“Real change doesn't come from moments alone. It comes from movements. And this room represents a powerful one of movement that is rooted in truth and resilience and the belief that everyone deserves to live free from fear and free from harm.”

“Domestic and sexual violence are not just personal tragedies. They are systemic issues that touch every corner of our state, disproportionately affecting indigenous women women of color members of the LGBTQ plus community and those living at the intersections of multiple oppressions.”

“It means updating our laws and policies to ensure that coercive control is not ignored but named, addressed and stopped.”

“This is personal for so many of us. It is personal for me. I am a survivor and I'm a child witness. Coercive control was often used in our home. I remember my mom saying to me 'I'm sorry I couldn't hang in there until you graduated from college.'”

“One of the biggest ones is a personality that's insecure. They don't feel like they belong many places or they don't feel like they have a lot of control. Eventually it starts to develop into kind of an anxiety right—you have to control everything around you. Where's a saber-tooth tiger? Everything's a saber-tooth tiger.”

“This is a person who out of a fear of losing control over whoever it is or whatever it is that they are trying to control will start to do things that make it look like I'm not controlling. I'm caring. I'm loving. I'm looking out for you.”

“Even though there are mental disorders, they're not the reason for it. This is a behavior that is chosen by the person who's using it.”

“Violence does not need to be used often. It merely needs to be convincing when it is used. The threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than the coercion itself.”

“Toxic shame is where we're stuck. It's like we're stuck in quicksand. We can't move forward. Coercive control contributes to that quicksand.”

“Our sympathetic nervous system's job is to keep us alive. It activates, gets us ready to fight, flight, freeze. Coercive control activates that sympathetic nervous system even if there's not actually a threat. Our sympathetic nervous system engages instantly to keep us alive and our parasympathetic can take days, weeks, often to kick in.”

“One of the biggest after effects of domestic violence is hits to self-trust. That's a big one.”

“Coercive control and power and control are hard to see. They're hard to understand. One survivor said in a powerful statement that the chains of abuse and power and control are invisible.”

“The most common form that we are going to see is that verbal control or that verbal manipulation. We can see it in ways that come to put guilt, to put shame on the victim survivor. The purpose of it is so that their self-worth is undermined to the point where they're less likely to resist the abuse.”

“Another aspect we see when it comes to sexual assaults is the use of alcohol or substances. It can show up as a person willingly wanting to drink alcohol, use substances. It can show up as someone being forced to use that alcohol or substances, or it can be someone feeling pressured to use that.”

“When these tactics are being used during a sexual assault, the goal is that they will engage in this sexual activity because they don't feel they have any other option. When that does happen over time, this creates a big power dynamic which then makes that victim survivor feel trapped in that relationship and fearful of what could happen if they do ever not want to participate or refuse any of those sexual demands.”

“One of the big issues with coercive control is that it disrupts the victim survivors' ability to even kind of communicate what's happening to them to the system actors that might be able to help. If what's happening to you is subtle and it's not something that the person who's trying to help you is predisposed to recognize, you know if someone's used to looking at black eyes and what they're now seeing is somebody being insidiously controlled via verbal commands or threats, they might not have the same level of response that they probably should.”

“It is universally accepted by people here in our domestic violence abuse prevention movement. But it's not every person you see on the street will immediately recognize that as a form of abuse. And so that's one of the biggest thing that impacts our community responses is that level of self advocacy that every victim survivor in every abuse situation has to do gets harder when it's hard to have that exact language to describe what's happening to me.”

“A lot of the people that we work with right, they tend to say things along the lines of like well I'm helping them. They don't know what they're doing wrong. Or they say well you have the borderline, it's not borderline personalities or it's the borderline. And she's got the borderline. She doesn't know what she's doing. She does this all over the place. She's very emotional. Or you know she keeps flirting and she's giving her kids a bad example of what it means to be a mom or what it means to be a woman and I'm just trying to keep her straight.”

“He had over the years now like five years convinced his wife that she needed medications, she needed to go to the hospital because she's feeling suicidal. 'You didn't hear what you just said in front of the kids. Honey, why are we arguing about this? I'm trying to protect the kids and you need help.' After about the fifth or sixth time that she went to the hospital, a social worker realized she'd recognized these kids before and befriended them. She told the dad 'Why don't I take the kids, get them some ice cream and you take care of your wife?' When taking the kids off to the side she asked him 'So what's going on, why does mom keep coming here?' Well, 'Daddy's making her think that she's not a good mom. Daddy's making her think that she's better off. Daddy's making her think that her medications aren't working.'”

