There is a way of pushing someone out of a family, friendship or community that doesn’t require anyone to tell them to go.

Nobody has to ban you from the house. Nobody has to announce that you’ve been excluded. Nobody even has to admit that anything has changed. Other people simply begin knowing things you don’t know.

Relationships form around conversations you weren’t part of. Someone you thought was neutral suddenly seems angry with you. Another person becomes strangely distant. Someone makes a comment that doesn’t quite make sense unless there was a conversation before it. You walk into a room and sense something has already happened, except apparently you are the only person who doesn’t know what it was.

Eventually you start staying away.

And that’s the part I don’t think we talk about enough.

Isolation doesn’t always look like someone preventing you from leaving. Sometimes it looks like making the places where you once belonged increasingly uncomfortable to enter.

Nobody Had to Tell You to Go

We tend to imagine isolation in domestic abuse as something obvious. You can’t see your friends. You can’t talk to your family. You can’t go there. You can’t call her.

Sometimes it is that blatant. Sometimes it is much more sophisticated.

The relationships around you begin changing. One person becomes especially close to another. Complaints are shared. Grievances are repeated. Events are interpreted for people who weren’t there. Details that support one version of the story travel easily; everything that might complicate that version somehow doesn’t.

Nobody needs to tell the target, You’re not welcome here.

The atmosphere can do it.

After enough uncomfortable encounters, subtle digs, unexplained hostility or the unmistakable feeling that other people know something about you that you don’t, you begin making your own adjustments. You visit less. You wait to be invited. You avoid certain people. You watch what you say. You decide you’d rather stay home than walk into another situation you don’t understand.

From the outside, that can look entirely voluntary.

She doesn’t come around anymore.

Maybe the more important question is: What happened that made her stop coming?

Recruiting Other People Changes the Balance

There is a name for part of this: triangulation. Instead of dealing directly with another person, someone brings a third person into the relationship or conflict.

But that word alone doesn’t capture everything that can happen.

Other people can become validators, messengers, critics, witnesses and eventually enforcers. They may not know that’s the role they’re playing. They may sincerely believe they’re helping someone they care about.

A complaint can sound perfectly reasonable. In fact, it may be true.

Someone doesn’t pick up after himself. Someone is difficult. Someone forgot something important. Someone said something insensitive. Someone has habits that drive everybody crazy.

None of us is particularly difficult to criticize if somebody is building a case.

The question is what happens with those criticisms.

Are they part of an ordinary conversation between friends? Or are they being accumulated, repeated and delivered to other people until those people begin viewing someone through a carefully constructed lens?

That’s when something seemingly ordinary can become much more consequential.

You Can Be Recruited Without Knowing It

This is the part that deserves much more attention.

Sometimes you’re not the person being isolated. You’re the person being recruited.

Someone complains about a partner, sibling, parent, child or friend. You know the complaint has some truth in it, so you agree. Then another complaint comes. You agree with that one too.

Before long, you may find yourself criticizing someone you love based on a stream of information being supplied by somebody else.

You may think you’re being fair. You may think you’re helping. You may even think you’re protecting the person doing the complaining.

You may have no idea that you’ve been given a role in a much larger pattern.

That’s why I have become much more interested in what happens around coercive control. The person exerting control doesn’t necessarily have to personally deliver every criticism, consequence or punishment. Other people can begin doing some of that work.

And they may never realize they’ve been enlisted.

The Target Has an Impossible Problem

Imagine trying to defend yourself against a conversation you never heard.

You don’t know exactly what was said. You don’t know who heard it. You don’t know how long it has been going on. You don’t know which version of events people have been given.

You only see the result.

Someone’s behavior toward you changes. A remark comes out of nowhere. Someone confronts you about something you didn’t know was an issue. A person who once seemed warm becomes guarded.

If you ask what’s wrong, you may get nothing.

Nothing’s wrong.

Now you’re left trying to respond to something nobody will acknowledge is happening.

That’s an incredibly effective position from which to destabilize someone because there is almost nothing concrete to grab onto. If you react strongly, your reaction itself can become evidence that the negative story about you was right.

So you learn to be careful.

And eventually, you may learn to stay away.

Pay Attention to Information That Only Travels One Way

None of this means every friendship outside a relationship is suspicious. People are allowed private conversations. They’re allowed to vent. They’re allowed to dislike each other. Families form alliances. Friends sometimes take sides. Human relationships are messy.

