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This episode has to start a little differently. It comes with an extra trigger warning because it contains discussion of sexual coercion, reproductive coercion, and intimate partner abuse. Please take care of yourself as you listen. I need you to hear something before we go anywhere. If there's ever been a moment in your relationship, one moment or a thousand moments where you felt pressured into doing something with your body that you were not comfortable with, that is not normal. And that is not just part of a relationship. And that was not your fault. It was never your fault. I'm gonna say a lot of important things today, but I want those words, those three words, to be the last ones that stay with you.

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Not your fault. Not your fault. Not your fault. All right, let's begin.

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The podcast for women who are done sleepwalking through relationships that were never designed for them to thrive in. Week after week, we dig into the psychology of why we get stuck, why we stay, and most importantly, how we break free. Before we go any further, I want to offer a quick disclaimer because it matters. When I talk about relationship abuse and coercive dynamics, you'll often hear me use the pronoun he for the person causing harm. That's because the patterns I've studied and the women I've worked with and my own lived experience align with that framing. But I want to be clear, abuse does not belong to one gender. Anyone can be harmed and anyone can cause harm. And this space is for anyone who sees themselves in these stories regardless of how their relationship looks from the outside. And today? Today we're going somewhere that many of you have been waiting for someone to take you. We're talking about sexual coercion inside of relationships. And before you brace yourself, I want you to take a big breath. You are safe here. And this is exactly the kind of conversation that changes things. Coercion. Coercion is not the same as force. It doesn't always look like a threat, it doesn't require physical violence. Coercion is about pressure, sustained, strategic, and deliberate pressure that wears down someone's resistance until they comply. And when that pressure is applied to someone's body and their sexuality, it is called sexual coercion. The legal and clinical definition is this sexual coercion is any unwanted sexual activity that occurs after pressure, threats, or manipulation, where physical force may or may not be involved. And I want to be very clear, this can absolutely happen inside of a committed relationship, inside of a marriage, inside of a relationship that you have been in for years. Here's what's important to understand about consent first, because this is the foundation of everything. Consent is not the absence of a no. Consent is a freely given, enthusiastic, ongoing yes every single time, full stop. Anything that interferes with your ability to give that freely given, enthusiastic yes, that crosses a line, even if it happens in your bedroom, even if it happens with someone who says they love you. So what does sexual coercion actually look like? Because this is where it gets confusing for a lot of women. It doesn't always feel violent. It often feels exhausting. It feels like wearing down. It looks like being asked and asked and asked until you finally give in just to make it stop. It looks like being guilted. Oh, I thought you loved me. Oh, you never want to be close to me anymore. It looks like being told that intimacy is your duty, that it's what a good wife does, that he needs it. It looks like being pressured when you're sick, when you're exhausted, when you've just had a terrible day and when you are clearly not okay. It looks like being touched when you're asleep or partially asleep without your consent. It looks like being told that what happened was your idea even when you know it wasn't. It looks like having your no treated like a negotiating position rather than an answer. It looks like being made to feel broken or selfish for not wanting sex. And one I want to name very specifically because it shows up more often than people realize reproductive coercion. That's when a partner sabotages your birth control, pressures you about pregnancy decisions, or uses the possibility of pregnancy as a way to control your body and your future. This is coercion, it is abuse, and it is far more common than most people know. Now, the number that stops people cold every single time I share it. According to the CDC's most recent National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, data collected just in 2023 and 24, nearly one in five women in the United States has experienced sexual coercion in her lifetime. One in five. That means if you're listening to this right now, statistically, at least one in five of you have lived through what we're talking about today, and many of you may not have had a word for it until this moment. And here's the thing I need you to hear. Being in a relationship does not mean that you consented. Being married does not mean that you consented. Having said yes before does not mean that you consented today. Your body is still yours. Always. There is no relationship, no vow, no history that transfers ownership of your body to someone else. Because the question I hear most often isn't, was that sexual coercion? The question I hear most is, am I overreacting? And I want to dig into that because the self-doubt isn't accidental. It is built into the dynamics of the coercion itself. When people think about sexual violence, they often think about a very specific image, a stranger, a dark place, a moment of clear, unambiguous assault. And because that image is so powerful, so cemented in our cultural understanding of what counts as violence, anything that doesn't match that image gets minimized by society, by the legal system, and most painfully by the woman herself. But what happens when it's someone you love? What happens when it's someone you sleep next to every single night? What happens when he's kind in the morning, brings you coffee, is great with the kids, and then at night you feel like you don't have the right to say no? That ambiguity is not a design flaw in your thinking. It is exactly how this kind of abuse works. It counts on your love for him. It counts on your desire to keep the peace. It counts on the fact that you'll rationalize it before you name it. People like me who study intimate partner violence have a phrase for this: coercive control. It's not a single incident. It's a pattern, a sustained climate of pressure, fear, and control that makes it nearly impossible for a person to trust their own perceptions. You start to think, maybe I'm too sensitive. Maybe I misread that. Well, he