This newsletter contains a spoiler for the ending of the latest season of Bridgerton. So, if you’re a fan and you’re still not through it, you might want to finish watching and then come back and read this.
For those of you who don’t watch it, in the latest season, Sophie, an illegitimate daughter forced into servitude by her stepmother, discovers years later that her father did leave her an inheritance — a truth her abusive stepmother hid from her.
Benedict, her “prince charming”, is shocked by Sophie’s apparent gullibility. He says to her, “It’s clear that woman despised you. What reason did you have to believe her?”
Sophie’s response is this:
I’m sure that plenty of viewers, just like Benedict, found it hard to understand why Sophie fell for her stepmother’s lies. Not me.
To me, this is actually the most believable part of this whole tale. I've seen this same dynamic play out more times than I can count. Victims of abuse who seem to blindly believe the lies told to them by their abuser, even when those lies could be refuted with a quick Google search.
To outsiders, it looks like wilful ignorance. Benedict's reaction is the classic response: What reason did you have to believe her? The implication being that a reasonable person simply wouldn’t have.
But victims of abuse aren’t being unreasonable. They’re being controlled.
Why the lies stick
There are two things happening in the mind of someone living under coercive control: the fear response and learned helplessness.
When you live in a state of chronic fear, even low-grade, ambient fear, your brain’s threat-detection system is constantly running in the background. A brain under chronic stress prioritizes survival over critical thinking. Questioning the abuser feels dangerous, even when the lie is obvious from the outside. So the mind doesn’t go there.
Learned helplessness kicks in when someone has tried to push back, question, or escape, and failed, or been punished for trying this, enough times that they stop trying altogether. Psychologist Martin Seligman first observed this in animals, but it applies just as powerfully to humans trapped in abusive dynamics. The brain essentially learns: resistance is futile. And so it stops generating the thought.
Sophie had access to her father’s will for seven years. The document that would have freed her was one locked drawer away the whole time. But fear had built a wall between her and the truth, a wall so solid that she never even thought to look for it.
I know this because I lived it.
I’ll never forget my own moment of enlightenment: a Google search. One question typed into a search bar — Do I have to have sex with my husband whenever he wants? — and years of lies unravelled in an instant. One query. That’s all it took. But I couldn’t have typed those words until I was ready to face the truth. Until the fear had loosened its grip just enough.
In hindsight, my ex’s threats were totally unfounded. But I was too overextended, depleted, and isolated to understand the law and to fact-check.
That’s how the spell works. And that’s why it can take so long to break.
How the spell breaks
It rarely breaks from the inside. Most victims don’t wake up one day and decide to question everything. The crack usually comes from the outside. It takes one person, one question, one piece of information that slips through the wall.
For Sophie, it was the Bridgerton family. For me, it was the shocked reaction of a friend, a few months earlier, when I’d mentioned offhandedly to her that my husband insisted on recording my weight every day in an Excel spreadsheet. That was the first crack in the spell I was under.
This is why community matters. This is why one conversation can change everything.
If you are supporting someone you suspect is trapped in this dynamic (maybe it’s your own children you see dealing with this), here’s what actually helps:
Ask questions, don’t make declarations. “Have you ever looked into what the law says about that?” lands very differently than “That’s not true, they’re lying to you.”
Plant seeds, don’t yank the plant. The goal isn’t to force an immediate awakening. What you want to do is to create a small opening. Trust the process.
Be the safe place they come to when the spell breaks. Because it will. And when it does, they’ll need someone who didn’t make them feel stupid for believing in the first place.
If you are the one who was inside the spell, I want you to hear this: believing your abuser was never a failure of intelligence. It was a survival strategy that made sense in the environment you were in. You weren’t naive or gullible. You were under the control of a master manipulator.
Need help breaking the spell?
Like Sophie, Maria, and me so long ago, you might be sitting there, stuck in your fears and not able to move forward and take the action that you need to take. If you need to talk to someone about this, I can help you. I offer a 30-minute consultation, free of charge, where you’re welcome to talk to me about the challenges facing you, where you want to be, and what’s keeping you from getting you there. This is not a pushy sales call. I don’t do those. Whether or not you want to move forward with coaching, I will help you clarify your situation and help you find resources that will get you where you need to go.
Want to know more about what I do?
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Resources
First of all, I’ve got an ask for you. If you’ve bought a copy of my book AI Armor: Your Digital Defense Solution For Coparenting With A Narcissist, it would be very helpful to me and to other people who might need the book but don’t know anything about it if you would leave a review. Maybe you’ll be the one who can break the fear spell someone else is under.
If you want to dig a bit deeper into why abuse can make you feel frozen or powerless, this Psychology Today piece explains how trauma reshapes your sense of control and why “just leaving” often isn’t psychologically possible yet. It’s a gentle, accessible overview of how the nervous system responds to chronic harm, and how that helplessness can begin to shift once you’re safer and better supported.
