You Are Not The Problem—Naming Abuse Restores Power

Fear doesn’t vanish in a blaze of glory—it cracks in a quiet moment of truth. We call that moment the reckoning: the shift from “maybe it’s me” to “this is abuse.” In this second part of our recovery series on domestic abuse and coercive control, we unpack how naming behavior restores power, why escalation can follow clarity, and how to protect yourself while you break the spell of gaslighting.

We get practical about language and boundaries. Kim shares how calling out manipulation in the room (“We don’t do that here”) models respect and signals to the survivor that her perception is real. You’ll learn the “emotional riot shield” technique to see the game without being cut by it, and how simple giving-back statements—“I’m not discussing that” and “What are you trying to accomplish?”—refuse the bait that keeps cycles alive. We also dig into a crucial pivot: stop asking how to fix him and start asking how to protect yourself.

Expect a tour through the drama triangle and how abusers flip into a false victim role to hook you into rescue mode. We show you how to step out of the script, forecast consequences instead of re-arguing reality, and move toward objective supports—legal advice, advocacy services, and informed networks that understand coercive control. If your strength surges one hour and wobbles the next, you’re not failing; your nervous system is unwinding from control, and that takes repetition and care.

If this resonates, follow the series, share this episode with someone who needs language for what they’re living, and leave a review so more people can find these tools. Your clarity can be the first brick in a safer life—subscribe, listen, and tell us which boundary you’re practicing this week.

Chapters

• 0:00 Defining The Reckoning
• 0:43 Naming Abuse And Regaining Voice
• 2:17 Calling Out Behavior In Therapy
• 4:35 Language Shift And Statistics
• 5:43 Gaslighting Collapses And Clarity Grows
• 6:56 Building An Emotional Riot Shield
• 8:39 Withholding Engagement And Breaking Cycles
• 9:59 From Fixing Him To Protecting Yourself
• 11:16 Escaping The Drama Triangle
• 12:36 Actions, Consequences, And Future Focus

