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One of the least understood consequences of psychological abuse is not what happens during the relationship itself, but what continues happening inside a person long after the relationship has ended.

The arguments stop. The accusations grow quiet. The constant criticism may become a distant memory.

But the conditioning remains.

A simple disagreement can feel like a threat. Someone’s disappointment can trigger overwhelming guilt. An accusation can provoke hours of self-examination, even when the person being accused knows they have done nothing wrong.

A survivor may become independent, confident, successful, and outspoken, yet still experience an almost involuntary need to explain, defend, apologize, or make things right whenever someone else is unhappy.

The relationship has ended, but the survivor may still be living by rules the abuser established.

And sometimes those rules have become so deeply embedded that they no longer feel imposed.

They feel like personality.

How Abuse Rewrites the Rules of Human Interaction

Psychological abuse rarely begins with an announcement that another person intends to dismantle someone’s confidence.

It often begins with criticism disguised as concern, control disguised as love, or accusations disguised as reasonable complaints.

You’re too sensitive. You’re overreacting. You’re selfish. You misunderstood. You’re making something out of nothing. You’re always causing problems.

Over time, repeated criticism and manipulation can change how a person approaches ordinary interactions.

Instead of simply expressing an opinion, they anticipate objections.

Instead of making a decision, they calculate how others might react.

Instead of trusting their memory, they search for confirmation.

Instead of recognizing another person’s anger as that person’s emotion, they begin treating it as a problem they must solve.

They learn that peace depends on anticipating someone else’s needs, moods, and interpretations.

And because the rules of an abusive relationship can change without warning, they learn that being careful is never quite careful enough.

The goal gradually shifts from being understood to avoiding punishment for being misunderstood.

That distinction matters.

In healthy relationships, misunderstandings can be discussed and resolved. In abusive relationships, misunderstandings may become weapons, with explanations dismissed, distorted, or used as further evidence against the person offering them.

Eventually, a survivor may stop asking whether an accusation is fair and begin asking what they must do to make the conflict end.

When Disagreement Becomes a Warning Signal

Disagreement is a normal part of human relationships.

People have different opinions, expectations, experiences, and interpretations. Healthy disagreement can deepen understanding, challenge assumptions, and strengthen relationships.

But for someone who has experienced prolonged psychological abuse, disagreement may carry an entirely different emotional meaning.

It may signal that anger is coming.

That affection will be withdrawn.

That silence, punishment, humiliation, or retaliation may follow.

The body can react before the conscious mind has fully evaluated the situation.

A raised voice, critical message, disapproving expression, or unexpected accusation may trigger anxiety, tension, racing thoughts, or an urgent need to explain.

This is one way trauma-related hypervigilance can manifest.

The nervous system has learned to anticipate danger from patterns that were once associated with harm.

Even in safer circumstances, familiar signals can activate old protective responses.

The survivor may understand intellectually that a disagreement is not dangerous.

But their body may respond as though it is.

Knowing that you are safe is not always the same as feeling safe.

The Endless Need to Explain Yourself

One of the most exhausting consequences of psychological abuse can be the compulsion to defend yourself against every accusation or misunderstanding.

Survivors may spend extraordinary amounts of time searching for the perfect explanation.

They replay conversations, examine their choice of words, reconstruct events, and anticipate possible objections.

They may compose lengthy messages to clarify something that should never have required an elaborate defense.

They may continue explaining themselves even after it becomes clear that the other person is not interested in understanding.

Why?

Because in an abusive relationship, being misunderstood may have carried consequences.

An accusation could escalate into hours of conflict. An attempt to walk away could provoke further hostility. Silence could be interpreted as guilt. Defending oneself could be labeled disrespectful.

There was no reliable way to win.

But the survivor kept trying.

Over time, that effort can become automatic.

The survivor may no longer be trying to persuade an abuser, but the psychological habit of defending against accusations remains.

The person may feel that every misunderstanding must be corrected, every criticism answered, and every unhappy relationship repaired.

Yet there is a fundamental difference between taking responsibility for one’s behavior and accepting responsibility for everyone else’s interpretation of it.

The first is accountability.

The second can become a lifelong burden.

When the Abuser’s Voice Becomes Your Own

Repeated criticism can eventually become internalized.

The survivor may begin questioning themselves before anyone else does.

Am I being unreasonable?

Was that selfish?

Did I say something wrong?

Should I apologize?

Am I making too much of this?

What if they’re right about me?

These questions are not inherently unhealthy. Self-reflection is essential to personal growth.

The problem arises when self-examination becomes relentless, automatic, and disconnected from any reasonable evidence of wrongdoing.

The survivor may treat another person’s displeasure as proof of personal failure.

They may assume that conflict means they have made a mistake.

They may experience guilt simply because someone else is disappointed.

And they may struggle to recognize that their internal critic is repeating messages they learned in an abusive environment.

The abuser no longer needs to deliver the criticism. The survivor has learned to deliver it to themselves.

This does not mean survivors lack intelligence, strength, or insight.

Many understand exactly what happened to them.

They may recognize manipulation in other people’s relationships, identify coercive control, and explain the psychological consequences of abuse with remarkable clarity.

Yet understanding a pattern does not automatically extinguish the emotional responses associated with it.

Intellectual recognition and emotional recovery do not always occur at the same pace.

When Survival Strategies Look Like Personality Traits

Psychological abuse can shape behaviors that outsiders interpret as ordinary personality characteristics.

A survivor who constantly anticipates others’ needs may be described as exceptionally thoughtful.

Someone who avoids disagreement may be considered agreeable.

Someone who carefully examines every decision may be called conscientious.

Someone who apologizes frequently may be praised for humility.

Someone who works relentlessly to avoid mistakes may appear ambitious or perfectionistic.

These qualities are not necessarily harmful, and they do not automatically indicate a history of abuse.

But sometimes behaviors that appear to be personality traits began as strategies for surviving an unpredictable relationship.

Being agreeable reduced conflict.

Being useful reduced criticism.

Being perfect seemed to offer protection.

Anticipating anger created a sense of control.

Explaining everything seemed necessary to prevent accusations.

What began as adaptation can become habit.

And what becomes habit can eventually feel inseparable from identity.

A survivor may spend years believing that they are simply an anxious, overly sensitive, or conflict-avoidant person without recognizing how much of that behavior was learned under pressure.

Recovery can involve discovering which behaviors reflect genuine preferences and which developed because the person once needed them to feel safe.

Why Setting Boundaries Can Feel So Uncomfortable

Boundaries are often presented as simple acts of self-respect.

Say no.

Walk away.

Stop explaining.

Protect your peace.

But for survivors of psychological abuse, those seemingly straightforward actions can activate deeply conditioned responses.

In an abusive relationship, saying no may have led to punishment.

Disagreement may have provoked rage.

Independence may have been interpreted as betrayal.

Refusing to engage may have escalated conflict.

Consequently, setting a boundary in a safer relationship can still evoke anxiety, guilt, sadness, or fear.

A survivor may recognize that a particular interaction is unhealthy, establish a reasonable boundary, and experience immediate relief.

Then the second-guessing begins.

Was that too harsh?

Should I have given another chance?

What if I hurt their feelings?

What if they leave?

What if I was wrong?

This is an important distinction in understanding recovery.

Establishing an external boundary does not automatically silence the internal conditioning that once made boundaries dangerous.

A person can know that a decision was appropriate and still feel uncomfortable making it.

They can experience sadness without regretting the decision.

They can care about another person without accepting harmful treatment.

They can wish a relationship had developed differently without assuming responsibility for preserving it at any cost.

Feeling uncomfortable does not necessarily mean a boundary was wrong.

Sometimes it means a person is practicing a response that once felt unsafe.

The Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

Guilt can be useful when it alerts us to genuine wrongdoing.

It can encourage accountability, repair, and compassion.

But guilt can also become conditioned.

Someone who has repeatedly been blamed for another person’s anger may begin feeling guilty whenever anyone is upset.

Someone who has been punished for asserting independence may feel selfish when making an ordinary personal decision.

Someone who has been taught that love requires endless accommodation may feel cruel when declining an unreasonable demand.

In these circumstances, guilt is not necessarily a reliable measure of wrongdoing.

It may reflect an old association between another person’s unhappiness and the expectation of punishment.

The challenge is learning to distinguish genuine responsibility from learned responsibility.

A person is responsible for their own conduct, honesty, choices, and treatment of others.

They are not automatically responsible for preventing disappointment, eliminating disagreement, managing every emotional reaction, or maintaining every relationship.

Another person’s unhappiness is not, by itself, evidence that someone has behaved badly.

That realization can be profoundly liberating.

It can also be difficult to accept after years of being taught the opposite.

The Boundary Outside and the Battle Inside

There is another dimension to this experience that deserves attention.

A survivor may successfully end an unhealthy interaction and still find themselves mentally trapped in it.

The conversation is over.

The relationship may be over.

The immediate conflict has ended.

But internally, the argument continues.

The survivor rehearses explanations that will never be delivered.

They imagine responses to accusations that are no longer being made.

They reconsider decisions that have already been made.

They search for evidence that they were justified.

They may spend hours, days, or longer mentally revisiting an encounter that lasted only minutes.

This kind of repetitive thinking, often called rumination, can occur for many reasons. It is not unique to abuse survivors.

But in people who have experienced chronic criticism or coercive control, it may be connected to learned patterns of threat anticipation, self-monitoring, and defensive preparation.

The person has established a boundary in the outside world but continues struggling to establish one internally.

They have stopped participating in the conflict, yet the conflict continues consuming their attention.

And that attention has a cost.

Time that could be spent creating, learning, resting, enjoying relationships, or simply experiencing peace becomes occupied by an argument that no longer requires participation.

Recognizing this pattern is not another reason for self-criticism.

It is an opportunity to understand why disengagement can be emotionally complicated.

The Grief That Can Accompany Self-Protection

Not every boundary brings uncomplicated relief.

Sometimes protecting yourself means accepting the loss of a relationship you valued.

Sometimes it means acknowledging that someone cannot or will not participate in the kind of respectful relationship you hoped to have.

Sometimes it means abandoning the expectation that another person will finally understand your experience.

That can be painful.

Survivors of abuse may already carry profound grief over relationships that did not become what they hoped.

They may have spent years trying to earn understanding, affection, recognition, or basic fairness.

Walking away from another unproductive relationship can awaken some of that earlier sadness.

But sadness and regret are not interchangeable.

A person can mourn the relationship they wanted without believing they should have continued accepting the relationship they had.

They can miss someone without reopening the door.

They can wish circumstances were different without assuming responsibility for changing them.

You can regret that a conversation was not possible without regretting that you ended it.

This is not indifference.

It is the recognition that caring about someone does not require surrendering your boundaries.

Reclaiming Your Time, Your Judgment, and Your Peace

Recovery from psychological abuse is not simply a matter of becoming more confident.

Confidence alone does not necessarily erase years of conditioning.

A survivor can be accomplished, articulate, independent, and fully aware of the abuse they experienced while still encountering old emotional responses.

Recovery may involve learning to recognize those responses without automatically obeying them.

It may mean pausing before apologizing and asking whether an apology is actually warranted.

It may mean noticing the impulse to overexplain without immediately acting on it.

It may mean allowing another person to disagree without treating the disagreement as an emergency.

It may mean accepting that some people will misunderstand, disapprove, withdraw, or remain angry.

And that their reactions do not automatically require intervention.

For some survivors, trauma-informed therapy, supportive relationships, and opportunities to practice boundaries safely can help weaken these learned patterns.

The goal is not to become incapable of self-doubt or immune to criticism.

Healthy self-reflection remains important.

The goal is to restore proportion.

To recognize when criticism deserves consideration and when it does not.

To distinguish discomfort from danger.

To understand that being misunderstood is sometimes unavoidable.

And to reclaim the freedom to make decisions without seeking universal approval.

Not every accusation deserves a defense. Not every misunderstanding requires correction. Not every disagreement demands resolution.

The Freedom to Trust Yourself Again

Perhaps one of the deepest injuries inflicted by psychological abuse is the erosion of trust in one’s own perceptions and judgment.

And perhaps one of the most meaningful aspects of recovery is rebuilding that trust.

Not believing that you are always right.

Not rejecting accountability.

Not refusing to listen.

But understanding that your experiences, observations, reasoning, needs, and boundaries matter.

That someone else’s confidence in an accusation does not make it true.

That another person’s anger does not establish your guilt.

That disagreement is not necessarily danger.

That saying no is not necessarily cruelty.

That protecting your time is not selfishness.

And that walking away from an unproductive conflict does not mean you have lost.

The shadows of abuse can follow survivors into situations that bear little resemblance to the relationships in which those responses developed.

A harmless disagreement may awaken an old fear.

An unfair accusation may trigger an old defense.

A necessary boundary may produce an unexpected wave of guilt.

But recognizing these patterns creates the possibility of responding differently.

The survivor can begin to separate the present from the past.

The current disagreement from the former danger.

The other person’s judgment from their own sense of worth.

And the familiar feeling of guilt from actual responsibility.

The relationship may have ended years ago. The survivor may have reclaimed their home, their independence, and their voice.

The next freedom may be reclaiming the right to stop defending themselves against accusations they never deserved.

Because surviving abuse is not only about escaping another person’s control.

It is also about learning that the control no longer has to live inside you.

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The consequences of domestic abuse don’t always end when the relationship does. Psychological conditioning, self-doubt, trauma responses, and difficulties with boundaries can affect survivors for years or even decades.

At Domestic Assault, we explore the realities of coercive control, gaslighting, emotional abuse, and recovery—especially the experiences that too often remain invisible.

Join our community to support independent survivor-centered writing, deepen public understanding, and help create a space where the lasting consequences of abuse are recognized and taken seriously.

Leaving an abusive relationship can end the immediate harm. Understanding what remains is part of reclaiming your life.

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When Did Ordinary Human Decency Become Extraordinary?

Something disturbing has happened to the way Americans communicate.

A politician listens to a difficult question. He acknowledges the concern behind it. He answers without humiliating the person who asked. He makes his point without shouting, threatening, ridiculing, or reducing another human being to an enemy.

And people are astonished.

We call it brilliant. Remarkable. Incredible.

But what, exactly, is incredible about treating another person with dignity?

Perhaps the truly incredible thing is how far we’ve drifted from the expectation that human beings should be able to disagree without trying to destroy one another.

We’ve normalized verbal aggression so thoroughly that ordinary human decency has become noteworthy. We’ve watched political leaders transform contempt into entertainment, bullying into leadership, and intimidation into a demonstration of strength.

And somewhere along the way, we’ve allowed the distinction between communicating with another person and exercising power over another person to become dangerously blurred.

This is not simply a political problem.

It’s a problem intimately familiar to survivors of domestic abuse, particularly those who have experienced coercive control, psychological manipulation, gaslighting, intimidation, and the slow destruction of their ability to speak without fear.

There is a connection between the language of domination inside a home and the language of domination in public life.

The underlying questions about power, fear, humiliation, and control deserve serious examination in our government.

Because the opposite of violent communication isn’t silence. It is communication that recognizes human dignity without surrendering truth, boundaries, or accountability.

And there is an established framework for understanding it.

It’s called Nonviolent Communication.

A Psychologist Who Asked a Different Question

In the 1960s, American clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg began developing what became known as Nonviolent Communication, or NVC.

Rosenberg, who lived from 1934 to 2015, was concerned with a fundamental human problem: Why do people who are capable of compassion so frequently resort to blame, judgment, punishment, and aggression when faced with conflict?

His early work included school integration projects during the civil rights era, where racial hostility, institutional inequality, and deeply entrenched social divisions demanded more than polite conversation.

In 1984, Rosenberg founded the Center for Nonviolent Communication, an organization devoted to teaching methods of connection and conflict resolution.

His central insight was that human behavior is connected to underlying needs, and that much of what we describe as conflict becomes destructive when people communicate through accusations, moral judgments, demands, and threats rather than acknowledging those needs.

Rosenberg did not invent empathy. He didn’t invent compassion. And he certainly didn’t invent the idea of resolving disagreement peacefully.

What he developed was a structured way to practice those principles, particularly when emotions are running high.

And he challenged the assumption that punishment, humiliation, and coercion are necessary tools for obtaining cooperation.

Consider the implications.

How much of modern political discourse depends on convincing us that someone must be defeated, humiliated, excluded, or punished before our own needs can be met?

How often are Americans encouraged to see their neighbors not as people confronting many of the same economic and social pressures, but as enemies responsible for their suffering?

And who benefits when those divisions become permanent?

Four Simple Steps That Change the Nature of Conflict

At the heart of Rosenberg’s model are four components: observations, feelings, needs, and requests.

The framework is straightforward. Practicing it consistently, particularly in conflict, is easy, if you try.

1. Observation without judgment.

Describe what actually happened instead of immediately assigning motives or attacking someone’s character.

There is a difference between saying, “You interrupted me three times while I was explaining my concern,” and saying, “You’re an arrogant bully who never listens.”

The first identifies behavior that can be examined. The second attacks identity and invites defensiveness.

That doesn’t mean we’re forbidden from recognizing bullying when it occurs. It means that observations and character judgments serve different purposes, and confusing the two often prevents productive communication.

2. Identifying feelings.

Recognize the emotions generated by an experience.

Fear. Anger. Frustration. Sadness. Disappointment. Anxiety.

Emotions are information. They help us understand what matters to us.

But experiencing anger does not automatically justify directing aggression toward another person.

3. Recognizing underlying needs.

Behind many arguments are concerns about safety, security, belonging, independence, dignity, fairness, or being heard.

Two people may disagree profoundly about how to meet those needs while sharing more fundamental human concerns than either initially recognizes.

This does not mean all political positions are equally supported by evidence or equally respectful of human rights.

