Reclaiming Our Lives with Pattern Recognition and Reverse Engineering

I was raised by a woman who gaslit, manipulated, punished, and raged at me for no good reason. As a teen and young adult, the more I learned how to recognize what was harmful and dangerous about my mom’s behaviors, the more I learned to recognize those behaviors elsewhere, in other individuals, and also in organizations and systems.

For example: We lived on a rural property with few near neighbors, and my parents kept us busy with chores, organized sports, and music lessons. This kept us isolated in subtle ways. I rarely had individual play dates as a child, and had to get parental approval and transportation for rare teenage hangouts. Otherwise, I only saw others in groups and was expected to behave in certain ways in public. If I didn’t, I could be pulled out of the group for the remainder of the activity, and punished when we left. I didn’t have the opportunity to be my authentic self with others, or to let them know what was really going on at home.

Our culture isolates people, too. Moving for work is so common that many people live far from their families and communities of origin. Keeping wages low ensures that most people are struggling to survive, working so many hours that they don’t have much energy or time left for their most important relationships, let alone their neighbors and communities. People have been writing for years about the challenges of making and sustaining friendships as adults. This means that it’s difficult to tell others what is really going on and even more difficult to carry out mutual aid.

[This is a post, not a book, so I’ll save additional examples for a future post.]

I got to a point where I was seeing all of these things as fractals. The same tactics that are used by individuals to control other individuals and groups are being used to control larger groups and whole societies, too.

An alfalfa field at dawn.

In the last several months, I started following some creators who are writing and speaking brilliantly about different aspects of this phenomenon, especially Zawn Villines and Daniella Mestyanek Young. Zawn is deconstructing patriarchy and Daniella is a cult survivor and scholar. They both talk about how the point of these systems is to benefit men/the cult leader(s) and to exploit the labor of women, children, and cult members. Taken together with my own experience and observations, these women helped me connect the dots to apply a term usually used to describe the behavior of abusive partners and parents to the tactics used by other individuals, organizations, and systems on a broader scale: coercive control.

Coercive control is a pattern of behavior that one party employs to exert power and control over another party or group. The behaviors vary in specifics, but commonly involve isolation, intimidation, punishment for asserting authority, manipulation, financial abuse, and more. This is done to benefit the controlling party in multiple ways: they get more power, resources, and leisure. My observation and experience, which I haven’t yet read or heard from other sources in quite this way, is that the main benefit to the controlling party might be in exploiting the emotional labor of their targets. The controlling party often grabs for emotional regulation or relief by venting their rage, demanding reassurance or accolades, or refusing to acknowledge the other party’s needs while centering their own. The target of this behavior is doing the emotional labor of accepting responsibility for the other party’s emotions, walking on eggshells, trying to manage their own feelings and behavior to keep the abuser from lashing out, and apologizing for having needs or not reading the abuser’s mind. The controlling party has effectively outsourced the labor of regulating their own emotions to their target.

The “haves” have been exploiting the labor of the “have-nots” for centuries. It continues to this day, with governments and oligarchs propping up divide-and-conquer strategies such as patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, gender essentialism, ableism, childism, and more. These strategies serve to keep us in isolated groups, rather than building and maintaining healthy, robust, inclusive communities and economies.

As much as it sucks to acknowledge this, it’s also empowering and liberating. First, when you can name a thing, you can learn about it–and how to change it. Without a name it feels like a looming cloud that blots out the sun. When you can name the thing, it now has shape, form, and structure. You can hold it, at least mentally. It immediately becomes smaller (though not necessarily lighter). Second, when we can name things, it becomes easier to talk about them, to get support, and to collectively figure out what to do about them. 

When I was a teen, I started telling my mom that her behavior was hurtful. I assumed that she didn’t know and that she didn’t want to hurt me, so if I told her, she would change her behavior. I was wrong. She doubled down, claiming to be justified because of some fault of mine, often accusing me of the very same thing I had just pointed out in her behavior. Every conversation ended with me being told to go work on myself. My concern was completely dismissed, ignored, invalidated, and unresolved.

The thing is, I actually did go do that work. I was horrified by the suggestion that I might be hurting others in the same ways my mom was hurting me. If I was doing those things, I was determined to stop! Thus, I began to reverse engineer how to be a kind human.

Collectively, we don’t have to start from scratch like I did as a teenager. We have more resources and support available to many people than were available to me. That said, a reverse engineering framework is still a useful guide. What does coercive control do? Let’s do the opposite.

“They” (the people and systems using coercive control) want us isolated, desperate, blaming ourselves or other oppressed groups for systemic problems, working until we drop, and giving them more and more of our time/energy/resources. If we don’t have time/energy/resources to give them, or if we’re perceived to be costing more time/energy/resources than they extract from us, they consider us worthless and better off dead.

So we turn that around. We connect with each other and work to meet each other’s needs. We stop blaming ourselves or other oppressed beings for systemic problems, and start attributing them to the people and systems perpetrating coercive control. We “quiet quit” on abusive relationships and systems and save our energy to build equitable relationships and communities. We recognize the fundamental truth that everyone is worthy of life, care, and love, and that “contributions” come in many more forms than what is currently considered profitable by the oppressors. We build relationships and communities on reciprocity, not exploitation.

There is so much more to say about this. For now, I believe that there are many ways to create healthy communities and healthy people, and many people who are already doing this work. It’s becoming more common to discuss and work towards healing from trauma and coercive control. I believe at some point we will reach a critical mass of people who are doing this work as individuals and in groups, and we will begin to see a shift in culture. I see this as a positive feedback loop or virtuous cycle. I hope everyone who wants to do this work can find a way to do it that works for them (admittedly, access and affordability are challenges for many), and invite anyone who feels drawn to work with me to learn more about Conspire to Thrive or book a coaching session.