, they go on the offensive, attacking the victim and anyone seeking to call them to account, often making false accusations
finally, they reverse the roles, declaring themself the victim and the actual victim to be the aggressor, deftly flipping the narrative so that the abused becomes the villain.
As the United States is mired in both coercive control and DARVO with regard to the Epstein Files and our current executive branch (heard of the Trump Derangement Syndrome?), I’ve been reflecting a lot on how many of us are deeply familiar with both phenomena in our daily lives and, sadly, closest relationships. Part of why I left the world of social justice education and became a psychotherapist was because I wanted to address the impacts of this relational fuckery on the actual mind-bodies* of people. In academia at that time, at least in the field of education, embodiment and emotional experience were on the margins of intellectual discourse. We theorized and talked about relational dynamics and roles. We didn’t, however, ask directly, “What happens in your body when you think about your husband rolling his eyes at you?” “Your foot is tapping while your torso is completely still. What’s going on inside of you right now?” “If that bracing in your body could speak, what would it say?”
When I was training to be an academic, I had the privilege of visiting Johannesburg and hearing a legal scholar-activist discuss the new South African constitution’s focus on coercive circumstances instead of consent in the realm of sexual offenses. I felt inspired by her argument that this new legal framework would put the burden of proof on those accused of coercing sex. In other words, they would have to prove they didn’t create coercive circumstances rather than requiring those who were victimized to prove nonconsent. Fast forward 20 years, and the state of Colorado, where I live, passed a coercive control statute (§ 14-10-124) in 2024. In it, coercive control is described as a “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual.” What really stuck out to me and gave me hope that the law might recognize the harmful impact of a more covert, insidious pattern of coercion was this criterion: “Name-calling, degrading, or demeaning the individual, or the individual's child or relative, on a frequent basis.” It is not lost on me while typing that last sentence how this behavior is a core feature, not a bug, of U.S. leadership right now.
When I worked as a therapist with faculty and staff members at a university, the only time I saw someone face significant consequences for the latter kind of coercive control was when an audio recording of it existed. Otherwise, the case became about litigating who expressed a more credible version of the truth, sometimes called a “he said, she said” situation in a workplace and “mutual high conflict” in a divorce. Unfortunately, I have seen that time and time again in this country, credibility is granted to those who both hold positions in the upper rungs of social hierarchies and perform charm and charisma. In other words, the most socially privileged and manipulative manage to effectively sell their story, even though that narrative is the one rooted in an “unreal world,” to return to the definition above. Jeffrey Epstein’s autobiography is a clear case of a white man with narrative prowess—rather than the hard-won mastery of skills and knowledge—garnering power and wealth. Said differently, if it takes deliberate practice to master something, he was an expert in peddling bullshit in addition to chronically violating and exploiting girls and women and retaliating against those who challenged him.
To get historical for a moment, the enlightenment principles on which this country was founded implicitly and explicitly suggest that humans are primarily rational beings. The scientific evidence, on the other hand, is robust that we are emotional creatures whose reason is a check and balance on our felt experiences. This matters a lot in the context of coercive control as how we look at a relational dynamic and how we pursue justice in the face of harm change dramatically if we refuse to sideline the four core organizers of our lived experience that are not reason—namely emotion, sensation, five-sense perception, and movement. I ask you to imagine what our society might look like if we gave as much legitimacy to the chronic distress someone is expressing, such as through trembling hands or an inability to give voice to their experience, as we do to the slick telling of a story?
While the way I’m describing this shift may seem minor, I want to highlight that our social order, rooted as it is in ideas of white supremacy and patriarchy, would be compelled to transform dramatically if we first gave credibility to the “confusion, contradiction and fear” of those victimized rather than the story of the apparently calm, confident, smooth-talking salesperson. Lest I be misunderstood as promoting an either/or perspective, I want to proactively assert my emphasis on sequence. We start with believing the experience of the one alleging victimization. We don’t end there. Reality-testing with reason and evidence are important parts of the process when we’re talking about holding someone to account. I am suggesting that we begin to address coercive control by honoring its impacts rather than immediately centering intent or someone’s ability to charm an audience. This point brings us back to DARVO. To believe someone initially is the opposite of denying their reality.
