Coercive control works by shrinking choices, isolating community, and overriding inner signals. Whether it happened in a religious organization, intimate relationship, family system, or high-control group, the patterns are remarkably similar: your autonomy gets eroded gradually, often in the name of love, spiritual growth, or protection.
If you doubt your own memory, question your values, or can't trust your intuition—there's nothing wrong with you. That's what the system was designed to produce. Coercive environments deliberately create confusion about what's real, what's healthy, and what you can trust about yourself.
Recovery is possible and practical, step by step. Your inner compass still exists, even when it feels buried or broken.
If you doubt your own memory, question your values, or can't trust your intuition—there's nothing wrong with you. That's what the system was designed to produce. Coercive environments deliberately create confusion about what's real, what's healthy, and what you can trust about yourself.
Recovery is possible and practical, step by step. Your inner compass still exists, even when it feels buried or broken.
What Is Coercive Control?
Coercive control is a pattern of behavior that seeks to take away your autonomy and independence. Unlike isolated incidents of abuse, coercive control is ongoing and systematic—it targets your decision-making capacity, your relationships, your reality, and ultimately your sense of self.
Common tactics include:
- Isolation: Cutting you off from friends, family, or outside perspectives
- Monitoring: Tracking your location, communications, or activities
- Regulation: Controlling what you wear, eat, read, watch, or believe
- Degradation: Systematic criticism, shaming, or humiliation
- Exploitation: Financial control, forced labor, or manipulation of resources
- Gaslighting: Denying your reality, rewriting history, or making you doubt your perceptions
- Threats: Direct or implied consequences for non-compliance
These tactics appear in intimate partner violence, but they're equally present in high-control religious groups, cults, authoritarian family systems, and other environments where one person or group claims total authority over another's life.
Evan Stark, who developed the coercive control framework, describes it as a "liberty crime"—it's not just about what's done to you, but about what's taken from you: your freedom to be yourself.
Recognizing the Pattern: The BITE Model
Dr. Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to understand influence and control in high-demand groups, but the framework applies with devastating clarity to coercive control in any context.
Behavior Control: Restricting what you can do
Who you can see, where you can go, what you can wear, how you spend money, whether you can work or pursue education. When someone controls your behavior, they control your choices.
Information Control: Manipulating what you know
Withholding information, lying, creating confusion, limiting access to outside perspectives, monitoring communications, distorting reality. When someone controls information, they control your understanding of what's real.
Thought Control: Reshaping what you believe
Installing beliefs about your incompetence, unworthiness, or dependence. Reframing control as love or spiritual guidance. Using loaded language that stops critical thinking. When someone controls your thoughts, they control your identity.
Emotional Control: Weaponizing how you feel
Using fear, guilt, and shame to enforce compliance. Creating emotional dependency. Punishing independence with manufactured crises or withdrawal of affection. When someone controls your emotions, they control your capacity to leave.
How Coercive Control Differs from Isolated Abuse
A single incident of violence is traumatic. Coercive control is something different—it's the systematic dismantling of your autonomy over time.
Key differences:
- Pattern vs. incident: Not one bad thing that happened, but an ongoing system designed to control
- Psychological vs. physical: Can exist without physical violence (though often includes it)
- Identity impact: Doesn't just hurt you—it makes you doubt who you are
- Isolation from self: You lose connection not just to others, but to your own inner knowing
Many people who've experienced coercive control describe feeling like they "lost themselves" or "don't know who they are anymore." That's not dramatic language—it's an accurate description of what this form of abuse does.
Understanding Coercive Control in Religious Groups
Religious systems and high-control groups add another layer: they claim divine authority. When control is framed as God's will, spiritual growth, or the path to salvation, questioning becomes not just difficult but "sinful" or "faithless."
- Thought control: Dictating beliefs, forbidding questions, punishing doubt
- Information control: Limiting access to outside sources, labeling contrary information as "dangerous"
- Emotional control: Using fear, guilt, and shame to enforce compliance
- Behavioral control: Regulating appearance, relationships, sexuality, career, family planning
Financial Coercion: When Money Becomes a Weapon
One of the most devastating—and least understood—forms of coercive control is financial coercion. It's not just about money. It's about systematically dismantling your capacity for autonomous decision-making.
Financial coercion often includes:
- Controlled access to bank accounts, cards, or passwords
- Requiring permission or justification for purchases
- Sabotaging employment (hiding car keys, creating crises on work days)
- Hidden accounts, debts, or credit cards opened in your name without knowledge
- "You're too stupid/irresponsible to understand money"
- Threats of financial ruin if you leave
If you're experiencing financial coercion alongside other forms of control, recovery will need to address both the trauma and the practical barriers.
"On a personal level, I would say that Janice is one of the most compassionate, encouraging, and caring people I have ever had the privilege of meeting. On a professional level, I would say that 'the proof is in the eating of the pudding'. I am a new man, with new hope, and a renewed life!"
How I Work with Coercive Control Recovery
My approach combines evidence-based trauma therapy with deep respect for your inner wisdom and autonomy. Unlike the systems you've experienced, this framework recognizes you as the expert on your own life.
EMDR for Trauma Processing
EMDR helps the nervous system file what happened so the past stops running the present. It doesn't require you to extensively narrate traumatic events, which can be particularly important when discussing religious abuse.
Soul Unity Therapy for Autonomy Reclamation
Soul Unity Therapy integrates evidence-based trauma care with explicit focus on reconnecting with your inner guidance. This approach directly counters what coercive control does—it reinstalls trust in your intuition as a legitimate authority.
What Sessions Look Like
- Safety and pacing agreements: You control the speed and depth of our work.
- Education about coercive tactics: Understanding the patterns reduces shame.
- EMDR preparation: We build internal stability before processing trauma.
- Tools to notice and trust your signals again: Reconnect with your emotions and body wisdom.
- Boundaries and communication support: Navigating ongoing relationships.
- Integration support: Exploring questions of faith and purpose at your own pace.
Common Questions About Recovery
Do we have to talk about everything that happened?
No. You decide what to share and when. We work with what you bring, at the pace that feels manageable.
Is EMDR safe for religious trauma?
Yes, when properly prepared and entirely voluntary. We spend time building resources and safety before any processing begins.
How long does recovery take?
Recovery is highly individual. Complex trauma from coercive control typically requires 9+ months of consistent work.
Ethics and Boundaries
I don't provide religious advice. Your choices about belief, relationships, and life direction remain entirely your own. Recovery means reclaiming the authority over your life that was taken.