What matters is the pattern.

Who consistently controls the information? Who gets to tell the story first? Does one person’s interpretation repeatedly arrive before the other person does? Are people being encouraged to confront someone rather than talk with them? Does hostility seem to appear in people who weren’t originally part of the conflict? Is one person becoming increasingly uncomfortable in places where they once belonged?

And perhaps the most important question for those of us on the outside: Am I being asked to form a judgment about someone who isn’t in the room?

Sometimes the best thing you can do is refuse the assignment.

When They Push You Out, Then Blame You for Leaving

Eventually the person on the outside really does make a choice. They stop visiting. They wait to be invited. They avoid certain gatherings. They become cautious around particular people. They decide the emotional cost of showing up is too high.

Then the story gets flipped.

She doesn’t come around anymore.

Or worse:

See? She doesn’t care about us.

Now the withdrawal that was created by exclusion, hostility or repeated discomfort becomes proof against the person who withdrew. The environment pushes someone out, then uses that person’s absence to justify the way they are being treated.

That is how responsibility gets reversed.

If someone has clearly said they do not feel comfortable coming unless they are invited, or has explained why certain situations or people feel hostile or unsafe, continuing to exclude them while later blaming them for not showing up is not neutral.

You cannot make someone feel unwelcome and then use their absence as evidence that they do not care.

That is a way of rewriting cause and effect so the person on the receiving end becomes responsible for the very isolation they were reacting to.

That is a form of isolation we need to get much better at seeing.

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Domestic Assault is about recognizing patterns that are easy to miss when we look at one incident at a time. This is one of them.

I want us to get better at recognizing when someone is being pushed to the edges of their own relationships. I also want us to recognize something harder: when we may be getting pulled into somebody else’s pattern and helping to isolate another person without understanding what we’re doing.

You don’t have to tell your story to belong here. You can read, learn, recognize something you have lived through, or realize for the first time that you may have been standing somewhere inside somebody else’s pattern.

Everything I publish here will remain free to everyone. Paid memberships support the research, writing and time it takes to build this community while keeping the work open to all.

If this work helps you see something you couldn’t see before, subscribe and stay with me.

One of the most frustrating things about trying to explain domestic abuse is that people want an incident. What did he do? Did he hit you? Did he threaten you? Did you call the police? Those questions can matter, but they can also miss what is actually happening.

Sometimes the abuse is the accumulation of a hundred things designed to accomplish one thing: control. Massachusetts law now recognizes that.

In 2024, Massachusetts changed its domestic abuse law to explicitly include coercive control in the definition of abuse used for Chapter 209A abuse-prevention orders. The change took effect September 18, 2024. That means the law can look beyond a bruise or a single threat and consider a pattern of behavior intended to threaten, intimidate, harass, isolate, control, coerce or compel someone to comply.

What Coercive Control Can Look Like

The behaviors Massachusetts chose to identify are not exotic. They are the kinds of things people living with abuse often know very well.

The statute includes isolating someone from friends or family, depriving them of basic needs, monitoring communications or movements, controlling money or access to services, and using technology to keep track of them. It can also include forcing someone to do or stop doing something, threatening children or relatives, threatening an animal, damaging property, threatening to expose private information or sexually explicit images, and repeatedly using court proceedings that a judge finds legally unwarranted.

Look at those behaviors together and the picture changes. The pattern is the story.

Any one of those acts can be explained away. I’m worried about you. I’m protecting our money. I just want to know where you are. Your friends are bad for you. Why do you need privacy from me? But when one person steadily takes away another person’s independence, privacy, relationships, financial freedom, movement or ability to make decisions, we are no longer talking about a collection of unrelated disagreements. We are talking about control.

The Word “Autonomy” Matters

There is one word in the Massachusetts law that matters enormously: autonomy.

The pattern can qualify as coercive control when it causes a family or household member to reasonably fear physical harm or have a reduced sense of physical safety or autonomy. That gets much closer to what coercive control actually does.

An abusive person does not need to lock a door to make someone feel unable to leave. Control can become so embedded in everyday life that the victim starts organizing decisions around avoiding the other person’s reaction. Can I say this? Can I spend this? Can I see that person? Can I go there? What will happen if I say no?

After a while, the person doing the controlling does not have to issue an explicit command every time. The system is already in place.

