The Invisible Harm of Coercive Control: When You Know He's Hurting You but Can't Explain How

One of the most confusing things about living with coercive control is that you can feel anxious, fearful, or constantly on edge without being able to clearly explain what your intimate partner is doing to make you feel that way.

There may not have been an obvious threat. Your partner may not have yelled, or hit you, or even said anything that another person would immediately recognize as abusive. Instead, it might have been a look on his face, a change in his posture, an irritated huff when you expressed an opinion, a mocking sound, a dismissive grunt, or the sudden withdrawal of affection and communication.

You may become so sensitive to these subtle changes that you can walk into a room and know almost immediately that something is wrong. You can tell by the way he is sitting, the expression on his face, the way he exhales, or the fact that he isn't speaking to you. Before he ever tells you he is angry, your body is already reacting.

This can be extremely difficult to explain to someone who hasn't lived inside the relationship. How do you tell another person that a sigh frightened you? How do you explain that the way your partner looked at you caused you to immediately change what you were saying? How do you describe knowing from someone's posture that you needed to be careful?

Taken out of context, these things can sound insignificant. Within a coercively controlling relationship, however, they can have an entirely different meaning.

Research on coercive control helps explain why. Women experiencing coercive control do not necessarily assess danger solely by asking whether their partner is physically violent. They can learn to recognize patterns, including behaviors that predict punishment, humiliation, intimidation, interrogation, surveillance, withdrawal, or escalation. Research has specifically described looks, signals, body language, and threatening facial expressions as ways intimidation can be communicated without physical contact.

In other words, the threat isn't necessarily contained in the look itself. Its meaning comes from what you have learned that the look predicts.

Your Nervous System Learns the Pattern 🧠

Human beings are extraordinarily good at recognizing patterns. When one event repeatedly predicts another, our brains and bodies begin preparing for what is likely to happen next. In a healthy relationship, this ability can be benign and even comforting. You recognize your partner's expressions and know when he is tired, amused, worried, or excited.

In a coercively controlling relationship, that same capacity for pattern recognition can become part of surviving an unpredictable environment.

A particular expression is frequently followed by criticism. An irritated huff might mean that you have said something he disapproves of and will soon be questioned about it. A certain posture may have preceded intimidation in the past. Silence may mean that affection and communication are about to be withheld until you apologize or give in. A sarcastic laugh might tell you that expressing your opinion will result in ridicule.

After enough repetition, your nervous system doesn't have to wait for the entire sequence to unfold. It recognizes what is happening from that very sublte first sign.

This is the reason a very small behavior can produce such a significant reaction in someone experiencing coercive control. Researchers describe coercive control as a pattern involving demands, surveillance, restriction, intimidation, and believable consequences for noncompliance. Within that larger system, a seemingly minor cue can communicate something much bigger because of what has happened before.

Someone outside the relationship sees a facial expression, but you experience the history attached to that facial expression. Someone else hears a sigh, but your nervous system recognizes what has repeatedly come after that sigh.

This distinction matters because survivors often judge themselves for reacting so strongly to things that appear small. The reaction may not be about the small thing at all. It may be about what the small thing has come to mean.

This Is How You Begin Walking on Eggshells 🥚

The phrase "walking on eggshells" describes something very real about living with coercive control. You begin carefully monitoring the other person's emotional state because identifying changes early may help you prevent what will happen next.

You notice the expression on his face when you mention seeing a friend. You notice whether his voice changes when you disagree with him. You listen to the way he closes a cabinet or puts something on the counter. You notice when his responses become shorter. You notice the silence. You notice whether he is looking at you differently.

At the same time, you begin monitoring yourself just as carefully. You think about how to phrase things. You rehearse explanations before you give them. You decide whether something is worth bringing up. You wonder whether now is a safe time to ask a question. You may change clothes, plans, opinions, purchases, friendships, or ordinary decisions because you are anticipating how he might respond.

Eventually, an enormous amount of your mental and emotional energy becomes devoted to preventing another person's negative reaction.