It means that understanding the concern beneath a position can create an opportunity for communication that attacking the speaker may destroy.

4. Making requests rather than demands.

A request creates an opportunity for cooperation.

A demand makes disagreement punishable.

This distinction is particularly important.

If refusing someone’s request results in threats, retaliation, humiliation, or punishment, we are no longer dealing with a free exchange between equals.

We are entering the territory of coercion.

And that brings us directly to the subject at the center of this publication.

Domestic Abuse Is Not a Communication Problem

Survivors of coercive control know something that many discussions of communication fail to acknowledge.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that two people don’t know how to communicate.

The problem is that one person is using communication as a weapon to control the other.

A survivor may explain a concern carefully, calmly, compassionately, and repeatedly.

The abusive partner may understand perfectly well.

Understanding, however, does not guarantee a willingness to relinquish control.

The survivor’s words may be twisted, mocked, denied, or used as evidence of disloyalty.

An attempt to establish a boundary may be treated as an attack.

A request for respect may be met with punishment.

An effort to describe harmful behavior may provoke retaliation.

And the person experiencing abuse may eventually conclude that if only they could find exactly the right words, the conflict would finally stop.

But there may be no combination of words capable of persuading someone to stop a pattern of behavior they are committed to maintaining.

That is why the National Domestic Violence Hotline cautions against couples counseling in abusive relationships. When one person controls or intimidates the other, treating abuse as an ordinary relationship disagreement can increase danger and reinforce the unequal power dynamic.

Nonviolent communication should never become another obligation imposed upon someone who is already being abused.

A survivor does not owe an abuser endless empathy.

A survivor does not have to calmly explain why threats are unacceptable.

A survivor does not have to negotiate the right to personal safety.

And nobody should mistake a victim’s refusal to continue a dangerous conversation for a failure of compassion.

Sometimes the most important boundary is the end of the conversation.

Sometimes safety requires distance, protection, outside intervention, or escape.

Nonviolent communication can be valuable, but it is not a substitute for safety, accountability, or protection from abuse.

Gaslighting, DARVO, and the Language of Control

One reason psychological abuse can be so difficult to recognize is that it frequently disguises itself as ordinary disagreement.

The abusive person denies something that happened. The survivor provides evidence. The abusive person attacks the survivor for bringing it up. Suddenly, the conversation is no longer about the original conduct.

It is about the survivor’s alleged cruelty, instability, disloyalty, or unfairness.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified a pattern known as DARVO:

Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender.

The person confronted about harmful conduct denies responsibility, attacks the person raising the concern, and presents themselves as the injured party.

Research has associated exposure to DARVO with increased self-blame among people confronting wrongdoing. Experiments have also found that DARVO can influence observers to perceive the person accused of misconduct as less responsible and the person confronting them as less credible.

The consequences are profound.

The conversation becomes a contest over who is entitled to be believed, who controls the narrative, and whose suffering counts.

The original question of accountability gets buried beneath accusations.

Now consider what happens when similar rhetorical patterns appear in political discourse.

A public official is asked about a documented failure. Instead of addressing the evidence, the official attacks the journalist, questions the motives of investigators, portrays the inquiry as persecution, or characterizes oversight itself as an assault.

And sometimes the people helping perpetuate that reversal are the very people now claiming to have seen the light.

Consider Tucker Carlson.

In a July 22, 2026 interview with Stephen A. Smith, Carlson discussed his changing assessment of Donald Trump. He suggested that something fundamentally changed in Trump after the July 13, 2024 so-called assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

But what caught my attention was his explanation of why he had supported Trump in the first place.

Describing his interpretation of efforts to put Trump in jail, Carlson declared:

“See, it’s totally real. You know, it’s not a fake thing.”

Then he added:

“That’s what I thought. And I still kind of think that.”

Are you fucking kidding me?

Carlson was emphatic. He characterized the persecution narrative as real, not some imaginary grievance. And even while describing his disillusionment with Trump, he acknowledged that he had not entirely abandoned that interpretation.

But let’s examine what Carlson was actually calling persecution.

Trump was not simply being persecuted because prosecutors investigated him, grand juries indicted him, or courts exercised their authority. He was facing criminal allegations that demanded examination under the law.

He was also convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York.

That conviction was not an assassination attempt, a political insult, or an act of persecution. It was the result of a criminal trial.

And the federal criminal proceedings that ended after Trump’s return to the presidency did not produce verdicts resolving the underlying allegations. Those dismissals were not findings of innocence, just as the original indictments were not findings of guilt.

Accountability is not persecution merely because the person being held accountable is powerful.

Carlson’s supposed political transformation deserves considerably more scrutiny.

He now criticizes Trump while continuing to embrace, at least in part, the narrative that attempts to hold him criminally accountable amounted to persecution.

He’s talking out of both sides of his mouth.

He acknowledges that he was wrong about Trump while preserving the very narrative that helped justify his earlier support.

What exactly has changed?

And why should Americans accept a revised assessment of Trump’s character that still treats efforts to hold him legally accountable as evidence that he was the victim?

In my view, Carlson’s remarks reinforce the reversal at the heart of DARVO.

The alleged or established misconduct recedes into the background. Investigators and prosecutors become the supposed aggressors. The person facing accountability becomes the injured party.

And the public is invited to sympathize with the powerful person being investigated rather than examine the evidence against him.

Carlson is not himself the defendant in those criminal proceedings. Nor does his commentary, standing alone, demonstrate every element of DARVO. But it illustrates how the reversal of victim and offender can be repeated and reinforced by influential third parties, even those who now profess disillusionment with the person they once defended.

And that distinction matters enormously.

It is incredibly insidious.

Because a narrative that excuses abusive conduct does not necessarily disappear when someone’s loyalties change. It can survive the political relationship that helped create it.

You cannot meaningfully confront an abuse of power while continuing to portray legitimate attempts to hold that power accountable as victimization.

This is precisely why understanding DARVO matters beyond intimate relationships.

When every demand for accountability can be reframed as an attack, accountability itself becomes increasingly difficult to enforce.

The accused becomes the victim. The investigator becomes the persecutor. The evidence becomes secondary to the grievance.

And the original question—what actually happened, who was harmed, and who should be held accountable—gets lost.

That is not simply a communication breakdown.

It can become a powerful means of escaping responsibility.

The Political Economy of Humiliation

Trump did not invent cruel political rhetoric. American history contains far too many examples of racism, religious persecution, political intimidation, and public dehumanization to make that claim.

But his political career has made personal insult, public ridicule, threatening language, and the creation of internal enemies unusually prominent features of presidential communication.

This is not merely a subjective impression.

Political scientists Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman examined Trump’s public addresses from 2015 through 2024 and compared his language with that of other political leaders.

Their research found that his use of violent vocabulary intensified over time, becoming among the most extreme of the democratic politicians studied by late 2024.

The researchers also identified a pattern of exclusionary populism that emphasized the vilification of opponents and marginalized groups.

Consider what happens when such language becomes part of the daily political environment.

Disagreement becomes betrayal. Opposition becomes an enemy. Criticism becomes persecution. Questions become attacks. Accountability becomes revenge.

And the audience is repeatedly invited to participate in the humiliation.

An insult receives applause. A mocking nickname becomes a slogan. A threat becomes a headline.

The most outrageous exchange travels across television, social media, podcasts, and news feeds.

Outrage attracts attention, attention creates engagement, and engagement can be converted into money, influence, and political power.

The incentive is not always to communicate more clearly.

Sometimes it is to provoke more intensely.

“If it bleeds, it leads.”

And when that becomes the prevailing standard, a calm, substantive answer can suddenly appear almost revolutionary.

Words, Threats, and the Escalation of Political Hostility

The consequences of violent rhetoric are not confined to wounded feelings.

A February 2026 analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported that violent online rhetoric directed at prominent American public officials increased more than threefold between 2021 and 2025.

The threats crossed party lines, with Republicans receiving more violent threats in that particular dataset and Trump himself accounting for a substantial share of the threatening content.

This matters because violence and intimidation should not become acceptable merely because we dislike the intended victim.

At the same time, researchers continue to debate precisely when inflammatory language increases real-world support for violence. Some studies identify dangerous associations and effects; others find more limited causal effects.

We should be careful not to pretend every insult produces an act of violence.

But we should be equally careful not to dismiss threats as harmless theater.

On October 14, 2026, Trump told an Arizona rally that people who leak military plans should be shot.

Consider the difference between advocating prosecution for unlawful disclosures of classified information and declaring that people should be shot.

One invokes legal process, evidence, and proportional punishment.

The other introduces lethal violence into political speech without those distinctions.

Words matter not because every ugly statement becomes a violent act, but because words help establish what a society learns to tolerate, excuse, and eventually expect.

The Question Behind the Question: Abdul El-Sayed

An exchange involving Michigan physician and Senate candidate offers an interesting counterexample.

Asked about what it means to be pro-life, El-Sayed answered that the most pro-life decision America could make would be Medicare for All.

Whatever one’s position on Medicare for All, the communication itself deserves examination.

He took a morally charged phrase, one frequently associated with deeply entrenched partisan disagreement, and shifted the discussion toward a shared concern: protecting human life.

Instead of beginning by questioning the moral character of those who disagreed with him, he offered a different way of understanding the underlying value.

The issue became the human consequences of access to healthcare.

A child who needs treatment.

A parent facing medical bills.

An older American deciding whether an appointment is affordable.

A family confronting illness without financial security.

The policy remains open to vigorous debate. People can disagree about costs, implementation, government responsibility, and alternative approaches to healthcare.

But the response illustrates an important communication principle.

You can challenge someone’s political framing without humiliating the person who raised the question.

That is not surrender.

It is a way of moving disagreement from competing identities toward substantive human needs.

There is an additional irony.

On October 9, Reuters reported that Trump had characterized El-Sayed using inflammatory labels including allegations of extremism and sympathy for terrorism.

Those are not ordinary policy disagreements.

They illustrate how quickly political discourse can move away from a discussion of healthcare, security, and public responsibility into attacks on a person’s identity and presumed loyalties.

James Talarico: Disagreement Without Requiring Humiliation

Texas Senate candidate provides another revealing example.

At his October 14 CNN town hall, Talarico faced pointed questions on abortion, religion, gender, and other contentious issues.

A Catholic voter challenged his understanding of abortion and religious teaching.

The disagreement was real.

Neither side simply abandoned its convictions.

But the exchange included efforts to identify overlapping concerns, particularly the desire to reduce unintended pregnancies and protect human welfare, even though the participants disagreed sharply about what government policy should allow.

That distinction matters.

Nonviolent communication does not require agreement.

It does not erase moral differences.

It does not require a woman who believes reproductive autonomy is fundamental to concede her rights. Nor does it require someone with religious objections to pretend those convictions do not exist.

It asks a more difficult question:

Can we understand what another person is expressing without immediately turning that person into an object of contempt?

A disagreement can remain unresolved without becoming a campaign of personal destruction.

And when politicians demonstrate that possibility in public, audiences are given a different example of how political conflict can be conducted.

Jon Ossoff: Strength Without Intimidation

Georgia Senator offers another important example of how forceful political communication need not depend on aggression, intimidation, or personal humiliation.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ossoff’s public communication is his measured, deliberate delivery. He can challenge an opponent, press an uncomfortable question, and express serious disagreement while maintaining control of his voice, his words, and his body language.

He does not need to shout to be heard. He does not need to threaten to demonstrate strength. And he does not need to abandon his composure to demand accountability.

During his October 2026 debates with Republican challenger Mike Collins, Ossoff brought economic and healthcare policy into the discussion, raising questions about household expenses, the pressures facing Georgia farmers, and the consequences of Medicaid cuts for rural hospitals.

These are not abstract political arguments. They concern whether families can afford medical care, whether rural communities can maintain essential services, and whether people can meet their most basic needs.

That connection is central to Marshall Rosenberg’s work.

Nonviolent Communication asks us to look beneath political positions and arguments to recognize the human needs involved. Security. Health. Stability. Safety. Dignity. The ability to provide for one’s family.

Ossoff states verifiable facts, over and over.

Ossoff’s questioning about a rural hospital losing its labor and delivery services illustrates why these needs matter. A debate about Medicaid funding becomes something considerably more immediate when we consider what happens to a pregnant woman who must travel farther to deliver her baby.

The policy disagreement remains. So does the obligation to examine the evidence and hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.

But the conversation is no longer simply about which political party prevails.

It is about the people who must live with the consequences.

And just as importantly, Ossoff demonstrates how a political argument can be delivered with composure and control.

His measured approach does not eliminate disagreement or prevent him from challenging an opponent sharply. But it offers an example of how public officials can focus attention on evidence, consequences, and the responsibilities of government without relying on threats or dehumanization.

Ossoff naturally aligns with the qualities associated with nonviolent communication—self-control, attention to human needs, and the ability to confront difficult issues without intimidation.

Being measured is not being weak. Being controlled is not being passive. And refusing to communicate violently does not mean refusing to fight for what matters.

A democracy needs leaders who can challenge one another, defend their convictions, and demand answers.

It does not require those leaders to make cruelty a demonstration of strength.

The ability to remain composed while confronting difficult truths is not the absence of strength. It is one way strength can be exercised without violence.

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Anger Is Not Violence

and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complicate the assumption that nonviolent communication must sound soft, quiet, or conciliatory.

Their Fighting Oligarchy events have centered on concentrated wealth, political influence, healthcare, economic insecurity, and the relationship between ordinary Americans and powerful institutions.

They raise their voices.

They express anger.

They criticize powerful people and systems.

And that brings us to one of the most misunderstood aspects of Rosenberg’s work.

Anger is not the same thing as violence.

Anger may arise from witnessing suffering, exploitation, inequality, betrayal, or injustice.

It can signal that something important is being threatened.

The crucial distinction is how anger is expressed and what purpose it serves.

Does it clarify the harm?

Does it identify unmet needs?

Does it demand an accountable response?

Or does it become an excuse to dehumanize, threaten, and punish?

Their focus on material needs such as healthcare, wages, housing, and economic security offers an opportunity to examine how forceful political rhetoric can be organized around human welfare rather than personal submission.

That is an important distinction.

Because the goal of nonviolent communication is not to eliminate moral urgency.

It is to prevent that urgency from becoming a justification for denying another person’s humanity.

Why Coercive Power Depends on More Than Force

This brings us to the larger political question.

Why might communication grounded in dignity, empathy, and independent judgment pose a challenge to political movements organized around loyalty, fear, and punishment?

The answer lies partly in the relationship between power and consent.

Coercive power seeks compliance.

It may employ explicit threats, economic pressure, punishment, humiliation, exclusion, or the suggestion that resistance will carry unacceptable consequences.

Healthy communication, by contrast, leaves room for refusal.

It recognizes that understanding another person’s needs does not give us ownership over that person’s decisions.

In an intimate relationship, the distinction is fundamental.

A partner who respects your autonomy can be disappointed by your decision without treating your independence as an offense.

A coercive partner may regard the very existence of independent judgment as a threat.

Political relationships are not intimate partnerships, but democratic government is also built upon limits to power.

Citizens are not supposed to owe personal loyalty to an officeholder.

Public officials are supposed to answer questions, accept oversight, obey the law, and recognize that disagreement is a legitimate exercise of citizenship.

The First Amendment protects speech, including criticism of government officials.

Elections exist so the public can withhold or withdraw political authority.

The courts exist, in part, to ensure that power remains subject to law.

These arrangements are not obstacles to democratic legitimacy.

They are among its essential conditions.

A political leader who treats independent journalism, lawful protest, judicial review, or electoral opposition as intolerable disloyalty challenges those principles.

The Difference Between Peace and Submission

One of the most dangerous ideas survivors of abuse encounter is that peace means the absence of disagreement.

Don’t upset him.

Don’t ask questions.

Don’t challenge the story.

Don’t bring up the past.

Don’t make things worse.

Keep the peace.

But whose peace is being preserved?

If one person is required to surrender independence, silence legitimate concerns, and endure mistreatment so another person will remain calm, that is not mutual peace.

It is enforced submission.

The same distinction matters in public life.

A society is not necessarily peaceful because dissent has become quiet.

Silence can reflect satisfaction. It can also reflect fear, exhaustion, resignation, or the belief that speaking will only invite retaliation.

Nonviolent communication is not a demand that injured people become more accommodating to those who harm them.

It cannot require marginalized people to politely negotiate whether they deserve equal rights.

It cannot replace criminal accountability with a discussion about feelings.

And it cannot be used to distribute responsibility for abuse equally between the person exercising coercive control and the person trying to survive it.

There is nothing nonviolent about demanding that someone surrender their safety or dignity so the person controlling them can feel more comfortable.

That is why the distinction between communication and coercion must remain central to this discussion.

What Happens When We Begin Recognizing the Pattern?

Imagine what might change if more Americans learned to distinguish between a genuine request and a disguised threat.

Between an observation and an accusation.

Between emotional honesty and emotional manipulation.

Between accountability and humiliation.

Between disagreement and dehumanization.

Imagine a political interview in which a journalist asks a specific question and the audience recognizes immediately when the politician responds by attacking the journalist instead of answering.

Imagine a family conversation in which someone recognizes that a boundary is not an act of aggression.

Imagine a workplace in which intimidation is no longer celebrated as strong leadership.

Imagine an election campaign in which voters examine not only what candidates promise, but how they respond when confronted with disagreement.

None of these changes requires us to become less passionate.

They require us to become more discerning.

And perhaps that is what makes the study of nonviolent communication so relevant to the current moment.

Rosenberg’s work offers a framework for understanding how words can either create human connection or contribute to cycles of hostility.

Research on coercive control and DARVO helps explain what happens when communication is deliberately used to distort reality and evade accountability.

