Coercive Control: Why They Were Nice To Everyone Else

One of the hardest things about coercive control to explain to anyone else is that the person doing it was usually well liked. Your friends thought they were lovely. Your family thought you’d done well for yourself. At work they were the one who stayed late to help somebody out, and the first time you tried to say something to a friend about what things were actually like at home, you watched their face do something complicated before they'd said a word.

So you stopped saying it. The gap between the person everybody else got and the person you got was so wide that describing it out loud made you sound unreliable, and after a while the simplest explanation available was that you were the problem. They managed to be patient with everybody else. You were the only one who seemed to bring something different out of them.

There’s a forensic explanation for this, and it has nothing to do with you being difficult to live with. The public self and the private one are doing the same job.

What Offending Competency Means In Coercive Control

Andrew Day and Erica Bowen took a concept from the study of sexual offending and applied it to intimate partner violence, and they called it offending competency. The argument is that abusive behaviour works like any other learned skill. It improves with practice.

As they put it, as competency develops, the use of coercive control tactics becomes more successful. Somebody who has been doing this for years has learned which responses get a reaction out of their partner, which ones produce compliance fastest, and which ones are safe to use in front of other people. Day and Bowen describe the most practised offenders as people who carefully select who they target, plan what they do, and think carefully about how best to avoid being detected.

That last part is the one that matters here. Avoiding detection isn’t something that gets bolted on afterwards once the behaviour is established. It’s built into the behaviour from the beginning, and the most reliable way to avoid detection is to be somebody nobody would ever suspect.

Day and Bowen pick up something else from survivor accounts, which is that the charming presentation to other people carried on long after the behaviour towards the partner had become abusive. The public self doesn’t get dropped once the relationship is secure. It gets maintained, because it’s working.

Why Coercive Control Only Happens Where There Are No Witnesses

Evan Stark, whose work led to coercive control becoming a criminal offence in England and Wales, built his whole account of it around entrapment in personal life. Personal life is the one setting with no witnesses, no record of what was said, and nobody with the authority to step in. A rule about what time you come home is unenforceable anywhere else, and nobody outside the house would accept it for a second.

If what you lived with were a temperament, or a short fuse, or the pressure of a difficult job, you’d expect it to turn up wherever the pressure did. It doesn’t. Most people who use coercive control manage, year after year, not to do it to their manager, their mother-in-law, the neighbour who parks across the drive, or the officer standing in their hallway at one in the morning. Day and Bowen, citing a police inspectorate review, note that officers arriving at domestic abuse incidents frequently found the perpetrator calm and plausible while the victim was distressed and hard to follow. That’s the same skill, performed in the highest-stakes conditions it will ever face.

There’s a study from John Jay College in New York that gets at this from another direction. Barbara Reissman and colleagues looked at 85 men who had been court-ordered onto a domestic abuse programme after criminal charges, and measured how strongly each man leaned towards impression management, meaning the habit of presenting yourself in a socially acceptable light. The men who scored highest on impression management reported the least coercive control and the least physical abuse. The ones who reported more shame and guilt about what they’d done reported more of it.

It’s worth being clear about what that does and doesn’t show. It’s a correlation in a small sample of men who all had very good reasons to play things down. What it does suggest is that the ability to manage how you come across and the ability to deny what you’ve done aren’t two separate things.

Why The Public Self Isn’t A Different Person

Somebody I worked with on a programme described an evening at his mother’s house. His partner made a comment at the table that he decided was a dig at him. He said nothing about it. He was good company all evening, helped with the washing up, drove them home. In the car he didn’t speak. Once they were in the house he went straight upstairs, and his partner spent the next three hours apologising to a closed door for something she couldn’t have named.

When he described it to me he was describing a decision, and he was mildly proud of having made it. He told me he’d never embarrass her in front of his mother.

The restraint at the table and the silence in the car are the same behaviour. Both of them required him to know exactly what he was doing and to pick his moment. His mother went to bed that night thinking her son was a lovely man with a slightly moody girlfriend, and she wasn’t wrong about what she’d seen. She’d only seen the part he’d arranged for her to see.

Why Nobody Believed You When You Finally Said Something

Ellen Reeves, Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Silke Meyer and Sandra Walklate interviewed 54 Australian women about what happened when they tried to get help through the courts and the police. Their finding is that the system goes on disbelieving women and siding with the person who harmed them, and that people who use control turn the legal process itself into another way of keeping hold of someone.

The mechanism is the one already described, with far more riding on it. The person who has spent years practising being plausible walks into a police station or a courtroom and is plausible. The person who has spent years being destabilised walks in shaking, with an account that comes out in the wrong order and keeps doubling back, and then gets judged on the way she told it rather than on what she said.

The same thing happens in smaller rooms, which is where most people meet it first. You tell a friend what's been happening to you. They think of the person who helped them move house. Nothing you’ve described sounds like the person they think they know, so they assume there must be a side of it you haven’t mentioned, and ask a careful question that lands on you rather than them.

The Part You’ve Had The Wrong Way Round

The thing you’ve probably been carrying since it ended is that there must have been something specific about you. Something you did to them that you didn’t do to anybody else, or something about the two of you together that brought out a side of them nobody else ever saw.

What the research describes instead is a person who was choosing, continuously and skilfully, where to do it. The pleasantness other people got wasn’t the real them breaking through. It was the other half of the same operation, and it worked exactly as it was supposed to, because it meant that if you ever did say something out loud, the people who heard it had years of evidence that it couldn’t possibly be true.

You weren’t the one person who brought out the worst in them. You were the one person they’d decided the rules didn’t apply to.

Where to go next...

If reading that put a name to something you’ve never been able to describe to anybody, the next useful thing is practising on a case where nobody is telling you you’ve got it wrong. The Healthy Relationship Collective opens in January, and everyone on the waitlist gets a complete case file in the meantime, released in instalments the way control actually unfolds, with my breakdown of what was happening underneath it at the end. It’s the same format members get every month.

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This week’s video is the perpetrator-side version of everything above, including what people who have used control say when they explain why they never did it in front of anybody.

👉 [Watch the YouTube video here] 👈

Why They Never Took Responsibility for Anything goes into what happens to accountability inside the same thinking that produces the public self.

Can Abusers Really Change? What the Research Shows takes the obvious next question, which is whether a skill that took years to build can be given up.

If you’re not on the Clarity Drop list, it’s one email every Tuesday breaking down a single psychological concept from that week’s topic, with a practical tool you can actually use and first access to everything new from THRC.

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