Why Smart People Miss the Signs of Coercive Control

Coercive control can be difficult to recognize because it often begins long before physical violence. It can look like intense attention, seemingly reasonable concerns about your relationships, increasing expectations around your time and communication, or subtle pressure that gradually makes your world smaller.

In this episode of Hey Tabi, licensed trauma therapist and domestic abuse/ coercive control expert Tabitha Westbrook explains why the pattern matters more than any single behavior. She explores how coercive control can affect intimate relationships while also examining similar dynamics in workplaces, churches and religious organizations, families, politics, and online communities.

You’ll also hear why charisma and character are not the same thing. Confidence doesn’t automatically equal competence. Charm doesn’t guarantee safety. Authority doesn’t guarantee integrity. And someone can be deeply admired in public while behaving very differently toward the people closest to them.

Rather than leaving you with a list of red flags that could create fear or suspicion, Tabitha offers a framework for discernment. One of the central questions is simple: Is this influence expanding your ability to think, flourish, maintain healthy relationships, and exercise your own judgment—or is it slowly narrowing your world?

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Transcript

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Coercive Control Before Violence

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Two public figures, both respected, they both held real positions of power, and both eventually faced allegations or arrests for violence at home. And I'll be honest with you, that part doesn't surprise me anymore. What surprises me is this. If those allegations are true, and I'm just gonna keep saying if because they haven't been proven in a court of law, then there were almost certainly warning signs long before anyone ever witnessed a single moment of physical violence. There was a pattern. It's a pattern that to most of us we miss it because it doesn't start with bruises. It doesn't start with a broken bone or a police report. It starts with something so much quieter, something that is a lot harder to name. It's called coercive control. Welcome to Hey Tabby, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud with our actual lips. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how it intersects with the Christian faith. Nothing is off limits here, and we are not take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook, and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, but I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now, let's get going. Welcome to this week's episode of Hey Tabby. And today I want to show you exactly what coercive control looks like and why so many of us, smart, discerning, and well-meaning people, walk right past it. My learning to see this, learning to understand this pattern can do two things at once. It can protect you in your own relationships, and it can help all of us stop handing power and applause to people who have plenty of charisma and nowhere near enough character. So stay with me for this episode of Hey Tabby, and let's dive into this topic. So here's something that I have noticed after years of doing this work. When some people hear the term domestic violence, they picture exactly one thing: an explosive night, a terrible decision, maybe even a few explosive nights, drinking, alcohol, drugs, whatever, right? It's to them a single moment where everything went wrong. There was an argument that got out of control, and then somebody did something that they regret. But I'll be honest with you, that's almost never how it actually happens. And for those of us who work with this, that is for sure not how we understand it either. More often than not, physical

Physical Violence Is The End

SPEAKER_00 3:32

violence is it's just not the beginning of the story. It's actually the end of one or the most visible part of one. This story starts long before that. And it starts out with coercion and control. And that's really what coercive control is. It's the slow, patient work of gaining power over another person's world. You gain power over their choices, their relationships, their sense of what's real, until by the time someone gets hurt on the outside and it's visible, that person has already been shrinking on the inside for a very long time. And their body is telling the toll. But here's the really hard part for us. If we only start paying attention once someone is physically harmed, we have already missed most of the story. So let's go back to the beginning and let's learn to actually read this pattern together. So again, talking about coercive control being a pattern of power and control over another person, right? So we have a pattern here. So I'm going to tell you a story. It's not just one person. This isn't just one person I've sat across from. This is like literally at this point, hundreds that I have sat across from. And if we look at my whole team, it's probably in the thousands at this point. But it almost always starts the exact same way or in some similar way. Imagine you meet someone and they are wonderful. They are attentive in this way that you're not used to. They text you constantly. They want to spend all their time with you. They tell you that no one, and I mean

