Coercive control is a form of abuse that may not involve physical violence, yet it can have a lasting impact on an individual’s emotional wellbeing, safety, and autonomy. This behaviour often develops gradually and can be challenging to recognise, as controlling actions may appear subtle or be mistaken for care or concern.
Understanding coercive control and its manifestations is essential for supporting wellbeing and preventing long-term harm. Increased awareness helps people identify unhealthy patterns early and seek support before the effects become severe.
What Is Coercive Control?
Coercive control refers to repeated behaviours intended to dominate, restrict freedom, and undermine a person’s autonomy and sense of safety over time.
It may involve emotional manipulation, intimidation, isolation, monitoring, and control over daily decisions. These actions are designed to create fear, dependency, and compliance, even in the absence of physical violence.
Coercive control most often occurs in intimate partner relationships, but it can also arise in family or caregiving contexts. Its cumulative impact can severely affect mental health and overall wellbeing.
Australian legislation formally recognises coercive control, as research and lived experience show that it is often a precursor to serious harm and, in some cases, lethal violence. In Queensland, coercive control has been criminalised to acknowledge that patterns of controlling behaviour can be as dangerous as physical abuse.
According to the Queensland Government, coercive control laws were introduced to enhance protection for victim-survivors by recognising sustained patterns of abuse rather than treating incidents in isolation.
The legislation aims to support earlier intervention, reduce escalating risk, and acknowledge that many individuals experience prolonged psychological harm before physical violence occurs.
This legal recognition affirms that coercive control is a severe form of abuse, rather than a relationship issue or interpersonal conflict, and that it can result in significant emotional and psychological harm.
How Coercive Control Develops Over Time
Coercive control can involve both physical and non-physical forms of abuse, often used together to gain power over another person by limiting their choices, independence, and decision-making.
While controlling behaviour may be disguised as love or concern, manipulation and domination are not features of healthy relationships.
Coercive control is often difficult to identify because the behaviour is tailored to the individual. It may escalate gradually and is designed to confuse, intimidate, or isolate, making it harder to recognise what is happening or to seek help, particularly for those already facing barriers to support.
Over time, these behaviours often intensify and become more restrictive. Individuals may find their choices increasingly questioned, their independence reduced, and their confidence undermined. Because these changes occur gradually, many people do not realise they are experiencing coercive control until the emotional impact becomes severe.
This gradual progression can make coercive control difficult to recognise and easier to remain undetected. The behaviour may become normalised, and individuals may grow increasingly uncertain about their own perceptions and decisions.
Early Signs of Coercive Control
Identifying early indicators is essential to preventing the escalation of coercive control. The following behaviours may indicate a developing pattern of control.
1. Isolation from Support Networks
A person may be discouraged or prevented from seeing friends, family, or colleagues. This isolation may be framed as concern or jealousy, but it limits access to support and perspective.
2. Excessive Monitoring
Constant checking of whereabouts, phone use, messages, or social media activity may indicate control rather than care.
3. Control Over Everyday Decisions
Decisions about finances, clothing, routines, or work may increasingly be made by someone else, leaving the individual feeling powerless or dependent.
4. Emotional Manipulation
Dismissing feelings, denying events, or questioning someone’s memory and judgement can gradually erode confidence and self-trust.
5. Intimidation and Emotional Punishment
Threats, silent treatment, withdrawal of affection, or unpredictable emotional responses may be used to enforce compliance and create fear.
These behaviours may appear minor when viewed in isolation. Over time, however, they form a pattern that can significantly undermine emotional safety and autonomy.
Examples of Coercive Control Behaviour
Coercive control can take many forms. The following examples typically occur within a broader pattern of abuse and may overlap or escalate over time.
1. Love Bombing
Love bombing is a form of emotional abuse involving excessive attention, affection, gifts, or pressure to commit to a relationship before someone is ready.
The aim is to create emotional dependence or obligation, which can later be used to exert control. This may include excessive praise, unwanted gifts, or intense and premature discussions about a shared future.
2. Gaslighting
Gaslighting is emotional abuse that causes someone to doubt their feelings, instincts, memories, and perception of reality. Over time, individuals may come to trust the abuser’s version of events more than their own experiences.
Common signs include persistent self-doubt, questioning whether one is “too sensitive,” frequent confusion, excessive apologising, and a sense of losing clarity or judgement.
3. Social Isolation
Social isolation often begins subtly and can progress to complete disconnection from friends, family, and support networks.
Someone using coercive control may restrict movement, dictate who the person can see or communicate with, criticise loved ones, or create situations that block access to social, medical, or support services.
This may also involve controlling transportation, limiting access to communication devices, or preventing time alone with others.
4. Financial Abuse
Financial abuse occurs when one person controls another’s access to money or financial resources.
This may include monitoring spending, restricting access to bank accounts, withholding income, refusing to pay for essential items, or preventing someone from working. Over time, financial abuse can create dependency and make leaving the relationship seem impossible.
5. Emotional and Psychological Abuse
Emotional and psychological abuse target a person’s self-esteem, thoughts, emotions, and sense of control. This may include constant criticism, humiliation, name-calling, controlling what someone wears, repeated gaslighting, threats of self-harm to manipulate behaviour, or actions that undermine a person’s mental or emotional wellbeing.
Verbal abuse, such as yelling, swearing, insults, or threats, may also be used to intimidate and instil fear, eroding confidence and emotional safety over time.