“When you start seeing the trajectory from somebody who's starting off in their previous relationships, if it worked in one relationship a little bit to get what you want or at least make you feel like you're not as insecure, then you'll do it again in the next relationship until there's an intervention. And often times these individuals that come in and they're still young, they're still in a relationship, 'Well I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought that I was trying to be a good man.'”

“As they get older and they've gotten through the system, maybe they've gone through some charges and convictions, maybe they've gone through some anger management, they're beginning to realize that their job is to not get caught. Right, so then that's where the denying, the minimizing becomes more insidious. 'Honey let's be honest. I was trying to take care of you. Your mental health symptoms were coming out. The kids were watching it. Everybody heard you yelling at me. I was just trying to keep the peace.'”

“Shame is often when we're talking shame, I'm talking in this case toxic shame. The barrier here is feeling dirty, feeling disgusted, becomes a barrier to being able to go in to get help. Right, if I believe in my heart that I deserved what I got, it's going to be really hard for me to want to reach out, be able to manage the relationship side and be able to reach out and ask for help because again when I'm in that place of toxic shame, I don't want to socially connect.”

“A lot of those individuals think we're going to think they're crazy. And that's real because they have been told so many times that they're crazy, whether it be by their partners, by family members, or even by themselves. They've been told they're crazy, right? So they're expecting us to say the same to them.”

“If I tell you enough times that the grass is pink because you trust me, eventually you're going to believe the grass is pink. Does that actually make the grass pink? It doesn't. But you start to believe it. Right? That's the power of this coercive control.”

“Emotional reasoning is where I feel an emotion, oftentimes like conviction or fear or shame, and because I feel an emotion, it convinces me the thought behind my emotion is true. This is one of the biggest after effects of experiencing any trauma. Because I experience an emotion that comes with the thought, I convince myself that thought is true. So that emotional reasoning is a massive barrier to seeking out treatment.”

“People will choose to turn to other forms of self-medication. We'll see things like substance abuse. People will turn to substance abuse. The overlap between eating disorders and trauma is well over 90%. People will turn to unhealthy coping strategies because they are looking for any way to manage because again, going to seek out help takes being in relationship and that is really freaking hard.”

“One of the biggest ways we see is support systems. Whether they're moving them away from family, maybe making them feel guilty about wanting to go out for dinner with friends, they're slowly taking away those relationships that people have comfort in. Another way is monitoring their daily activities. That can be something like having cameras in the house so that they feel like they're being watched. They're always feeling like someone's watching them, controlling what they're doing even in their home.”

“Even going into controlling aspects of their health and body, I've seen it where people are on exercise regimens where they're on a diet regimen. They're controlling even something that maybe brought that person joy at one point and now it's another thing that's being controlled. They can deny them finances. So maybe at one point they made them quit their job. Maybe they're given an allowance every week that they can only use or maybe they don't even have access to their finances. The goal of all of that is to not have that person doesn't have any autonomy anymore, which makes it that much harder for them to be able to leave.”

“Reproductive coercion can be done in multiple ways. That can be done as limiting access to birth control. That can be forcing someone to be on birth control. It can be forcing to terminate pregnancies, it can be forcing them to go through with the pregnancy. Not only is it the physical aspect that affects that with reproductive abuse, but it also is a huge mental effect. If a woman is going through a pregnancy where it's maybe something they didn't want, they're going to have a lot of resentment towards that pregnancy and they might even have resentment towards that child, which then can really impact that mother-child bonding experience.”

“A lot of people then will look at their children and they're seeing that as a reminder of that abuse and that control that's ongoing in that relationship. Depression is a big thing that we that they're they could experience. And then in regards to the baby, low birth weight is a really big side effect that can happen just because of the possibility that it was a poor pregnancy, poor support, whatever it might be.”