Research on political rhetoric warns us about the normalization of violent language, even as scholars continue to study the precise relationship between rhetoric and real-world violence.

Together, these fields offer a powerful lesson.

Before we can resist manipulation effectively, we must learn to recognize it.

Before we can insist upon accountability, we must understand how language can be used to evade it.

And before we can recover a political culture that respects human dignity, we must stop mistaking intimidation for strength.

The Most Dangerous Lie About Strength

There is a particular kind of power that demands submission while calling itself strength.

It mistakes fear for respect.

It mistakes obedience for loyalty.

It mistakes humiliation for victory.

And it mistakes the ability to silence someone for the ability to lead.

Survivors of coercive control know the difference.

They know that someone can dominate a room without earning the respect of a single person inside it.

They know that a threat can produce compliance without producing agreement.

They know that silence can be purchased through fear, and that a person who appears powerful may be profoundly dependent upon keeping everyone else afraid.

But democratic citizenship demands something different.

It demands the freedom to question, disagree, refuse, criticize, and hold power accountable.

It demands that we recognize the humanity of people with whom we disagree without surrendering the obligation to confront falsehoods or injustice.

And it demands that we stop treating cruelty as evidence of courage.

Nonviolent communication will not, by itself, repair American democracy.

It cannot replace legislation, constitutional protections, independent courts, honest journalism, effective public institutions, or criminal accountability.

It is not a cure for abuse or authoritarianism.

But understanding it can help us recognize a fundamental distinction upon which healthy relationships and democratic institutions both depend.

The difference between communicating with another human being and trying to control one.

Maybe that is why a politician who answers a difficult question with respect can seem so extraordinary today.

Not because respectful communication is a remarkable human achievement.

But because we’ve allowed something profoundly ordinary to become painfully rare.

And perhaps the beginning of change is recognizing that we never should have accepted that decline as normal.

Cruelty is not strength. Intimidation is not leadership. Silence is not consent. And submission is not peace.

The measure of power is not how thoroughly it can silence another human being.

It is whether it can tolerate that human being speaking freely.

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Domestic abuse does not begin and end with physical violence. It can involve coercive control, intimidation, psychological manipulation, economic dependence, gaslighting, and the destruction of personal autonomy.

At Domestic Assault, we examine how power is exercised, how abuse is concealed, why institutions sometimes fail survivors, and what meaningful accountability requires.

If this article helped you recognize a pattern, understand a distinction, or find language for something you’ve experienced, please share it.

Understanding coercive control is not only important for survivors. It is important for everyone who believes human dignity matters.

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Every October, we wear purple.

We share hotline numbers.

We talk about recognizing warning signs.

We tell people to understand coercive control, financial abuse, isolation, threats, stalking and escalating violence.

And sooner or later, we tell the survivor:

Leave.

But leave for where?

That may be one of the most important questions we are still failing to answer.

A Minnesota analysis published this week reported that at least 16 intimate-relationship-violence deaths have already been identified in the state in 2026, after at least 31 known deaths connected to intimate-partner violence in 2025.

Its larger argument is one we should be talking about everywhere during Domestic Violence Awareness Month:

Awareness without infrastructure is not enough.

Knowing You Are Being Abused Does Not Make Escape Possible

A survivor may understand perfectly well what is happening.

She may know he is controlling the money.

He may recognize that his partner has slowly isolated him from friends and family.

A survivor may recognize the monitoring, threats, humiliation, password control, employment sabotage, financial restrictions, manipulation of children or pets, and the constant recalculation required to avoid provoking the person controlling the household.

They may even know they are in danger.

But knowing does not create somewhere safe to sleep tonight.

It does not pay first month’s rent.

It does not produce a security deposit.

It does not create an available shelter bed.

It does not replace wages lost because an abuser prevented someone from working.

It does not repair ruined credit.

It does not provide childcare while someone goes to court.

It does not provide transportation.

It does not pay an attorney.

It does not make a restraining order enforce itself.

And it certainly does not guarantee that leaving will make the survivor safer.

For some victims, separation is one of the most dangerous periods of the entire abusive relationship. National Institute of Justice research has found that an attempt to leave was the precipitating factor in 45 percent of murders of women by their intimate partners in one major study.

So when we tell someone, “You need to leave,” we need to be willing to answer the next question.

How?

Violent Crime Can Fall While Violence at Home Does Not

This becomes even more urgent because of another troubling finding.

The Police Executive Research Forum recently examined something that should stop us in our tracks.

Violent crime is dropping significantly in many American communities.

Intimate-partner violence is not necessarily dropping with it.

Police departments surveyed by PERF reported that domestic and intimate-partner violence often was not declining at the same rate as other violent crime, and some jurisdictions reported trends moving in the wrong direction.

That matters.

We know how to celebrate falling homicide numbers, fewer shootings, fewer robberies and safer streets.

But a country can become safer on the street while remaining terrifying behind closed doors.

A woman can live in a city where crime statistics are improving while calculating which version of her husband will walk through the door tonight.

A man can live in a statistically safer neighborhood while hiding the fact that his partner controls his money, threatens him or terrorizes him inside his own home.

A child can live on a street with very little crime and still go to bed listening for the sound of an argument escalating downstairs.

Public safety cannot stop at the front door.

The Missing Infrastructure of Escape

Domestic violence is often discussed as though it is primarily a problem of recognition.

Recognize the signs.

Know your worth.

Ask for help.

Leave.

Those things matter.

But coercive control is frequently designed specifically to make leaving difficult.

An abuser may control bank accounts.

Destroy credit.

Prevent employment.

Sabotage transportation.

Threaten pets.

Use custody arrangements as leverage.

Monitor phones.

Track locations.

Threaten suicide.

Threaten homicide.

Threaten deportation.

Threaten to expose secrets.

Threaten to take the children.

Threaten the survivor’s family.

By the time someone is ready to leave, the escape route may have been systematically dismantled.

That is why housing belongs at the center of domestic-violence policy.

California recently took a step in that direction by requiring domestic-violence survivors to be considered more explicitly in local housing planning.

That should not seem remarkable.

It should seem obvious.

If housing instability is one of the forces keeping survivors trapped with abusers, then housing policy is domestic-violence policy.

So is transportation policy.

So is childcare.

So are employment protections.

So are court systems.

So is access to legal representation.

So are firearm laws.

So are police responses.

So is financial protection.

Domestic violence does not exist inside a sealed category marked “relationship problems.”

It intersects with nearly every structure a person needs in order to live independently.

It Takes a Force to Break a Pattern

I wrote a song called “Escape Velocity” about this.

The title comes from physics: escape velocity is the speed something must reach to break free from the gravitational pull holding it down.

Abuse can have its own gravity.

Money holds you.

Children hold you.

Fear holds you.

Shame holds you.

Threats hold you.

And sometimes hope holds you too — perhaps longer than almost anything else.

I wrote:

It takes a force to break a pattern
A fire to cut through atmosphere
I burned through everything to leave you
To live a life without constant fear

And then:

I thought if I got it right
You’d soften, I’d be safe
But your chaos kept things out of focus
And love became a shape I chased

That is something people outside abusive relationships often fail to understand.

The survivor isn’t necessarily sitting there unaware that something is wrong.

She may be spending years trying to get it right.

Be quieter.

Be kinder.

Don’t provoke him.

Make the dinner differently.

Keep the children quiet.

Don’t ask where the money went.

Don’t mention what happened last night.

Don’t say that word.

Don’t make that face.

Don’t leave.

Don’t stay.

Don’t breathe wrong.

The rules keep changing because the purpose was never actually compliance.

The purpose was control.

And eventually escaping that gravitational pull requires more than awareness.

It requires enough force to break free.

Sometimes that force is money.

Sometimes it is housing.

Sometimes it is a friend with a spare bedroom.

Sometimes it is a shelter bed.

Sometimes it is a police officer who takes the threat seriously.

Sometimes it is a judge who understands coercive control.

Sometimes it is simply another human being saying:

I believe you. Come here.

You can listen to my song “Escape Velocity” here:

Coercive Control Often Comes Before the Bruise

There is another problem with the way we talk about awareness.

We still too often wait for visible violence.

A black eye makes sense to people.

A broken bone makes sense.

A police report makes sense.

But coercive control can begin long before anyone is punched.

It may begin with isolation disguised as devotion.

Financial restriction disguised as budgeting.

Constant texting disguised as concern.

Jealousy disguised as love.

Control disguised as protection.

Humiliation disguised as joking.

Threats disguised as temper.

By the time physical violence appears, the survivor may already have been psychologically, socially and financially trapped for years.

That is one reason simply telling people to recognize physical abuse misses so much of what domestic assault actually looks like.

We have to recognize the architecture of control.

Not only the final explosion.

The Body Lives There Too

There is another part of domestic abuse that receives far too little attention.

The body lives inside that environment.

Fear is physical.

Hypervigilance is physical.

Sleep disruption is physical.

Chronic stress is physical.

Living for months or years in a state of constantly anticipating another person’s mood does not remain confined to the mind.

The nervous system participates.

The cardiovascular system participates.

The immune system participates.

Hormonal systems participate.

Sleep participates.

Digestion participates.

This is one reason I also write about the biology of stress and shame at TotalWellCoach.

I recently wrote about “The Biology of Shame” because abuse doesn’t always end biologically when the relationship ends.

A survivor may leave the person and still carry the body’s learned expectation of danger.

Healing therefore cannot mean only getting someone through the door.

We need to think about what happens afterward too.

Safety.

Housing.

Money.

Community.

Healthcare.

Rest.

Nutrition.

Mental-health support.

Legal security.

Rebuilding trust.

Relearning what calm feels like.

Sometimes survival gets someone out.

Healing helps them build a life afterward.

Which Killings Do We Decide to Be Afraid Of?

There is another uncomfortable question we need to ask.

We hear enormous political attention devoted to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants.

When one horrific murder occurs, the victim’s name may be repeated nationally. The case may appear in campaign advertisements, speeches, congressional hearings and presidential rhetoric.

Those murders are real.

Those victims matter.

Every person murdered by an undocumented immigrant is every bit as dead, and every family every bit as devastated, as someone murdered by anybody else.

But if public policy is really about protecting Americans from danger, then we should be willing to look at all of the danger.

Here is the strange part.

The United States does not even maintain a reliable national annual count of homicide offenders according to immigration status.

Texas provides some of the best available data because it has been able to match criminal records with immigration-status information.

From 2013 through 2022, there were 472 undocumented immigrants convicted of homicide in Texas — an average of about 47 convictions per year.

More importantly, when population size is taken into account, the homicide-conviction rate among undocumented immigrants in Texas was 2.2 per 100,000, compared with 3.0 per 100,000 among native-born Americans.

In other words, undocumented immigrants in that dataset were 26 percent less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide.

In 2022 alone, Texas recorded 67 homicide convictions of undocumented immigrants, compared with 1,209 involving native-born Americans.

We should not pretend Texas automatically represents the entire country.

But suppose, only as an illustration, that the decade-long Texas rate of 2.2 homicide convictions per 100,000 undocumented residents roughly applied nationally.

Pew Research Center’s revised estimate puts the undocumented population in 2022 at about 11.8 million people.

Apply that Texas rate nationally and you get an order-of-magnitude estimate of roughly 260 homicide convictions a year.

Again, that is not an official national count. No such reliable national count exists.

It is an extrapolation designed to give us a sense of scale.

Now compare that with intimate-partner homicide.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics found an intimate-partner homicide victimization rate of 0.7 per 100,000 Americans in 2023.

With a national population well over 330 million, that translates to roughly 2,300 people murdered in a single year by a current or former spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend.

A separate CDC analysis of 2022 violent deaths identified 2,380 homicides in which intimate-partner violence was a precipitating circumstance.

That broader CDC category includes not only murdered partners but also other people killed during intimate-partner violence — for example, a new boyfriend killed by an abusive former partner.

Whichever federal measure you use, the scale is enormous.

And it suggests something startling.

The number of Americans killed in intimate-partner violence each year appears to be many times larger than the number we would estimate are killed by undocumented immigrants.

Yet listen to our national political conversation.

One threat gets rallies.

Speeches.

Campaign advertisements.

Emergency declarations.

Television coverage.

Congressional hearings.

Government operations.

In Ohio on October 3, 2026, Trump even read “The Snake,” a poem he has long used as an immigration metaphor, while campaigning before the midterm elections. The message was unmistakable: fear the person coming in from outside.

Meanwhile, the other threat is already inside the house.

It may have been there for years.

Controlling.

Threatening.

Stalking.

Strangling.

Escalating.

And when somebody finally ends up dead, the television report may reduce the entire history to two words:

“Domestic incident.”

Why?

Why are we taught so relentlessly to fear the danger coming across a border while thousands of Americans are killed by people who already had access to their homes, their children, their bodies and their lives?

And there is an even larger meaning of the word domestic.

Domestic means inside the home.

But domestic also means inside our own country.

That is the territory I keep writing about at DomesticAssault.com: what happens when coercion, intimidation, fear and the abuse of power are normalized—whether the person wielding that power is standing across the kitchen or standing behind a government seal.

Some of the dangers we are told to fear come from outside.

But the most consequential dangers are already inside the house.

Many of These Deaths Do Not Come Out of Nowhere

The comparison becomes even more disturbing when we look at what often happens before intimate-partner homicide.

These murders are frequently not unpredictable eruptions involving people with no prior warning signs.

National Institute of Justice research has documented the importance of prior abuse, escalating violence, threats and attempts to leave.

One NIJ review found that four out of five women killed or severely injured by an intimate partner had experienced prior physical violence from that partner.

That means the fatal or life-threatening assault was the first physical attack for only about one in five.

And, as noted earlier, attempts to leave can themselves become dangerous.

This is why domestic-violence advocates repeatedly tell us that “Just leave” is not a safety plan.

There may already have been threats.

There may already have been stalking.

There may already have been strangulation.

There may already have been police calls.

There may already have been a restraining order.

There may already have been threats involving firearms.

There may already have been terrified relatives and friends saying something was terribly wrong.

And eventually, somebody dies.

We rightly ask after a murder committed by an undocumented immigrant:

How did we fail to prevent this?

We should ask exactly the same question when someone with a history of domestic violence eventually kills a partner.

How did we fail to prevent this?

Why does one kind of murder become evidence of a national crisis while another becomes a private tragedy?

Domestic violence is not private when someone ends up dead.

It is public safety.

Stop Asking Only Whether People Are Aware

During Domestic Violence Awareness Month, perhaps we should ask a different question.

Not simply:

Do people know domestic violence exists?

Most people do.

Ask instead:

What happens when someone recognizes that it is happening to them?

Can they find safe housing?

Can they afford to leave?

Will someone believe them if there is no bruise?

Can they take their children?

Can they protect their pets?

Can they keep their job?

Can they get to court?

Can they obtain competent legal help?

Can they safely disappear from digital tracking?

Can they survive financially for the first month?

The first six months?

The first year?

Can they rebuild?

Those are domestic-violence questions too.

And until we are willing to answer them, we should be careful about congratulating ourselves for raising awareness.

Awareness is the beginning.

Infrastructure is what makes escape possible.

And healing is what makes freedom sustainable.

Join My Community

DomesticAssault.com exists because abuse is bigger than the bruise.

It is coercive control. Gaslighting. Financial control. Isolation. Fear. Power. Shame. Survival. And the long work of rebuilding afterward.

I write here for survivors, people who love them, professionals trying to understand what happens behind closed doors, and anyone willing to look honestly at the systems that allow abuse to continue.

And I write about domestic assault in both meanings of the word domestic — what happens within our homes and relationships, and what happens within our own country when power, fear, coercion and control become normalized.

If this work matters to you, join this community. Subscribe. Share these articles. Send them to someone who may need the words before they know how to find them for themselves.

And if you are able to become a paid subscriber, you help me keep doing the deeper work: researching, connecting the dots, challenging the language we use around abuse and saying the things that too often remain unspoken.

Awareness matters. But awareness must lead somewhere.

I want this community to help build that somewhere.

Sources

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Victimization in the United States, 2023.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Surveillance for Violent Deaths — National Violent Death Reporting System, 2022.

National Institute of Justice, research on causes, consequences and risk factors for intimate-partner violence.

Police Executive Research Forum, 2026 analysis of intimate-partner violence trends.

Texas Department of Public Safety data analyzed by the Cato Institute, Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022.

Pew Research Center, estimates of the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population.

Minnesota domestic-violence reporting and analysis, October 2026.

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Donald Trump did not become an abuser when he became president. He arrived in American politics with a long public history of allegations of abusive and sexually aggressive behavior toward women, and Americans heard his own recorded words about what he believed celebrity allowed him to do to them. Years later, a civil jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, and that judgment survived his appeals.

That history matters because I don’t believe what Trump subsequently did to MAGA was some sophisticated political technique he happened to discover on the campaign trail. He already understood how domination worked.

He understood overwhelming attention. He understood seduction and salesmanship. He understood how to make himself enormous in somebody else’s world. He understood denial and counterattack, how to discredit people who challenged him and how to make virtually every conflict revolve around Donald Trump. And after a lifetime of selling the Trump brand, he understood perhaps the most important principle of the con: find the hunger first, then sell yourself as the thing that will satisfy it.

When Trump entered politics, there were millions of Americans hungry for exactly what he knew how to sell.

They felt forgotten. They felt unseen. They felt disrespected. Some had watched factories disappear and communities deteriorate. Some had watched economic security become increasingly difficult to attain. Some believed the culture no longer respected them or the lives they had built. Some had lost faith in government, journalism and other institutions. Some came from cultures in which hierarchy, toughness, obedience and loyalty were highly valued and vulnerability was not.

