When I was a kid, my dad would tell me I was his brand new Mercedes, not the second-hand car in the dealership round the corner. He said it like it was a compliment. As if I was flawless and valuable because I reflected on him. That view of my brothers and me, as possessions, an extension of him, permeated our whole childhood.
Mealtimes weren’t pleasant. We often had to endure long lectures from him as we tried to force down food we didn’t like. And there was a lot I didn’t like, especially mashed foods whose texture made me feel like I wanted to throw up. I’d sit there, struggling to swallow every last bite before I could leave the table.
We had chores, and mine was to clean the bathroom every Saturday. My dad would come in when I thought I was finished and point out every teeny little thing I’d missed. I’d have to keep cleaning till he was satisfied. One Saturday, I skipped the cleaning because I was rushed and had a play rehearsal that afternoon.
After the rehearsal, he picked me up and, as I was sitting down in the car, he turned and slapped me hard in the face. That was back in the days when corporal punishment was accepted, and my dad would regularly hit us on the buttocks with a switch from our apricot tree. And yes, I detest apricots and cleaning bathrooms to this day.
I went from a coercively controlling father to a coercively controlling husband, who then became a coercively controlling ex-husband. But the coercive control didn’t stop with me.
Just like me, my kids had to deal with their own coercively controlling father. They’d come home to me with story after story of emotional and even physical abuse during his parenting time. One typical episode is the time he made them eggs Benedict and my youngest son noticed mold on his bread. When he pointed it out to his brother, his dad yelled at him.
“Mom,” my son said to me later, “I picked the moldy pieces off my bread and hid them under my plate, and then I snuck them into the trash and pushed them under the stuff at the top.”
So, as someone who’s experienced coercive control as a child myself and witnessed my own children being subjected to it, I know what coercive control of children actually looks like. I’ve observed it in other families, even decades before I was familiar with terms like “CC” and “NPD”, when coercively controlling parents drop their mask in public. So, I can see really clearly when someone uses words like “coercive control” as a cloak for something else, that absolutely isn’t it.
There’s a rebranding going on in the family courts. Bills are being proposed and laws passed in many jurisdictions to prevent allegations of parental alienation from being weaponized against protective parents by abusers. And the alienation industry is pivoting to address this.
Unfortunately, they’re not switching to another field. The careers they’ve built in their ideological bubble are too precious for this. Instead, they’re changing the language they’re using. They’re dropping the term “parental alienation” like the radioactive hot potato it is, and appropriating directly from the protective parent playbook. The main term they’ve landed on is, wait for it….. coercive control. Of course.
This is what it looks like in practice:
A child resists contact with an abusive parent. This is reframed as evidence that the protective parent is coercively controlling the child. The protective parent’s normal, healthy attachment with the child is labeled as psychological manipulation. The assumed manipulation is called “coercive control." This Trojan horse gets wheeled into court by an evaluator who is part of the alienation industry and adept at this new linguistic pivot. or by someone trained in their techniques.
Check out this article by Karen Woodall, doyenne of the alienation industry. On the surface, it seems credible. She mentions the concept of coercive control, citing Evan Stark, and then, in a sneaky 5-step move, she stomps all over the coercive control framework, reducing it to parental alienation.
Woodall takes a behavior that’s actually a symptom of coercive control by one parent—a child withdrawing, refusing contact, shutting down in the presence of an abusive parent—and reattributes it as evidence of coercive control by the other parent.
After she’s established her thesis, that a child’s emphatic rejection of a parent is coercive control (the artist formerly known as alienation), Woodall gives lip service to the fact that abusers sometimes weaponize alienation allegations against protective parents. This tactic is known in critical discourse analysis as “stake inoculation”. That’s when you get ahead of the obvious objection to your argument by acknowledging it and then moving on as if you've dealt with it.
Woodall does this at the end of her article after the entire framework, including the reunification protocol, is already in place. She notes that abusers sometimes make false alienation claims, offers a vague test for telling the difference, and then quietly cancels that test out by acknowledging that genuine targeted parents can look exactly the same as false claimants.
The concession sounds responsible, but it’s meaningless. She doesn’t even suggest any modalities for assessing this, but just waves it away as a “critical skill.” And by the time you (the expert that she wants to sell her training to) read it, you've already absorbed five steps that assume the child needs to be reunified with the rejected parent.
