Learning to Recognise the Cage You're In: Therapy, Coercive Control, and Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from surviving too long in a situation that was never safe.

In my work as a drug and alcohol counsellor within a specialist court-based programme, I sit with people who carry this kind of tiredness. They come in alert, watching — monitoring everything — because monitoring everything is what kept them alive.

One of the most important things I've learned working at the intersection of substance use, domestic abuse, and family court proceedings is this: these things are rarely separate. Alcohol and substances are often not the root problem. They are, more often, a response to one.

Coercive control is one of the most misunderstood forms of domestic abuse, and one of the hardest to name while you're inside it. It doesn't always look like violence. It looks like your movements being monitored. It looks like sarcastic messages designed to destabilise you. It looks like someone using your children — or contact with your children — as a lever.

I recently worked with a woman I'll call Sarah. Articulate, warm, self-aware, and utterly exhausted. She was in a long-running family court process, trying to be reunited with her young daughter. Her former partner had, over years, slowly narrowed her world — her friendships, her sense of herself, her confidence in her own judgement. By the time she came to me, she had become so attuned to managing his moods, his threats, his sporadic contact updates, that she had almost no bandwidth left for anything else.

She hadn't been drinking. Her recovery was solid. But the coercive control hadn't stopped just because the relationship had.

What we know from trauma research — and what I see regularly in practice — is that living under sustained threat reorganises the way a person thinks and responds. The nervous system learns to scan for danger constantly. Emotional regulation becomes harder. Small provocations — a sarcastic WhatsApp message, an update withheld, a voice note designed to unsettle — land like emergencies, because for a long time, they were.

For Sarah, every message from her former partner was a potential detonation. She found herself reacting in ways she later regretted, then spiralling in shame, then overcompensating with attempts to placate him — which he then used against her. She could see the pattern. She just couldn't stop it from inside it.

This is not weakness. This is the nervous system doing exactly what years of conditioning trained it to do.

Part of our therapeutic work together involved beginning to introduce Internal Family Systems (IFS) — a model developed by Dr Richard Schwartz that understands the mind as made up of different "parts," each with their own role, motivations, and history.

When I first described it to Sarah, something shifted in her face. "That's exactly what it feels like," she said. "Like there are different people inside, and I don't always know which one's going to show up."

IFS offers a map for exactly this. There are manager parts — organised, planning, trying to hold everything together. There are firefighter parts — reactive, impulsive, trying to extinguish pain fast even when the method creates more damage. And there are exile parts — younger, hurt aspects of self that carry old trauma and have been pushed away because they were too painful to hold.

Crucially, in IFS, none of these parts are bad. They are all trying to help. The firefighter that wants to fire off a message to an abusive former partner isn't trying to sabotage the court process — it's trying to reduce unbearable distress, right now, by any means available.

The work is not to defeat these parts. It's to help the Self — the calm, clear core of a person — become strong enough to lead, so the parts don't have to fight for control.

For many people who have experienced coercive control, one of the most difficult things is the retrospective reckoning. Understanding, after the fact, that what felt like a relationship was a system of control. That the walking on eggshells, the self-editing, the shrinking — that was not love. That was captivity.

Sarah described it herself: "I've been painted in such a bad light. But that's not who I am. That's who I became, trying to survive him."

There is something both devastating and liberating about that sentence. Devastating, because it points to how much was taken. Liberating, because it means the person underneath is still there — waiting, recoverable, real.

I find myself drawing on the image of someone who has been held against their will and has just stepped into daylight. They're blinking, disoriented, not quite able to trust their own perceptions yet. Of course they're not immediately okay. The task of therapy isn't to rush them toward being okay. It's to stand beside them in the light and say: this is real, you're out, let's take it slowly.

In the specialist court programmes I work within, substance use is often the presenting issue. But sustained recovery — real, lasting change — almost always requires looking at what the substance was doing for the person. What pain was it managing? What did it make bearable that was otherwise unbearable?

For Sarah, sobriety had come relatively quickly, once she was in the right environment with the right support. What was slower, and harder, was the work of understanding herself — her history, her patterns, why she had stayed, why she had kept trying, what her parts were protecting her from.

That is not a small thing. In fact, it might be the biggest thing.

I want to be honest about something: therapy alone cannot fix a system. It cannot make the legal process move faster. It cannot undo poor decisions made by professionals elsewhere. It cannot remove an unsafe parent from a child's life, or guarantee a just outcome, or make up for the months and years that have been lost.

What it can do — what I have seen it do — is help a person hold themselves together long enough for the system to catch up. It can help someone recognise when a part of them is hijacking their behaviour, and pause before acting. It can help someone learn to soothe themselves the way they would soothe a frightened child — with patience, not punishment.

And perhaps most importantly, it can help someone begin to trust their own perception again. That matters enormously for survivors of coercive control, who have often had their reality systematically distorted for years.

If any of this resonates — if you recognise yourself in Sarah's experience, or in the patterns I've described — I want to say a few things directly.

You are not the things that were done to you. Your past does not define you. The parts of you that reacted badly under sustained pressure were doing what they could to survive something that should never have been happening in the first place.

Recovery is possible. Not easy. Not linear. But possible.

And if you are currently in a situation involving domestic abuse — coercive control, financial abuse, emotional manipulation — please reach out to someone who can help. In the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (run by Refuge) can be reached at 0808 2000 247, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You don't have to be in immediate danger to call. You don't have to have all the words yet. You just have to make contact.