They were not all the same people, and they did not all arrive there by the same road. But enough Americans had been primed by their lives, their communities, their media and their experiences to respond to someone who would tell them that their pain was real, their anger was justified, somebody else was responsible—and he was the one man strong enough to save them.

Trump recognized them.

That may have been his greatest political skill.

He didn’t begin by controlling them.

He began by loving them.

Or, more precisely, by making them feel loved.

He Love-Bombed the Unseen

Trump told them they were patriots. They were hardworking Americans. They were the forgotten men and women who had built this country while corrupt politicians, corporations and elites abandoned them. He didn’t shame their anger. He validated it. He didn’t tell them they had misunderstood America. He told them they understood America better than the people running it.

After years of feeling unseen, suddenly one of the most famous men in America was looking directly at them and saying, in essence, I see you.

That was the love-bombing.

And it worked spectacularly.

Trump didn’t merely give these Americans a candidate. He gave them an identity.

MAGA.

There was a name for them now. A slogan. A hat. A flag. A community. There were enormous rallies where thousands of people who had felt ignored could look around and discover they weren’t alone. They were surrounded by people who shared their anger, their fears, their frustrations and their hopes.

They belonged.

And standing at the center of all that belonging was Donald Trump.

Listen to the architecture of his own language when he accepted the Republican nomination in 2016. He spoke about people who had been “neglected, ignored, and abandoned.” He called them the “forgotten men and women” and said they no longer had a voice.

Then:

“I am your voice!”

And shortly afterward:

“I alone can fix it.”

Put those statements together.

You’ve been forgotten. You’ve been abandoned. You’ve lost your voice. I see you. I am your voice. I alone can fix it.

That is the architecture of the relationship.

Trump identified the wound, validated it, positioned himself as the person who understood it and then made himself the solution.

The people who felt powerless were promised power.

But there was a catch they couldn’t yet see.

Their power would increasingly have to flow through him.

Then He Gaslit Them

Once someone becomes the person you trust because everyone else supposedly failed you, that person acquires extraordinary power over what you believe.

Trump spent years attacking not simply individual journalists but the credibility of the press itself. Prosecutors investigating him could be corrupt. Judges ruling against him could be politically motivated. Republicans who challenged him could become RINOs. Officials who contradicted him could become part of the establishment or “deep state.”

The universe of trustworthy people became smaller.

And this is where the manipulation becomes extraordinarily difficult to escape, because contradictory information can actually strengthen the relationship.

If journalists say Trump is lying, that’s because the media lies. If prosecutors investigate Trump, that’s because justice has been weaponized. If former Trump officials criticize him, they betrayed him. If Republicans oppose him, they aren’t real Republicans. If experts contradict him, perhaps the experts are compromised too.

Eventually, evidence that might ordinarily cause someone to reconsider the leader can be transformed into evidence that the leader was right all along.

See? They’re all against him. He told us they would be.

The belief begins defending itself.

And the person who warned you not to trust anyone else becomes the person you trust more than anyone else.

Then He Made His Problems Their Problems

The next transformation was even more consequential. Trump increasingly fused his personal fate with the fate of his followers.

At CPAC in 2023, Trump reminded supporters that he had declared himself their voice in 2016. Then he went further. He called himself their “warrior,” “justice” and “retribution.”

That wasn’t ordinary political language.

Trump was no longer merely saying, I represent your political interests.

The message had become: Your struggle and my struggle are the same struggle.

If they came for Trump, they were coming for you. If they prosecuted Trump, they were persecuting you. If they humiliated Trump, they were humiliating you. If Trump defeated his enemies, you defeated yours.

His grievances became their grievances, and their grievances became his justification.

That changes political allegiance into something much harder to break. If I support a politician because I prefer his policies, I can abandon him when he stops representing those policies. But if that politician becomes intertwined with my identity, rejecting him means confronting something much larger than immigration, taxes or trade.

It can feel like rejecting part of myself.

Then Loyalty Changed Direction

Politicians are supposed to be loyal to the people who elect them.

Somewhere along the way, the relationship reversed.

The question should always have been: Is Donald Trump still loyal to the things I elected him to do?

Instead, loyalty to Trump himself became increasingly important within his movement and government. When Trump prepared his second administration after the 2024 election, Reuters reported that prospective officials were being scrutinized for previous criticism of him as his team sought loyalists for key positions.

That reversal is crucial.

Is Trump loyal to what I believe? is the question of an independent citizen.

Am I loyal to Trump? is the question of a follower.

One keeps the citizen at the center of the relationship.

The other puts Donald Trump there.

And that is precisely what happened to a movement supposedly created to return power to forgotten Americans.

Donald Trump became the center.

And Now Comes the Abuse

This is the part of the relationship America needs to talk about now.

Because Trump’s supporters do not stop experiencing the consequences of his decisions simply because they voted for him.

A farmer doesn’t stop being hurt by a policy that damages his farm because there’s a Trump sign beside his barn. A factory worker doesn’t become immune to economic consequences because she voted Republican. A family struggling to pay for groceries, heating oil, gasoline, healthcare, a mortgage or credit-card debt doesn’t get a separate MAGA economy. A young American sent into a war doesn’t become invulnerable because his parents supported the commander in chief.

Trump’s supporters live under Trump’s presidency too.

And this is where the analogy becomes especially uncomfortable.

In an abusive relationship, eventually the person who once promised to protect you can become the person hurting you. The person who promised safety becomes a source of instability. The person who told you everyone else was responsible for your pain can inflict pain himself while continuing to tell you somebody else is responsible for it.

But by then, leaving is far more complicated than simply recognizing the harm.

Because leaving means confronting the entire relationship.

Walking Away Means Confronting Ten Years

People outside MAGA often ask the wrong question.

They ask, How can they possibly still support him?

They assume another fact will do it. Another contradiction. Another broken promise. Another scandal. Another policy consequence. Surely this one will finally make people see.

But imagine what walking away can require after ten years.

You may have defended Trump to your children and argued with your siblings about him. You may have lost friendships. You may have donated money, attended rallies, bought the hat, flown the flag and spent countless hours defending him online. You may have repeated claims that later proved false. You may have excused behavior you once insisted you would never tolerate from a president.

You may have built friendships and community around MAGA.

You may have built part of your identity around MAGA.

Now imagine being asked to consider that the man you defended for a decade didn’t merely disappoint you.

He used your loyalty.

That is a brutal possibility to confront because now you aren’t being asked merely to change your opinion about Donald Trump.

You’re being asked to reconsider ten years of your own decisions.

And perhaps most painfully, you have to consider the possibility that the man who spent a decade warning you that everyone else was manipulating you was manipulating you himself.

That Doesn’t Make MAGA Stupid

This is where Trump’s opponents repeatedly make a terrible mistake.

They mock his supporters. They call them stupid, ignorant, gullible or deplorable and then wonder why those people retreat further into the community that tells them they are valued.

Manipulation does not require stupidity.

Smart people can be manipulated. Educated people can be manipulated. Successful people can be manipulated. Strong people can be manipulated. People who pride themselves on being skeptical can be manipulated.

One of the most effective ways to manipulate someone is to convince them that they are among the few people perceptive enough not to be manipulated.

That’s why humiliation doesn’t necessarily break the bond.

Sometimes it strengthens it.

If everyone outside the relationship tells you you’re an idiot while the person inside it tells you you’re brilliant, patriotic, special and one of the only people who understands what’s really happening, where are you likely to feel safest?

Right where you already are.

And an experienced manipulator understands that.

MAGA Never Belonged to Donald Trump

This is the part I wish more Americans understood.

The people who became MAGA existed before Donald Trump came down that escalator.

They had political beliefs before him. They worried about immigration, jobs, trade, taxes, crime, government spending, religion, globalization and cultural change before Donald Trump put those concerns beneath a red hat.

Donald Trump did not invent those people.

He recognized them.

Then he validated them.

Then he gave them an identity.

Then he made himself indispensable to that identity.

That’s the trick.

A movement ostensibly created to return power to forgotten Americans gradually became organized around the grievances, legal problems, political survival, enemies and ambitions of one man.

The forgotten Americans were supposed to become the center of American politics.

Instead, Donald Trump became the center of theirs.

And so perhaps the most important question for MAGA isn’t whether Democrats were right about Donald Trump.

Forget Democrats.

Forget liberals.

Forget the media.

Forget me.

Ask yourself something much simpler:

When did supporting Donald Trump become more important than Donald Trump supporting you?

You don’t have to become a Democrat to ask that question. You don’t have to become liberal. You don’t have to change your position on immigration or taxes or guns or abortion. You don’t have to apologize to anybody for how you voted. You don’t even have to stop believing in making America great.

You only have to remember who was supposed to be in charge of this relationship.

You were.

Donald Trump found Americans who felt unseen and told them he saw them. He validated their anger, gave them belonging and helped create an identity around their grievances. Then he taught them to distrust the people and institutions that contradicted him. He fused his identity with theirs and made loyalty to himself central to the movement.

The love-bombing worked.

The gaslighting worked.

The control worked.

And now the man who promised to protect MAGA can hurt the very people who trusted him while the relationship itself makes walking away extraordinarily difficult.

As abusive relationships do.

But there is one thing an abuser never wants the person on the other side of that relationship to discover:

You can take yourself back.

Your judgment was yours before Donald Trump.

Your values were yours before Donald Trump.

Your voice was yours before Donald Trump.

Your country was yours before Donald Trump.

None of them ever belonged to him.

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There is a double meaning in the title of my song “Shame on Me.”

Most of us hear those words and understand them immediately.

Shame on me.

I should have known better. I should have seen it sooner. I shouldn’t have stayed. I shouldn’t have believed him. I shouldn’t have tolerated that. I should have been stronger. Smarter. Less trusting. Less forgiving.

For a long time, that is exactly how shame worked in my own life.

But that isn’t what the title ultimately means.

The deeper meaning is this:

I feel the shame that other people put on me.

It was handed to me. Taught to me. Reinforced in me. And eventually I learned to carry it so naturally that I mistook it for something that belonged to me.

That is what this song is about.

We learn the rules before we understand the consequences

The song begins with messages that sound almost ordinary:

“Daddy said I was born for making babies.
Mama said to keep the house clean.”

Those lines are deliberately simple because conditioning often is.

Be a good girl. Take care of everybody. Don’t complain. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t make trouble. Keep the peace. Make your marriage work. Take care of your husband. Put the children first. Be grateful for what you have.

And certainly don’t talk publicly about what happens behind closed doors.

None of those instructions has to arrive accompanied by violence to become dangerous.

They can become the soil in which coercive control later grows.

If you have already learned that your value comes from keeping everyone else comfortable, it becomes easier to believe that someone else’s anger is your responsibility.

If you’ve been taught that a successful woman keeps her family together no matter what, leaving can feel like failure.

If you’ve learned that endurance is strength, you may not recognize when endurance has become self-erasure.

That is why one of the most important lines in the song is:

“I carried the weight as if it was glory.”

I did.

Many women do.

We are praised for how much we can withstand.

When suffering gets confused with love

The first chorus says:

“Shame on me for believing the story
They handed down so easily
That love was something you earned by suffering
And silence was dignity.”

That is the heart of the song.

Some of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that love required sacrifice. Then sacrifice became suffering. And suffering became proof that we loved enough.

We tolerated what should never have been tolerated because we believed perseverance was honorable.

We stayed quiet because we thought silence was dignity.

We protected people who were hurting us because exposing what was happening felt like betraying the family.

And when things went wrong, we looked inward.

What did I do?

What could I have done differently?

Why wasn’t I enough?

That is one of the cruelest accomplishments of coercive control: eventually, the person being harmed becomes responsible for explaining the harm.

Shame keeps survivors quiet

Abuse does not survive only because abusers are powerful.

It also survives because shame is powerful.

Shame tells you nobody will believe you.

Shame tells you people will ask why you stayed.

Shame tells you your children will blame you.

Shame tells you admitting what happened means admitting your life wasn’t what you pretended it was.

Shame tells you that if you were really strong, you would have prevented it.

And shame can linger long after the relationship itself ends.

You can leave the person and still carry his accusations around inside your own head.

You can understand intellectually that something wasn’t your fault and still feel emotionally responsible for it.

That is why healing is not simply about getting away.

Sometimes it is about identifying all the things you carried out the door with you.

The title changes as the song changes

When the song begins, “Shame on Me” sounds like an accusation directed inward.

By the end, I hope it sounds different.

Because the shame belongs somewhere else.

The shame belongs to the person who abused trust.

The shame belongs to the person who frightened, controlled, demeaned or abandoned someone who loved them.

The shame belongs to systems and families that demanded silence.

The shame belongs to the people who saw what was happening and looked away.

What belongs to the survivor is the life that remains.

The strength.

The knowledge.

The ability to finally say:

That happened to me. But it was never who I was.

“Shame on Me” — Lyrics

Daddy said I was born for making babies
Mama said to keep the house clean
Don’t ask questions about money
Don’t go chasing bigger dreams

I saw what they allowed me to see
Blue collar means working hard every day
Keep my man happy so he won’t hurt me
Taking the blame when he went astray

Shame on me for believing the story
They handed down so easily
That love was something you earned by suffering
And silence was dignity

I carried the weight as if it was glory
Like a plaque I’d hang on the wall
All those years I blamed myself
Shame on me
For believing it all

Their dad abandoned all our needs
Hardly gave his time or a single dime
I raised the kids, I paid the bills
Why do they act like the shame was mine?

Shame on me for believing the story
They handed down so easily
That love was something you earned by suffering
And silence was dignity

I carried the weight as if it was glory
Like a plaque I’d hang on the wall
All those years I blamed myself
Shame on me
For believing it all

Funny how the road teaches
Things no classroom ever could
Somehow the shape of broken promises
Survives in me as something good

Turns out the heart gets stronger
From every storm it sees
The only thing I had trouble learning
Was asking people to be kind to me

Shame on me for believing the story
They handed down so easily
That love was something you earned by suffering
And silence was dignity

I carried the weight as if it was glory
Like a plaque I’d hang on the wall
All those years I blamed myself
Shame on me
For believing it all

If this sounds familiar

If you recognize yourself somewhere in this song, I hope you hear the second meaning of the title.

Not shame on you.

Not anymore.

Look carefully at the shame you’re carrying and ask yourself where it actually came from.

Who handed it to you?

Who benefited when you accepted it?

Who taught you that suffering was love?

Who taught you that silence was dignity?

You may discover that some of what you’ve carried for years was never yours in the first place.

And putting it down may be one of the most important things you ever do.

Listen to “Shame on Me”

You can listen to “Shame on Me” on YouTube here:

The song is also streaming on your favorite music platforms.

If this song speaks to you, please subscribe to @JoyceStrongMusic on YouTube. I’m building a growing catalog of original music about survival, heartbreak, healing, family, politics, place, hope, humor and all the complicated things we carry through life.

And if you know someone who may still be carrying shame that was never theirs, please share this song with them.

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We usually think of gaslighting as words: That never happened. You’re imagining things. You’re too sensitive. You’re overreacting. But sometimes nobody says any of those things. Sometimes you tell someone you are hurting and they give you nothing. No acknowledgment. No curiosity. No comfort. No protection. No attempt at repair.

Maybe they simply go silent. Maybe they continue with their lives as though nothing happened. Maybe they become irritated because your pain is making things uncomfortable. Maybe they chastise you for being depressed instead of asking why you are hurting. And slowly, something very strange begins to happen.

You become invisible.

When Silence Becomes the Message

Silence is not always abusive. People need time to cool down. People become overwhelmed. People sometimes don’t know what to say. Healthy relationships can contain silence. But healthy silence eventually makes room for connection: I wasn’t ready to talk yesterday, but I’m ready now. I know you’re hurting. Help me understand. I may see this differently, but I care about what this has done to you.

Silent gaslighting feels different.

You say, “You hurt me.” The answer may be, I did nothing wrong. And then nothing. Or perhaps there isn’t even an argument. You are visibly struggling and nobody responds. Life simply continues around you.

The dishes get washed. The television comes on. People talk about tomorrow. Everybody behaves as though the person standing in the middle of the room with a broken heart isn’t bleeding at all. There may be no sentence to argue with.

The silence itself becomes the sentence.

Your pain isn’t important. Your experience doesn’t require acknowledgment. Your distress is inconvenient. Deal with it yourself.

Existential Gaslighting

Eventually this isn’t only about questioning what happened. You begin questioning your significance.

I think of it as existential gaslighting.

Not simply, Did that really happen? but Do I matter? Not merely, Am I remembering this correctly? but Would anybody care if I disappeared?

You are not seen. You are not validated. You are not protected. You are not cared for. You are standing right there, yet somehow you have become a ghost.

The Walking Dead

There is language we use for emotional pain that sounds melodramatic until you’ve lived it: dead inside, walking dead, a ghost. I understand those words differently now.

They don’t necessarily mean someone wants their physical life to end. Sometimes they describe what happens when a human being repeatedly reaches toward the people they love and discovers there is nobody reaching back.

You continue functioning. You make coffee, pay bills, answer messages, work, and maybe even laugh. People looking at you see a living person. But inside, something has gone terribly quiet.

Human beings don’t only need food, shelter and oxygen. We need to experience ourselves as existing in the minds and hearts of other people, especially the people who tell us they love us.

The Second Injury

There is another cruel part of this pattern. Eventually the person who has been ignored may become desperate to be heard. They explain again. They cry harder. They raise their voice. They send another message. They become angry. They say things with more intensity because saying them quietly accomplished nothing.

Then suddenly that reaction becomes the problem.

Now everyone can see something, but they don’t see the months or years of indifference that preceded it. They don’t see the repeated attempts to communicate or the original injury. They see the crying, the anger, the desperation, the depression.

