Everyone’s Talking About the Trust Recession. Almost Everyone’s Solving It Wrong.
There is a phrase moving through the coaching and consulting world at the moment that gets something genuinely right. The trust recession. The idea is that trust, the actual currency of any practice built on relationships, has become harder to earn and quicker to lose, and that this is now the central challenge facing anyone […]
Your AI Clone Knows What You Wrote. It Has No Idea What You Know.
There is a quiet assumption underneath almost every AI-for-coaches tool on the market right now. It goes like this: your expertise is contained in your content. Feed the machine your books, your courses, your recorded calls and your written frameworks, and it will have you. It will know what you know. It will not. And […]
How a Five-Pound Bicycle Gave Me My Life Back
One of the most significant things I did in my recovery cost me five pounds. It was a second-hand bicycle, a slightly rusty Raleigh Misty, and buying it did more for me than a good deal of the formal work that came before it. That sounds like an exaggeration or a nice line for an […]
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 first is: just let it go. The second is: you will never really recover, so you had better learn to live with it. They sound like opposites. One […]
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. It is a reasonable question, the kind you are supposed to be able to answer with a percentage or a hopeful sentence about how far you have come. What I said was: I think I have healed what […]
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. All the things I would do once I was out, once no one was controlling where I went or who I spoke to or what I was allowed to want. I had built […]
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. Terrified that an authority, the school, a social worker, anyone, would intervene and remove me from the situation. I would have done almost anything to prevent that. I protected him. I covered […]
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, educated enough, you will see it coming. The implication follows naturally: people who end up in coercively controlling relationships must have missed something that a more capable person would have caught. This […]
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. It is the stage at which the external source of gaslighting becomes unnecessary. By that point, you are doing it yourself. This is not a metaphor. It is a specific, observable psychological […]
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. So the tool that analyses those messages should live on the phone too. Several AI tools for detecting manipulation and documenting coercive behaviour have now launched as mobile apps, and that logic is sound as far as […]