“The biggest protective factor against any mental health diagnosis that there is is social support. Earlier Jeff asked us all to stand if we had experienced domestic violence or knew somebody who had. The reality is every single one of us in this room could have been standing because the prevalence rates of domestic violence and sexual violence are that high. I would be really hard-pressed to believe there's not a person in this room who doesn't at least know somebody who's experienced it, which means that we all have the ability to make a difference in somebody's lives.”

“My answer to them always is just be there. Avoid that question. Please, please, please don't ask that question 'Why don't you just leave?' That question induces shame. Instead of trying to push somebody to do what you really really want them to do, be there. Be their social support. Be with them. Walk with them. Support them. Ask them what they need. Don't be their rescuer. Be their empowerer.”

“For a survivor to be able to really work on managing their self-talk, there's a lot of good ways to be able to do that. Psychotherapy is one of them. There's a number of really good post-traumatic stress disorder structured protocols. Being able to really fight back on that self-talk, getting through that shame, getting through those shame-based statements, getting through that black-white thinking, that emotional reasoning, being able to fight back, being able to get through the 'I shoulds.'”

“There's a difference between submission and consent. Submission means that you are doing something without consent. Consent means you are doing it freely. When we are talking about things, this is sexual violence awareness month. If somebody is holding me at gunpoint and asks for my wallet and I give them my wallet, I am submitting to them to give them my wallet. I am not consenting to give them my wallet. The same is true in the context of sexual relationships and bodily autonomy.”

“We have to do things like work through self-compassion, work through self-care, work through self-love. For some people it involves breaking the silence. Thank you for everybody in here that's an advocate that's helped do things like write victim impact statements, that have helped people with memoirs. That's a really big part of breaking the silence. So that's also a big part of how we help people break free from all of this.”

“Yes, I completely agree that anybody's capable of change. And it starts with a choice, realizing that what you're doing isn't working. It's destructive. It's toxic to relationships, to yourself. Even the amounts of cortisol that you dump into your body when you're an angry person—fatty liver is associated with that.”

“One question that guys don't get asked often, and we've had some individuals that have done some heinous things, we're listening to like people who have really hurt people. We ask 'Where did you learn how to do that? Where was that model for you?' And then it starts the cycle going like 'Oh my gosh, yeah, there was a genesis to this and it wasn't a happy little story of being raised in a home where I got everything I wanted. There's a lot of ACEs back there.' So what we do is we look at cognitive behavioral models. I specifically use dialectical behavioral therapy to be able to get to the trauma that may exist.”

“We do see most of our clients that come through our programming do stop. It's we have some cool stories. You see the transition guys coming in and saying things like 'Hey I just got out of jail. When did you get out?' to like 'Man, you're going to want to stay in this program. It's going to change your life.' We were just listening to a guy this past Tuesday saying 'Man, I've only been using these skills. I wish I learned this when I was 12 years old. I wouldn't have gotten myself into these messes. I wouldn't have done the things I've done. I wouldn't have been so mad and felt like this is the only way to do things.'”

“We're not doing a good enough job. We need to do better. We can't have programs where guys just go, they show up and because there's nothing else then they get a check mark. We're dealing with individuals who if we don't intervene effectively with the most evidence-based and empirically supported treatments, programming, whatever you want to call it, then we're creating a problem.”

“Historically, the conversation where we started using this phrase 'coercive control' a lot of people think of that as like starting to kick up around the '90s and especially recently. This isn't a new concept nor is it a new thing that's happening to people. If you look back at the Seneca Falls convention, women's convention 1848, we often times think of that as like the kickoff of the women's suffrage movement, but the declaration of grievances at that included things like freedom to divorce, fair shake at custody proceedings. A lot of these things were expressing an imbalance in the power between men and women in relationships.”

“When we talk about coercive control, I think it's important that we know that our kids can use that word, that they can say 'coercive control,' that they know what it means, so that if it's happening to them they can express that instead of just saying like 'Oh my boyfriend is being a jerk.' They might be able to use actual language to determine if this is a regular type of a boyfriend being a jerk or if it is something more than that.”

“Because of the way that society is structured and the power dynamics that we have, this is most commonly a situation where a man is the perpetrator and a woman is the victim. That is not always the case. We have cases of men being victims with women as perpetrators. LGBT relationships are certainly not immune to this. So I think it's just really important to kind of wrap those in, know that you should be talking about this to your daughters and your sons, both from the perspective of them being a perpetrator or them being a victim.”

