This week, on Facebook, I came across this comment under a post by Divorce Lawyer Denise about how to deal with the other parent keeping kids’ clothes. The commenter said:

Now, today’s newsletter isn’t about what to do when clothes go missing. I’ve written about that before. What jumped out at me, aside from Michele’s condescending tone and her sadness that parents who “fight about” clothes, was her total incomprehension about the existence of coercive control.

Well, I’ll tell you what’s sad to ME, Michele.

It’s that there are women who are struggling day in, day out, with a coercively controlling ex who’s constantly undermining and impoverishing them in little ways and big ones, and that people like you are so oblivious to this. Instead of thanking your lucky stars you don’t have an abusive ex, you get on your high horse and tell them there’s something wrong with them.

Recently, someone in the early stages of divorcing a coercive controller said to me, “What’s happening to me is like something out of Hollywood.” She went on to describe her ex’s calculated moves and his elaborate schemes to financially destroy her. There was a kind of theatrical cruelty to it all.

Nothing about it was surprising or new to me. It’s a story that reads as cinematic to someone living through it for the first time, or as unbelievable to someone like Michele happily ensconced on her comfy moral high ground. For me, it was a script I’ve seen dozens of times.

I’m not the slightest bit jaded by it, though. Every time I read or hear the story of a woman who’s so ground down by the demands on her that she’s just struggling to put one foot in front of another, my heart goes out to her because I see the massive burden she’s carrying. The ongoing trauma she’s suffering, as she battles on several fronts, constantly undermined by an ex-partner and so-called coparent whose outsize aim seems to be to control and destroy her.

Your nightmare is not unique.

I’m the co-admin of a local support group for women with abusive exes. If there isn’t a group like that for women in your area, I encourage you to start one. Mine started with two other friends in the same situation as me. I never meant it to grow. But people started adding more local fellow victims.

Now the group is inching towards the 350-member mark. And I know that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Last week, a woman in my group’s area was killed by her partner. She was the eighth woman murdered here by a partner or ex in three months.

It’s well known that divorce is listed as the second-highest life stressor on the Holmes-Rahe scale, ahead even of imprisonment or major illness. But that scale was built in 1967, when divorce was a single catastrophic event. What it couldn't measure—what people like Michele still can't see—is that divorcing a coercive controller isn’t an event. It’s a slow-motion disaster that compounds daily, seemingly designed to make you feel crazy for noticing, and impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it.

What makes it even worse is that most other stressors don’t come with an opponent. A medically complex child isn’t strategizing against you. A demanding job doesn’t have someone inside the process actively working to make you look unstable (or not usually). Your situation does.

That adversarial layer changes everything. It turns ordinary functioning into a performance under surveillance. Every emotional response becomes possible evidence against you. Every protective instinct becomes a liability. The system that's supposed to protect you can be, and often is, weaponized against you.

You’re under severe stress, 24/7. And the existing frameworks, whether they’re legal, therapeutic, social, financial, familial, or societal, consistently underestimate and misunderstand this. They only address one piece. And they often let victims down.

Your experience is even too extreme and constant for fiction to render credibly. Maid, a Netflix show that people found really hard hitting, came across as simplistic to many victims of post-separation abuse, whose circuits are fried constantly for years after they leave an abuser. To really give a picture of what post-separation abuse really looks like, you’d need a daily soap that goes on for 18 years. And people would still think it’s too outrageous to be reality.

Which is why being in a group with other women who describe the exact same thing as you, and can easily finish your sentences for you, is a lifesaver. A group collapses the isolation fast.

Peer groups are more than just support. First of all, they’re proof that you’re not crazy and that your script is shared. Women finish each other's sentences because they've run the same gauntlet: the daily destabilization and the way systems are weaponized against them.

What you’re living through isn’t a personal failing or a unique catastrophe. It’s a recognizable pattern. Women who were where you are now, exhausted, surveilled, doubted, fighting on every front simultaneously, have made it through. Not because the system suddenly got better or their ex suddenly got reasonable, but because they understood what they were dealing with and refused to let it be the end of their story.

Did someone forward this to you?