Coercive control is not something that happens only to women. Men can be subjected to it too, and sometimes the pattern is harder to recognize because other people can be drawn into it without realizing the role they are playing. A complaint about a partner may sound perfectly reasonable. You may even agree with it. But repeated criticism can gradually recruit family and friends into reinforcing the criticism and turning against the person being targeted. You can think you are responding to an ordinary complaint and discover much later that you were being enlisted to criticize, shame or isolate someone you love. Sometimes recognizing coercive control means looking not only at what one person is doing to another, but at who else is being pulled into doing it for them.

What This Means for Restraining Orders

Massachusetts abuse-prevention orders are commonly called 209A orders or restraining orders. Coercive control is now one of the forms of abuse a Massachusetts court can consider when deciding whether to issue one.

Massachusetts court guidance says a pattern generally requires three or more acts, and each act must be intended to threaten, intimidate, harass, isolate, control, coerce or compel compliance. Certain particularly serious single acts can also qualify on their own.

That does not mean every controlling relationship automatically results in a restraining order. Judges still have to look at evidence and decide whether the conduct actually meets the law.

What has changed is important: the court is allowed to look at the pattern.

But How Broad Is Too Broad?

That question is now before Massachusetts’s highest court.

In G.P. v. S.P., SJC-13947, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has specifically asked whether public social-media videos criticizing a former partner can amount to coercive control under Chapter 209A, and whether the state’s coercive-control provision is unconstitutionally vague or overbroad.

That is a real issue worth taking seriously.

A law meant to protect people from coercive abuse still has to respect due process and constitutional protections, including free speech. A bitter breakup, cruel criticism or an ugly social-media post cannot automatically become domestic abuse just because the conduct is offensive.

At the same time, speech and technology can absolutely be used as tools of coercion. Public humiliation, threats, surveillance, disclosure of private information and campaigns designed to intimidate or control someone can be part of a much larger pattern.

That is where the line becomes difficult. Courts now have to sort out where ordinary conflict, even ugly conflict, ends and legally actionable coercive control begins.

I do not think that challenge makes the law less important. It makes careful application of the law more important. Recognizing the pattern does not mean abandoning the evidence. It means knowing what evidence to look for.

I Wish We Had Understood This Decades Ago

I lived through domestic abuse beginning in the 1970s. We did not talk about coercive control. We barely had adequate language for domestic violence.

There were things happening inside marriages that the rest of the world treated as private relationship problems until somebody was physically injured badly enough that the problem became impossible to ignore.

We know more now. At least we should.

Putting coercive control into Massachusetts law does not solve domestic abuse. A law is only as useful as the people applying it, the evidence available, the victim’s ability to get into the system, and the system’s willingness to understand what it is seeing.

But language matters. Recognition matters. Being able to walk into a courtroom and explain a pattern of control, instead of waiting for the next physical act to prove something is wrong, matters.

Maybe the law can teach the rest of us something too. Instead of asking only, What happened? we need to ask, What has been happening?

That question can reveal an entirely different story.

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Domestic Assault exists to help us recognize these patterns sooner, understand what they mean, and make it harder for coercion and control to hide behind isolated incidents.

You do not have to be in an abusive relationship now to belong here. You may be trying to understand something that happened years ago, worried about someone you love, or simply trying to get better at recognizing abuse of power when you see it.

Everything I publish here will remain free to everyone. Paid memberships support the research, writing and time it takes to build this community while keeping the work open to all.

If this work matters to you, subscribe and stay with me.

There is something deeply unsettling about the way death can rearrange a family story.

An abusive person dies, and over time the edges begin to soften. The cruelty becomes “complicated.” The fear becomes “a difficult time.” The damage gets folded into a larger story about who that person was supposed to have been.

And sometimes, little by little, the person who actually existed disappears.

In their place comes the parent, partner, or family member someone wished they had. The person they wanted to believe in. The person who was loving underneath it all. The person who “did the best they could.”

Maybe sometimes that is true. Sometimes it is not.

What can be painful to watch is not simply that someone remembers the good. People are allowed to remember good moments. They are allowed to love someone who hurt them. They are allowed to grieve someone complicated.

What hurts is when remembering becomes rewriting.

Because someone else usually remembers the whole story. Someone remembers the fear in the room, what had to be managed, covered for, explained and survived. Someone remembers who carried the bills, the children, the fallout, the embarrassment, the repair work and the responsibility.

