My work as a trauma-informed life coach repeatedly exposes me to the stark truth that domestic abuse encompasses far more than just physical violence. While the visible scars of a physical assault are undeniable, the invisible chains of coercive control, emotional torment, financial deprivation, and psychological manipulation can be just as destructive, if not more so.
Recent figures in the UK reveal a truly chilling truth: more individuals are dying by suicide following domestic abuse than are being killed by a current or former partner. This underlines the urgent need to bring to light these hidden forms of abuse and understand their potential for serious harm, and even death.
What makes these forms of abuse so dangerous is how subtly they often begin. Over time, the constant broken boundaries, the subtle criticisms, and the escalating demands can become terrifyingly normalised, making it incredibly difficult for victims to see the full extent of their situation.
Domestic abuse is fundamentally about power and control. The abuser strips away a victim’s autonomy, self-worth, and connection to the outside world, creating an environment of fear and dependency.
Let’s delve into the intricate and devastating reality of non-physical domestic abuse, exposing how it can lead to severe harm, and in the most tragic cases, to murder or suicide.
The Stranglehold of Isolation: Severing Lifelines
An emotionally abusive partner employs deliberate, systematic isolation of you/your children from friends and family. This is a meticulously planned strategy to dismantle your support network. It can begin with small criticisms of those you care about, then grow into created arguments, emotional manipulation, or even banning contact.
The abuser might become verbally abusive if you even message them or if they message you, creating an atmosphere where reaching out for comfort or advice feels like a dangerous act. Imagine the terror of receiving a barrage of angry texts or facing a furious tirade just for replying to a message from your own mother. This constant vigilance and hostile reaction to any outside communication forces victims into a hermetic existence, making them entirely dependent on the abuser and unable to share their suffering.
The Impact: This isolation isn’t just about loneliness; it’s a deliberate tactic to strip away your ability to gain perspective, seek help, or even recognise the abuse for what it is. Without external validation, the abuser’s warped reality becomes your only reality. This can lead to profound mental health deterioration, including severe depression, anxiety, and a complete erosion of your very sense of self.
The Invisible Hierarchy: Prioritising Their Children Over Yours
A deeply painful and manipulative form of abuse, especially for parents, is when an abuser makes their children more important than your own (from a previous relationship). This is a deliberate attempt to control you by undermining your relationship with your children, creating conflict within the family. Your children might face constant criticism, emotional neglect, or be openly treated as inferior, while the abuser’s children receive favouritism and attention.
This dynamic often plays out through subtle but corrosive actions: your child’s needs are ignored, their achievements downplayed, or their presence resented, while the abuser’s children are prioritised for everything from leisure activities to financial support. This can cause immense emotional distress for both you and your children, leading to feelings of profound inadequacy, guilt, and resentment.
The Impact: The emotional damage to children witnessing or experiencing this blatant favouritism is immeasurable, often leading to attachment issues, low self-esteem, and difficulty forming healthy relationships in the future. For the victim, it’s a cruel form of leverage, forcing them to endure the abuse to protect their children, or face the excruciating pain of their children being harmed by the abusive environment.
The Threatening Edge of Coercive Control: “I’ll Leave You” and Taking the Children
Abusers constantly wield threats as weapons, not just of intimidation, but of total control. The threat to end the relationship whenever something doesn’t go their way is a classic manipulation. It keeps victims walking on eggshells, desperately trying to guess their partner’s moods and avoid conflict. This isn’t about solving disagreements; it’s about maintaining absolute power.
Even more terrifying is the threat to leave and take the children. This weaponises a parent’s deepest love and fear. Abusers exploit the legal and logistical complexities of child custody, often fabricating allegations or using financial leverage to terrify victims into staying. This form of abuse can be particularly devastating, trapping individuals in dangerous situations out of an overwhelming desire to protect their children. The fear of losing your children, especially for those who have already experienced trauma, can feel overwhelming, making escape seem impossible.
The Impact: The relentless stress of these threats can lead to chronic anxiety, panic attacks, and a profound sense of helplessness. The fear of losing children can paralyse a victim, forcing them to tolerate escalating abuse, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Constant Surveillance: Tracking Your Every Move
“Where are you? Who are you with? Why didn’t you answer my call immediately?” These questions are characteristic of an abuser who is tracking what you are doing and where you are going. This can manifest in obsessive phone calls and messages, demanding real-time updates on your location, checking your phone and computer for messages, or even installing tracking apps on your devices or vehicle. In extreme cases, they may follow you physically.