As you can see, this sneaky linguistic sleight of hand has been going on for a while now (this blog post was published in 2017), and it’s easy for protective parents and advocates in the field to be conned by the language. It’s vital to start looking at every article, YouTube video, or social media post about “coercive control of children” with critical eyes. That way, you can spot the wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Here are some things to look for:
Do they cite Woodall, Gardner, Dwarshak, and other alienation industry experts, or do they have ties to the alienation industry?
Do they use the language of coercive control but only apply it to “alignment” or “manipulation” of the child by one parent to reject the other one?
Do they describe the child’s relationship with the protective parent in clinical, negative terms, like enmeshment, psychological manipulation, unhealthy attachment, while describing the child's relationship with the abusive parent as a right to be restored?
Do they default to framing the child’s expressed views, fears, and refusals as symptoms of the protective parent’s behavior, rather than as responses to their own lived experience?
Do they move quickly from assessment to reunification, with more detail and confidence in the intervention than in the prior question of whether the intervention is warranted?
Is the child’s voice present in their framework at all, or does the child only appear as an object of competing parental forces?
Is the coercive control presented as an attempt to control various aspects of the child’s daily life or only as a strategy to harm the other parent by making the child reject them? Is the child a primary victim or just a weapon?
Here are some examples of this framing in the wild. You can click on the screenshots to go to the actual link.
Once you can spot the pattern, you’re less likely to be misled by these smooth operators. But what if you see it come up in your own case? Here are some ways you can deal with that.
Translate the jargon out loud.
When an evaluator or report says “coercive control of children,” mentally substitute: “Are they just talking about my child aligning with me and rejecting him?” If yes, clock that as PA-logic in CC clothing.Document your child’s reality, not just the conflict.
Keep a running log of your child’s concrete experiences: what they say, what happened, who was there, what you observed in their body (shaking, nightmares, hiding food, panic at transitions). That becomes your counterweight to the “alignment” story.Name the pivot on the record.
In emails, affidavits, or reports you’re allowed to comment on, use simple, direct language like:
“This report uses the term ‘coercive control of children’ solely to describe my child’s rejection of their father, and does not assess his long‑term pattern of control or abuse.”Ask pointed questions of professionals.
Things you are absolutely allowed to ask evaluators, GALs, therapists:“Whose work on coercive control are you drawing from?”
“How are you distinguishing between my child’s trauma response and so‑called ‘coaching’?”
“What data are you relying on about my child’s experience with each parent, aside from who they currently align with?”
Refuse to fight on their invented terrain.
When the frame is “You are coercively controlling the child,” resist the pull to explain your every interaction. Instead, bring it back to patterns: “Here is his years‑long pattern of control toward me and the children. Here is how the child reacts in his care versus mine.”Look for genuine CC expertise, not rebranded PA.
When you’re choosing an expert or training to share with your lawyer, scan for:Do they ever talk about children’s direct experiences of terror, surveillance, humiliation?
Do they mention Evan Stark or CC statutes in a way that isn’t immediately followed by “alignment” and “reunification”?
If they’re all about “repairing the bond” and don’t address the history of abuse, treat it as PA with a new coat of paint.
The rebranding isn’t going away. As long as there are laws to circumvent and careers to protect, the language will keep shifting. But the framework underneath doesn’t change, and neither does the damage it causes to children who are telling the truth about what happened to them.
You already know what coercive control of children looks like. You’ve lived it, or you’ve watched your children live it. That knowledge is what will help you to see through the fog these smooth operators are creating to obscure their agenda.
BTW, check out the resources section for a link to the handy cheat sheet I created.
Want to know how I can help you?
Feel free to reach out to me by booking a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, if you’re struggling with anything and you’re just looking for some clarity. We can talk through what’s showing up and figure out where to focus your energy.
If it feels like you need more ongoing support, I offer coaching too, but I'll never push it on you. The call is just a conversation.
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Resources
If you need a credible, well-sourced document that describes what your children have been through, this is it. This newsletter from The Learning Network is packed with citations from peer-reviewed research and describes coercive control of children accurately, in Evan Stark's own framework.
I've also put together a short resource to prepare you for a meeting with your attorney if you’re accused by an abusive ex of “coercively controlling” your children because they’re rejecting that parent. It’s not legal advice, but a way to walk in prepared and ask the right questions.