That history does not disappear because the person who caused much of it is dead.

But families sometimes act as if it should.

There is something strange about how easy it can become to honor the dead while withholding tenderness from the living. The dead ask nothing of us. They do not call at the wrong time. They do not have needs. They do not contradict the version of events we have decided to live with.

The living are harder.

The living still need patience. They still want to be known. They still remember things differently. They may still want to talk about what happened, or simply be treated with some kindness while there is still time.

That is where this gets especially painful.

Because sometimes the person who caused the damage becomes easier to cherish once they are gone, while the person who stayed, survived and carried what was left behind becomes the easier person to blame.

Maybe that is because the living are still available.

Anger can still be directed at them. Distance can still be created from them. They can still be misunderstood, resented, dismissed or reduced to whatever role the family needs them to play.

The dead cannot push back.

So the dead get a cleaner story. The living get the consequences.

There is nothing wrong with loving someone who hurt you. There is nothing wrong with missing them. There is nothing wrong with holding onto the parts of them that were good.

But love does not require lying to yourself, and grief does not require rewriting history.

You can say: I loved this person, and this person hurt me. You can miss what you had while also mourning what you never had. You can wish the story had been different without pretending that it was.

What you cannot do, at least not without hurting someone else, is turn the dead into the person you needed them to be and then expect the living to silently carry the truth.

That is its own kind of cruelty.

And there is another piece of this that matters.

Honor people while they are alive.

If someone is still here, still reachable, still capable of hearing “I love you,” then that matters more than any tribute you may someday write.

If you dismiss someone while they are alive, distance yourself from them, blame them, make no room for them, and then honor them after they die, that is not honor.

That is guilt.

And if you rewrite the dead into who you needed them to be, that does not change who they were.

It only leaves someone else carrying what actually happened.

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Domestic abuse does not necessarily end when the relationship ends, or even when the abuser dies. It can live on in families, memories, silence, blame and stories that get rewritten because the truth is harder to live with.

That is part of what I want this community to talk about: not only surviving abuse, but understanding what comes afterward—the things that are rarely said out loud and the experiences that can leave people wondering if anyone else understands.

If something here feels familiar, you are not the only one carrying it.

Join my community. Read, share your experience when you want to, listen when you don’t, and help make room for the truths families too often leave unspoken.

I watched all three episodes of Netflix’s Death of the Pastor’s Wife. I knew something about Mica Miller’s story before I started. I knew how she died. I knew there had been allegations of abuse and coercive control involving her husband, pastor John-Paul Miller.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how familiar parts of it would feel.

I am a survivor of domestic abuse. My relationship began in the 1970s. I married in 1981. Mica Miller belonged to another generation entirely—different time, different circumstances, different technology. Religion and church authority were central to Mica’s story; they played no role in mine.

And still, I recognized the pattern.

I Kept Watching the People Around Her

That is what got me.

I wasn’t watching this mainly as a true-crime mystery. I kept watching what was happening around Mica before she died. Who saw pieces of it? Who understood what they were seeing? Who didn’t? Who believed her? Who looked away? Who had the authority to intervene?

What happens when someone keeps trying to tell the world something is wrong, but what she is describing doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes people know how to respond to?

Mica told police she was afraid for her life. Her family and friends have described a long pattern of control and manipulation. The documentary examines allegations involving tracking, harassment and other forms of coercive behavior. Her husband has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged in connection with her death.

That distinction matters. So does everything that happened before her death.

We Are Still Too Interested in the Incident

When I was living through abuse, the world was different. Police responses in the 1970s and 1980s were different. Too much of what happened inside a marriage was treated as private. If an officer didn’t witness something, meaningful intervention could be hard to get.

We’ve changed laws since then. We’ve changed terminology. We know far more about domestic violence and coercive control.

What I kept wondering while I watched Mica’s story was whether we have actually gotten much better at recognizing the pattern before the catastrophe.

Coercive control is rarely one clean event. It is who you talk to, where you go, what money you can access, whether you’re being watched, whether someone else is defining reality for you, whether resistance brings punishment, whether the people around you see a charming and respected person while you experience someone entirely different behind closed doors.

And after enough time, whether you begin to question your own judgment.

Take each thing separately and someone can explain almost all of it away. Put the pieces together and the picture changes.

The pattern is the story.