Transcript

Defining The Reckoning

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back. This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist. This is episode two of the three-part series concerning recovery from domestic abuse, coercive controlling behavior. This second episode is called The Reckoning. And a kind of working subtitle is The Moment That Fear Begins to Break. This second stage of recovery is really very important because this is a stage where the silence begins to end. So what is the reckoning? Well, it's not simply confrontation, it's a psychological shift from maybe it's me to no, this is not me, this is abuse. The victim begins to name behavior, recognize manipulation, see patterns, resist distortion, and reclaim her voice. But this stage is also, in some senses, a little dangerous emotionally and in truth, sometimes physically, because abusers often escalate when control is threatened. So the reckoning is not about dramatic confrontation, but it is about internal clarity and growing resilience. I think one of the most important things that I've learned with my own experience of seeing people who fit into that category that we might call abusers is when the behavior, or I call the behavior what it is. And so when I see manipulation reframing, or those behaviors which are not respectful in the consulting room, and I'm talking about if I'm seeing a couple together, I will call the behavior out. And I'm doing two or three things. I'm saying this behavior is you know controlling it, or or you're redefining what the other person has said. I also say we don't do that here, and and that's a very clear statement of under no circumstances will that behavior be tolerated. And it's not aggressive, but it's pretty assertive. And I think the third thing it does is it signals to the other party who is the victim that actually what they've been experiencing is something which I now see and I am naming. And for many people it's liberating. And it's liberating because it's the beginning of seeing that actually, no, the that there's a completely different way to see this behavior, and very often the the abuser will apologize, or they will try and reframe, or they will try and say, No, I I didn't mean that, and so I will say, Well, then say what it is you mean. And things develop accordingly. But when we call out the behavior, instead of saying to ourselves, oh, he gets angry, or we argue, or he loses control, the language becomes he intimidates, he manipulates, he controls, this is abuse. Now I want to say at this point, I keep saying he and she, and for the for the sake of fairness, it isn't always that way around. I have to say, it is incredibly rare, and I think I can only remember one case in the last ten or so years where it was the other way around. Mostly it is women who are the victims, in my experience, and the UK stats tend to reinforce that. So naming, naming the reality restores psychological power. The process of gaslighting starts to collapse because gaslighting is about reality distortion, it's about saying that never happened, you're too sensitive, you're imagining things, you're the problem. But during the reckoning, the woman begins trusting her own perceptions again, and she says, Sembers, she remembers what was said, what was done, and how it felt. And the truth begins to stabilize in her mind. And she may still feel some degree of fear, doubt, attachment, hope for change, but something has shifted because she's no longer psychologically asleep. And resilience starts to grow through small acts, the setting of emotional boundaries internally, refusing to absorb blame, seeing patterns clearly, reconnecting with self-worth and seeking support. Quite often I will say to women that they need they need to develop an emotional riot shield, which sounds creative, but essentially, if you think about what a riot shield does, it protects officers from missiles, and they can see through it. It's normally made of very hard perspects. But the important thing here is they can see through it, but nothing is getting in. No matter how much is thrown at them, that that isn't going to get in because they have this shield. Now, emotionally, we can develop one ourselves. We can imagine that we are one side of the shield and the other person is the other side. When people are being abused, they have no shield. And one of the things that abusers do, particularly in adult relationships, is to try and engage the victim. Engaging the victim means having them answer questions, explain themselves. And quite often victims will do this. Not because they are careless, but because they're trying desperately hard to be understood. Actually, if you keep your shield up, you're just not going to engage. You're going to say, I'm not discussing that with you. That's not relevant white what it is, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? These are all giving back statements. It's a way of saying, I can see through my shield that this is the game that you play. And it's about controlling me. It's about you repeating a cycle of something where you feel powerful and I feel valueless. I'm not going to play that game. Some while back I wrote a podcast entitled Extinguishing the Gaslighter. And the principle there was if you don't feed a flame, it goes out. And I think this is really what the reckoning is about. It's about a kind of psychological resistance, and it's also an internal turning point. The other thing that goes with that is the acceptance that victims will realize that they've been asking questions like, how do I fix him? And instead of doing that, they say, How do I protect myself? But this is the turning point of recovery. The other thing here is that sometimes, and I'll talk about this in other podcasts, what we see is victims as persecutors. I'll say that again. We see persecutors as those who cause their target to be victims. Sometimes what can happen is that the persecutor will turn themselves into a victim. It's all because of this, that, or the other, and I just can't cope. I know it's wrong, but then what happens is the victim, the real victim, switches to rescuer to try and fix the problem. This is a toxic little game known as the drama triangle, something developed by Stephen Carpenterman, who was a significant figure in the world of transactional analysis, which is a kind of particular type of therapy. The point is this if you don't enter into the game, then you can't be a victim, you can't be a persecutor, and you can't be a rescuer. Now, these things sound easy, but they happen as a consequence of practice and intention. And once a person gets a sense of that, they start to gain ground. Part of the reckoning, I think, also talks about actions and consequences. In one case, I made, I asked the question, what do you think will happen if you continue to behave in this way towards your partner? And what I was doing was saying, I see what is happening, we can name what is happening. What I now want you to do is not have a discussion with me about whether or not it's happening. We've already established it is. What I now want you to do is fast forward and think about consequence, because there will be consequences, you know, that that's a fact. So sometimes what we have to do is we have to we can ask questions like that, but we can also ask for advice. We can also say things like, okay, what do I need to do if I am in the reckoning stage? Because there's going to come a point when that turns into some sort of change. Inform yourselves. I think it's so vitally important. I, as you can tell by now, am somebody who has considerable experience in this field, but I think what is so reassuring is to know that many, many other people do as well, and many organizations exist. And that includes things like legal services. Women with children will very often worry about what will happen where the children are concerned, have all kinds of concerns about the legal assertions that the abuser may put to them. Fascinatingly, they seem to have knowledge of family law, despite the fact that they've never trained in it. And so I think it's almost like what women can do is suddenly enter into this external world of objective reality, not defined by the abuser. Now, if you are in this stage, you may feel strong one moment and afraid the next, clear, then confused, determined and then exhausted, and it's normal. You're not going backwards. You're and you're unwinding an internal psychological control mechanism. And this this takes courage. In the next episode, we move into what recovery really means. And this is the stage where dignity, identity, and selfhood are rebuilt. Thank you for listening, and I look forward to producing the next podcast.