As someone who was engulfed by denial in childhood, I’ve actively sought out those who illuminate both what it is as a phenomenon and its impacts. A humorous and clear-seeing acronym I heard for denial is Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying. This perspective exposes how a focus on intention when someone is in denial is going to lead to more delusion, as they are not able to be honest enough with themselves to have a clear-seeing intent, let alone to be honest with others. Resmaa Menakem also reveals how denial is a core feature of dirty pain, which he describes as
…the pain of avoidance, blame, and denial. When people respond from their most wounded parts, become cruel or violent, or physically or emotionally run away, they experience dirty pain. They also create more of it for themselves and others.
He contrasts dirty pain with clean pain:
…pain that mends and can build your capacity for growth. It's the pain you experience when you know, exactly, what you need to say or do; when you really, really don't want to say or do it; and when you do it anyway. It's also the pain you experience when you have no idea what to do; when you're scared or worried about what might happen; and when you step forward into the unknown anyway, with honesty and vulnerability…Paradoxically, only by walking into our pain or discomfort — experiencing it, moving through it, and metabolizing it — can we grow. It's how the human body works.
I again invite you to imagine what U.S. society and politics might look like if we tuned in and turned toward the pain our government and military have inflicted on so many vulnerable people within and beyond our borders rather than denied that harm and then blamed those most injured for causing it. Since the integrity inherent in the clean pain that Menakem describes requires a level of honesty and vulnerability that many current political and corporate leaders spurn, I want to share some practices, in addition to believing those who have been victimized, that are within our power to enact. Perhaps more importantly, these methods aspire toward clarity and connection, not more delusion and fear.
First and foremost, I want to emphasize coming out of the isolation that this country’s hyper-individualistic and emotionally neglectful culture has bred so that we can build and strengthen relationships with others who have the capacity for clean pain. We humans, after all, are pack animals. In her memoir Believing Me, Ingrid Clayton highlighted that before she could validate her own experience, she needed to be believed by others. For her, a twelve-step program provided that empathetic witnessing. Thankfully, in the present moment, many different online and in-person groups exist to help people recover from relational abuse. That said, seeking connection and community is no small feat for those who have been coerced into alienation and repeatedly accused of being unworthy of love, care, and protection. Moreover, many systems, including family and couples therapy and family law, have baked into them approaches that presume all adults are navigating issues equally with little regard for how coercive control works and its impacts on both adults and children. The risk of moral injury by third parties who deny the possibility and harm of power imbalances is real. I do not propose an easy solution to this systemic issue and would encourage us to find helpers who alleviate rather than exacerbate the confusion, contradiction, and fear we are feeling.
Another barrier to exposing coercive control to others is the intense shame that clients feel for believing the “unreal worlds” actively projected onto them. The thing about gaslighting is that it works. It very effectively destabilizes our perception of reality and sense of self, especially over time. So having someone outside our mind re-anchor us to what is happening in a more clear-seeing, empathetic way heals that shame and illuminates the distortions of the unreal worlds in which we have been trapped. Simple statements, expressed authentically and repeatedly by a compassionate listener, can make such a difference: “That was not okay.” “Your confusion makes sense.” “You are not crazy.” “Something similar happened to me too.” “No wonder you feel afraid.” A personal favorite these days, casually stated by a journalist, is, “Accusations are confessions.”
