What If There’s a Diamond in the Rubble You’re Carrying?
There are two pieces of advice that get handed to people recovering from serious harm, and both of them, in their own way, make things worse.
The Question a Therapist Asked Me That I Still Can’t Fully Answer
A therapist once asked me how much I thought I had healed from what happened to me.
The Freedom That Doesn’t Feel Like Freedom
When I first left, I moved into a small bedsit in North London. I had spent a long time imagining that moment.
Why Survivors Protect the People Who Harmed Them
I remember being terrified that someone would find out and report us. Not terrified of my abuser, although that fear was present too.
The Belief That Intelligence Protects You Is Wrong. Here Is Why.
There is a persistent belief in public conversation about coercive control that goes something like this: if you are smart enough, perceptive enough…
The Point at Which You No Longer Need Them to Do It
There is a stage in prolonged coercive control that receives almost no attention in the clinical literature and virtually none in public conversation.
The Safest Place to Run an Abuse Detection Tool Might Not Be the Obvious One
The logic is straightforward. Digital abuse happens on phones. Messages arrive on phones. Screenshots are taken on phones.
When the Tool Finds Nothing
There is a result from an AI abuse detection tool that nobody talks about.
What the EU AI Act Actually Bans, and Why Practitioners Keep Getting it Wrong
A client asks whether the app her employer has introduced is something she should worry about.
Every Time You Think in a New Way, You Expand Your Nervous System
There is a particular quality to the difficulty of abstract thinking that is worth naming, because most people experience it as a failing rather than…