Research examining women's experiences of coercive control describe fear, unpredictability, constraint, and entrapment as important aspects of these relationships. Coercive control can create a huge amount of fear even when physical violence is absent.

This helps explain why "But he never hit me" is not an adequate measure of whether your nervous system experienced the relationship as threatening.

When Fawning Becomes a Way to Stay Safe 🛡️

Most of us are familiar with the fight-or-flight response to danger. But fighting back or leaving are not always perceived as safe or available options, particularly when the person you are afraid of is your intimate partner.

If disagreeing has repeatedly made the situation worse, fighting back may not feel safe. If walking away leads to accusations, intimidation, or escalation, leaving the room may not feel safe either. If saying no leads to punishment, ridicule, threats, or hours of interrogation, asserting yourself may begin to feel dangerous.

When fighting or fleeing feels dangerous, another survival strategy may emerge: appeasement, often called the fawn response.

Fawning can involve compliant, soothing, approval-seeking, or overly helpful behavior when resisting the threatening person feels more dangerous. It can include suppressing your own needs, agreeing, caretaking, acquiescing, trying to appear calm, or attempting to soothe the other person so the situation does not escalate.

This can look very different from what is happening inside your body.

You may smile while you are afraid. You may speak gently while your heart is racing. You may apologize even though you don't believe you did anything wrong. You may agree with something you don't actually agree with because you sense that disagreement will make the situation worse. You may become intensely focused on making your partner feel better because experience has taught you that his emotional state affects what happens to you.

From the outside, someone might interpret this as passivity, people-pleasing, or excessive accommodation. From inside the relationship, however, the behavior can serve a very practical purpose: reducing the immediate threat.

Research on appeasement supports understanding it as a potential short-term de-escalation strategy. Appeasement may lower the chance of immediate aggression, buy time, avoid punishment, or reduce the severity of what happens next when safer options feel limited.

This does not mean fawning makes an abusive relationship safe, nor does it mean appeasing someone will reliably prevent violence. It means the behavior can make sense as an adaptation to perceived danger.

That distinction is important. Fawning is not evidence that you were comfortable with what was happening. Sometimes it reflects how hard you were working to prevent what you feared might happen next.

Sometimes Staying Safe Means Hiding the Truth 🤐

This part of the conversation deserves more attention because it can become a source of enormous shame.

You may look back and wonder why you lied, withheld information, changed your answer, minimized something, or simply told your partner what you thought he wanted to hear.

You may ask yourself, Why wasn't I just honest? Why did I tell him I was fine when I wasn't? Why did I say I agreed when I didn't? Why did I hide something when I hadn't even done anything wrong?

Those questions sound very different when we consider what your nervous system may have learned about the consequences of honesty.

If telling the truth repeatedly leads to interrogation, accusations, ridicule, punishment, intimidation, or escalation, you may begin altering what you say in an effort to prevent those consequences.

You might say you don't care where you eat when you actually have a preference. You might say you agree because disagreement feels dangerous. You may omit an innocent interaction because you anticipate jealousy or accusations. You might minimize something that happened because you know you will otherwise be questioned for hours. You may say, "Nothing is wrong," because previous attempts to discuss your feelings have resulted in conflict.

It is important to be careful about labeling all lying as fawning. Research on appeasement more directly describes behaviors such as submission, approval-seeking, masking needs, caretaking, and acquiescence. However, the same threat-management framework can help us understand why someone who anticipates retaliation might conceal information or give the answer she believes is safest in that moment.

Instead of only asking yourself, "Why didn't I tell the truth?" it may be more revealing to ask, "What had I learned might happen if I did?"

That question places the behavior back into the context in which it developed.

Gaslighting Makes You Question What Your Nervous System Is Detecting 🌀

Now imagine that while all of this is happening, your partner also denies the behaviors you are responding to.

You notice his expression change and immediately become anxious, but later he insists there was no expression. You remember what he said during an argument, but he tells you that you remembered it incorrectly. You tell him his behavior frightened you, and he responds that you are overly sensitive, dramatic, irrational, or imagining things.