I also want to emphasize the quality of our relationship with our internal world, which I recently heard Michael Pollan describe as the “precious space of interiority.” To have one’s reality repeatedly denied is a kind of betrayal, which is also relational trauma. Sadly, the frequent impact of this betrayal is that we not only generalize a distrust of others but also come to distrust ourselves. I have found that only after the spell of coercive control is broken, and we have been able to get more distance from the unreal worlds of individuals and systems, does the rebuilding of self-trust become more possible. Similar to how I do not encourage people to reprocess trauma when they’re still inside of it, I do not suggest that decolonizing one’s mind from unreal worlds is very feasible while continuing to be inundated with messaging from them. As Prentis Hemphill said, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously” (emphasis mine).
When we do have more space from the gaslighting, one of my favorite resources for restoring self-trust and for mapping what trust actually looks and feels like is Brene Brown’s BRAVING model. The last two letters of that acronym stand for nonjudgment and generosity. Because the shame I mentioned above so often pervades our interior space after betrayal trauma, infusing how we relate to ourselves with compassionate curiosity and grace is some of the best medicine. Another way I like to spark this softening toward ourselves is to consider that employing the tools of coercive control on ourselves—particularly, the “name-calling, degrading, and demeaning” I referenced above—grows the very distress from which we are trying to break free. I have yet to see bullying restore self-trust more effectively than the three components of self-compassion: mindful observation, common humanity, and self-kindness.
What happens with enough genuine self-trust? We authorize our own knowing. According to Lisa Miller,
…when we authorize our knowing, it builds a hundred fold for every one of us. The more we take as real, the more we can see. The lens widens, the lens deepens…We literally augment our capacity…it allows us to love. It allows us to dialogue, have the conversation with the universe. It allows us to participate in the extraordinary, non-probabilistic miracles around us. We get to be part of this. We’re co-creators.
What I want to emphasize in closing is the power of refusing to step onto socially constructed hierarchies in the first place or return to them once we have learned truer, more expansive worlds exist. We can choose to believe that everyone’s dignity is equal and worthy of being honored, including young Iranian school girls, Palestinian civilians, and undocumented and transgender people in the U.S. We also can pay attention to the evidence that we are interconnected. As such, if I honor your dignity, I strengthen my own. If I violate your dignity, I diminish my own. I’m significantly more motivated not to control others or seek revenge when I see clearly how those actions bring more torment than peace to my inner and outer lives. Since the poets have a way of capturing possibility in ways that regular prose can’t touch, I leave you with Tracy K. Smith’s words:
Sometimes I dream of a steep hill dotted with trees, where we, but who do I mean by we, will one day find ourselves sitting, staring out onto evidence of the end. It won't be sad. Nothing will have ended but what had already revealed itself to be insufficient. Small fires will burn mounds of ember and ash. I keep trying to touch the name of the feeling that will have settled in our bodies by then, after knowledge and regret, after hope and steadier, more certain because more honest.
More honest because we will by then have seen our biggest lies, the final and most dire shatter above us in the common sky, taking away everything with them that needed to go. I see us there on the hill. Who do I mean by us? Some combing fingers through long tufts of grass, others leaning back on our hands or hugging our own bent knees, watching in the same direction, out and down upon the passive distance. All of us, all, I guess, nothing remaining to be battled over, nothing to hide, no rewards for what we've long prized. I see us astonished, finally, and each differently, some of the forest, of us at home in the silence, others talking softly in our original voices.
* I appreciate how Ellen Langer, the first woman to gain tenure in Harvard University’s psychology department, has drawn on her research and others’, to argue that the mind and body are not separate or even just connected. Instead, she talks of the mind-body unity and said the following in her interview with Dan Harris: “To speak of a mind-body connection is one step or five steps better than the way things used to be because it suggests that the mind has something to do with the body. Way back when, the medical model believed that the only way you were going to get sick was the introduction of an antigen. And I'm sure doctors at that point thought it was nice for people to be happy, also not experience stress, but essentially that was irrelevant to their health. So when you talk about mind-body connection, they're saying, okay, yeah, there's a relationship. I'm saying the relationship is far greater than most people believe.”