Unpacking the ‘Just-World’ Fallacy

How to understand the lack of fairness and justice for victims of abuse The idea of the ‘Just-World Fallacy’ stems from a belief that the world is generally good and fair, and people get what they deserve. This belief holds that actions have consequences in alignment with ethics and morality. Thus, when bad things happen, … Read more

Should We Even Call it Healing?

More on how language contributes to victim pathologizing? Decades ago, when all we had were wives’ groups from the various AA, NA, SA recovery programs, wives of men who use ‘Targeted Partner Abuse©’ attended those groups so that we had a place where we could talk to other women who understood what we were going … Read more

How Victims Respond to Abuse

The Correct Way to View our Human Interactions in Adverse Settings Victims Respond to Abuse/Violence No matter the issue, situation, or context, all human beings respond in one way or another to violence and abuse. That may be going small and quiet, or it may be fighting back physically depending on the context.  Human beings … Read more

Trauma, Attachment Styles, and Identity

How faulty theories impact you and your well-being How often do you listen to a podcast, read books, or stumble across that perfect social media post that describes a condition that resonates with what you are going through? Many of us are searching for the answers. Social media has become “the authority for life.” It … Read more

What if Your Brain Processes by Prediction, not Reaction?

How would this change all of the psychological theories we believe? What if I told you that most of the information we learn in our psych classes or read online when we are attempting to create social media content for our coaching clients is wrong? What if you woke up one day thinking your brain … Read more

Correcting the Narrative

Unpacking the Stockholm Syndrome Myth For some reason lately, my social media feed has filled up with a considerable amount of posts on ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Even though this term has been debunked several times by several authorities close to the case where this paleologistic reference was crafted.  I just read a story on a pretty-popular … Read more

Power and Pain = Coercive Control

The Main Tactics of Men Targeting Abuse of Their Intimate Partner In the early days of dissecting the elements of abuse and coercive control into the model most abuse specialists use today, we ran into a lot of pushback with the language, labels, and behaviors. As you are likely aware, most men refuse to accept … Read more

“Targeted Partner Abuse©”

Acting Against the Agency and Freedoms of The Targeted Victim  Experts in the field of Coercive Control refer to this behavior targeted on women by men as a crime against the freedoms of those women (Stark, 2007).  The patterns of abuse targeted on the wife trespass upon rights and freedoms that all human beings expect … Read more

The Latest in Targeted Weaponization©

“Semantic Abuse” You know an issue is important when we develop multiple terms for the same problem. In the field of “Targeted Partner Abuse©” or Coercive Control, this is particularly applicable. We have so many terms for abuse and the various abusive actions executed by men who target abuse on their spouse. In this week’s … Read more

Power and Control in our Intimate Relationships

You are all likely aware of the Power and Control Wheels (Pence & Paymar 1983) that shifted the trajectory of the field of domestic violence. Initially these wheels were meant to visually represent patterns of male batterers towards their intimate partner. As valuable as these tools are, they have become siloed in the domestic abuse/violence … Read more