You now have two conflicting sources of information: your nervous system is telling you that something is wrong, while your partner is telling you that nothing happened.

Research on coercive control describes gaslighting and repeated lying as particularly damaging because these behaviors can erode confidence in a person's own memory, perceptions, and judgment. Research into subtle or covert abuse also includes behaviors such as discounting, humiliation, manipulation, invasion of space, and punishment delivered indirectly.

Over time, you may stop questioning his behavior and begin questioning yourself. You may wonder whether you really are too sensitive, whether you misunderstood what happened, whether your memory can be trusted, or whether you are somehow causing the problems in the relationship.

This is one of the reasons subtle coercive control can become so psychologically destabilizing. The cues can be meaningful enough for your nervous system to react to them while remaining subtle enough that you struggle to explain them, prove them, or even trust your own interpretation of them.

Why This Kind of Abuse Can Feel So Isolating 🫥

Imagine trying to explain one of these experiences to a friend.

You tell her that your partner looked at you in a particular way and you immediately knew you needed to stop talking.

Without the history of the relationship, your friend may have no way of understanding why that moment caused your stomach to tighten or why you immediately changed what you were saying. To her, it may have been a look. To you, that look carried the weight of everything you had learned could come after it.

The same problem can occur when you try to describe silent treatment, contemptuous noises, dismissive facial expressions, physical posturing, minimizing, subtle put-downs, or gaslighting. When each behavior is removed from the larger pattern, it can appear insignificant.

This is one of the reasons subtle coercive control can be so difficult to articulate.

Other people are hearing about one incident. You are living inside the pattern.

Research on coercive control describes looks, posture, and signals as potential ways of communicating threat or impending punishment within an established controlling pattern. Mocking, put-downs, and contempt can humiliate and reinforce compliance. Gaslighting, denial, and repeated lying can contribute to confusion and undermine confidence in one's perceptions. Appeasement can then become a way of attempting to de-escalate the situation when other options feel unsafe.

None of this means that every irritated expression, disagreement, sigh, period of silence, or lie between intimate partners constitutes coercive control.

People sigh. People become frustrated. People sometimes need space. Couples disagree. People communicate poorly.

The difference is the pattern, the context, and what happens when you don't comply.

In a healthy relationship, your partner can be disappointed with you without making you afraid of the consequences. You can disagree without having to manage his emotional reaction. You can have a preference he doesn't share. You can say no. You can tell the truth even when he doesn't like it. You can bring up a concern without first calculating whether it is safe to do so.

Coercive control gradually changes those conditions. Your freedom becomes increasingly constrained because experience has taught you that there may be consequences for behaving in ways your partner doesn't want.

Your Body May Understand the Pattern Before You Have Words for It 🧭

Perhaps one of the most important things to understand about subtle coercive control is that you may have difficulty explaining what is happening even while your nervous system is responding to it.

Threat responses do not depend entirely on conscious thought. Research on defensive responding shows that our behavioral and physiological reactions change depending upon factors such as how close a threat feels and whether we believe we have an effective way to escape or control it.

This means you can be responding to a pattern before you have fully put that pattern into words.

You may find yourself studying someone's face before speaking. You may automatically soften your voice when you sense irritation. You may become extraordinarily skilled at anticipating another person's needs while becoming increasingly disconnected from your own. You may apologize reflexively, struggle to say no, or feel compelled to fix another person's mood.

Eventually, you may not even recognize these behaviors as adaptations to threat. They simply become the way you move through the relationship.

This is also why it can be so confusing when someone asks, "What exactly did he do?"

Sometimes you don't yet have a simple answer. You may only know that you feel your body tense when he walks into the room, that you carefully choose your words, that you check his expression before making a decision, or that you feel an enormous sense of relief when he is not home.

The inability to immediately explain the threat does not necessarily mean there is no pattern worth examining.

Sometimes your body has learned the pattern before your conscious mind has found the language to describe it.

