The behaviors associated with an abusive narcissist (AN) aren’t confined to intimate relationships. They scale. In relationships it’s intimate partner violence (IPV). In families it’s domestic violence (DV). In a group, a cult, and at a national level: a dictatorship. Couples therapists screen for coercive control because, if missed, therapeutic tools are weaponized against survivors.
These patterns aren’t abstract. We’re living with them in specific, repeated behaviors.
Here’s what the pattern looks like in practice. If this feels heavy, that’s not a failure of understanding. It’s a sign you’re seeing the pattern clearly. Once the pattern is visible, escape stops being abstract.
Normalizing physical and sexual violence:
- “Inciting a mob” on January 6th
- Trump convicted of sexual violence against E. Jean Caroll
- Trump-era immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has seen federal agents kill civilians during operations
- Expressing a desire to “punch” a protester and offering to pay legal fees for supporters who “knocked the crap” out of them
Threats, coercion, and intimidation:
- Threatening to “primary” congress members if they “are on the wrong side of the vote” conditioning safety on loyalty
- Using the Department of Justice to target political rivals
- Targeting law firms to limit legal opposition and accountability
- Federal Communications Comission (FCC) threats against broadcasters critical of Trump
Emotional abuse:
- Labeling unfavorable information “fake news” severing trust in external reality
- Offering contradictory statements on the Epstein files
- False claims about President Obama’s citizenship
- False claims about the size of his inauguration crowd
- Deploying degrading labels that reduce political opponents to caricatures, signaling who is safe to ridicule
Minimizing, denying, blaming:
- Publicly minimizing COVID-19 while privately acknowledging its severity, shifting responsibility for harm
- Denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, reframing accountability as persecution
- Claiming audits prevented the release of tax returns despite evidence to the contrary
- Blaming Democrats or local officials for outcomes driven by one’s own decisions
- Consistently centering himself as the victim of media, institutions, or democratic processes
Using male privilege:
- Framing sexual access as an entitlement of power (“grab them by the pussy”)
- Casting control as protection (“whether they like it or not”)
- Walking in on women changing for his beauty pageant
- Institutionalizing loss of bodily autonomy through judicial appointments and policy
Using economic abuse:
- Targeting law firms to limit legal opposition and access to advocacy
- Threatening universities with funding loss to enforce ideological compliance
- Firing or sidelining employees who challenge authority
- Revoking security protections, forcing individuals to absorb personal financial costs for dissent
Taken together, these behaviors form an unsophisticated attack that exploits the vulnerabilities of being human. The strategy is simple and repetitive: remove emotional, psychological, physical, and financial resources, and consolidate power toward the perpetrator.
This pattern scales because it operates on capacities shared by individuals and institutions alike. Humans, and the systems we build, orient to the world through three lenses: objective reality, individual reality (thoughts, emotions, sensations, personal histories), and collective reality (norms, shared stories, and goals).
Coercive control disrupts all three, fracturing how we know ourselves, each other, and how we coordinate around truth.
If this feels unsettling, that’s not confusion. It’s what happens when a system designed to disorient is finally named.
Humans act not only on what happens, but on the meaning they attribute to it. For instance, silence can feel neutral to one person and ominous to another. The same absence of response can prompt calm patience or intense vigilance, depending on the meaning assigned. In relational systems, this is how disorientation begins: meaning becomes unstable, and behavior follows.
In coercive systems, disorientation isn’t accidental. It’s the strategy.
In abusive relationships perpetrators deny, deflect blame, gaslight, name call, and use half-truths until you can’t track reality. Humans have finite cognitive capacities. In politics, this kind of cognitive saturation is created through techniques like flooding the zone and “alternative facts.” Under these conditions, confusion drains agency and makes resistance harder to sustain.
Through abuse tactics, perpetrators undercut our confidence, resources, sanity, self-trust, and physical and emotional safety. Cumulatively, this stops us from tracking our own realities and instead pulls our attention toward the abusive narcissist (AN). We do this for safety. This is not weakness; it’s a nervous system adapting under threat.
ANs have a unidirectional relationship with reality. Only their perception matters. They’re always right, and anyone who disagrees becomes bad, wrong, or the enemy. We track them to avoid punishment and devaluation; they flood us with chaos and content until we’re reacting instead of choosing—and power consolidates accordingly.
Over time, this erosion of self-trust has profound psychological consequences. If Siegel is right, and emotions are the emergence of self through time and space, then our inability to know our emotional state is nothing less than a loss of self. Can you think of a news day in the past decade that didn’t include Trump? I can’t either. What else is this constant saturation if not a demand that we orient around the perpetrator at the expense of ourselves?
