20/09/2025
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My abusive husband never told me what I should wear, but I ended up avoiding the clothes he didn't like anyway.
One ordinary morning I walked into the kitchen wearing a black blouse — simple, comfortable, nothing dramatic — and his face scrunched up like I'd brought the weather inside. "Why are you wearing black?" he asked, as if the color itself were a crime. He told me I looked ugly in it. He said he didn't like it. I told him it was fine, that he didn't have to wear it.
Then he did something small that landed like a stone. He called our five-year-old son into the room. "Mummy doesn't look good in black, does she?" he asked, looking straight at our child. My son, already trained by the rhythm of our household — where disagreement meant anger, and anger meant punishment — glanced at his father, swallowed the honest answer, and nodded. "Yes, black is not a nice color mummy," he said, obedient and unsure.
It wasn't the critique of the blouse that made me furious; it was the way he weaponized our child to validate his taste and control my choices. I told him, sharply, that he was not to comment on my clothes again, and that he had no business dragging our child into it. That set him off. What followed was a two-hour lecture about how I overreacted, about how he had a right to his opinions, about how I needed to "work on my reactions" and improve myself. By the time the three-hour conversation about a single blouse wound down, I felt exhausted, small, and confused — as if the truth of my own preferences had been negotiated out of existence.
A month later I stood in front of my wardrobe reaching for that same black blouse. For a heartbeat I wanted to put it on and reclaim that small piece of myself. Then memory rushed in: the squeezed face, the public humiliation, the child made into an accomplice, the hours of arguing. I asked myself — was it worth the hassle? Did I have the energy? What would it cost me that day, that week, that relationship? I put the blouse back and chose something safer, something quieter.
This is how coercive control works. It isn't always dramatic. It's cumulative. It's tiny but constant acts that train you to take the path of least resistance so you can keep the peace, preserve the household, and avoid emotional and sometimes physical punishment. At first it's a preference, a "suggestion" disguised as concern. Then it becomes a debate. Then it becomes a test of endurance. Eventually, the easier choice becomes the default choice. Bit by bit, your tastes, reactions, and even your selfhood are reshaped to fit someone else's comfort.
Coercive control doesn't just steal outfits — it steals choices. It teaches you to anticipate displeasure and pre-empt it. You learn to censor yourself before a sentence leaves your mouth, to avoid places and conversations, to dim colors and opinions so you do not provoke. You learn to read the room with an accuracy born of fear. And the cruelest part is how normal it starts to feel: a compromise, a kindness, a way to "keep the peace." Only later do you realize just how many small things you gave up.
Involving our child made it worse. It turned parenting into theatre where my dignity was the prop, and my son's agreement the proof. Children learn what they live. When a parent uses a child to validate control, the harm ripples outward: the child internalizes obedience as safety and learns to police affection and appearance in the same way. It becomes generational.
I tell this not for pity but to name the invisible pattern. If you find yourself choosing the easier option again and again — not because you want to, but because it saves you from conflict — that's coercive control tightening its hold. Recognizing it is the first step out. Reclaiming those small choices — putting on the blouse, speaking up, refusing to let a child be used as a jury — is how you begin to rebuild yourself, one color, one sentence, one peaceful morning at a time.