The Slow Drift Into A Cage

SPEAKER_00 5:07

no one, has ever understood them the way that you do. And at first, it feels like so amazing. It feels like being chosen, right? And I quote this all the time because I love this quote so much. But I think it just sums it up, right? It's from uh psychiatrist Kurt Thompson. And he says, we come into the world looking for someone looking for us. So when we feel chosen, it feels amazing. We're like, yes, this is exactly what I was hoping for. But slowly something starts to shift. This person doesn't really like your friends, and there's always a reason, and it seems like such a good reason, right? Maybe Cheryl is doing something that she shouldn't be doing, right? Or like, oh, maybe she's just not godly enough, or fill in the blank, right? So there's there's always a seemingly good reason, at least at first. And they start asking little questions about your family, maybe just little digs. Gosh, do they always talk to you like that? You know, I think your mom could be kinder. You know, your sister has a lot going on. Maybe you should distance yourself from her a little bit. They have opinions about your coworkers, your church, your group chat that they're also reading on your phone because they insisted they have your password, but you don't necessarily get to insist that you have theirs. They get upset if you do not answer a text or a phone call like right away, and I mean like immediately. I've had so many clients tell me I was literally in the middle of doing something. My hands were dirty, but I knew if I didn't answer that, that I was gonna be in big trouble. And so, dirty hands and all, they grabbed their phone to meet that requirement. They want to know where you were. Why didn't you call back? What's going on? It's very accusatory. And they want to know where you are, not out of curiosity or out of your own safety, but out of like, they just require that of you, right? Why were you at the gym five extra minutes? Were you talking to someone? You know, who were you allowing to look at you, et cetera, et cetera? And little by little, without you ever deciding to hand it over, they become the one who decides what is and is not acceptable for you. They decide what you can see here, how you can spend a Tuesday, whether or not you can go to women's Bible study, whether or not you can go do this other thing, whether or not you can even be friends with a person or even hold a job. Now, I do want to be really, really careful here. Not one of these moments on its own proves anything. People can get jealous, people can become insecure. We all have our own woundings when we come into a relationship. People have a bad day and send a text that they regret. All of those things are being human, and none of them on their own is coercive control. But what I want to say is the pattern is actually the point. So I want to just say this really clearly. No behavior on its own tells us the full story. The pattern is what tells us the full story. And I want you to say it with me because I'm gonna keep coming back to it. It's the pattern that matters, not a single moment, but the accumulation over time of the things that we can see. It's the accumulation of the direction that things are moving. You are either moving toward having more of a life and it might be with someone and it might be a life of flourishing, or you are moving away from that to less of a life, to feeling trapped in a cage. And that is what so many of my clients have said to me. It's like I walked into a cage I didn't know I was entering, and then I was trapped. So here's the question that kept me up at night for years, and just I had to really wrestle with how do we miss this? Right? There's a lot of smart people in this world. There are discerning people in this world, people who have genuinely good instincts. And I think that the answer to this and the how we miss it is a little bit humbling. I think it's because of the way that our brains are built in a lot of ways, and to some degree, in the Christian world, our theology. So our minds are efficiency machines. We take shortcuts constantly because, well, we have to. There's a lot going on. And you'd never get through a single day if you had to consciously evaluate literally every single person

Brain Shortcuts And Manipulators

SPEAKER_00 9:27

you meet. You'd be really tired. So your brain runs quick little substitutions in the background, and most of the time it serves you really, really well. It's really helpful. But here's where it can get really dangerous. Watch how easily these things swap in for each other. We see confidence, and what we read is competence. So we see confidence and what we read into that is competence. You know what you're doing because you are confident. We feel or experience charm and we read safety. So we feel or experience charm, and then we read, we assume safety into that. We hear certainty and we call it wisdom. So we hear certainty from someone and we name it as wisdom. We notice popularity and we assume credibility. We notice popularity and we assume credibility. Do we not see that in like celebrities all the time? So just because someone comes out and talks about a thing, we are like, oh, they must know what they're talking about. And you're like, I think they might have pulled that out of their rear end. I don't know that they know that they're what they're talking about. We're shown authority and we equate it with integrity. We're shown authority and we equate it with integrity. And that we see a lot in the church, right? Sometimes it is absolutely accurate and sometimes it is not. So I want you to think about that list and go back and play it again slowly if you need to, because every single one of those is a leap. Confidence does not necessarily mean competence. Charm does not necessarily mean safety. Certainty is definitely not always wisdom. I am certain that a tomato is fruit, but my wisdom tells me it should not be in a fruit salad, right? Being liked is not necessarily being also trustworthy. And having authority is absolutely not the same as having integrity. And I think in our current news cycle, we have seen that so much over and over and over again. Here's the uncomfortable truth: our brains are wired to make these shortcuts. And manipulative people, they often understand our shortcuts better than we do. They are good at reading others, sometimes much worse than we are. And in the faith communities, we are often really predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which is not a bad thing. I'm gonna be clear about that. That's not a bad thing. But sometimes it does mean that we table our discernment. And so we don't want to do that. We want to make sure that we are holding on to good discernment. So, look, if a manipulator is not confused about how this all works, they're like fluent in it, they know exactly which buttons produce trust and then they press them on purpose. And if we know that, then that is something that we can learn from. And we can start more critically evaluating the people that we come into contact with and the people that we are platforming. So I want to share the realization that genuinely changed how I see this world. This one really kind of rearranged the furniture in my head, if that makes sense. I had to kind of like refile my file cabinet. So here it is for you. The very same traits that make someone impressive in public can be the exact same traits that make them almost impossible