And the question becomes: Why are you behaving like this?

That can deepen the gaslighting because the response to being chronically unheard becomes evidence that you are the difficult one. The wound disappears. Only your reaction remains visible.

Being Unseen Is Not the Same as Being Unworthy

This may be the hardest distinction of all. When people repeatedly fail to see your pain, it is very easy to conclude that your pain isn’t worth seeing.

Those are not the same thing.

Someone else’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge you does not determine your significance. Their silence doesn’t rewrite what happened. Their indifference doesn’t make your pain imaginary. And someone refusing to protect you does not mean you weren’t worth protecting.

Sometimes healing begins with something much smaller than forgiveness or reconciliation. It begins by refusing to participate in your own erasure.

This happened. It hurt. I know what I experienced. I am allowed to care that it happened. And I am still here.

Recognize the Pattern

Abuse isn’t always screaming. Control isn’t always a threat. Gaslighting isn’t always somebody telling an elaborate lie. Sometimes the most destabilizing message in a relationship is delivered without words at all.

You are hurting. You look toward the people who are supposed to care. And nobody comes.

If you have lived that experience, you may know exactly what I mean when I say it can make a living person feel like a ghost.

But a ghost has no voice.

You do. Use it.

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Domestic Assault is about recognizing the patterns that are hardest to name — coercion, control, manipulation, gaslighting, triangulation, emotional abuse and the injuries that leave no visible bruise.

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And because what happens emotionally does not stay neatly separated from the rest of our health, I also write about stress, resilience, sleep, nutrition, aging and whole-person wellness at TotalWellCoach.com. Our relationships are part of the environment our bodies live in, and sometimes understanding the pattern is only the beginning of healing from what it has done to us.

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There is an old piece of advice that says: don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. The reason is simple. When you are hungry, everything looks good. You buy too much, reach for things you would not normally choose, and make decisions based on an immediate need instead of what will actually nourish you.

I think relationships can work the same way. When you are lonely, unseen, depleted, grieving, insecure, or simply starved for connection, attention can feel much more valuable than it really is. Someone notices you, listens to you, seems fascinated by you, wants to talk every day, or tells you how much they understand you. Before you know it, they may have been given access to parts of your life that they have not yet earned.

Emotional Hunger Changes Judgment

Loneliness is powerful because it can change the value we place on attention. An ordinary amount of interest can suddenly feel extraordinary. Intensity can feel like intimacy. Validation can feel like love. Familiarity can feel like safety.

That does not mean lonely people should avoid relationships. We need one another, and connection is part of being human. But emotional hunger can influence judgment just as physical hunger can influence what lands in your grocery cart.

When your emotional reserves are empty, the question can quietly shift from “Is this person good for me?” to “Does this person want me?” Those are very different questions, and the second one can make us overlook things we would normally see much more clearly.

Familiar Does Not Mean Safe

For people who grew up around narcissistic, entitled, controlling, volatile, dismissive, or emotionally manipulative people, certain behaviors can feel strangely familiar. You may know instinctively how to manage someone who needs constant reassurance, how to calm someone who becomes defensive, or how to tolerate someone who monopolizes conversations, turns disagreements into battles, needs to be right, or expects you to validate every grievance.

You know the dance, and that can be precisely the problem. What is familiar to us can feel comfortable even when it is unhealthy. Sometimes we recognize a personality long before we consciously understand what we are recognizing.

We may think, I really connect with this person. But underneath that connection may be something very different: I know how to survive this person.

Attention Is Not Care

One of the most dangerous substitutions in relationships is confusing attention with care. Attention is easy. Someone can text constantly, compliment you, praise you, confide in you, tell you that you are special, and want immediate emotional closeness. None of that proves they care about your well-being.

Care reveals itself over time. Care respects your boundaries. It does not punish you for disagreeing. It does not require you to constantly soothe someone’s ego, take sides in every grievance, or become responsible for another person’s emotional regulation. Care does not become hostile when you say no.

The difference matters because someone can make you feel intensely seen while still being primarily focused on what they are getting from the relationship.

Watch What Happens When You Disappoint Them

We often judge relationships by how someone treats us when everything is going well, but that is not enough. Pay attention to what happens when you disagree, correct them, tell them no, become unavailable, support someone they dislike, fail to provide the validation they were expecting, ask them to explain themselves, or set a boundary.

That is where you learn much more about the relationship. A person may be charming while receiving what they want from you. The more important question is what happens when they do not.

Do they remain respectful? Can they tolerate being wrong? Can they hear your perspective without turning it into a fight? Can they accept that your attention belongs to you? Those moments tell you far more than compliments ever will.

Let Trust Be Earned

You do not have to become suspicious of everyone, and you do not have to build walls so high that nobody gets through. But you can slow the process down. Friendship does not require immediate emotional access, and neither does romance, an online connection, or a professional relationship.

Someone can be interesting without becoming intimate. Someone can be supportive without becoming central. Someone can be kind without immediately becoming trusted. Trust should be built through repeated evidence.

Watch how they respond to boundaries, how they talk about people who have disappointed them, whether they take responsibility when they are wrong, and whether they constantly need reassurance or validation. Notice whether they involve you in conflicts that have nothing to do with you. Most importantly, notice how you feel after interacting with them. Do you feel steadier, or do you find yourself exhausted, anxious, obligated, or rehearsing conversations afterward?

Your body often notices the cost of a relationship before your mind is ready to name it.

Keep Your Own Bucket Full

One of the best protections against unhealthy relationships is not becoming better at diagnosing other people. It is becoming less desperate for what they are offering.

Keep your own bucket as full as you reasonably can. Not perfectly full, because that is not realistic, but full enough. Build connection with more than one person. Maintain work that matters to you, interests that belong to you, quiet that you can tolerate, confidence that does not depend entirely on someone else’s approval, and communities where no single person controls your sense of belonging.

The fuller your life becomes, the easier it is to notice when someone is offering attention without respect, intimacy without trust, or connection with strings attached. You become less likely to think, At least somebody wants me, and more able to ask, Do I actually want this person in my life?

That is a powerful shift.

Hunger Is Not Shameful

There is nothing shameful about wanting friendship. There is nothing weak about wanting someone to see you. There is nothing wrong with wanting companionship, affection, recognition, or belonging.

The danger comes when hunger becomes the reason we ignore information. We explain away the defensiveness, excuse the entitlement, tolerate the constant conflict, accept being pulled into other people’s grievances, ignore how depleted we feel afterward, or convince ourselves that having someone is automatically better than having no one.

Sometimes loneliness is painful. But the wrong relationship can make loneliness feel peaceful by comparison.

Recognize the Pattern Before You Have to Escape It

The goal is not to become afraid of people. The goal is to become slower about granting access. Let people reveal themselves over time. Let them disappoint you a little. Let them encounter a boundary. Let them hear the word no. Let them see you disagree, and then watch what happens.

You do not need to diagnose anyone. You only need enough information to decide whether the relationship is healthy for you.

Don’t go shopping when you’re hungry. And when your heart is hungry, be especially careful about who you invite home.

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Sometimes the most important thing we can learn is not how to survive another unhealthy relationship. It is how to recognize one before we let it all the way in.

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This happened to me this week.

Someone hurt me deeply. An apology followed, but it was superficial. There was no real conversation about what happened, no willingness to sit with the harm that had been done, and no indication that the person fully understood why the behavior was unacceptable.

Still, almost immediately, the pressure shifted to me.

Forgive.

Don’t confront the person.

Don’t make too much of it.

Try to understand what they are going through.

See it as a mistake.

That word kept bothering me.

Mistake.

A mistake is forgetting an appointment. Taking the wrong exit. Saying something carelessly and realizing afterward that you hurt someone.

A mistake becomes something else when the behavior repeats.

And this did.

It didn’t even take a day.

That is why I have become increasingly wary of the way forgiveness gets used in conversations about harmful behavior.

Forgiveness can be deeply personal. Someone may choose it because it brings peace. Someone else may never use the word at all. Neither choice determines whether that person has healed.

But forgiveness demanded from the person who was harmed is something very different.

Especially when accountability has barely begun.

The Rush to Make Everything Okay

There is often enormous pressure after someone behaves badly to restore peace as quickly as possible.

The person who caused the harm apologizes. Everyone exhales.

Now the injured person is expected to accept the apology, stop talking about what happened and help return the room to normal.

But normal may be exactly what allowed the behavior to continue.

Sometimes the person insisting that you forgive is uncomfortable with conflict. Sometimes they love both people involved and desperately want everyone to get along. Sometimes they genuinely believe they are helping.

The result can still be the same.

The burden moves.

Instead of the person who caused the harm being responsible for repairing it, the person who was hurt becomes responsible for restoring peace.

That is backwards.

An Apology Is Not Accountability

An apology matters.

But the words I’m sorry are only the beginning.

Accountability sounds more like: I understand what I did. I understand why it hurt you. I will listen when you tell me what happened from your perspective. I will not excuse my behavior by blaming my stress, my trauma, my anger or someone else. And most importantly, I will change what I do next.

Without that last part, the apology is just words.

That was the boundary I tried to hold this week.

I did not want an apology delivered through somebody else. I did not want a text message to magically make everything disappear.

I wanted a face-to-face conversation.

And I was very clear about something else:

I can care about what another person is going through without becoming the source of their pain or the target of it.

Those things are not contradictory.

Compassion does not require submission.

Understanding does not require silence.

Love does not require pretending something didn’t happen.

“But They’re Going Through a Lot”

This may be one of the most dangerous sentences we use around harmful behavior.

Of course circumstances matter.

People behave badly when they are frightened, overwhelmed, grieving, angry or under enormous stress.

Those things can help explain behavior.

They do not erase responsibility for it.

There is a difference between understanding why somebody behaved a certain way and deciding that therefore you must accept being treated that way.

People who have spent years around abusive or controlling behavior often know this trap particularly well.

We become excellent at explaining other people.

They had a difficult childhood.

They are under pressure.

They didn’t mean it.

They were drinking.

They are depressed.

They are angry.

They are scared.

They are going through something.

Eventually we can become so busy understanding everyone else that nobody has to understand what happened to us.

Forgiveness Cannot Be the Price of Belonging

There is something else worth naming.

Sometimes forgiveness becomes the admission price for remaining part of a family, relationship or community.

You can stay — if you stop talking about it.

You can belong — if you don’t confront anyone.

You can keep the peace — if you accept the apology.

You can be considered compassionate — if you forgive.

That is not reconciliation.

That is compliance.

And there is a difference.

Real reconciliation requires participation from the person who caused the harm.

It requires listening.

It requires accountability.

It requires boundaries.

And it requires evidence that the behavior is changing.

Otherwise we are not repairing the relationship.

We are restoring the conditions that allowed the harm to happen.

A Pattern Is Built One “Mistake” at a Time

One incident can be a mistake.

The second time matters.

So does the third.

Eventually the question stops being, Why did this happen?

The better question becomes:

What happens after it happens?

Does the person take responsibility?

Do they listen?

Do they change?

Or does everyone around them rush to minimize the behavior, protect them from consequences and convince the person who was hurt to move on?

Patterns do not survive because nobody notices them.

They often survive because everyone learns how to explain them.

That is part of why I created Domestic Assault.

Abuse and coercive control do not always arrive looking dramatic. Sometimes they appear in the smaller moments when someone else’s anger becomes your responsibility, when your boundary becomes the problem, when an apology is supposed to erase the behavior, or when forgiveness is demanded before accountability has even begun.

Recognizing the pattern matters.

Because sometimes the sentence “It was a mistake” is true.

And sometimes it is simply what we call the behavior until it happens again.

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Free subscriptions help these conversations reach more people. Paid subscriptions help support the time and work required to keep DomesticAssault.com independent and growing.

Most of all, your presence matters.

The more we talk honestly about abuse, coercion, boundaries, accountability and the behaviors we have been taught to excuse, the harder those patterns become to hide.

Recognize the pattern.

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One of the quieter ways entitlement develops in a relationship is when something you once did freely becomes something the other person begins to expect.

Maybe you drove them somewhere because they needed help. Maybe you loaned them money because things were tight. Maybe you watched the children, changed your plans, answered the phone every time they called, covered a bill, cooked dinner, forgave something painful or stepped in during a crisis.

You did it because you cared.

Then, somewhere along the way, the favor stopped being a favor.

It became expected.

And when you finally said no, you were treated as though you had broken an agreement you never made.

That shift matters, because one of the clearest signs of entitlement is when another person stops recognizing your generosity as something you choose to give and starts treating it as something they have a right to receive.

Kindness has consent built into it

A gift is a gift because I choose to give it. Help is help because I decide to offer it. My time belongs to me before I give some of it to you. So do my money, my home, my emotional energy, my labor, my attention and my forgiveness.

None of those things become someone else’s property because I shared them yesterday.

Yesterday’s yes does not create today’s obligation.

That sounds obvious when you write it down. It becomes much less obvious when you are living inside a relationship where someone has spent years teaching you otherwise.

Entitlement is more than ordinary selfishness. It is the belief that your needs, your limits and sometimes even the ordinary rules of the relationship should bend around the other person.

That is where kindness can become dangerous in an unhealthy relationship.

The question stops being, Will you do this for me?

It becomes, How dare you not do this for me?

You often see the entitlement when you stop giving

Sometimes entitlement is difficult to recognize while you are still providing what the other person wants.

You see it when you stop.

You stop answering immediately. You stop lending money. You stop changing your schedule. You stop rescuing them from consequences. You stop tolerating the insult. You stop being available on demand.

Then watch what happens.

A healthy person may be disappointed when you say no. They may even be frustrated. But they can still recognize that you have the right to decide what you will and will not do.

An entitled person often experiences your boundary as a personal offense.

That is when the punishment begins.

It may look like anger, sulking, guilt, silent treatment, accusations or threats. It may mean dragging other people into the conflict and telling them how selfish you have become. Suddenly the issue is no longer whether you are able or willing to help. The issue becomes your character.

You have changed. You don’t care anymore. You’re selfish. After everything I’ve done for you. I guess I know where I stand.

The boundary has been turned into betrayal.

Gratitude disappears when entitlement takes over

Another sign is that appreciation begins to disappear.

At first, the person may have thanked you. Eventually there is nothing to thank you for because, in their mind, this is simply what you are supposed to do.

Of course you picked them up. Of course you paid. Of course you changed your plans. Of course you tolerated the behavior. Of course you said yes again.

What was generous last month becomes expected this month. What was exceptional becomes ordinary, and what was ordinary becomes insufficient.

This is why people sometimes discover that the more they give, the less appreciated they become.

The problem is not generosity.

The problem is that generosity has been absorbed into an entitlement system.

This is where entitlement begins to overlap with coercive control

A person who believes they are entitled to your resources will eventually experience your boundaries as interference.

If they believe they are entitled to your attention, privacy may look suspicious. If they believe they are entitled to know where you are, independence becomes disloyalty. If they believe they are entitled to your money, financial limits become selfishness. If they believe they are entitled to your body, sexual boundaries become rejection. If they believe they are entitled to your emotional labor, your exhaustion becomes irrelevant.

That is why entitlement belongs in conversations about coercive control.

Sometimes the question is not simply, Why does this person keep violating my boundaries?

A better question may be:

Do they believe I am entitled to have boundaries at all?

That is a very different problem.

Kind people often turn the blame back on themselves

This is where people who have spent years giving can begin to question themselves.

Maybe I did too much. Maybe I made it too easy. Maybe I spoiled them. Maybe I should have said no sooner. Maybe I am too forgiving.

But your kindness did not create another person’s entitlement.

Kindness, conscientiousness, loyalty and generosity are not defects. The problem arises when someone recognizes those qualities and decides they are available for exploitation.

That distinction matters because survivors are too often given the wrong lesson.

They are told to become harder. Trust less. Give less. Stop caring so much.

That is not the lesson.

The lesson is to learn the difference between someone who appreciates your kindness and someone who quietly incorporates it into their expectations.

One receives your generosity.

The other begins to believe they own it.

Entitlement destroys equality

Healthy relationships are not based on keeping score. Sometimes one person gives more. Sometimes the other does. Families go through illnesses, unemployment, financial trouble, grief and crisis. Love absolutely includes periods when one person carries more of the load.

But something essential should remain underneath all of it.

Equality.

Your needs still count. Your exhaustion still counts. Your money is still yours. Your time still belongs to you. Your body still belongs to you. Your no remains available to you.

Once another person begins to believe that their needs automatically outrank yours, the relationship has changed.

Your generosity no longer looks like generosity to them.

It looks like something they are due.

One of the clearest tests is what happens when you say no

You do not have to make it dramatic.

You do not need seventeen paragraphs of explanation.

You can simply say, I can’t do that today.

Or, I’m not paying for that.

Or, That doesn’t work for me.

Then pay attention to what happens next.

Someone who cares about you may not like your boundary, but they can recognize your right to have one.

Someone who feels entitled to you may regard the boundary itself as unacceptable.

That is information.

Your kindness is still yours

You do not have to stop being generous because somebody exploited your generosity.

You do not have to become cold because somebody weaponized your warmth.

You do not have to stop helping people because someone once confused your willingness to help with a lifetime contract.

Kindness is powerful precisely because it is voluntary.

The moment another person demands it, extracts it, punishes you for withholding it or insists that yesterday’s generosity created today’s debt, something fundamental has changed.

Your kindness has been converted into their entitlement.

Recognize the pattern.

Kindness is something you give. It is never something another person gets to own.

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Paid subscribers make that possible.

Your support helps me keep researching, writing and publishing about coercion, control, manipulation, entitlement, abuse and the patterns that are too often minimized or misunderstood.

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There is a phenomenon I don’t think we talk about nearly enough.