Healing Includes Learning That Someone Else's Displeasure Is Not Automatically Danger 🌱

These patterns can persist even after you are no longer in the environment where you learned them.

You may find yourself monitoring other people's facial expressions, becoming anxious when someone is quiet, overexplaining ordinary decisions, apologizing when you have done nothing wrong, or feeling an intense urge to make things better whenever someone seems disappointed with you.

You may know intellectually that you are safe while your body continues responding as though another person's irritation is something you urgently need to fix.

Healing can involve gradually becoming curious about those responses instead of judging yourself for having them.

You can begin noticing the difference between "This person is unhappy with me" and "I am in danger."

You can notice when you are agreeing because you genuinely agree and when you are agreeing because your body is afraid of what will happen if you don't.

You can notice when you are caring for someone because you want to and when you are desperately trying to regulate their emotions so that you can feel safe.

You can practice having preferences without apologizing for them. You can practice allowing another person to be disappointed without immediately trying to change their emotional state. You can begin reconnecting with the parts of yourself that became quieter while so much of your attention was focused on monitoring someone else: your opinions, your needs, your boundaries, your anger, your desires, your joy, and your ability to say no.

Perhaps most importantly, you can begin looking back at your survival responses with understanding rather than shame.

Instead of asking, "Why was I like that?" you can begin asking, "What had my nervous system learned it needed to do to keep me safe?"

That question changes the conversation because the fawning, hypervigilance, appeasing, overexplaining, or hiding of your needs did not develop in a vacuum. They may have developed in an environment where carefully reading another person's behavior helped you anticipate what was coming next.

As healing takes place, the goal is not simply to stop fawning.

It is to create enough safety, internally and externally, that your nervous system no longer believes it has to.

References

Aspinall, M., Gill, C., Dawson, M., & Cousineau, M.-M. (2024). Coercive control and risk in intimate partner violence: Are Canadian police prepared to assess? Policing and Society, 34, 613–626.

Choudhury, A., Martland, N., & Luzón, O. (2025). Women’s experiences of coercive control in intimate partner relationships: A qualitative systematic review. Journal of Family Violence.

Crossman, K. A., & Hardesty, J. L. (2017). Placing coercive control at the center: What are the processes of coercive control and what makes control coercive? Psychology of Violence, 8, 196–206.

Dichter, M., Thomas, K., Crits-Christoph, P., Ogden, S. N., & Rhodes, K. (2018). Coercive control in intimate partner violence: Relationship with women’s experience of violence, use of violence, and danger. Psychology of Violence, 8, 596–604.

Dutton, M., & Goodman, L. (2005). Coercion in intimate partner violence: Toward a new conceptualization. Sex Roles, 52, 743–756.

Gampe, M., Jeffries, S., & Rathus, Z. (2024). “A kiss delivered as a punch”: Coercively controlling tactics in Australian women’s same-gender intimate relationships. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.

Hamberger, L., Larsen, S. E., & Lehrner, A. (2017). Coercive control in intimate partner violence. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 37, 1–11.

Kassing, K., & Collins, A. (2025). “Slowly, over time, you completely lose yourself”: Conceptualizing coercive control trauma in intimate partner relationships. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 41, 662–684.

Lohmann, S., Felmingham, K., O'Donnell, M., & Cowlishaw, S. (2024). “It's like you're a living hostage, and it never ends”: A qualitative examination of the trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 48, 571–588.

Löw, A., Weymar, M., & Hamm, A. (2015). When threat is near, get out of here. Psychological Science, 26, 1706–1716.

Parkinson, R., Jong, S., & Hanson, S. (2024). Subtle or covert abuse within intimate partner relationships: A scoping review. Trauma, Violence & Abuse, 25, 4090–4101.

Schlote, S. (2023). History of the term “appeasement”: A response to Bailey et al. (2023). European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14.

Tseng, Y.-T., Schaefke, B., Wei, P., & Wang, L.-P. (2023). Defensive responses: Behaviour, the brain and the body. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 24, 655–671.