Charisma Is Morally Neutral

SPEAKER_00 14:36

to recognize as controlling in private. Just gonna let that sit with us for a minute. So I'm gonna say it again. It's counterintuitive and it really matters, right? So I want you to think about the person that everyone loves. They're the person who lights up a room, they're charismatic, they're funny, persuasive, confident, socially fluent. They're the kind of person you would trust to give the toast, run the meeting, lead the room, right? And a person can, in fact, be all of those things, every one of those things, and also be someone who coerces, controls, diminishes, and harms the people closest to them. Those things are not opposites. And I think that's the part that we sometimes get wrong. We assume that if someone is warm and gifted and beloved out in society, then they must be the same way at home. That's not always true. Sometimes it is true. It's not always true. Charisma doesn't tell you that. Charisma can't tell you what their character is. And so what I really want you to kind of walk away with and think about is that charisma is morally neutral. It is a communication skill. It is a good thing to have. It can be really helpful in communicating. But character is what determines how someone uses it. So let me say that again. Charisma is morally neutral. It's a skill, it's a communication skill. It's the same as being a strong writer or a good cook. It's not a virtue, right? It doesn't tell you what someone is capable of doing in a room. It tells you nothing about what they'll do as a person at all. Nothing. But character. Character is what makes the decision on how all that talent actually gets used. I think of the quote from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. And that great responsibility is bound up in character. And honestly, I think our whole society keeps confusing charisma and character. We confuse them a lot. We keep handing the microphone, the platform, the trust, the benefit of the doubt to the people who are charismatic, not because they're of good character, but because they're compelling. It's not necessarily because they have earned our trust. It's because they feel trustworthy to us in some ways. Oh that's hard to think about, right? That's hard to lean into a little bit. You know, it's like, wow, what as society have we been doing in this space? Now, here's where this got a little bit bigger for me because once I understood the dynamics of coercive control and really understood the pattern, I could not unsee it. You will hear me say often, once you see, you can't unsee. And am I looking for coercive control under every bush? No. There just happens to be a lot of coercive control under bushes of powerful people. That's that's it. And I started noticing, honestly, like these dynamics of coercive control take place in places other than just intimate relationships, dating, marriages, things like that. They definitely do take place there, but it's not the only areas in which they take place. So I want to be careful how I say this. So I'm gonna tell you what I am not saying first. I am not saying by any means that all leaders are abusive, not at all. In fact, I know amazing leaders who are anything but abusive. I'm also not saying every strong personality is dangerous. That's not true at all. There is such beauty in strong personality. I am a strong personality, without question. And I'm definitely not saying that disagreeing with you makes someone a manipulator, right? I'm not saying any of that. Disagreement is not necessarily manipulation at all. It's just a disagreement, right? It's how we disagree, the way that we enter into disagreements and things like that that tell the deeper story, but that's a whole other episode of the podcast. So, what I am saying here is that power tends to operate in similar ways, no matter where it shows up. So I want you to think with me gently about a few of these places. So let's talk about workplaces. A boss can make loyalty literally feel like survival. And any question that you might ask, a feeling of betrayal, like, oh, how could you ask that question? Do you not trust me as your boss or whatever? Right. Like I remember having some really great bosses who encouraged what they called the marketplace of ideas. And so I was free to bring up anything, be curious, ask questions, even if it was literally a dumb question. I was like 20 years old at the time, right? And so I didn't know business from a hole in the ground, right? I'd never worked in a corporate office before. So