Coercive control disrupts collective reality through isolation and scapegoating. Isolation creates the echo chamber where only the perpetrator’s perspective is valid. Trump is divisive, and he benefits from an isolation-prone culture. Social media algorithms and media silos create individual realities where we lose collective capacity.
This isn’t a failure of social cohesion. It’s the predictable outcome of sustained isolation.
In Sapiens, Harari argues that humanity’s superpower is large-scale cooperation built on shared stories—money, laws, nations, and human rights. These collective fictions allow unrelated humans to coordinate beyond social groups. When shared reality fragments, cooperation collapses. Coercive control doesn’t just divide us; it disables us.
One of the most efficient tools for sustaining isolation is scapegoating: it dehumanizes targets, absolves leaders of responsibility, and redirects collective anger. Scapegoating doesn’t end when the abusive system collapses; if left unaddressed, it metastasizes—altering relationships to power, safety, and trust, and producing chronic vigilance long after the original perpetration is gone.
Scapegoating creates relational injury: some develop empathy and clarity, while others find that the rage of being targeted—justified and real—fuses with the unidirectional reality modeled by coercive control, producing a secondary harm clinicians call offending from the victim position.
This isn’t a moral failure. People are harmed not because of what they did, but because scapegoating serves the abusive system, and naming this risk isn’t condemnation. It’s how we see coercive systems replicate through injury.
Some people feel genuinely empowered under Trump. This, too, is part of the isolation tactic. In abusive systems, certain individuals are rewarded for compliance. In domestic violence, golden children may never be beaten, yet they understand implicitly that their safety depends on continued loyalty. Their power is conditional and revocable. Over time, this false empowerment can produce moral injury– the betrayal of deeply held values in exchange for proximity to power.
Objective reality exists, but we approach it through shared interpretive frameworks called paradigms. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argues that scientific progress depends on paradigms that tolerate disagreement, anomaly, and correction. Paradigms are not distortions of reality; they’re how limited human minds approximate it together. When disagreement becomes dangerous and only one reality is permitted, our collective capacity to see objective reality collapses.
Because mental health, human relationships, and democracies require a tension between individual, collective, and objective reality, repair must focus on restoring the capacities coercive control erodes. To find our way back, we need a relational framework built on three principles: regulation, discernment, and reconnection by redefining “us.”
This isn’t a linear process, rather, a reinforcing one. Regulation supports discernment. Discernment makes reconnection safer. Reconnection, in turn, increases regulation. Together, these responses interrupt power and control dynamics and restore collective agency.
Take this in at your own pace; the goal is to help you stay human.
Regulation
Biologically, regulation and dysregulation are resource allocation issues. Every quarter of a second, the brain assesses whether it has sufficient resources to engage the metabolically expensive higher cortex. When it doesn’t, resources shift to survival systems, prioritizing immediate safety over relationships and long-term reasoning. Regulation refers to flexible, adaptive, relational thinking that allows access to higher cortical processes while remaining connected to emotions. Politics depends on nuanced relational thinking.
Dysregulation, by contrast, is rigid, reactive, and chaotic. It’s a mismatch between internal states and external context. These responses are disproportionate or misaligned with the situation, rather than appropriate to immediate danger.
We must seriously consider where we put our internal resources.
Some questions to guide regulation:
- Am I engaging out of curiosity, fear, obligation, or urgency?
- Do I have the internal resources for this and is this a wise use of them right now?
- Do I notice myself becoming rigid, certain, or reactive?
- Does engaging with this person or content increase clarity or just agitation?
Discernment
Couples therapists must distinguish coercive control from dysregulation so therapy isn’t weaponized against survivors; a distinction many institutions have failed to make. That same discernment changes how we read polarization: not as disagreement, but as relational injury; chaos not as content, but as a mechanism of control; the core question is not “who is right?” but “who holds power, and how?”
Practically, we have to discern on two levels: who can be an ally, and what you let in. I draw on two texts for discernment, A Typology of Domestic Violence by Johnson and Couples Therapy for Domestic Violence by Stith, McCollum, and Rosen.
Johnson distinguishes three forms of violence in intimate relationships:
Intimate Terrorism (IT) describes systems organized around coercive control, where one party uses intimidation, asymmetry, and abuse to dominate others while avoiding accountability—making repair structurally impossible.
Violent Resistance (VR) occurs when a person being controlled fights back. While often rooted in self-protection or attempts to regain agency, this violence reliably backfires—reinforcing the perpetrator’s narrative that they’re the true victim and obscuring the underlying power imbalance.
Situational Couple Violence (SCV) arises from dysregulation rather than control, where conflict escalates into harm but accountability, shared reality, and repair remain possible.