This constant surveillance is designed to erase your privacy and freedom, creating a panopticon of control. Every moment outside their direct sight becomes a source of suspicion and potential punishment.
The Impact: This behaviour leads to a profound sense of being watched, controlled, and suffocated. Victims often develop hyper-vigilance, always anticipating the abuser’s next demand or accusation, leading to severe anxiety, paranoia, and a complete loss of personal space and autonomy. It is a form of psychological imprisonment.
The Financial Chains: Controlling Your Money
Financial abuse is a powerful and often invisible chain. It involves controlling what you do with your finances, stripping away your economic independence. This might mean denying you access to money, demanding access to your bank accounts, preventing you from working, taking your wages, or even accumulating debt in your name without your knowledge.
The abuser might also jeopardise your employment through constant calls, undermining your work performance, or fabricating reasons for you to quit. This deliberate impoverishment leaves you utterly dependent, making the prospect of leaving feel impossible.
The Impact: Economic abuse traps victims within the abusive relationship, as they lack the financial means to secure housing, food, or legal assistance if they were to leave. It creates profound feelings of helplessness, shame, and a sense of being completely trapped.
The Unpaid Servant: Expecting You to Do It All
Abusers often harbour an extreme sense of entitlement, expecting you to run around after them whilst not offering you help and support when you need it. You might find yourself burdened with all household chores, childcare, and tending to their every whim, while they contribute nothing. When you are ill, struggling, or simply need a moment of respite, they are conspicuously absent, dismissive, or even critical of your needs. This dynamic often goes hand-in-hand with an explosive temper, where expectations are enforced through fear and intimidation.
This creates an exhausting, demoralising, and deeply unfair dynamic where your own well-being is entirely disregarded. Your role is reduced to serving their needs, with no reciprocal care or consideration.
The Impact: This constant exhaustion and emotional neglect leads to burnout, chronic stress, and a crushing sense of being undervalued and invisible. It can profoundly impact physical health due to lack of rest and persistent stress, and significantly contribute to mental health issues like depression and feelings of worthlessness.
The Explosive Temper: Smashing Things in the House
While not physical violence directed at you, smashing things in the house is a terrifying act of intimidation and emotional abuse. It’s a blatant demonstration of their unpredictable rage and power, designed to instil fear and keep you on edge. The shattered objects are not just broken items; they are visible symbols of their violent capacity and a constant threat that their anger could, at any moment, escalate to harm against you or your children. This can often be a “testing of the waters” before direct physical violence begins.
The Impact: Living with this unpredictable rage creates a constant state of fear, anxiety, and hyper-vigilance. Victims learn to anticipate and dread these outbursts, often leading to symptoms akin to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even without direct physical assault.
Gaslighting: Undermining Your Reality
Another tactic often employed in coercive control is gaslighting, where the abuser makes you doubt your memory, perception, and sanity. They might deny events that happened, twist your words, or tell you that you’re ‘crazy’ or ‘too sensitive.’ This constant undermining erodes your confidence and makes you question your own reality, leaving you more vulnerable to their control.
The Impact: Gaslighting is profoundly disorienting. It can lead to severe confusion, a loss of self-trust, and even symptoms resembling psychosis, trapping the victim in the abuser’s fabricated version of reality.
I have a more detailed blog about gaslighting https://littlerocktrauma.co.uk/2023/12/13/breaking-the-cycle-of-gaslighting/
The Cycle of Abuse: A Predictable Trap, with Lethal Potential.
Non-physical abuse, like all forms of domestic abuse, often follows a predictable yet cunning pattern known as the cycle of abuse. This cycle typically involves:
- Tension Building: The abuser becomes increasingly irritable, moody, and critical. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells, desperately trying to avoid upsetting them.
- Incident (Abuse Phase): The actual abuse occurs. This can be a severe verbal attack, an act of financial control, an extreme isolation tactic, or the smashing of objects. The abuser asserts their dominance.
- Reconciliation/Honeymoon Phase: The abuser might express remorse, apologise profusely, promise to change, or shower you with affection, gifts, or attention. They may blame stress, alcohol, or even you for their behaviour. This phase offers a deceptive glimmer of hope, making it incredibly hard to leave, as you cling to the memory of the “good” partner.
- Calm: A period of relative peace and normalcy before the tension begins to build again, often imperceptibly.
This cyclical nature creates a powerful trap. The “honeymoon” phase, even if brief, re-engages the victim’s hopes and emotional investment, making them believe the abuse was an anomaly, or that they can help their partner change. It’s a powerful tool of manipulation, preventing the victim from recognising the pattern and breaking free.