The People Around the Abuse Matter Too

This may be one of the hardest parts of domestic abuse to explain. The relationship does not exist in isolation.

There are family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, churches, doctors, police officers, lawyers, judges and entire communities around it. Some know very little. Some know pieces. Some suspect. Some don’t want to get involved. Some believe the person with more power. Some simply cannot imagine that the person they know could possibly be the person you know.

And sometimes the victim is trying desperately to explain something that is almost impossible to communicate one incident at a time.

That is why learning to recognize patterns matters.

Mica’s Story Should Make Us Better at Seeing

Mica Miller died on April 27, 2024. Her death was ruled a suicide. Her family continues to seek answers and advocate for changes in the law. John-Paul Miller has denied allegations of abuse. He was federally indicted in December 2025 on charges of cyberstalking and making false statements to investigators, has pleaded not guilty, and is scheduled for trial in October.

Those legal proceedings will establish what can be established in court. But we do not have to wait for a courtroom to learn something from Mica’s life.

We can learn to listen differently. We can stop waiting for one spectacular incident to give us permission to take someone seriously. We can pay attention when the pieces keep accumulating. We can understand that leaving an abusive relationship is not one simple act and can be dangerous, complicated and hard to explain to people standing outside of it.

The question that stayed with me through Death of the Pastor’s Wife was this:

What are we seeing before it becomes impossible not to see it?

I couldn’t watch Mica Miller’s story without thinking about the decades separating her experience from mine. We know more now. We have words we didn’t have then. We understand coercive control better.

That knowledge should matter.

Mica Miller should still be here. The next person trying to tell us what is happening to her is.

We need to learn how to hear her.

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Domestic Assault exists so we can get better at recognizing what we are seeing—while it is happening, after someone has left, and sometimes years later when the pieces finally make sense.

You don’t have to tell your story to belong here. You can read, learn, recognize something, share when you want to, and help someone else see what they may not yet have words for.

Everything I publish here will remain free to everyone. Paid memberships support the research, writing and time it takes to build this community while keeping the work open to everyone.

If this work matters to you, subscribe and stay with me.

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Most of us know someone who has experienced domestic abuse. Many of us have experienced it ourselves.

And yet we still have trouble recognizing it while it is happening.

We look for the incident. The bruise. The threat. The moment when something becomes bad enough that everyone agrees it is abuse.

But abuse often doesn’t work that way.

It develops as a pattern: control, manipulation, intimidation, isolation, gaslighting, financial dependence, surveillance, punishment for resistance, escalating violations of boundaries. One thing happens, then another, then another. Each can be explained away when viewed alone.

The pattern is the story.

I created Domestic Assault because I want a place where we can learn to recognize those patterns and talk about what they do to people—not only while they are living through abuse, but afterward.

Sometimes long afterward.

I survived an abusive marriage. My experience began in the 1970s, when domestic violence was understood very differently than it is today. I left decades ago.

Leaving didn’t make everything that happened disappear.

There are things I understand now that I couldn’t understand then. There are things I still recognize in myself. There are things I see differently because I lived through them.

That’s part of what we’ll talk about here.

We’ll look at coercive control, gaslighting, manipulation and escalation. We’ll talk about laws and institutions, families and bystanders, films and documentaries, books and news. We’ll talk about what happens when someone tries to leave, what happens after they do, and what it means to reclaim a life that has been organized around someone else’s power.

And we’re going to look beyond intimate relationships.

Those patterns do not stop at the front door.

The same mechanisms of coercion and control can operate in families, churches, workplaces, institutions and governments. Understanding how power works in one setting can help us recognize it in another.

Domestic means what happens inside our homes.

It also means what happens inside our country.

This is a community, not simply a collection of resources. You don’t have to be experiencing abuse now to belong here. You may have left yesterday or forty years ago. You may be worried about someone you love. You may be trying to understand something that happened to you years ago. You may simply want to become better at recognizing abuses of power when you see them.

And you never have to tell your story to belong here.

You can simply read.

Everything I publish here will remain free to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. Paid memberships are a way for people who are able and want to support the research, writing and work of building this community.

There will be difficult things here.

But I don’t want Domestic Assault to become a place devoted only to what was done to us.

I want us to talk about what comes after recognition, too: rebuilding trust in ourselves, finding our voices, understanding what happened, keeping ourselves and one another safer, and making room again for something abuse works very hard to take from us.

Our ability to fully engage in the joy of life.