Coercive control is increasingly recognised as a pattern of behaviour that restricts another person’s freedom. This has enabled professionals to look beyond isolated incidents and recognise domination that is cumulative, patterned and often hidden.

But a behavioural understanding of coercive control is not enough.

If we assess coercive control only by compiling lists of acts, such as monitoring, intimidation, isolation, financial restriction, threats or interference with relationships, we may identify what happened without fully understanding what it did to the minds and relationships of those living within it. But coercive control is also a psychological environment because it shapes what can safely be felt, thought, remembered, spoken and loved. It alters the meaning of closeness, independence and disagreement. For children, whose psychological organisation develops within caregiving relationships, this is especially consequential.

A psychologically informed understanding must therefore examine not only control between adults, but the relational world in which the child has been developing. In particular, it must recognise the potential harm to children living within enmeshed or disorganised caregiving relationships. This is highly relevant after divorce, when a child’s presentation may be treated as if it explains itself. A child may align intensely with one parent, reject another, speak with rigid certainty, appear frightened, become controlling, or insist that their position is wholly independent. These are important communications. But they are presentations, not complete explanations of their own origins.

The task is not to disbelieve the child. It is to investigate the psychological conditions in which the child’s beliefs, fears and relationships developed.

Coercive control is more than a catalogue of acts

The Home Office statutory guidance describes coercive control as creating “invisible chains” that deprive a person of liberty and reduce their ability to act. It recognises that coercive control may include emotional and psychological abuse and that its cumulative nature can be missed when behaviours are viewed separately (Home Office, 2023).

This account takes us towards a psychological understanding. The defining harm is not found only in what the controlling person does. It is also found in the progressive narrowing of the other person’s world. Under coercive control, the victim may retain theoretical choices while losing the psychological freedom to exercise them. They learn to anticipate reactions, avoid forbidden subjects, monitor the controlling person’s emotional state and abandon actions that may produce anger, withdrawal, accusation or danger. Eventually, external control may become internal vigilance.

For a child, this process takes place within dependency. The child cannot simply leave the relational field. Their caregiver is ordinarily the source of safety, regulation, recognition and belonging. When access to these depends upon compliance, the attachment relationship itself may become the medium through which control operates. Coercive control must therefore be understood not only as restriction of behaviour, but as restriction of psychological and relational freedom.

Enmeshment: when separateness becomes unsafe

Enmeshment is sometimes reduced to excessive closeness. Healthy closeness, however, supports the child’s emerging separateness. The child can disagree, hold mixed feelings, love other people and develop an increasingly independent mind without threatening the relationship.

Enmeshment is different. It involves blurred intergenerational boundaries and a loss of psychological distinctiveness between parent and child.

Thompson, Platts and Davies’s meta-analysis of 478 studies defines enmeshment as the entanglement and blurring of the parent–child boundary through psychologically controlling and intrusive behaviours. It places enmeshment within the wider construct of boundary dissolution and finds associations between all identified boundary-dissolution patterns and children’s internalising and externalising symptoms (Thompson, Platts, & Davies, 2024).

The direct connection with coercive control is important. Enmeshment is not simply a feeling of closeness. It may be maintained through intrusion into the child’s inner world and the restriction of psychological autonomy.

Research using the Inadequate Boundaries Questionnaire describes a lack of boundaries as circumstances in which children are perceived and treated as extensions of the parent. Within the same framework, psychological control refers to manipulative and intrusive parenting that inhibits children’s autonomy so that the parent can maintain power in the relationship. Guilt induction describes children being coerced into compliance through guilt, while triangulation includes circumstances in which a child is required to side with one parent against the other (Penner et al., 2024).

These processes may teach the child that:

my feelings must correspond with yours;

your distress is my responsibility;

disagreement is disloyalty;

loving someone whom you fear or hate is a betrayal;

closeness depends upon my confirmation of your reality;

psychological separation risks anger, withdrawal, collapse or abandonment.

An explicit command is not necessary. Coercive pressure can be communicated through anxiety, silence, facial expression, repeated interrogation, emotional withdrawal, selective approval, catastrophising or the parent’s inability to tolerate the child’s separate relationship.