This distinction matters because not all attempts at repair increase safety. Stith et al.’s research demonstrates that therapy reduces violence only under specific conditions: agreement that violence occurred, the ability to name what happened without retaliation, acknowledgment of harm by the person who caused it, and observable movement toward change. When these conditions are absent—when one person benefits from the system as is—repair efforts create harm rather than safety.
Some questions for discerning who’s an ally:
- Who shares power versus who hordes it?
- Is there enough shared reality to do meaningful work? We can’t make change if we can’t agree on what’s true.
- Is independent thought tolerated, or is only one perspective allowed?
- Is harm repaired or does it lead to deflection and confusion?
When I assess that a system is organized around coercive control, my focus shifts. I can’t continue couples therapy and my role changes. I don’t track content as if it were good-faith communication; I track its function. Is this interaction clarifying—or destabilizing? Connecting—or exhausting? This assessment isn’t quick, casual, or punitive; it’s based on repeated patterns over time. The same discernment applies civically: one of the few forms of power we reliably retain is attention, and choosing where to place it is harm reduction.
Some questions for discerning content:
- Does any of this fall into the category of emotional abuse, minimizing, blaming, or DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender)? If so, that’s about removing regulations and internal resources. We have choices about what we attend to.
- Are material resources being removed such as safety, finances, or fundamental rights? Attend these, as they’re actionable.
Discernment isn’t disengagement; it’s a refusal to be governed through saturation. When discernment collapses, attention, rage, uncertainty are no longer ours. They become resources the system uses to sustain itself.
Reconnection by Redefining “Us”
If isolation is the mechanism of control, reconnection is the mechanism of escape.
Under coercive control violent resistance is an understandable response and inevitably a counterproductive one. Nonviolence isn’t the absence of forceful action; it’s the deliberate use of collective pressure without reproducing coercive dynamics. Violence reinforces the abusive system’s narrative, legitimizes repression, and deepens division. Nonviolent resistance does the opposite: it broadens participation, increases public sympathy, and strengthens collective power.
That’s why nonviolent civil disobedience is necessary to escape dictatorship.
This creates a central bind: the conditions that make nonviolent collective action necessary–fear, chaos, and threat–are the same conditions that make it hardest to sustain. In The Ideological Brain, Zmigrod writes, “[t]he ideological brain is a brain that is cognitively rigid, emotionally dysregulated, physiologically less sensitive to injustice and injury.” Zmigrod posits that ideology provides two shortcuts for the brain, offering a sense of certainty amidst chaos and a strong belonging among like-minded groups. Coercive systems reward certainty because it collapses discernment, suppresses correction, and turns belonging into compliance. In a world this uncertain, moving towards ideology isn’t a failure of character. It’s a predictable response to fear.
One of the ways coercive systems weaken collective power is by collapsing distinct relational questions into a single, misleading metric: who feels safe or familiar, and who agrees with me?
Agreement, affinity, and trust aren’t the same as shared reality or shared capacity for change. In healthy systems, we distinguish between the people we love, the people we tolerate, and the people we can work with toward change. Under threat, those distinctions blur. This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse, abandoning boundaries, or maintaining relationships that cause harm. Some positions—especially those that deny others’ humanity or safety—are rightly disqualifying for closeness. Discernment isn’t moral generosity; it’s relational precision.
The question isn’t “who do I like” or “who agrees with me,” but “who shares enough reality, accountability, and willingness to share power to make change possible.” Confusing these questions doesn’t protect us. It fragments us.
Change
We can’t lose sight of the ultimate goal: change. Couples enter therapy seeking change. Politics is how we negotiate change as a country. Yet too many people fall for a dangerous falsehood: that raising awareness alone will change behavior. That’s false with an AN. Abusive narcissism isn’t a psychosis, it’s a fundamental denial of other’s rights, autonomy, and need for personal will. Good-faith negotiation can’t be our only tool under coercive control.
We have already seen this administration reverse course under sustained public pressure, most notably in the cases of Jimmy Kimmel and the Epstein files. In both instances, public outcry, financial pressure, reputational risk, and political resistance altered the cost-benefit calculation. Power shifted. Behavior changed.
This isn’t a comprehensive map, but a set of orienting principles for staying human inside systems designed to erode our capacity.
We regain power by organizing around behavior, not ideology, and refusing to let coercive systems decide who ‘counts’ as us. Through chaos, isolation, and fragmentation we are controlled. Through regulation, discernment, and reconnection we resist.
Collective power is not restored by winning arguments, but by rebuilding the conditions that make coordinated action possible. Action, even small action, is a refusal of helplessness and a return to collective capacity. If we take coercive control seriously—structurally, relationally, and collectively—we can interrupt it.
This is how democracies survive.
This is how people do, too.
