A Therapist Explains How Men Can Recognize And Change Coercive Behavior

Control can look like care until you notice the fear it leaves behind. We sit down to unpack how coercive control takes root in relationships, why it feels justified from the inside, and what it costs partners and children when power replaces empathy. Drawing on Kim Lee’s clinical experience as a child and adolescent psychotherapist, we break down a clear, three-category model that helps men understand their behavior without shame—and without letting responsibility slip away.

First, we define coercive control in plain terms: not a single argument, but a repeating pattern that narrows a partner’s choices through monitoring, isolation, shifting rules, or emotional leverage. Then we focus on impact over intent, illustrating how good intentions can still cause harm when someone changes their life to avoid conflict. Kim shares how Category One behavior shifts once men recognize the damage, take responsibility, and commit to change, and why that accountability opens the door to real repair and safety at home.

We also tackle Category Two, where the reflex is to justify—“I did it because…”—and to externalize blame. Kim offers practical strategies to interrupt that loop: swap certainty for curiosity, replace surveillance with agreed transparency, and test your beliefs against outcomes like trust, calm, and mutual respect. Throughout the conversation, we center children’s wellbeing, exploring how exposure to control teaches hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and fear of mistakes, and how modeling apology and repair can reset the family system toward security and empathy.

If you’ve ever wondered whether being “right” is costing you connection, this conversation offers language, tools, and hope. Listen, reflect, and share it with someone who might need a gentle nudge toward accountability and change. If this resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what insight you’re taking into your relationships.

Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Conversation
• 0:27 Defining Coercive Control
• 1:11 Harm To Partners And Children
• 1:55 Why Speak To Men Directly
• 2:25 Three Categories Of Behavior
• 2:56 Category One: Recognition And Change
• 3:39 Category Two: Justification And Externalizing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Hello and welcome. This is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist. This next episode is entitled When Control Replaces Love and Understanding Coercive Control. So I want to speak today directly and carefully to Med. And this isn't about blame and it's not about labelling, and it's not about condemning. It's about understanding what's called coercive control. And I'm sure that this is a term that many of you will be familiar with. And some of you may have been described as behaving in that way. Now, you may not have listened to my podcasts before, but I have written many for people who are the victims of coercive control, and also for the children who are involved, pointing towards the effects of these kinds of behaviors in relationships and how damaging they are, and particularly damaging to children who don't have a voice. But I want to look at how it develops, how it feels from the inside, and how a man might recognize it within himself before it causes deep harm. A while back I attended a training seminar on this subject, and the person conducted it, conducting it, described three different types or three different categories of this form of behavior and the people responsible for it. In category one, he described how men don't necessarily intend to behave in this way. They don't necessarily have the ability in that moment to see that the behavior is harmful. What then happens when Category One males are informed of the effects of their actions, they take responsibility. They do so because there's this sudden realization that they've done something which has harmed somebody else. And there may be all manner of reasons as to why they've behaved that way, but the single most important thing is they take responsibility and then they look at themselves and then they change. Category two tend to be people who really don't believe that there's anything wrong with their behavior. They believe that the behaviors they exhibit and the ways that they treat others is justified because after all, if the other person is doing something that you don't think is right, then you have the right to say so, and you have the right to behave in the ways that you do because you're right. What tends to happen with category two is they will externalize. And they do this in a way which has to do with justification. I behave that way because.