The child adapts by monitoring the parent and editing the self. Feelings that preserve the attachment can be expressed; feelings that endanger it may be disowned. The child may come to experience compliance not as something externally imposed but as something necessary, natural and entirely their own. The central injury of enmeshment is therefore not merely that the child is close to the parent. It is that the child is insufficiently free to be psychologically separate from the parent.

Disorganised caregiving: when the source of safety is also the source of alarm

A different but related form of harm occurs in disorganised caregiving relationships.

Attachment theory describes the child’s need to approach a caregiver when frightened. But what happens when the caregiver who should provide safety is also frightening, frightened, dissociative, hostile, helpless or radically unpredictable?

Hesse and Main describe this as an approach–flight paradox: the child’s attachment system draws them towards the caregiver at the same time as fear pushes them away. Frightening, threatening, dissociative or frightened parental behaviour can leave the child without a coherent strategy for securing safety (Hesse & Main, 2006).

Research reviews similarly associate frightening and unpredictable caregiving—including intrusive and hostile behaviour—with attachment disorganisation (Doyle & Cicchetti, 2017). Thompson and colleagues describe the disorganisation form of parent–child boundary dissolution as a chaotic boundary marked by inexplicable and contradictory behaviour and no coherent pattern of relating (Thompson et al., 2024).These ideas must be used carefully however because disorganised attachment behaviour is not, in and of itself, a diagnosis of maltreatment, does not identify a particular perpetrator and cannot by itself prove that coercive control has occurred. But it does signal the need to look closer because the child who is being harmed cannot say the words ‘help me’ they can only show their predicament through their behaviour. The caregiving process is clinically vital. When safety and alarm arise from the same relationship, the child must somehow adapt to an unsolvable problem.

Therefore the child may become:

compulsively compliant or watchful;

emotionally frozen or dissociative;

controlling and punitive;

controlling and caregiving;

highly sensitive to changes in the caregiver’s mood;

rigid in their efforts to make relationships predictable;

unable to integrate loving and frightening experiences of the same person.

What appears later as certainty, hostility, caretaking, dominance or emotional shutdown may therefore have a regulatory function. The behaviour may be an attempt to organise an interpersonal world that has not reliably organised safety for the child.

Two pathways through which coercive control harms children

Enmeshed and disorganised caregiving relationships are not interchangeable. A child can experience one without the other, and different patterns may coexist within the same family. The distinction is nevertheless illuminating.

In an enmeshed relationship, the child’s separate mind threatens attachment security. In a disorganised relationship, the attachment figure is simultaneously associated with safety and danger, leaving the child without a stable strategy for approaching or avoiding them.

Relational pattern	Psychological dilemma for the child	Possible adaptation
Enmeshment	“Can I have a separate mind and still remain connected to you?”	Agreement, self-suppression, guilt-driven compliance, alignment
Disorganised caregiving	“Where can I find safety when my source of safety is also alarming?”	Freezing, dissociation, contradictory behaviour, controlling-caregiving or controlling-punitive strategies

Coercive control may interact with either pathway. It may intensify enmeshment by making autonomy, privacy and other attachments unsafe. It may contribute to disorganisation by creating a caregiving environment that is frightening, unpredictable or governed by incompatible signals. It may also undermine the other caregiver, thereby reducing the child’s access to a relationship that might otherwise help organise safety.

Children should not therefore be understood merely as witnesses to coercive control between adults. They live inside the relational system coercive control creates.

Children as direct victims of the controlling environment

The Home Office guidance recognises children as victims in their own right when they see, hear or experience the effects of domestic abuse. It also instructs professionals to consider both coercive control directed at children and the use of children to exert control over another parent (Home Office, 2023).

Xyrakis and colleagues’ systematic review of 51 studies supports this whole-family perspective. Interparental coercive control was associated with poorer family functioning, harsher parenting, higher levels of child abuse, strained parent–child relationships and children being used as tools and becoming co-victims. The review also identified internalising and externalising difficulties and restrictions upon children’s opportunities to socialise (Xyrakis et al., 2024).

Katz’s research shows that children living with coercive-control-based domestic abuse can experience highly restrictive and unfree family lives, with limited opportunities to develop confidence, competence, independence and social skills (Katz, 2016). Callaghan and colleagues likewise demonstrate that children respond actively to coercive environments, developing strategies of resistance and adaptation rather than simply observing adult abuse from the sidelines (Callaghan et al., 2018).