6. Physical Abuse
Physical abuse involves causing bodily harm or injury to create fear and maintain control. This may include hitting, kicking, choking, restraining movement, damaging property, harming pets, or withholding care needed for basic needs such as food, medication, or hygiene.
7. Surveillance and Technology-Facilitated Abuse
Technology may be used to monitor, control, or intimidate. This can include constant messaging or calls, unauthorised access to devices, spyware, tracking devices, monitoring online activity, harassment on social media, or sharing intimate images without consent.
Behaviours may also include following someone, repeatedly appearing at their home or workplace, monitoring their movements, or leaving unwanted gifts or messages.
8. Sexual Abuse
Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Sexual abuse includes forcing or coercing sexual activity, exposure to unwanted sexual material, causing pain without permission, or using degrading or humiliating sexual behaviour to control.
9. Reproductive Control
Reproductive control may involve interfering with contraception, pressuring someone to become pregnant or terminate a pregnancy, or forcing decisions about having children against their wishes.
10. Religious or Spiritual Abuse
Religious or spiritual abuse involves using beliefs or practices to justify control, restrict freedom, or enforce compliance. This may include forcing participation in religious activities, preventing cultural or spiritual expression, or using faith to excuse abuse.
11. Identity-Based Abuse
Identity-based abuse often targets individuals from LGBTIQA+ communities. It may include threats to disclose sexual orientation or HIV status, reinforcing shame or fear, isolating individuals from supportive communities, or exploiting concerns about discrimination to prevent help-seeking.
People from LGBTIQA+ communities may also experience multiple forms of coercive control simultaneously.
The Impact of Coercive Control on Wellbeing
Living under coercive control can keep a person in constant stress and hypervigilance. When control is maintained, the body and mind may remain in a state of heightened alertness, as if danger were always present.
Over time, this prolonged survival response can affect wellbeing in several interconnected ways, including:
- Emotional and mental health changes, such as persistent anxiety, low mood, reduced self-esteem, and difficulty regulating emotions
- Cognitive impacts, including trouble concentrating, impaired decision-making, and reduced confidence in one’s own judgement.
- Physical and nervous system responses, such as ongoing tension, emotional numbness, or feeling easily overwhelmed in demanding or unpredictable situations
- Work and daily functioning challenges, including reduced focus, emotional exhaustion, and difficulty maintaining consistent performance
- Strain on relationships, with increased withdrawal from colleagues, friends, and loved ones due to fatigue, fear, or reduced emotional capacity
The impact of coercive control rarely stays within the relationship. Even after a controlling relationship ends, these effects may persist. This does not reflect personal weakness but is a natural result of prolonged emotional and psychological stress.
Learning how ongoing stress and trauma affect the nervous system, emotional boundaries, and resilience can help explain these responses and support gradual stability over time.
There is no place for controlling behaviour in a healthy relationship. Experiencing coercive control is never acceptable, and it is not your fault. Responsibility lies solely with the person using coercive control to acknowledge their behaviour and seek support to change it.
For those affected, accessing clear, evidence-based information can be a meaningful first step toward understanding their experience and considering appropriate next steps.
Why It Can Be Hard to Recognise or Leave
Recognising coercive control and deciding to leave a controlling relationship is rarely straightforward. For many, the experience unfolds gradually, making it hard to see where concern ends and control begins. Over time, the relationship may feel familiar and predictable, even when it causes harm.
This sense of familiarity can create a feeling of safety in what is known, despite ongoing emotional or psychological distress. Within this dynamic, coercive control is not a mutual conflict, but a pattern of behaviour in which one person exerts power over another.
Leaving a long-term relationship is especially challenging, even when coercive control or domestic and family violence is present. Emotional attachment, shared history, and dependence can make separation overwhelming. Common reasons individuals may feel unable to leave include:
- Love and hope for change, where emotional attachment leads individuals to trust promises that the behaviour will improve or return to a time without control or harm.
- Fear for personal or family safety, including concerns about threats, retaliation, or being found if they leave, as well as fear of isolation from family, friends, or community
- Financial dependence, where limited access to money or employment creates a belief that independent living is not possible
- Family loyalty or social obligation, including pressure from family members, friends, religious leaders, or community expectations to stay or give the relationship another chance
- Familiarity and uncertainty about the future, particularly when children are involved, or when individuals struggle to imagine life outside the relationship
- Cultural or religious beliefs, where values around marriage, family unity, or endurance discourage separation despite harm
- Shame and self-blame, which may develop over time as confidence and self-worth are eroded, leading individuals to believe they are responsible for the abuse
Seeking Support and Professional Guidance
Since coercive control involves ongoing harm rather than isolated conflict, support that prioritises safety, understanding, and emotional wellbeing is often more effective than mediation.
Speaking with a trained, trauma-informed professional who understands the psychological effects of coercive control can be helpful. Counselling offers a safe, confidential space to process experiences, rebuild emotional stability, and regain autonomy without pressure to reconcile or negotiate harmful dynamics.
Professional support can help individuals understand their experiences, strengthen coping strategies, and consider next steps that prioritise safety, emotional wellbeing, and long-term stability.
If controlling behaviours are affecting your mental health, safety, or daily life, accessing trauma-informed support can be an important step. D’Accord OAS offers confidential counselling and critical incident support for those experiencing emotional distress, relationship harm, or the ongoing effects of coercive control.
To learn more about Counselling Services or Critical Incident and Trauma Response support, visit the D’Accord OAS website or contact the team to discuss suitable support options.
