Three things that look separate

Twenty years in, my work has narrowed to three things that look separate. Coercive control and intimate partner violence. A woman living with a real betrayal underneath everything he actually does — one she has been reading, and hurting over, for years, and that nobody will hear. And the pattern people call sex addiction — which, in the form I see most often, involves very little sex.

All three come down to who gets to say what happened. He looks at a woman across a restaurant. His wife sees him do it. He tells her she’s imagining it, or she’s insecure, or that all men do that. By the end of the conversation the thing she saw is no longer a thing that happened. Something real was done to her, it hurt, and she has to bury it to keep the peace. Do that for years and it isn’t her confidence that goes. It’s her hold on what’s real.

That isn’t a side effect of coercive control. That is coercive control, and it doesn’t need a single raised voice.

No man learns to rank the women in a room by accident. He learns it in change rooms, in guy talk, in the shows where it’s the joke, in porn. He didn’t ask for it, and he was never offered the other thing — how to feel something, how to stay close to someone, how to see a partner, or any woman, as a person and not a rating.

None of it is ever taught as harm, or understood as harm. It is harm. It just arrived looking like ordinary manhood, and it’s in husbands, in fathers, in the man who passes you on the street.

And it lands on girls long before anyone names it for them. How she sees herself in a mirror. How she measures herself against every other woman in a room. What she learns to expect from men — and what she learns not to say, because it lands nowhere. Not with him. Not with her friends. Sometimes not even in a therapist’s office.

I’m still learning this, and I expect to be. If some of it sounds like your life, you’re welcome to read on — not to be handed a verdict, but to have better language for thinking it through yourself.

What this is, and what it isn’t.

This is educational material, not therapy, and not an assessment of you. Nothing here is a diagnosis — I’m a social worker and psychotherapist, and diagnosis isn’t mine to give. What follows is a way of understanding a pattern I’ve seen often in twenty years of practice, offered so you can think about your own situation with better language than most of us are handed. If you’re working with a therapist, bring this to them. If you’re not, this may help you decide what kind of support you’re looking for.

A note on language.

Throughout, the person with the pattern is “he” and the partner is “she.” That reflects where this shows up most often, and it isn’t the only way it happens. If your situation is arranged differently, everything here still applies — read it with that adjustment.

If you’re struggling right now, you don’t have to sit with it alone. In Canada, the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline is available 24/7 — call or text 9-8-8.