Where Power Plays Show Up

SPEAKER_00 19:15

I asked some pretty dumb questions, but they were all welcome. And I was educated and I was allowed to flourish. It was a lot different. And I've worked for organizations where questioning anything was tantamount to heresy and to treason and all kinds of things. And a simple question was met with, you know, some sort of denigration, especially if it was a good question about something. We also see this in religious organizations. And I know that this one is super tender for so many people that listen to Hey Tabby. It's this where the phrase God's will can become actually the leader's will, and we're asking a question is treated like a lack of faith. I've seen this for so many of my clients, so many folks that we serve and help, where it's like, oh, if you even question the Lord's anointed, then you are committing an act of heresy, an act of unbelief, an act of lack of faith. And that is so incredibly harmful. But when the leader sets themselves up as speaking for God and they're charismatic and they're confident, right? We talked about that a little bit ago, then it feels like, oh, maybe they're right. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong. So, look, if this just landed somewhere in your chest or in your body, I just want you to know you're not alone and true or not crazy at all. Like that does happen. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna touch this one. Hold on with me. Politics. And look, this is not gonna be a political episode. That's not what we're talking about, but I'm talking about places where we see coercive control show up. And in politics, certainty gets sold as strength, and the whole game becomes convincing you that you can't trust anyone but them. Right? There's a lot of politicians that use fear in order to secure your vote. And, you know, that doesn't matter. It's not party specific. So I'm not talking about any particular party, but that's what they're doing when they're using coercive control in their campaigns. So online communities and influencers. So, like the belonging is real and warm in a lot of ways, right up until you step out of line. And then suddenly you're out. And we see this both with the influencers themselves and even the followers and stuff. If somebody makes a mistake, the cancel culture can be really rabid and ugly. And influencers can influence you in ways that are not healthy. Like I see all kinds of lifestyle and fitness and religious influencers out there. Sometimes I listen to their stuff and I think, this is really great. This is good information. It's super helpful. And then sometimes I listen to their stuff and I'm like, I am real certain that they've never actually read any of the science around this or read the Bible or whatever. And so we have to really be discerning and who are we following? And then, of course, even in families, even the people who love us can fall into these patterns of power and control. And sometimes they are unintentional. It is what they were taught to do in terms of parenting. And sometimes it is very intentional to exert power and control over another. Now, look, here's the deal. I am not naming these to make you paranoid. It is so easy right now in this world to be scared and paranoid because there's a lot of shady stuff. I'm not minimizing them, but I don't want you to do that. What I'm doing currently is I'm naming them to help you build one specific muscle. And that muscle is discernment. So this is the tool that I keep coming back to, and this is a way that helps me tell the difference. Healthy influence expands your ability to think for yourself. Expands your ability to flourish, to get closer to God, all of those things. Coercive control narrows it. Right. So healthy influence, healthy curiosity, it's going to help you expand. Coercive control is always going to narrow you because it is entrapment, right? When I help teach advocacy class, that is one of the ways that Dr. Deborah has helped us to name it is a captivity crime. So you walk into a cage that you don't really realize that you are walking into. Healthy influence expands your ability to think. It's going to invite you to more perspective,

Expansion Versus Narrowing

SPEAKER_00 23:29

to more room, to more freedom. Coercive control is going to narrow it. It's going to shrink your world down until the only safe conclusion that you have is that this person has all the answers. And that's usually the conclusion that they want you to reach all along. So expansion or narrowing. That's our real tell here. One is going to expand you, one is going to narrow you. So that's just something we're thinking about as you consider these things in your life, these influences in your life, which are they doing? So, look, I am not going to hand you a checklist of red flags today. Red flags are going to ask you to maybe be paranoid and I just don't want you to do that today. There are also plenty of spaces where we talk about red flags. We talk about them in other episodes. You know, one of my favorite sayings is those red flags don't mean it's a carnival. If you would like a shirt that says that, do sell them. Link will be in the description. But what I really want to do more than anything right now is give you five questions to help you with discernment. Every question here is going to be about you and not about the other person, but about your own experience. You don't need access to someone's private life to answer them. You just need to really truly get honest with yourself. So, question number one in this relationship, this friendship, church, job,

