Mother and daughter are not grieving separately; they are navigating shared trauma. The child’s grief is entangled with the mother’s survival, and the mother must provide safety while her own nervous system remains activated.
Play therapist working with survivor’s child.
Coercive control is expressed as microaggressions that reduce women’s space for action, sense of self, autonomy and physical freedom.
In domestic abuse, the perpetrator and victim are intimately known to each other, and the microaggressions are bespoke and designed to target the victim and children specifically. This is humiliating, both in design and in its micro nature, which makes it hard to communicate to others. Often, what is seen from the outside as the behaviour of a partner who cares can be, in reality, a purposeful instrument of abuse.
The purpose of coercive control is to cause shame and isolation through control.
Children and young people are not witnesses to abuse, they experience it. Coercive control doesn’t end when the relationship ends; it changes form, and different tools are used to reassert control.
It is a traumatic, chronic experience.
When a perpetrator dies by suicide, he is using the tools of his abuse to further humiliate, shame, isolate and control her. The grief she experiences is complicated; she may have nowhere to process this; who he once was, someone she loved, was scared of, controlled by. A father to her children. She may be reminded again and again of him; services and individuals may suggest she is lucky that he has died, holidays and birthdays are painful reminders of her child's loss, and she may hear him referred to by bereavement services as her “loved one”.
Trauma shows up in the mind and the body in many ways. Extreme stress causes vision and speech impairments, dissociation from the body, time blindness, memory loss, nightmares, digestive problems, panic attacks, and intrusive thoughts.
It also causes loss of earnings, sickness, brain fog, impacts on sex and relationships, and body image. Complex trauma that is unprocessed causes difficulties for the minds, bodies and spirits of women affected.
The may use substances to cope with the harm they have experienced and to help them to sleep. They may mask their feelings to become more palatable to others and to show that they aren’t psychologically unwell. This might be to protect themselves from services because of the harm they fear from them; for example, he may have threatened to have her children removed, have her sectioned, or have housing removed.
Women may blame themselves for his death and hold complicated feelings about who he was and their relationship. They may miss and love him, wish him gone, wish him with them. They may be facing holidays, religious celebrations, alone for the first time and unsure how to cope.
They may have grief that isn’t able to go anywhere.
Our role-whether we are part of communities or as professionals- is to create a safe enough space to work through all of these complexities.
A large part of healing is helping women to connect with others with similar experiences. We know just how powerful validation and peer support are.
Women need services to support them, not collude with harm. They need to be seen- to be made to feel that they have value. They need to be offered multiple ways to heal, body-based, through music, talking, dance, drama, art, activism.
”The perpetrator has isolated you from your own support networks, and reconnecting with that is really hard”
Survivor reflection