You spend time with someone who makes you tense, guarded, angry, confused, small, or simply desperate to leave. You get through the encounter. You walk out the door. You get in the car. You go home.

And somehow, they come home with you.

Not literally, of course.

But your body is still carrying the encounter.

You replay what was said. You remember the tone, the look, the tension in the room, the moment you decided not to respond because it would only make things worse. Your muscles are still tight. You may feel shaky, angry, exhausted, nauseated, distracted, or strangely unable to settle back into your own life.

You may even feel as if you need to wash the experience off you.

This can happen after family gatherings, custody exchanges, school meetings, holidays, weddings, funerals, visits with in-laws, encounters with an ex, or any situation where you have to spend time with someone who feels emotionally unsafe or unpredictable.

And it is extremely common.

Your nervous system does not operate according to the clock. It does not say, The visit ended at 4:30, so we’re finished now.

While you are in the room, your body is gathering information constantly. Tone of voice. Facial expressions. Sudden changes in mood. Hostility. Contempt. Unpredictability. The possibility of an argument. The need to watch what you say. The need to protect someone else. The need to get through the next hour without things blowing up.

You may look perfectly calm while all of that is happening.

Then you leave.

And the reaction comes afterward.

That is one reason people sometimes wonder why they feel worse once they are finally home. They think, It’s over. Why can’t I just let it go?

Because your body may only now have enough distance to process what it was managing while you were there.

That does not mean every uncomfortable encounter was dangerous. It does not mean every unpleasant person is abusive. But it does mean that your reaction deserves your attention.

If the same person repeatedly leaves you feeling depleted, agitated, angry, confused, ashamed, or desperate to recover yourself, that is information.

If you need hours to feel normal again after spending two hours with someone, that is information.

If your body relaxes the moment you get into your own car or close your own front door, that is information too.

And this is where people can get themselves into trouble. We are very good at overriding ourselves.

We tell ourselves to be nice. Keep the peace. Don’t make trouble. It wasn’t that bad. Everyone else seemed fine. Maybe I’m too sensitive. Maybe I misunderstood.

Meanwhile, the body keeps registering what the mind is trying to explain away.

That is why the aftermath matters.

Pay attention to what happens to you after certain people leave.

Do you feel lighter?

Or do you feel as though you have to recover from them?

There is nothing strange about needing time to come down after a stressful encounter. There is nothing weak about feeling exhausted after spending hours monitoring yourself around another person. And there is nothing irrational about wanting distance from someone whose presence repeatedly puts your body on alert.

You have a right to feel the way you feel.

You do not have to talk yourself out of your own reaction because someone else thinks the behavior was harmless, normal, funny, or “not that bad.”

Your body is doing what bodies have always done. It is taking in information, looking for danger, and trying to help you minimize your exposure to it.

Pay attention to your reaction.

If you come home from an encounter and feel as though you need to sit quietly, walk outside, change your clothes, take a shower, turn on your music, or simply be alone for a while, there may be nothing wrong with you at all.

You may simply be coming down from spending time in a place where you did not feel safe enough to fully relax.

The encounter is over. The reaction may take longer. That is normal.

And if your body keeps telling you the same thing about the same person?

Pay attention. It’s information.

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If you have lived with abuse, coercive control, manipulation, or complicated relationships that leave you carrying the encounter long after it ends, join my community at Domestic Assault.

We are naming the patterns people often feel long before they have words for them.

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I read something this morning from that captured a truth many people who have lived with abuse understand instinctively.

An abusive person may appear completely out of control, raging through a house, throwing things, smashing property, punching walls. Yet somehow it is your phone that gets broken, your belongings that are destroyed, the wall beside your head that gets punched. Then someone knocks on the door and, almost instantaneously, the person who supposedly could not control himself can answer it calmly.

That is the part worth remembering.

Not because every outburst is calculated down to the broken coffee cup, but because what looks like uncontrolled rage can function as control. The destruction has an audience. The fear has a target. And the ability to stop when stopping becomes useful tells us something the explosion itself does not.

I have been thinking about that while watching Donald Trump exercise the enormous powers of the presidency.

Stop Looking at Each Broken Thing

One of the mistakes people make in abusive situations is examining every event separately.

Why did he smash the phone? Why did he threaten her job? Why did he humiliate her in front of the children? Why did he empty the bank account? Why did he suddenly become charming when someone else walked into the room?

Separated from one another, every incident invites its own explanation. Maybe he was angry. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. Maybe this time was different.

Put the incidents together and something else begins to emerge.

That is increasingly important when looking at the Trump regime because the sheer volume of individual controversies can obscure what is happening across the whole landscape.

Reuters undertook that exercise last year and documented at least 470 people, organizations and institutions subjected to actions it classified as part of Trump’s campaign of retribution during his second term. The list crossed almost every major center of independent power in American life: federal employees, prosecutors, law firms, universities, media organizations and others who had opposed Trump, investigated him, represented people he opposed, or challenged his policies.

Four hundred seventy targets should change the way we look at the individual stories.

The law firm is not just a law-firm story. The university is not simply an education story. The broadcaster is not merely another Trump-versus-the-media fight.

The question becomes what happens to a society when institutions throughout it learn that challenging the person holding executive power can carry a price.

The Damage Is Broader Than the Headlines

Trump’s regime has used federal authority in disputes with some of the country’s most powerful law firms, including executive orders restricting firms whose lawyers, clients or previous work drew his objections. Four firms obtained court orders blocking those actions. Nine others instead negotiated agreements with the White House that included pledges approaching $1 billion in free legal work.

Universities have faced threatened or frozen federal funding, changes to research support, immigration actions involving students and faculty, and demands affecting institutional policies. The administration is now proposing rules that could jeopardize the tax-exempt status of schools over programs that consider race, while simultaneously seeking greater political control over the distribution of federal research money.

The pressure has reached American history itself. The administration has threatened federal support for the Smithsonian, demanded changes in how museums present the country’s past and objected specifically to what Trump described as excessive attention to slavery.

It has reached journalism and entertainment. ABC and Disney are now suing the Federal Communications Commission, saying an unusually early review of eight broadcast licenses has affected programming decisions because executives fear retaliation from the administration. The FCC denies that it is infringing on ABC’s First Amendment rights. The licenses were not scheduled for normal renewal until between 2028 and 2031.

It reaches deeper still, into the ordinary machinery of government and the information Americans surrender to it.

This week a federal appeals court ruled that the IRS unlawfully gave immigration authorities taxpayer information involving approximately 47,000 addresses, violating federal privacy protections created after Watergate. The administration has also sought to require states receiving certain federal benefits funding to report people believed to be in the country illegally to Homeland Security, expanding immigration enforcement into universities, motor-vehicle departments and other parts of state government.

Any one of those stories can disappear after a day or two.

Together they describe something much larger.

The Point Is What Everyone Else Learns

This is where the domestic-assault lens becomes useful.

Control does not require punishing everyone.

It requires enough people to understand what may happen if they resist.

If one law firm is targeted, another law firm watches. If one university loses billions of dollars, another university notices. If one broadcaster faces government scrutiny after angering the president, every corporate owner with broadcast licenses understands the possible stakes.

That is how power can travel far beyond the people directly touched by it.

ABC’s lawsuit provides an unusually clear example because the company says the pressure has already affected decisions inside the network. It says executives have become more cautious about booking political candidates and have considered the possibility of administration retaliation when making programming decisions. The FCC disputes ABC’s characterization of its actions, but the significance of the case extends beyond who ultimately prevails in court. An institution says it has begun changing its behavior because it fears what government power might do next.

That is the moment worth noticing.

In a controlling relationship, eventually nobody has to throw the lamp.

Everyone already knows what happened to the last one.

Courts Have Been Finding the Boundaries

There is another reason the broader pattern matters.

Federal courts have repeatedly been asked to decide where presidential authority ends and constitutional protections begin. A Reuters review published in August found 75 federal court rulings in which judges concluded that Trump administration actions infringed First Amendment protections involving speech, religion or the press. Some rulings have been appealed, stayed or overturned, and the administration has argued repeatedly that judges are improperly interfering with legitimate executive authority. But the number and range of the cases reveal just how often those boundaries are now being tested.

That matters because institutions themselves are part of the system designed to constrain power.

Courts can say no. Lawyers can challenge the government. Universities can conduct research the government dislikes. Journalists can ask questions a president would rather not answer. Museums can describe history without asking the White House which parts are acceptable. Civil servants can follow statutes rather than personal loyalty. States can challenge federal authority.

None of those institutions is perfect.

That is beside the point.

Their independence is part of what prevents any president from becoming the only meaningful source of authority in the country.

And Then He Opens the Door

That image from keeps coming back to me: the person who appears consumed by rage until someone knocks.

Then the door opens and everything changes.

The voice softens. The posture changes. The performance is over because the circumstances have changed.

With Trump, the important question is not whether every angry statement is strategic or every presidential action motivated by retaliation. No outsider can know that.

What we can examine is where government power is being applied, who is receiving it, what happens after resistance and whether other people and institutions begin altering their behavior because they have seen what happened to someone else.

That is why counting only the broken things is no longer enough.

There are too many of them.

The deeper story is the atmosphere created around them — the lawyers calculating the risk of taking a case, the university wondering whether a grant will disappear, the broadcaster considering whether a program will provoke the government, the civil servant wondering whether professional independence will cost a career, the immigrant wondering whether information given to one government agency will quietly find its way to another.

That is how control expands.

Not because everyone is attacked.

Because everyone is watching.

And eventually the most consequential damage may not be the institution that was punished.

It may be the institution that saw what happened and decided not to risk being next.

Recognize the pattern.

Sources

Reuters, Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting, November 26, 2025.

Reuters, Trump vowed to ‘bring free speech back.’ Judges in 75 cases ruled that he has stifled it, August 4, 2026.

Reuters, Trump invokes presidential privilege in lawsuit over law firm orders, August 18, 2026.

Reuters, ABC says intimidation by Trump’s FCC forced programming changes, August 19, 2026.

Reuters, US to spend $5 billion on health, construction research powered by AI, July 22, 2026.

Reuters, Trump administration threatens to cut federal agencies’ support for Smithsonian, September 3, 2026.

Reuters, IRS under Trump unlawfully shared taxpayer info with immigration authorities, court rules, September 8, 2026.

Reuters, Trump’s DOJ threatens to cut aid to states unless they report migrants without legal status, September 2, 2026.

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Trump posted a map on Truth Social this week that looked, at first glance, like one more piece of the strange political theater we have become accustomed to. The American flag was stretched across not only the United States but Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, the whole expanse labeled “United States of America.”

There was no explanation attached to it.

Iceland did not find it amusing. Its government summoned the U.S. ambassador. Denmark’s foreign minister called the imagery disturbing, and Greenland’s leaders have already made their position on Trump’s long-running interest in acquiring their territory abundantly clear.

I looked at the map and thought about something I have been writing about here on mu Substack and my publication Domestic Assault.

Boundaries.

Not borders in the geopolitical sense, although obviously those matter too. I mean the deeper idea of a boundary: the place where one person’s authority ends and somebody else’s begins.

People who have experienced coercive control understand how important that distinction can become.

No Should Not Begin a Negotiation

One of the most exhausting things about living with someone who does not respect boundaries is that nothing ever seems settled.

You say you don’t want to do something, and instead of accepting the answer, the other person asks why. You explain why, and your explanation becomes something to argue with. You explain again, and another objection arrives. Before long you are not discussing whether you want to do something at all. You are defending your right to have wanted something different in the first place.

That is how a boundary can gradually become a negotiation.

It may not begin with a threat. Often it begins with persistence. The person pushing simply refuses to recognize that your answer has ended the discussion.

And because most people do not want to live in a state of permanent conflict, they engage. They explain. They defend themselves. They compromise on things they never wanted to compromise on. Sometimes they eventually give in, not because they have changed their minds, but because maintaining the boundary has become more exhausting than surrendering it.

Then, from the outside, somebody says: Well, she agreed.

Maybe she did.

The more useful question is what it took to get her there.

Entitlement Changes the Question

I write about patterns because patterns of power can appear in very different places.

The pattern that interests me here is entitlement: the belief that another person’s boundary does not deserve the same respect as your desire to cross it.

Trump has spent years talking about Greenland as though the wishes of the people who live there were an obstacle to an American acquisition rather than the central fact of the matter. He has repeatedly played with the idea of Canada becoming the 51st state. Now comes a map that simply eliminates boundaries altogether and replaces them with an American flag.

What interests me is not whether Trump actually expects Iceland to become part of the United States. I have no idea what he expects.

It is that a powerful person can place an outrageous proposition into circulation and force everybody else to respond to it.

Now Iceland must summon an ambassador. Denmark must answer. Greenland must answer. Canada must answer. Journalists must ask what it means. Diplomats must calculate how seriously to take it.

The burden quietly moves from the person crossing the boundary to the people who must defend it.

That dynamic is painfully familiar.

You Find Yourself Defending What Should Have Been Obvious

People who have lived with coercive control sometimes describe conversations that sound absurd when repeated later.

Why should you have to explain that you are allowed to speak privately with your own friends?

Why should you have to argue that the money you earned does not automatically belong under somebody else’s control?

Why should a parent have to defend maintaining a relationship with her own children?

Why should someone have to provide an acceptable reason for wanting an evening alone, keeping a password private, declining sex, going to work, seeing family or simply saying no?

Yet inside a controlling relationship, those arguments can become normal.

That may be one of coercive control’s most damaging accomplishments. It changes what the less powerful person believes must be justified.

Instead of asking, Why do you believe you have the right to control this?, everyone begins asking the targeted person to explain why she is resisting.

That is an enormous shift.

And once I learned to see it, I began seeing it everywhere.

Jokes Can Carry Power Too

The defense for behavior like Trump’s map often arrives quickly: he’s trolling. He’s joking. He likes provoking people. Everyone is taking him too seriously.

Perhaps.

But jokes do not occur in a vacuum, and they do not exist outside power.

A joke from somebody who has no authority over you is one thing. The same joke from the person who controls your livelihood, your immigration status, your access to money or your physical safety can feel very different.

Anybody who has lived around an intimidating person knows this instinctively. Sometimes the cruelest comments arrive with a laugh attached to them. If you object, the joke itself becomes the defense.

Can’t you take a joke?

Now the problem is no longer what was said. The problem is supposedly your reaction to it.

That is another wonderfully efficient way to erase a boundary. Not only are you expected to tolerate the intrusion, you may be blamed for objecting to it.

Power determines whether everybody in the room has the same freedom to laugh.

Watch What Happens After the Boundary

I have become less interested in declarations than in what happens after them.

Anybody can say they respect another person’s independence. The test comes when that person uses it.

Anybody can say they respect boundaries. The test comes when somebody establishes one they do not like.

Anybody can say they believe in consent. The test comes after the answer is no.

What happens next?

Does the person accept the answer and adjust?

Or does the campaign begin?

Do they bargain, punish, ridicule, threaten, recruit allies, withdraw affection, create consequences, keep asking, pretend not to understand, or simply behave as though the boundary never existed?

That is where a great deal of coercive behavior reveals itself.

And sometimes the most important thing we can teach ourselves is that we are allowed to stop participating in the negotiation.

You do not always owe another explanation.

The Map Is the Message

That is why this odd map caught my attention.

A border is one of the clearest boundaries human beings create. Whatever disputes countries may have, a sovereign nation does not ordinarily wake up one morning and discover that another country’s leader has colored over it with his flag.

The image is absurd precisely because the boundary is so obvious.

But perhaps that is why it is useful.

It makes visible something that is often much harder to see inside ordinary relationships: the assumption that another person’s line matters only until someone more powerful decides to move it.

The danger is not simply crossing boundaries. Human beings make mistakes. We misunderstand each other. We occasionally push too far and apologize.

The danger is the belief that the boundary was never really yours to establish.

That is something else entirely.

At Domestic Assault, I keep returning to these patterns because recognizing them can change the way we understand what is happening around us. Coercive control is rarely one dramatic incident. More often it is a system built slowly out of entitlement, pressure, intimidation, punishment, isolation and the steady erosion of another person’s authority over her own life.

Sometimes learning to recognize it begins with one very simple idea:

A boundary does not require the approval of the person who wants to cross it.

If this kind of writing helps you recognize those patterns more clearly, I hope you’ll join my community here at Domestic Assault. My writing will remain freely available because I believe this information needs to be accessible. Free subscribers help build the community, and paid subscribers make it possible for me to keep doing the work.

Sources

Reuters, September 8, 2026 — reporting on Trump’s map and Iceland’s decision to summon the U.S. ambassador.

Associated Press, September 8, 2026 — reporting on the international response to Trump’s map and his previous territorial rhetoric involving Greenland and Canada.

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There is a particular kind of loneliness that is hard to explain because, technically, nobody has rejected you.

“We’re always here.”

“You can come over anytime.”

“I don’t know why you don’t come around more.”

The door is open.

So why don’t you feel welcome?

I’ve experienced this, and for a long time I didn’t know what to call it.

You ask someone you love how they’re doing.

“Fine.”

You ask what’s going on in their life.

“Nothing much.”

Then you’re with them around friends or other family members and something slips into the conversation.

There’s been a problem at work. A decision they’re struggling with. Something happened last weekend. They’re planning something. They’re worried about somebody.

Everyone else seems to know.

You don’t.

And there is this little moment when you realize: These people know more about the life of someone I love than I do.

It hurts.

But more than that, it changes your understanding of the relationship.

When you stop trying

Maybe you’ve experienced this with a partner, an adult child, a parent, a sibling, a friend or someone else you love.

Sometimes the distance works in both directions.

They don’t ask much about your life either.

When they do, the question can feel almost ceremonial.

How are you?