“When you're reporting on domestic violence, we always want to make sure that you are using words that are affirming to a victim, that are not blaming a victim, and that are expressing what actually happened without using too much euphemism. But importantly also, we want if someone to read that story and say 'This sounds like what's happening to me,' we want there to be right at the bottom that if you or someone you know needs domestic violence services, call and then the number is usually the Day One hotline. If you can add those types of resources into articles about coercive control, there's still no harm in making sure everybody knows where they can find their resources.”

“People should be able to talk with clarity about what they're experiencing in their relationship. And part of that is on them to learn the words. And part of that is on you to listen through whatever words they're using.”

“There are not right now laws that specifically name coercive control. There are ways that elements of coercive control can come into a court case. So for example in a custody proceeding, one of the things that parents have to be talking about is their ability to cooperate together. A lawyer might say 'Hey look at this pattern of behavior right?' So there are ways that it can come in even if it's not explicitly named.”

“Everybody in our movement agrees that this is a form of domestic violence that it requires confrontation. Not everybody agrees if the state and if the justice system is the right venue for confronting the issue. One thing I want to start off saying is everybody in our movement agrees that this is a form of domestic violence that it requires confrontation. In the UK it is just in their definition of domestic violence for the purpose of crimes, family court orders for protection. In the US, a few states have started to introduce it. Some of them specifically say coercive control. Others have a description of the behaviors that a domestic violence advocate would recognize as coercive control but they might not use that word.”

“With this being a more subtle form of abuse that's harder to explain, you're not explaining an event, right? A physical abuse event—something like somebody getting punched, somebody getting strangled. That's an event that can be proven and specifically happened in like a tangible period of time. But coercive control is a relationship dynamic. It's still abuse but it's a more difficult thing to prove. And one of the fears that we have is that we already have a really hard time getting people their order for protection if they're experiencing physical violence. We already have a hard time getting people believed if they're experiencing physical violence. And we just don't know quite yet if we're ready to start addressing this other thing through the law.”

“We have some issues with specifically people of color being viewed as aggressors when they're not being aggressors. And so when we're talking about a relationship dynamic and you're trying to explain a relationship dynamic that might be coercive control, there's fear that abusers might control the narrative and might make specifically women of color look like aggressors when they're just doing regular relationship stuff to assert their needs.”

“Whether you are seeing this happening in your own life, whether you are law enforcement, whether you're a systems actor, if you're seeing this happen and you don't think that you can bring a criminal charge, you don't think you can do something like that, you still have 360 communities here. You can refer to advocates who have the best practices on that. You still have the Day One hotline. You have this whole community-based network of people who know about this issue who are ready to help clients deal with it even if that's not necessarily through a typical state response.”

“There's every corner of the state has somebody there to listen to survivors and you just got to refer. It's a network of people ready to fight for you. It's a network of people ready to listen to you, believe you, and it's a network of people for if you are here from the system for you to refer to and rely on as partners in making sure that the people you see suffering from domestic and sexual violence can get the help, the community support that they need.”

“Understand what the goal of that abuser is for those victim survivors. They want to take away independence. They want to make them feel scared and isolated. The tactics they use are a variety of ways. It's not just physical. It's not just sexual. It's not just mental control. It can be all aspects and it can be a range of when they show up. These tactics that are used are targeted and tailored specifically to those victim survivors and they are subtle and they escalate slowly over time. You don't always have to fill the space with your voice. Sometimes being a presence there and listening and encouraging them and knowing that you hear them and their story is sometimes the encouragement they need to continue to get help.”

“Coercive control is real and it has after effects and those after effects are treatable. I have seen the research. I've seen the brain scans. There is no trauma out there that can't be treated. So I ask you all to please know and to please make sure that you refer for good treatments. Trauma is treatable.”

“If you've gotten a little bit behind on your research, behind on your reading, behind on developing programming, behind on what's actually happening these days, you're not doing the people that you're serving a service. I'll ask you and I'll challenge you as a colleague in the field to rise up to that level. Read the research. Do your homework. Get the training right. And let's get people safe again.”

“I think for me it's knowing that we need to stop asking why people don't just leave. Hopefully this conversation has helped equipped you with all of the reasons or part of the reasons why people don't just leave, so we don't have to ask that question anymore.”