Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts in her area of research — how coercive control impacts on children and young people.
Emma specializes in the harms caused by father-perpetrated coercive control, as well as children’s and mothers’ resistance and recovery. Read more in her book Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press.
Thank you as always for reading these posts.
What I will be addressing today is an aspect of domestic violence and abuse that no one tends to talk about — the way the abusers, most often husbands and fathers, distort reality in their relationships with victims-survivors.
Why have I chosen this topic? Because reality-distortions are a vital part of how perpetrators behave.
Distorting reality is one of the key tools used by an abuser in order to get what he wants — the ability to dominate, exploit and control his partner and children. In order to be able to do this, he needs to create and assert his own distorted version of reality and pull his partner and children into it.
Ultimately, our sense of what is real underpins our sense of what is true and just. Once perpetrators control our sense of what is real, they can make their abuse seem fair, logical and justified when it is not.
The statements below represent common experiences of coercive control victims-survivors:
“I didn’t realize how serious the abuse had been until I was out of the marriage.”
“I didn’t realize I had been abused until years later.”
“I thought I knew about domestic violence but I couldn’t see it in my own relationship.”
“I thought I had a close relationship with my child, but over time he convinced my child to hate me.”
It’s like the home itself is surrounded by a bubble of reality where the rules, narratives and expectations all work to advantage the perpetrator and disadvantage everyone else.
Here are some of the key features of that bubble of false reality:
The abuser’s own needs and preferences are crucial, but his partners’ and children’s needs are usually irrelevant. Everyone must sacrifice for him, but he makes meaningful sacrifices for no one.
It is normal for the abuser to go from nice to cruel then back to nice again, and to routinely break his promises, but his children and his partner aren’t allowed to have normal human reactions like anger or disappointment in response. If anyone shows that they are angry or disappointed, then they are made to feel that they are in the wrong.
Neither the abuser’s partner nor his children is allowed to have worth just because they are a human being. Instead, worth is given or taken away based on how well his partner and children are meeting his demands and catering to his whims.
Rather than relationships being based on truth, the abuser uses lies and twisted half-truths to manipulate his partner and children and to get them to believe things which are untrue.
A note to readers
I’m writing here about men as perpetrators and women and children as victim-survivors because that is by far the most common dynamic in coercive control situations.
All abuse is wrong, and all victims-survivors deserve help and support.
In this post:
I’ll show you the 10 distorted realities that perpetrators set up — the exact psychological and practical strategies that they use to do so.
I’ll give you information on the impacts that this has on both the children and the partners, highlighting how perpetrators’ distorted realities affect children’s and partner’s abilities to understand what is happening in their lives and escape from it.
We’ll understand that, once the abuser’s reality distortions are taken into account, it makes perfect sense that victims-survivors cannot “see” the abuse that is happening to them for many years.
We’ll appreciate how incredible it is that many victims-survivors, including children, do manage to break free of these reality distortions in the end.
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