The Invisible Chains: Trauma Bonds
Crucially, we must address the concept of trauma bonds. These are powerful, unhealthy emotional attachments that form in abusive relationships. They occur when there’s an intermittent cycle of abuse (the tension and incident phases) followed by periods of kindness and positive reinforcement (the reconciliation/honeymoon phase). This unpredictable “push-pull” dynamic creates a powerful emotional and psychological dependency.
The abuser’s sporadic kindness, coupled with the victim’s desperate longing for the “good” person they once knew (or imagined), leads to a profound connection. The victim begins to confuse intense emotional experiences – both the highs and the lows – with love and connection. This bond can be incredibly difficult to break, as it taps into deep psychological needs and survival instincts, often making survivors feel “addicted” to the abuser despite the overwhelming harm. Recognising a trauma bond is a critical, albeit painful, first step towards healing and reclaiming your independence.
Read more about Trauma Bonds https://littlerocktrauma.co.uk/2023/12/22/unravelling-the-complexity-of-trauma-bonds-an-in-depth-exploration-of-emotional-attachments/
The Slippery Slope: From Coercive Control to Violence – With Tragic Outcomes
It is vital to understand how non-physical abuse can and often does progress into physical violence, and even death. Coercive control isn’t a ‘lesser’ form of abuse; it is the foundation upon which more overt forms of violence are built. The patterns of control, intimidation, and isolation erode a victim’s resilience, self-esteem, and ability to resist.
When emotional and psychological tactics are no longer sufficient to maintain absolute power, or when the abuser perceives a loss of control (often when a victim tries to leave), they may escalate to physical violence.
Tragic UK Cases:
These statistics paint a terrifying picture:
- Suicide as a Domestic Abuse Outcome: In the year to March 2024, there were 98 suspected suicides linked to abusive relationships in England and Wales. This number exceeded intimate partner homicides in the same period. This shocking statistic confirms what survivors and charities like SafeLives have long warned: the psychological terror of coercive control can lead victims to feel that suicide is their only escape.Â
These aren’t simply “unexplained” deaths; they are often the direct, devastating consequence of sustained non-physical abuse. Cases like that of Kiena Dawes, who died by suicide at 23 after prolonged psychological abuse, highlight the effects of coercive control. Police forces are now increasingly exploring manslaughter charges in cases where a perpetrator’s abuse leads to their partner’s suicide, finally acknowledging the direct link between coercive control and death.
- Escalation to Homicide: Coercive control is a significant risk factor in domestic homicides. The Femicide Census in the UK consistently demonstrates that a high percentage of women killed by a current or ex-partner were subjected to coercive control before their death. Abusers who exert this level of control often view their partners as possessions. If the victim attempts to leave or reclaim their autonomy, the abuser’s need for control can escalate to extreme violence, including murder.Â
Many domestic homicide reviews reveal a history of non-physical abuse, escalating to physical violence when the victim attempted to assert independence or end the relationship. The initial lack of physical violence often masks the deep-seated danger.
These tragic outcomes demonstrate that coercive control isn’t a “soft” form of abuse; it is a deadly one. It systematically dehumanises, isolates, and controls, until a person feels there is no way out, or until the abuser decides their ultimate control will be achieved through lethal force. It’s also crucial to understand that for many, the risk of coercive control doesn’t end when a relationship does; in fact, it can often escalate, particularly in areas like child contact or financial manipulation.
This is why having a robust safety plan and support network is paramount, both during and after leaving.
Seeking Support: Breaking the Silence
If you recognise any of these terrifying patterns in your own relationship, please know that you are not alone. The statistics are stark, but they also show the immense prevalence of this hidden crime. It’s estimated that nearly half (47%) of survivors of non-physical abuse experience suicidal thoughts. This is why early, joined-up support is so vital.
Breaking free from any form of domestic abuse, particularly when it’s non-physical, requires immense courage, support, and a recognition that what you are experiencing is abuse, regardless of visible injuries. As a trauma-informed life coach, my focus is on helping survivors understand these dynamics, heal from the profound trauma, and rebuild their lives.
Where to Find Support For Coercive Control and Domestic Abuse
In Devon, there are numerous local organisations and national helplines dedicated to supporting survivors of domestic abuse, offering confidential advice, refuge, and practical assistance. These patterns and resources are relevant across the UK.
Please don’t suffer in silence. Reaching out isn’t a sign of weakness; it is the most courageous and vital step towards a safer, more empowered future. Your life, your freedom, and your well-being are worth fighting for.
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