The psychological question however is not only, “What did the child witness?” It is:

What did this relational environment require the child to become in order to remain as safe and connected as possible?

Why this matters after divorce

Post-divorce assessment often takes place after the family’s relational patterns have become polarised. Professionals may encounter a child who presents with intense alignment, complete rejection, fear, adult-like certainty, rigid blame or a striking absence of ambivalence.

There are many possible explanations. The child may be responding to harmful or frightening parenting by the rejected parent. They may be reacting to conflict, instability, developmental pressures or genuine experiences of neglect or abuse. They may have been exposed to coercive control between adults. They may be enmeshed with a caregiver, caught in a loyalty conflict or trying to regulate a disorganised caregiving relationship. Several processes may operate simultaneously.

No single behaviour proves which explanation is correct.

But neither should the child’s stated position close down investigation. The child’s account is essential evidence of their subjective experience; it is not, by itself, a complete developmental and relational formulation.

A psychologically informed investigation should ask:

What was the history of caregiving and family power before, during and after separation?

When and how did the child’s presentation change?

Is the child’s account grounded in their own experiences, and is it proportionate and developmentally coherent?

Is the child able to express mixed feelings and retrieve both positive and negative memories?

Is the child free to disagree with the parent upon whom they depend?

What happens when the child expresses affection, interest or curiosity about the other parent?

Does each parent support the child’s psychological separateness in observable behaviour?

Is the child monitoring, protecting, soothing or managing a caregiver?

Is the caregiver frightening, frightened, dissociative, intrusive, hostile or markedly unpredictable?

Has the child been drawn into adult information, allegations or decision-making?

Are guilt, fear, surveillance, interrogation, emotional withdrawal or selective approval shaping the child’s relationships?

Is there evidence that either parent has harmed, frightened or coercively controlled the child or the other parent?

What competing hypotheses have been actively tested against records, observed interactions and evidence from multiple sources?

This requires assessment of the whole relational system, not merely an interview with the child followed by repetition of their stated wishes.

Listening to children without abandoning adult responsibility

Children have a right to be heard. They should be listened to respectfully and protected from repetitive, suggestive or adversarial questioning. Their fears and wishes must never be dismissed simply because family influence is possible. But hearing a child does not require adults to place the entire burden of interpretation upon them. A child cannot be expected to identify enmeshment while psychologically embedded within it. A child cannot be expected to explain a disorganised attachment dilemma that developed before they possessed language for it. Nor can a child be expected to distinguish unaided between danger arising from one parent and fear absorbed, amplified or required within a relationship with another.

That is the work of careful adult investigation.

The aim is neither automatic reunification nor automatic validation of rejection. The aim is to establish what has happened, what remains dangerous, what the child’s presentation is protecting against and which relationships support—or obstruct—the child’s developmental need for safety, psychological integrity and freedom.

Towards a psychological understanding of coercive control

The behavioural definition of coercive control remains necessary, but it is incomplete unless joined to a psychological and developmental understanding. Coercive control does not only restrict where someone goes, whom they see or what they do. It can colonise attention, organise fear, regulate permissible feelings and narrow the relationships a person is psychologically able to sustain.

For children, this may occur through enmeshment, in which psychological separation becomes dangerous, or through disorganised caregiving, in which the source of safety is also a source of alarm. The adaptations that follow may look like compliance, rigid alignment, rejection, caretaking, control, hostility, fragmentation or withdrawal. These presentations should never be converted mechanically into conclusions. They should prompt investigation.

The central question is not simply whether a child has expressed a clear view. It is whether the child has developed within relationships that allow enough safety and psychological freedom to experience and express the full complexity of that view.

Understanding coercive control psychologically means recognising the invisible organisation of the child’s world. It means looking beyond incidents to patterns, beyond words to relational conditions, and beyond expressed preference to the child’s freedom to have a separate mind.

Only then can we begin to understand not merely what the child is saying, but what has happened to the child and crucially, what the child may need in order to recover.

