A Behavioral Model for Coercive Control

Written By Jessica Ghigliotti

Skill-Based Resilience After Abuse

A New Way to Understand Coercive Control

There’s a core idea in behavioral science that changes everything once you really sit with it:

Behavior always makes sense in context.

But when it comes to abusive relationships, we often forget that.

Instead of asking “What is happening around this person?”, we ask “What’s wrong with them?”
We use words like codependent, trauma bonded, or low self-esteem.

Even when those labels are meant to help, they can quietly shift the focus away from the environment—and onto the person.

So let’s ask a different question:

What if the behavior we’re seeing is actually the right response to the situation?

The Organism Is Always Doing Its Best

In environments shaped by fear, unpredictability, or control, people adapt.

They learn what keeps them safest.

That often looks like:

  • Keeping the peace

  • Staying quiet

  • Scanning constantly for danger

  • Giving up choices

  • Hiding emotions

From the outside, these behaviors can look confusing or even “unhealthy.”

But inside the relationship, they are often:

  • Reducing risk

  • Preventing escalation

  • Maintaining access to resources

  • Preserving some form of stability

They are not random.
They are not broken.

They are strategies that worked—at least well enough to survive.

When “Healthy” Behavior Stops Being Safe

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough:

In abusive relationships, healthy behaviors can become dangerous.

Things like:

  • Saying no

  • Asking for what you need

  • Spending time with friends

  • Making independent choices

  • Setting boundaries

In a safe relationship, these behaviors are encouraged.

In a controlling one, they can lead to punishment, conflict, or harm.

So what happens?

People stop doing them.

Not because they’re weak, disordered, codependent, trauma-bonded etc.

But because humans are incredibly good at learning from consequences.

If something becomes unsafe, we adapt.

We should adapt.

Coercive Control as “Intimate-Partner Deskilling”

Researcher Evan Stark described coercive control as a pattern that traps someone in a world shaped by confusion, fear, and contradiction.

Building on that, here’s a more behaviorally precise way to understand what’s happening:

Intimate-Partner Deskilling

This is the process where:

A controlling partner changes the environment so that skills for independence and self-direction become unsafe or ineffective.

(More precisely, Intimate-Partner Deskilling is defined as: Inducing a Context-Responsive Skill Inhibition in an intimate partner by systematically manipulating the environment so that instead of supporting the skills of self-determination, the environment makes those skills unsafe or ineffective.)

Over time, those skills stop being used.

Not because the person lost them permanently—but because the environment made them too costly to use.

What is control?

It’s systematic interference with a person’s ability to act on their own life.

The Personal Power Wheel

When you listen closely to survivors—really listen—a pattern emerges.

Across different stories, people describe losing access to the same core abilities.

These include:

  • Understanding and trusting their own experience

  • Making choices

  • Asking for needs to be met

  • Managing daily life

  • Using their own abilities fully

  • Judging what is safe

  • Staying connected (including through technology)

  • Building and keeping relationships

  • Navigating the outside world and accessing help

These aren’t personality traits; they’re skills.

And these targeted skills map onto three basic human needs identified in Self-Determination Theory:

  • Autonomy (having choice)

  • Competence (feeling capable)

  • Relatedness (feeling connected)

Coercive control works by shrinking all three.

What grows in their place?

  • Deference instead of autonomy

  • Self-doubt instead of competence

  • Isolation instead of connection

This is what the Personal Power Wheel is meant to capture:
the specific areas of life where control quietly takes hold.

What Recovery Can Actually Look Like

If abuse reduces access to skills, then recovery isn’t about “fixing” a person.

It’s about rebuilding access to those skills—safely, gradually, and with support.

This might include:

  • Relearning how to trust your own perception

  • Practicing small, safe choices

  • Rebuilding connections

  • Strengthening daily living skills

  • Expanding access to resources

This is what skill-based resilience looks like.

Not just healing wounds—but reclaiming capacity.

Why This Perspective Matters

It reduces victim-blaming

When behavior is understood in context, it stops being about what’s “wrong” with someone.

It becomes about what they had to do to survive.

It puts safety first

If a behavior makes sense in context, then changing it without changing the environment can be dangerous.

Safety isn’t optional—it’s the foundation.

It gives power back to survivors

Instead of positioning professionals as the experts, this model recognizes:

The survivor already knows their world.

The work is helping them reconnect with that knowing.

It reveals real barriers

When we assume behavior makes sense, we get curious.

And curiosity reveals the actual obstacles—practical, environmental, relational—that need to be addressed.

Moving Toward a More Honest Understanding

Many traditional models assume people are operating in safe, stable environments.

But that’s not always true.

When we judge behavior without accounting for context, we risk misunderstanding—and even shaming—the very people we’re trying to support.

A contextual approach does something different.

It starts here:

People make sense.

Even in the most difficult situations.
Especially there.

And when we understand how their behavior makes sense, we open the door to something much more powerful than judgment:

Real, grounded, skill-based change.

Jessica Ghigliotti