Five Questions For Discernment

SPEAKER_00 24:49

whatever it is, do I feel more free or less free? Do I feel more free or less free? Question two. Can I disagree safely? Or does disagreement cost me something every single day? That is one of the ones that I talk through with my clients quite a bit. Okay, question three. Am I encouraged to keep my other healthy relationships or am I slowly and quietly being pulled away from them? Really look at the pattern there. Question four Do I trust my own judgment more or less than I did before this person had influence over me? Now, in the church setting, you might hear something like, Your heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? And that is such a misuse of the verse. First of all, once you're a believer in Christ, you've been given a new heart, a heart of flesh and not a heart of stone. And the Holy Spirit dwells in you. Therefore, the heart is desperately wicked kind of no longer applies. Now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't ask questions and be curious and check our own motives. Of course we should. But am I able to believe that I have my own discernment or not? And that's a question that I need to ask, right? God gives us discernment. He gives us the Holy Spirit. Right. Question five. Does this person gain power by reducing? Oh that's a good question, right? Do they gain power by reducing mine? This is a phrase that I've used a lot. I do not have to dim my light so you feel more comfortable. Right. And here's the opposite of that. You also don't have to dim yours so I can be more comfortable. Both of us can shine brightly. There is literally enough space for all of the stars in the sky, right? So we do not have to dim our light so someone else feels better. Now I'm not saying be unkind. I am not saying be selfish. I'm not saying any of those things. But I get to walk in the fullness of who God made me. And you get to walk in the fullness of who God made you. And that doesn't have to be restricted. When someone is restricting you, walking in the fullness of who God made you, then they are asking you to do something that God would not. So I want you to notice that those questions don't require you to prove anyone's intentions. They don't require any kind of confrontation. They don't even require you to like make a full character assessment of the other person. They are just asking you to tell the truth about your own life. And honestly, that's information you probably have already had the entire time as we've been talking, right? There's probably some of you listening who've been like, oh my goodness gracious. My goodness gracious. So look, I want to be really clear about why I am talking about this today. Because it'd be really easy to walk away from this episode colder and more distant and more suspicious of everybody on earth. And that is not what I want for you. You know that I believe that healing happens in community and healthy community is absolutely vital. I'm not in any way trying to make you fear other people, but I want to help you become discerning. And discernment and fear, honestly, two different things. Fear, again, makes your world smaller, but discernment makes it safer to be big and to be all of who you are. So I'm going to leave you with a few things that are very simply true. Healthy people don't need to isolate you in order to influence you, right? And again, influence isn't a bad thing, right? If I am influenced to go to the gym and

Healthy Community Without Fear

SPEAKER_00 28:28

have a healthy workout routine, that's not bad, right? That's a great thing, right? So healthy influence can be a fine thing, right? Healthy leaders, they're not afraid of your questions. They welcome them. I have been around so many healthy leaders and been able to ask such good questions of them, to have difficult conversations and to talk about places we don't agree. In fact, just last week, I sat down with a leader that does not agree with me on everything. And you know what happened? We walked away as friends. We still walked out with the same strong relationship we had when we walked in, and we did not come to agreement. And that's okay. It wasn't an argument. It was just two different positions on something that we were kind of wrestling out together. And it was beautiful and glorious. And something that I hope that more leaders and more people will enter into is like, how can we disagree with a place of beauty, right? Like, and and things that are not like life-altering and can and can be held with discernment and kindness, right? Healthy relationships never ever shrink. Healthy relationships never ever require you to shrink yourself to stay in them. In fact, you help each other flourish. There's the one another's of scripture, the mutuality of helping each other flourish. That is such a beautiful thing. And like, here's the most important thing of all the thing I want to leave you at the end of this episode with. We have got to stop confusing charisma with character. They're not necessarily equivalent. Charisma can attract us. It's supposed to, that's what it's for. It is actually a beautiful gift. But character is what actually makes the person worthy of our trust. Learning to tell those two things apart in our homes, in our friendships, in our churches, in the people that we follow, the people that we platform, and the people that we vote for, we all end up safer because of it. Our relationships will be more stable and safer, our communities and even the conversations that we have out loud together will become safer and healthier. So here's where we began and where I'm going to leave you. If we only pay attention once someone gets physically hurt, we have already missed most of the story. Let's not miss it anymore. I am so glad that you have been here with me this week. All of the resources for this show will be in the description. If you like this and got something out of it, please share it with a friend. Please be sure to like it, to subscribe, and to please rate it on your favorite platform. It really does help people who need this information get it and it helps push this out to more people so that they can be blessed, hopefully, by this information. I'm really grateful that you were here with me. Thank you so

Closing Resources And Requests

SPEAKER_00 31:29

much for joining me on this week's episode of Hey Tabby. And we will see you again next time. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of Hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrook.com forward slash hey tabby. That's H-E-Y-T-A-B-I, and you can grab it there. I look forward to seeing you next time.