References

Callaghan, J. E. M., Alexander, J. H., Sixsmith, J., & Fellin, L. C. (2018). Children’s experiences of domestic violence and abuse: Siblings’ accounts of relational coping. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23(4), 649–668. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104517720235

Doyle, C., & Cicchetti, D. (2017). From the cradle to the grave: The effect of adverse caregiving environments on attachment and relationships throughout the lifespan. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 24(2), 203–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12192

Granqvist, P., Sroufe, L. A., Dozier, M., Hesse, E., Steele, M., van IJzendoorn, M., Solomon, J., Schuengel, C., Fearon, P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M., Steele, H., Cassidy, J., Carlson, E., Madigan, S., Jacobvitz, D., Foster, S., Behrens, K., Rifkin-Graboi, A., Gribneau, N., … Duschinsky, R. (2017). Disorganized attachment in infancy: A review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers. Attachment & Human Development, 19(6), 534–558. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2017.1354040

Hesse, E., & Main, M. (2006). Frightened, threatening, and dissociative parental behavior in low-risk samples: Description, discussion, and interpretations. Development and Psychopathology, 18(2), 309–343. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579406060172

Home Office. (2023). Controlling or coercive behaviour: Statutory guidance framework. UK Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/controlling-or-coercive-behaviour-statutory-guidance-framework

Katz, E. (2016). Beyond the physical incident model: How children living with domestic violence are harmed by and resist regimes of coercive control. Child Abuse Review, 25(1), 46–59. https://doi.org/10.1002/car.2422

Penner, F., Cano, K., McGill, C., Vanwoerden, S., & Sharp, C. (2024). Psychometric properties of the parent and youth versions of the Inadequate Boundaries Questionnaire in community and clinical samples of adolescents. Child Psychiatry & Human Development, 55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-022-01438-0

Thompson, M. J., Platts, C. R., & Davies, P. T. (2024). Parent–child boundary dissolution and children’s psychological difficulties: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 150(7), 873–919. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000440

Xyrakis, N., Aquilina, B., McNiece, E., Tran, T., Waddell, C., Suomi, A., & Pasalich, D. (2024). Interparental coercive control and child and family outcomes: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1), 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380221139243

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News From the Family Separation Clinic

A New Season of Relational Repair

This season we are beginning a new phase of our work with parents who are living through a child’s rejection. Over almost three decades of working with families affected by a child’s alignment with one parent and rejection of the other, we have learned that waiting for a child to change their mind is not enough. Neither is endlessly trying harder, explaining more, appeasing, persuading or hoping that the passage of time alone will bring change.

The Lighthouse Keeping Relational Repair Pathway is designed to help parents to understand where their child is psychologically, what maintains the child’s defensive rejection, and what you can do at each stage to create the conditions in which relational repair becomes possible. This is not about learning how to chase a child more effectively. It is about recovering your psychological position as a parent and learning how to become a steady, recognisable and emotionally safe presence in your child’s relational world.

To that end our courses and resources this season will all be focused on sharing the core skills of relational repair. From Holding up a Healthy Mirror, to the Right Action at the Right Time, everything we will be doing will be about maximising your ability to achieve proximity to your children and through that deploy relational healing. Based upon our work over almost two decades, this approach is a synergy of the literature on attachment trauma and successful clinical practice with alienated children and their families.  Meaning what you learn from us is not just what is happening or why it is happening but how to heal the harms that have been caused by it happening in the first place.

At the Family Separation Clinic we are, first of all, psychotherapists and our focus is on therapeutic work which really makes a difference, as we head into the new season we welcome you to join us on one of our circles, seminars or courses, where you are guaranteed a warm welcome, a focused learning environment and our presence throughout your journey.  Remember that our work is always about finding the most effective ways to heal attachment traumatised children and we recycle the income from our courses and resources into continuous development of our services. Which means that when you work with us you are part of a community which is focused upon building routes to healing which are as widely available as possible. As with all of our services, your ability to pay or not does not determine your access, if you want to attend a course and cannot afford it, let us know and we will do all we can to help. This season we have free circles to celebrate the launch of the book The Journey of the Alienated Child and a Christmas Gathering for all parents and wider family and friends who would like to come together to listen to help and healing strategies at what can be a very painful time of the year. Read on for details and we look forward to seeing you online very soon.