You start answering and they interrupt. Look at their phone. Roll their eyes. Change the subject.

Or you try to talk about something important and hear:

“That’s your thing, not mine.”

Nothing dramatic happened.

There may not even be an argument.

But something has been communicated.

I’m not interested in this part of you.

So the next time, you tell them less.

Eventually you stop bringing certain things up at all.

This is one of the ways relationships change without anybody ever announcing that they have changed.

We learn from how people respond to us.

There are names for some of these behaviors

Emotional withdrawal is pulling back from the emotional connection of a relationship while perhaps maintaining its outward structure.

Emotional invalidation is dismissing, minimizing or showing contempt for another person’s feelings or experiences.

Relational exclusion happens when someone is increasingly left outside the conversations, information and experiences through which closeness is created.

Withholding can involve affection, attention, communication or information.

And blame shifting can happen when the person who eventually reacts to all of this becomes the problem.

None of these things, by itself, proves that someone is abusive.

People become overwhelmed. Families drift apart. Resentments build. Communication breaks down. Some people are simply terrible at talking about their feelings.

But patterns matter.

And when these behaviors are repeatedly used to control closeness, access, information, attention or belonging, they can become part of coercive control.

Coercive control isn’t always obvious

When people hear coercive control, they may picture someone being told where they can go, who they can see, what they can spend or what they are allowed to do.

Those are certainly forms of it.

But coercive control can also operate through the relationship itself.

Who gets included?

Who gets information?

Who gets warmth?

Who gets shut out?

Who has to initiate every conversation?

Who has to keep proving they care?

Who decides when closeness is available?

That matters because human beings respond to belonging.

When warmth, attention, information or inclusion are repeatedly given and withdrawn, you may start changing your behavior to regain them.

You call more.

You try harder.

You become careful about what you say.

You stop mentioning things that get an eye roll.

You avoid subjects that cause withdrawal.

You wonder what you did.

And sometimes you start accepting treatment you would immediately recognize as hurtful if you watched it happening to somebody else.

Coercive control doesn’t always tell you to leave. Sometimes it makes staying so uncomfortable that you leave on your own—and then blames you for leaving.

“Why don’t you come around anymore?”

This is where the contradiction becomes especially painful.

Eventually you visit less.

Maybe you call less.

You don’t share as much.

And then:

“You never come around anymore.”

You try to explain.

I don’t feel like you want me there.

And suddenly the conversation becomes a defense.

“What did I do?”

“When did I ever tell you not to come?”

“You know you’re welcome here.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong.”

And maybe there isn’t one thing you can point to.

That’s part of what makes emotional patterns so difficult to describe.

You’re not presenting evidence in a courtroom.

You’re trying to explain the cumulative experience of a relationship.

You don’t seem interested in knowing what’s happening in my life.

You’ve stopped letting me into yours.

When I try to connect, I often feel dismissed.

Other people seem to know you in ways I no longer do.

I leave feeling worse than when I arrived.

None of those statements requires someone to be declared guilty.

But they deserve to be heard.

“The door is open” can become a defense

There is a difference between:

“You can come over anytime.”

and

“I’d really like to see you.”

One says the door isn’t locked.

The other reaches toward you.

That difference matters.

Because “You’re always welcome here” can become a convenient answer to an entirely different question.

Do you want me in your life?

Are you interested in mine?

Do I matter when I’m here?

Do you notice when I’m not?

An unlocked door doesn’t answer any of those questions.

Look at what happens when you walk through the door

This is something I’ve learned from experience, but also from years of trying to understand patterns of abuse, coercion and control:

Don’t look only at what someone says the relationship is.

Look at what repeatedly happens inside it.

Do you feel safe speaking?

Can you disagree without being punished?

Can you share something important without being mocked or dismissed?

Is information routinely kept from you while being shared with others?

Is affection freely given, or does it seem to appear and disappear depending on whether you’re behaving the way someone wants?

Are you constantly trying to figure out what you did wrong?

Have you started making yourself smaller to preserve the relationship?

And when you finally pull away, are you blamed for the distance?

Those questions tell us much more than whether someone can technically say:

“But I never told you not to come.”

Maybe the most useful question isn’t:

“Why don’t you come around anymore?”

Maybe it’s:

“How do you feel when you’re here?”

Because an open door and a welcoming relationship are not the same thing.

And sometimes understanding that difference is the beginning of recognizing the pattern.

If you recognize something here, join my community. Domestic Assault is a place to name and understand the patterns of abuse, coercion and control that can be difficult to see when we’re living inside them.

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Most of us want help sometimes. We need it when we’re sick, overwhelmed, grieving, aging, raising children, struggling financially or simply carrying more than one person can reasonably manage alone.

And most people who help us really are helping.

But there is a line that can be crossed so gradually that neither person recognizes exactly when it happened. Help can become control when the person receiving it begins losing the right to decide how that help is given.

Someone offers to handle the finances because you’re overwhelmed. Soon you’re being questioned about what you spend.

Someone takes over a household responsibility because it’s difficult for you. Eventually you’re no longer allowed to have an opinion about how it’s done.

Someone offers transportation, makes appointments, speaks to professionals for you or manages something complicated on your behalf. It begins as assistance. But somewhere along the way, I can do this for you becomes I know what’s best for you.

The distinction isn’t whether the helper has good intentions. People can love us deeply and still become controlling.

Help should increase your ability to live your life

Healthy help asks, What do you need?

Control says, Here’s what I’ve decided you need.

Healthy help allows you to disagree, change your mind, make choices the other person wouldn’t make and sometimes even make mistakes.

Control becomes irritated by those things.

That’s one reason controlling behavior can be so difficult to recognize when it comes from someone we love. There may be no threats. No screaming. No obvious cruelty. There may instead be enormous effort, sacrifice and genuine affection.

And that makes it emotionally complicated to say, I appreciate everything you’re doing for me, but this is still my decision.

Gratitude does not require surrendering autonomy.

Dependence can change a relationship

The risk becomes greater when one person genuinely needs another person’s assistance.

Age, disability, illness, financial problems, childcare, housing or transportation can create practical dependence. The person providing help may gradually accumulate power simply because they control something the other person needs.

That doesn’t automatically make the relationship abusive. But it does create an imbalance worth noticing.

Ask a simple question: Can the person receiving the help still say no?

Can they disagree without being punished? Can they ask for the help to be provided differently? Can they make decisions the helper doesn’t approve of? Can they stop accepting the help without retaliation, humiliation or guilt?

If the answer repeatedly becomes no, something important has changed.

Sometimes we have to recognize it in ourselves, too

Control isn’t only something other people do.

Those of us who love fiercely can cross this line ourselves. We can become so convinced that we’re protecting someone, fixing something or preventing a bad outcome that we stop noticing that another adult has the right to make a different choice.

Recognizing that doesn’t make someone terrible. It gives us an opportunity to correct course.

Maybe the question isn’t simply, Am I helping?

Maybe it’s: Am I helping this person live their own life—or am I slowly making their life mine to manage?

That distinction matters because the best help doesn’t make another person smaller. It helps them remain themselves.

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Domestic Assault is about recognizing patterns of abuse, coercion and control—not only after they become unmistakable, but while they’re still difficult to name.

All of the core writing here will remain freely available because I believe this information needs to be accessible to anyone who needs it.

If you find value in this work, join my community by subscribing. Paid subscriptions help support the research and writing and allow me to continue building a place where we can talk openly about these patterns, understand them better and, hopefully, help one another see them sooner.

Thank you for being here and for supporting my work.

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On August 31, 2026, Republican Congressman Thomas Massie stood on the floor of the United States House of Representatives and read 14 names into the record. He described the people he named as Jeffrey Epstein’s “co-conspirators” and called for them to be investigated and prosecuted. Massie was also beginning another effort to force the release of additional Epstein records still being withheld from the public.

The distinction here is important: these are Massie’s allegations. Being named by a member of Congress, appearing in Epstein-related records or having associated with Epstein does not establish that someone committed a crime. Several of the people Massie named have never been charged with an Epstein-related offense. But Massie’s decision to stand on the House floor and say the names publicly raises a different question, one that has been hanging over this case for years: How did Jeffrey Epstein continue for as long as he did, surrounded by people, businesses and institutions that encountered pieces of what was happening?

THE 14 NAMES MASSIE READ ON THE HOUSE FLOOR

Jes Staley
Leon Black
Les Wexner
David Copperfield
Lapo Elkann
Tom Pritzker
Glenn Dubin
Frédéric Fekkai
Edoardo Teodorani
Jean-Luc Brunel
Daniel Siad
Ramsey Elkholy
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew
Lesley Groff

Massie described these people as Epstein “co-conspirators” and called for investigation and prosecution. His statement is an allegation, not a finding of criminal guilt.

Massie said he hoped that hearing the names might shame the Department of Justice into delivering justice. What makes that statement remarkable is the date. This isn’t 2008, when Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida and emerged from a prosecution involving minors with a deal that would later become infamous. It isn’t 2019, when Epstein was arrested again. It is August 31, 2026, and a member of Congress is still standing on the House floor arguing that the federal government has not adequately accounted for the people who may have helped Epstein operate.

This is why I called this publication Domestic Assault

When I started Domestic Assault, the name obviously referred to what happens inside relationships, marriages and families. Abuse is often hidden inside a home, where the person being abused lives in one reality while the outside world sees another. But the word domestic has another meaning too. It means our country, our government, our institutions and our United States of America.

That connection matters because abuse rarely survives solely through the power of the person committing it. It also survives because of what happens around that person. Someone sees something but doesn’t understand what it means. Someone else understands more but has a reason not to get involved. Another person accepts an explanation because questioning it would require doing something. Sometimes money is involved. Sometimes reputation is involved. Sometimes people simply don’t want to know.

Anyone who has lived through domestic abuse may recognize that structure. Eventually you discover that there were conversations you were never in. Someone was explaining you to other people. Someone was explaining himself. Different people were given different pieces of the story, and each piece could be made to sound reasonable when separated from all the others. The whole picture existed, but almost nobody was looking at the whole picture.

That is what interests me about Epstein now. Not just another breathless hunt through files looking for a famous name, but the much harder question of what happened among all the people and institutions surrounding him. Who knew something? What exactly did they know? When did they know it? What did they do afterward? And how many people possessed one piece of information without ever putting their piece beside somebody else’s?

The network is the story

The recent developments involving the banks make that question particularly difficult to dismiss. Bank of America agreed to a $72.5 million settlement with women who accused the bank of facilitating their sexual abuse by Epstein. A federal judge gave the settlement final approval on August 27. The settlement resolves the allegations without establishing that the bank committed the conduct alleged, but the case points toward something important: the infrastructure surrounding abuse can matter almost as much as the person committing it.

Then there is Jes Staley, one of the names Massie read. Staley was once one of JPMorgan’s most powerful executives and had a longstanding relationship with Epstein. In testimony released by Congress on August 26, Staley acknowledged that he had argued for JPMorgan to retain Epstein as a client after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. He also acknowledged sharing confidential and market-sensitive bank information with Epstein. Staley has maintained that he did not know Epstein continued abusing minors.

That doesn’t mean Staley is responsible for Epstein’s crimes. It does mean we are entitled to ask why a convicted sex offender remained valuable enough to powerful people and institutions that maintaining relationships with him continued to make sense.

This is the part that feels familiar to anyone who has tried to explain abuse from the inside.

The failure isn’t necessarily one grand conspiracy. It can be a series of smaller decisions made by people who never think of themselves as protecting an abuser. They protect a relationship, a client, a reputation, a business interest, an institution or simply their own comfort. Enough of those decisions can give the person causing harm more room to continue.

That is why I keep coming back to The Conversations You Were Never In. In domestic abuse, those conversations can create an entirely different version of reality around the person being abused. With Epstein, I want to know about the people on the receiving end of those conversations. What did the banker hear? What did the employee know? What did prosecutors and law enforcement have? What did wealthy friends observe? What did the people arranging travel or handling money understand about the world they were helping maintain?

One fragment may prove nothing. Even several fragments may prove nothing criminal. But at some point, if enough fragments exist, somebody has an obligation to put them on the same table and look at the picture they create.

Massie saying 14 names on the House floor doesn’t establish what any of those people did or didn’t do. Investigation is how we establish that, and due process matters just as much when an accusation is politically explosive as it does anywhere else.

But due process for individuals cannot become an excuse for institutional secrecy.

There are survivors who have waited years for answers. There are government records that remain beyond public view. There are legitimate questions about who knew what, when they knew it and what they did with that knowledge. Those aren’t questions driven by celebrity gossip. They are questions about accountability and about the environment that allowed a serial sexual abuser to operate for years despite encounters with law enforcement, prosecutors, banks and some of the most powerful people in the world.

That is why this belongs in Domestic Assault.

The publication is about what happens when abuse enters a home and distorts the lives of the people inside it. But it is also about what happens when secrecy, money, reputation and power create room for abuse to continue on a much larger scale.

Domestic means home.

It also means country.

And if we are going to understand abuse, we have to be willing to examine not only the person who commits it, but the people and institutions that make it easier for that person to keep going.

If you find value in this work, join my community, subscribe and support Domestic Assault. This publication is about understanding abuse in all the places it hides — inside homes, inside relationships, and inside the institutions that can make it easier for powerful people to avoid accountability.

Your subscriptions, shares, comments and financial support make it possible for me to keep following these stories, asking the questions that are too often left unanswered, and connecting the pieces instead of allowing them to disappear into separate headlines.

Thank you for reading, for being here and for helping me build a community willing to look directly at what abuse does, how it survives and who helps make its survival possible.

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There is a kind of apology I learned to accept in childhood, and somehow I have kept running into versions of it right up to the present.

It usually sounds reasonable. Sometimes loving. Sometimes even self-aware.

The reason I did that thing that hurt you was because I thought I was honoring you. I misunderstood what you wanted. I thought I was doing the right thing. I’m sorry.

And because I learned very early to look for the explanation behind someone else’s behavior, I understand. I make room for it. I tell myself they didn’t mean to hurt me.

Then, not long afterward, they do it again.

Maybe not the identical thing. That would almost be easier to recognize. It may come dressed a little differently, under different circumstances, with another perfectly reasonable explanation available for why this time wasn’t really the same thing.

And this is where I think something important happens.

I don’t necessarily get angry. I don’t necessarily say, Wait a minute. We just talked about this.

Instead, I understand again.

Oh. That’s just how he is.

I have done this for a very long time, and I suspect a lot of other people have too, particularly people who learned early in life to understand everyone else’s behavior before trusting their own reaction to it.

We call it compassion. We call it accepting people for who they are. We remind ourselves that nobody is perfect and relationships require forgiveness. All of those things are true, which is exactly why this can become so insidious.

Because somewhere along the way, understanding why someone hurts you can quietly turn into accepting that they will.

I think of it as the accommodation loop

I don’t mean that as a clinical diagnosis. I mean it as a name for something I recognize in my own life and am only now beginning to see clearly.

Someone does something that hurts you. You say so. They explain why they did it, and the explanation gives the behavior a more generous meaning than the one you experienced. They apologize. You understand. You forgive.

Then it happens again.

But now you have their explanation stored in your own head. They may not even have to give it to you again because you can do that part yourself.

He didn’t mean to hurt me. He thought he was helping. He doesn’t understand these things. That’s just how he is.

There is nothing inherently wrong with thinking about someone’s intentions. Intent matters. Context matters. People make mistakes, and none of us should be condemned forever because we got something wrong.

But repetition matters too.

If I tell you something hurts me and you tell me you understand, then what you do with that information matters more to me than how good the apology sounded.

An apology isn’t repair.

Changed behavior is repair.

I think I have spent far too much of my life confusing the two.

Look at who keeps moving

This is the part I didn’t see for a long time.

When I say, that’s just how he is, he doesn’t have to change.

I do.

Not all at once. That’s probably why it is so difficult to see. I adjust what I expect. I make a little more room. I reconsider whether what happened was really as hurtful as I thought it was. I remind myself of the explanation and decide that intention should count for something.

Eventually, I may stop bringing it up because we’ve already had this conversation. He already apologized. I already said I understood. Bringing it up again can somehow begin to feel unfair.

So the person whose behavior caused the hurt stays pretty much where he was, while the person who was hurt keeps moving the boundary.

I didn’t think of that as accommodation. I thought I was being understanding.

There is an enormous difference.

When empathy starts working against you

I have always wanted to know why.

Why did somebody behave that way? What happened to them? What were they thinking? What did they intend? What are they afraid of? What part of their own history are they carrying into this?

Understanding people has served me well throughout my life. I don’t want to lose that part of myself.

But there is a danger in becoming very good at understanding other people. You can construct such a good explanation for somebody else’s behavior that you explain yourself right out of your own experience.

Their intention becomes more important than the effect on you.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

I can understand why someone behaves the way they do and still say the behavior isn’t acceptable to me. I can believe someone loves me and still believe something they did hurt me. I can accept an apology without agreeing in advance to accept the same behavior again.

Those things aren’t contradictions.

Maybe that’s something I should have understood a long time ago. I didn’t.

“That’s just how he is”

I hear that sentence differently now.

Sometimes it really does mean acceptance. We all have quirks, faults and habits that the people who love us learn to live with. I certainly have mine.

But sometimes that’s just how he is means something considerably more troubling.

Sometimes it means I have stopped expecting him to care enough about the effect on me to change what he is doing.

That’s harder to admit.

Because then the question is no longer whether he meant to hurt me. The question becomes why his intention keeps getting more weight than my experience.

I am writing about this from my own life, but I don’t believe for a minute that it belongs only to me. I think people do this in marriages, families, friendships and workplaces. I think children learn to do it with parents long before they have words for what they’re doing, and sometimes they carry that accommodation with them into adulthood because it feels less like surrender than love.

