When Abuse Leaves No Bruise

Hi,

There was one idea in my conversation with Dr. Christine Cocchiola that I hope every parent, therapist, teacher and family-court professional hears:

A child does not have to be hit to be living inside abuse.

Christine is an internationally recognized expert on coercive control, a doctor of clinical social work, college professor, therapeutic parenting and divorce/custody coach, author, educator, survivor and protective parent. Her work focuses heavily on something our systems still miss far too often: what coercive control does to children.

A controlling parent can appear wonderful from the outside. Fun. Loving. Involved. Even heroic.

Inside the family, something very different may be happening.

The child begins learning that certain parts of themselves are safer to hide. Maybe Dad wants to play basketball, so the child stops saying they would rather play soccer. Maybe they hear that Mom is “too tired,” “always working,” or “not really there for you.” None of those statements sound dramatic in isolation. Over years, however, the child can begin absorbing a completely different story about the parent who was once their safe place.

Christine knows this professionally, but she also knows it personally.

She had already spent years advocating for victims and teaching social work when she began recognizing coercive control in her own life. I related deeply to that. I had been a social worker and psychotherapist for decades and still found myself inside relationship dynamics that I could understand perfectly when I was looking at someone else’s life and could not see clearly when they were happening in mine.

That is one of the reasons both of us speak so openly about our experiences. Knowledge does not make you immune to manipulation. Empathy, loyalty, optimism and the instinct to fix things can actually keep someone trying longer because you believe there must still be a way to reach the person you love.

Christine also taught me something important about protective parenting.

When a child has been pulled into a coercive family system, traditional parenting may stop working. You cannot simply correct behavior when the attachment underneath the relationship has been damaged. The work becomes connection first.

She describes having moments when her children would repeat deeply painful things they had absorbed about her. Her own nervous system would immediately register danger. Instead of reacting from that wound, she had to remind herself: I am safe. This is my child suffering.

Sometimes she would go into the bathroom afterward and cry.

That detail stayed with me because protective parenting is not about becoming emotionless. It is about finding somewhere safe for your own pain so that your child does not have to carry it.

Christine talks about being present, calm, accepting, authentic and as non-reactive as possible. She also talks about repair. Healthy parents make mistakes. We become overwhelmed. We say things badly. The difference is that we can return and say, “I did that. I am sorry.” No qualifications. No blame. Then we keep showing our children that rupture does not have to mean abandonment.

This conversation also goes into emotional abuse that leaves no visible injury. I share my own experience of being so devastated by withdrawal, silence and emotional punishment that I once remember thinking I would almost rather have had something physical happen because then I could point to it and say, “There. That is abuse.”

Coercive control can be much harder to explain. There may be no photograph of the injury. There is simply the slow accumulation of fear, confusion, hypervigilance and the loss of your ability to feel like yourself. Christine describes it as the equivalent of repeated paper cuts. Each one may appear small to an outsider. The cumulative injury is enormous.

I hope you will listen to this entire conversation.

You can find Dr. Christine Cocchiola and her work at:

www.coercivecontrolconsulting.com

Instagram: @dr.cocchiola_coercivecontrol

Her work includes The Protective Parenting Program, therapeutic parenting and divorce/custody coaching, professional coercive-control education, and support communities for protective parents.

And before I go, I want to share why this conversation feels so connected to the story I have been working on for more than twenty years.

My debut novel, Traitor Within, follows Casandra, a woman whose childhood fear of abandonment becomes a protective pattern she carries into her adult relationships. Again and again, the part of her that believes it is keeping her safe convinces her to tolerate what hurts, explain away what she knows, and abandon pieces of herself so that someone else will not abandon her.

That is the Traitor Within.

Sometimes the patterns protecting us were formed long before we understood what was happening. Recognizing them is what finally gives us the opportunity to choose differently.

Traitor Within: How Her Fear of Abandonment Led Her to Abandon Herself is available for preorder now and will be released September 22.

As a thank-you for preordering, you will receive a full year of guided Your Traitor Within journaling prompts to use for reflection, healing, and deeper exploration of your own protective patterns.

Preorder here:
https://www.jessicaannepressler.com/the-books

With love,

Jessica Anne Pressler, LCSW