Maybe that is why it can last so long.

The apology comes. The explanation makes sense. We forgive. We understand.

And then it happens again.

The question isn’t whether we should stop forgiving people. I don’t want to live that way either.

The question is whether we have mistaken forgiveness for an obligation to keep making room for the same injury.

I am learning that I can understand someone without accommodating everything they do. I can love someone without explaining away what hurts me. I can believe an apology was sincere and still pay very close attention to what happens after it.

And now, when I hear myself thinking, that’s just how he is, I want to ask myself something else.

Then what am I being asked to become in order to live with how he is?

If you recognize yourself somewhere in this, I hope you’ll join this community. Some of these patterns are remarkably difficult to see when we’ve been living with them since childhood. Sometimes another person putting words around the experience is what finally helps us recognize it in our own lives.

If you find value in my work, subscribe and support me. It allows me to keep writing about the things we learn to excuse, minimize and accommodate, and to keep building a community where we can talk about them without pretending they don’t hurt.

Sometimes the person trying to control you doesn’t have to come anywhere near you. They can reach you through somebody else.

A relative calls with a strangely specific question. Someone suddenly wants to know where you’ll be or who you’ve talked to. A friend repeats something about you that clearly came from another conversation. An adult child approaches you carrying a grievance that doesn’t quite sound like their own.

Or a message lands on your phone out of nowhere and leaves you wondering where the hell that came from.

There’s a word for one version of this: triangulation.

What triangulation actually is

Triangulation happens when a third person gets pulled into a relationship or conflict between two other people. That alone doesn’t make it abusive. We all talk to friends and family, ask for advice and sometimes need help sorting out a difficult situation.

The problem is what the third person is being used for.

In a controlling or abusive relationship, someone else can become a way around a boundary. They can carry a message, collect information, reinforce a story, apply guilt or reopen contact that you deliberately closed. Sometimes they know exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes they honestly think they’re helping.

That uncertainty is part of what makes triangulation so effective. The person in the middle may have heard only half the story or been given a version in which you are angry, irrational, cruel or refusing to communicate. They may think they’re trying to solve a problem when, in fact, they’re helping keep one going.

Meanwhile, the person who started the whole thing gets distance and deniability. They didn’t call you. They didn’t ask the question. They didn’t make the accusation. Somebody else did.

That doesn’t mean everybody is conspiring against you. It may simply mean several people are hearing the same story from the same source.

How triangulation isolates you

This is where the damage can really spread.

You’re no longer dealing with one difficult relationship. Now you’re dealing with other people’s impressions of it, often built from conversations you were never part of.

By the time you finally establish a boundary, somebody else may already have been given an explanation for it. Your refusal to engage becomes cruelty. Your distance becomes punishment. Your attempt to protect yourself becomes evidence that you’re difficult, unstable or vindictive.

That can send you into an exhausting cycle of explaining what happened before the part they heard, producing the text, reconstructing the conversation and trying to make somebody understand that there is a whole history missing from the story they were given.

Sometimes explanation is necessary. But sometimes it becomes another burden handed to you: proving your own experience to people who weren’t there.

You are allowed to notice when that is happening.

Families are especially vulnerable to triangulation

Family systems make this easy because the relationships are already there. Parents, siblings, in-laws, cousins, adult children and grandparents all come with their own histories, loyalties and pressure points. Information moves quickly, and so does emotion.

Children can become particularly powerful messengers because most parents will tolerate a great deal before risking the relationship with their child. That is true whether the child is eight or forty-eight.

Sometimes the message is direct: Tell your mother this. Ask your father why. Other times nobody says those words at all. A person communicates enough hurt, anger or helplessness that the child decides to intervene.

Now the child may believe they are solving a problem, while the parent on the receiving end knows that answering fully could pull them even deeper into an adult conflict they should never have been carrying in the first place.

That is an unfair position to put anyone in.

Look for the pattern, not one strange interaction

One odd phone call is not proof of triangulation. Neither is one uncomfortable text. Families gossip, people misunderstand each other, friends take sides, and sometimes somebody simply disagrees with you.

The better question is whether the same kind of contact keeps happening around the same pressure point.

Maybe someone reaches out every time you pull away. Maybe people start asking for information after you stop providing it directly. Maybe several relatives begin repeating the same version of events. Maybe a new person appears whenever you refuse to deal with the original one.

What matters is not only who contacted you, but what the contact seems to accomplish. Does it get information you stopped sharing? Does it make you feel guilty enough to reopen communication? Does it force you back into explaining yourself? Does it make your boundary harder to hold?

You may never be able to prove anyone’s intention. You can still pay attention to the effect.

You do not have to communicate through a third person

This can be difficult when the person in the middle is someone you love. You may care about them deeply and still refuse the role they are bringing you.

You do not owe everyone the full history of a relationship simply because they have heard somebody else’s version of it. You are also not required to negotiate a boundary through your sister, your son, your friend or anyone else.

Sometimes it is enough to say, “That’s between me and them,” or “I’m not going to discuss this through another person.”

And sometimes there is no reason to answer at all.

A boundary does not become invalid because somebody else comes along and asks you to explain it.

Pay attention when the route changes but the pressure does not

One thing worth noticing is what happens after you set a boundary.

You stop responding to one person, and someone else checks in. You become more careful about what you share, and another relative starts asking questions. You close one route and another one opens.

Any one of those things could be innocent. But if the route keeps changing while the pressure stays the same, that is worth paying attention to.

The question is not whether every person involved is acting with bad intent. The question is whether the same access, information, guilt or control keeps finding its way back to you through different people.

Keep records when the pattern matters

If triangulation is happening alongside harassment, threats, stalking, custody disputes, financial control or continuing abuse, documentation can help.

Save messages, emails and screenshots. Keep dates when something feels significant. Write down what happened while you still remember the details.

The reason is simple: isolated incidents can look trivial when you remember them one at a time. Put months of them next to each other and a pattern may become much easier to see.

That record may matter legally, but it can also matter for your own clarity. When somebody repeatedly makes you question whether you’re imagining things, seeing the sequence on paper can be grounding.

Protect the information you no longer want circulated

If private information keeps finding its way back to someone you deliberately stopped sharing it with, you may need to become more selective about what you tell people.

That doesn’t require a dramatic confrontation. It may simply mean recognizing that information travels and adjusting accordingly.

Your plans, finances, relationships, whereabouts and legal decisions do not automatically belong to everyone around you. Privacy is not the same thing as secrecy, and it is not a betrayal of people you love.

Sometimes privacy is simply part of holding a boundary.

The person in the middle still has responsibility

This is where things get uncomfortable.

Someone can be manipulated and still hurt you. They can have incomplete information and still make choices about what they do with it.

Understanding why someone behaved a certain way does not require pretending the behavior didn’t matter.

You do not have to decide whether they are a villain, diagnose them or figure out exactly how much they knew. You can recognize that an interaction was harmful and decide not to participate in that kind of interaction again.

That is enough.

You may never get the whole story

You may never know exactly how the story traveled, who contacted whom first or whether the person in the middle understood the role they were playing.

Trying to reconstruct every conversation can consume an enormous amount of energy and still leave you without certainty.

At some point, the more useful question may be whether the pattern itself is clear enough.

Does the same kind of pressure keep showing up through different people? Does contact repeatedly increase when you try to create distance? Do you leave these interactions feeling pulled back into a conflict you were trying to step away from?

If the answer is yes, you do not need a perfect map of every conversation before deciding how much access you want to allow.

Sometimes the most important thing to recognize is not who said what to whom.

It is that you are allowed to stop participating in the triangle.

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Domestic assault is not always obvious from the outside, and some of the hardest parts to explain are the ones that do not leave a visible mark.

Control can travel through money, silence, reputation, technology, family relationships and other people. Sometimes those people know what they are doing. Sometimes they do not.

Either way, the effect on the person in the middle of it can be profound.

That is what I want to keep exploring here: the patterns that are difficult to name while you are living through them, and the things that begin to make more sense once somebody finally gives them a name.

If something here helps you understand your own experience, recognize a pattern or think differently about something you have been carrying, join this community.

Read. Share what feels safe to share. Send a piece to someone who may need it.

And if there is something you have lived through that we have not talked about yet, tell me.

There is still a lot we need to name.

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We tend to think of domestic assault as something that happens in one primary relationship. A husband. A wife. A partner. Somebody who controlled us, frightened us, manipulated us or slowly taught us not to trust what we knew.

So when we begin to heal, that relationship becomes the crime scene we keep returning to. What did that person do? Why did I stay? Why did I keep explaining myself? Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why didn’t I listen to that little voice that kept telling me something wasn’t right?

I’ve spent plenty of time asking those questions. But lately I’m wondering whether we can get so focused on understanding the person who hurt us that we miss the part that actually matters now: what did that experience teach us to do, and where are we still doing it?

Because whatever made it possible for me to override myself in one relationship probably didn’t magically disappear when that relationship ended. Some of it was there long before. Some of it goes all the way back to childhood. And if I only look for it when somebody is obviously controlling or manipulative, I’m going to miss all the quieter places where it still shows up.

That’s what I mean when I say make your healing global.

Look at all of it.

Look at what happens with family, friends, colleagues and people you’ve barely met. Look at those little moments when you know what you want and then immediately begin talking yourself out of it.

I had one of those recently.

I met someone for the first time at an event. We had a perfectly pleasant conversation and she suggested exchanging phone numbers and getting together socially sometime.

There was nothing wrong with that. Nothing inappropriate about her. She was simply more comfortable than I was with moving from nice to meet you to let’s get together.

I’m not.

My life is already full. I don’t get enough time with the people in my own family whom I love and want to see. Starting a new social relationship with somebody I just met isn’t a priority for me. It isn’t even particularly in my comfort zone.

That’s not a judgment about her. It’s information about me.

And I knew it immediately.

The whisper wasn’t whispering much at all.

No. I don’t want to do this. Go away.

Yet almost as quickly, another part of me went to work.

She seems nice. You don’t want to hurt her feelings. What reason do you have to say no? Maybe you’re being antisocial. Maybe you should just give her your number. Maybe you could get together once. What’s the harm?

There I was again, one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas.

And that’s the part I’m interested in now. Why did I need something to be wrong with her before I could honor what I wanted? Why wasn’t I don’t want to sufficient information?

I think I know at least part of the answer.

Somewhere very early in my life, I learned to give other people’s feelings a lot of weight. Sometimes more weight than my own. I learned that saying no could require an explanation, and that the explanation had better be good enough. I learned to anticipate disappointment and try to prevent it before it happened.

That’s a useful skill when you’re a child trying to navigate people more powerful than you. It isn’t always such a useful skill when you’re an adult deciding whether you want to give somebody your phone number.

But those old lessons don’t come with expiration dates. They can sit there quietly for decades and turn up in places that don’t look remotely like abuse.

They can even look like kindness.

That’s what makes this complicated. I don’t want to become someone who doesn’t care about other people’s feelings. I do care. I don’t want to use “boundaries” as an excuse to become harsh or suspicious or closed off from everyone I meet.

But there has to be room in that equation for me.

The woman I met can be lovely. Her invitation can be completely reasonable. She can genuinely enjoy meeting new people and be perfectly comfortable making a new friend on the spot.

And I can genuinely not want that.

Neither of us has to be wrong.

That’s a surprisingly difficult thing to absorb when you’ve spent years believing that a no requires a defendant.

Maybe that is one of the residual scars we don’t talk about enough. We become very good at studying other people’s behavior because we had to. Is this safe? Is this manipulation? Is this person trying to control me? Is that a red flag?

Those are useful questions, but there’s another one I need to ask.

What am I doing with my own voice?

Because I can learn every word associated with abuse. I can recognize coercive control. I can identify gaslighting and manipulation. I can understand exactly what somebody else is doing and why, and still override myself.

That’s why I don’t think healing can stop with learning how to recognize the person who won’t take no for an answer.

I have to notice when I’m the one who won’t take my own no for an answer.

That means catching myself before the explanation begins. Before I manufacture a reason. Before I leave the door open because closing it makes me uncomfortable.

It means asking myself what I think is going to happen if I simply listen.

Will somebody think I’m unfriendly? Maybe. Will somebody be disappointed? Possibly. Will somebody misunderstand me? Probably, eventually. That’s part of being alive around other people.

The question is why I have believed that preventing all of that was somehow my responsibility.

I’m beginning to think that is where some of the deepest healing lives. Not in becoming harder. Not in assuming everybody has bad motives. Not in constructing a fortress around ourselves.

It’s in becoming someone who trusts her own voice.

When something inside me says, I don’t want this, maybe I don’t immediately put it on trial. Maybe I don’t cross-examine it or demand supporting evidence before I’m allowed to act on it.

Maybe I listen.

The whisper has been there all along.

My work now is to stop arguing with it.

If this piece felt familiar, you’re not alone.

Domestic Assault is where I write about the part that comes after survival too: learning what we carried forward, where we still override ourselves, and how we begin trusting our own voice again.

If you want to keep walking through that with me, join the community.

Listen to the whisper. Trust your no. Make your healing global.

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Listen to the Whisper

Verse 1
There’s a ripple on the water
Before the river starts to rise
There’s a shadow in the distance
Before the storm comes into sight
There’s a tremble in the silence
So soft I almost let it go
Something stirring deep within me
Telling me what I already know

Chorus
Listen to the whisper
The one beneath the noise
The one that never left me
When I couldn't hear my voice
I don't have to name the feeling
I don't even have to know why
I just have to listen to the whisper
That speaks to me from deep inside

Verse 2
There are hands that come with roses
There are chains that look like gold
There are doors that open easy
Then quietly start to close
There are favors wrapped in ribbons
There are debts I never made
And a thousand little reasons
To give something of myself away

Chorus
Listen to the whisper
The one beneath the noise
The one that never left me
When I couldn't hear my voice
I don't have to name the feeling
I don't even have to know why
I just have to listen to the whisper
That speaks to me from deep inside

Verse 3
I heard the whisper rise inside me
Saying, trust me, you know what this means
Something here was going wrong
Nothing here is what it seems
I didn't like where this was leading
I knew there'd be a price to pay
And the whisper kept on warning me
It's time to leave, just walk away

Bridge
The whisper keeps on whispering
Find your courage, speak the truth
No one gets to force their will on me
I always have the right to choose
There's a place deep inside me
There's a truth that's mine alone
I can hear it in the stillness
I can feel it in my bones

Final Chorus
Listen to the whisper
Let it rise above the noise
I was never meant to lose it
I was only taught to doubt my voice
I don't have to ask permission
I don't have to tell them why
Listen to the whisper
And never leave myself behind

Outro
Listen to the whisper
It's the voice that always knew
Listen to the whisper
It tells me what is true

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If Listen to the Whisper speaks to something you’ve lived through, you’re welcome here.

Domestic Assault is a place to talk about coercion, control, manipulation, boundaries, recovery, and the hard work of learning to trust your own voice again. You don’t have to have the perfect words for what happened to you. You don’t have to explain yourself before you belong.

Join the community. Read, share, speak when you’re ready, and listen to the whisper.

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I know what coercive control looks like.

I know about gaslighting, guilt, obligation, keeping score, moving the goalposts and making someone feel responsible for another person’s feelings.

I can recognize manipulation.

So why can I still fall for it?

That question has been bothering me, because awareness is supposed to protect us. And it does. But I’m beginning to understand that knowing the playbook and being immune to it are two very different things.

The problem may begin with the question I instinctively ask when something feels wrong:

What is it about me?

Did I misunderstand? Am I being unfair? Should I give this person another chance? Maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Maybe I owe them something because they were kind to me. Maybe I should explain myself better.

Those can sound like thoughtful questions.

They can also keep me in relationships where I spend far too much time explaining away what my instincts noticed immediately.

Awareness Isn’t Enough

Knowing the terminology doesn’t necessarily change the reflexes we developed long before we had words for them.

If you learned to keep the peace, accommodate, forgive quickly, explain yourself, anticipate someone else’s reaction or make things okay again, those responses can feel like kindness.

Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they make you exceptionally easy to manipulate.

And that distinction can be surprisingly difficult to see from inside the relationship.

Maybe the better question isn’t Why do I keep falling for this?

Maybe it’s:

What happens inside me when I sense that something isn’t right—and why do I so quickly talk myself out of it?

What Does Safe Friendship Feel Like?

I’ve been thinking about this, too.

I don’t want friendships built on accounting.

I don’t want I did this for you, therefore you owe me that.

Real friendship has give and take, but it breathes.

Sometimes one person gives more. Sometimes the other does. Nobody is standing there with a ledger.

You can say no without being punished.

You can disagree without fearing what comes next.

You can take some space without being pursued, guilted or made responsible for somebody else’s reaction.

A favor is a favor, not a down payment on a future obligation.

Kindness doesn’t arrive with an invisible invoice.

And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to surrender pieces of yourself to prove that you care.

Maybe This Is What I Need to Practice

Not becoming suspicious of everyone.

Not building walls so high nobody gets through.

Just slowing down.

When something feels off, I don’t have to decide immediately whether the other person is good or bad, manipulative or misunderstood.

I can simply notice.

I can wait.

I can say no to something small and watch what happens.

I can disagree and see whether the relationship survives it.

I can stop explaining every boundary as though I need permission to have one.

And I can pay attention to whether someone’s kindness leaves me feeling cared for—or indebted.

Maybe discernment isn’t learning how to read another person perfectly.

Maybe it’s learning to trust myself enough that I don’t have to.

I don’t need proof that someone intends to control me before I’m allowed to protect my peace.

And I don’t need to stop being generous, trusting or openhearted.

I just need to leave enough room in every relationship for me to remain myself.

Maybe that is what safety feels like.

Room to breathe.

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