said I wanted it, so maybe I did. That's the confusion talking. That's the coercion working exactly as intended. There's also something called fawning, a trauma response where instead of fighting or fleeing, a person appeases the source of threat to keep themselves safe. When you go along with something that you don't want to because the alternative feels dangerous or painful, you're not consenting. You are surviving. And there's a profound difference between those two things. I've worked with women who didn't realize that it had been happening to them for years, literally years, because every time they started to name it, something pulled them back. His reaction, their own doubt, the voice that said, but he loves me, or it wasn't that bad, or he never hit me. And here's what I want to say about that, with everything that I have. Your body's no does not require a perfect explanation or a dramatic story. If something felt wrong, that matters. You do not need a bruise or a police report to validate what happened to you. I'm gonna take a moment here and share something personal because I think there's a particular kind of loneliness that comes with this experience. The feeling that you're the only one, the feeling that something must be wrong with you, and I want to break that open. I have lived some of what we're talking about today inside of my own relationships in a place where I was supposed to be safe. I'm gonna start with the thing that might surprise you the most. There was a point in my relationship where I was so afraid, so genuinely afraid of being forced into a pregnancy that I did not want that I lied about a medical procedure. I told him it was for something else, and I had my tubes tied. Let that sink in for a second. I felt such a complete loss of control over my own reproductive future, my own body, that I had to find a way to quietly, secretly protect myself. Not because I didn't want any more children someday necessarily, but because I knew that if I became pregnant in that relationship, I would not have had a real choice. And that terrified me more than the procedure itself. That is reproductive coercion. And I didn't have a name for it at the time. I just knew that I was afraid. And I did what I could to keep myself safe. There were nights in a different relationship, and this is harder to say out loud even now, when I would wake up with the person who said he loved me doing things to my body. And in the morning, he would tell me that I had started it, that I had wanted it, that I had been the one initiating things and all over him. And there were moments where I genuinely questioned myself and I thought, God, is it possible that I don't remember? Did I do something in my sleep? Am I like losing my mind? And I would just stay quiet. That's not consent. That's not a gray area. That is a person doing whatever they need to do to get through something that should never have been happening in the first place. What I want to name is this the part that did the most damage wasn't even the events themselves. It was the confusion that followed. The way I turned on myself, the way that I tried to find the version of the story where it wasn't what I thought it was. I knew the language of abuse. I grew up in it and still, still, I questioned myself. That is how powerful the dynamic is. That is how deep the self-doubt goes when you are living inside it. Over time, I started noticing patterns. I started paying attention to the way my body felt before these moments happened. The low-grade dread that would settle at a certain time of night, the way I'd brace myself on certain days, the way I had, without even realizing it, developed a system for managing the situation, predicting it, deflecting it, surviving it. Those were the moments I started understanding what had been happening. Not a dramatic confrontation, not a single aha moment, just a slow, quiet recognition. This is not what a relationship is supposed to feel like in your body. If you're nodding right now, if any part of this resonates, I want you to know that you are not alone. You are not broken, and your experience is so real. Because I have been in rooms with enough women, and I have sat inside my own experience to know that what has been done to so many of us deserves more than careful. It deserves to be called exactly what it is. What we are talking about today is violation. It is theft. It is a person deciding that their desire, their comfort, their mood, their ego matters more than your body, your boundaries, and your humanity. And I want you to feel something right now that you have probably spent years being trained not to feel. I want you to feel angry. Not managed anger, not the polite, contained, I'm just a little frustrated version. I mean the real visceral anger, the kind that lives in your chest, the kind that knows with absolute certainty that what happened to you was wrong, that you didn't deserve it, that no love, no commitment, no history, no ring on your finger made it okay. Because here's the truth that too many women never get told. You were not difficult. You were not withholding, you were not broken or cold or too much or not enough. You were a person whose body was being treated as a resource and something to be accessed, managed, and taken from. And when you instinctively resisted that, when your body said no, and when your gut said stop, and when you went quiet or still or somewhere else in your mind, you were not feeling, you were surviving. Let me name what was actually happening in those moments, because I think this is where the anger becomes very specific. And specific anger is clarifying anger. When he kept asking after you said no, that was not persistence out of love. That was a man who decided that your no was a negotiating position, that it was an obstacle to work around rather than an answer to respect. He looked at your boundary and chose, consciously, deliberately chose to not honor it. That is not a misunderstanding. That is a decision. And you are allowed to be fucking furious about it. When he guilted you, oh, I thought you loved me. You never want to be close anymore. Other women don't have these issues. He was weaponizing your love for him. He took the most tender thing, the most vulnerable part of you, and used it as leverage. He made your compassion into a tool against you that is manipulative, it is cruel, and you were allowed to be fucking furious about it. When he came to you, when you were exhausted, half asleep, or in the middle of tears, when he chose those moments specifically, he was not misreading the room. He knew. He exploited the moments when your defenses were lowest, when you were least able to advocate for yourself, when your capacity to say no clearly was compromised by grief or exhaustion or trust. He knew it, and he did it anyway, and you are allowed to be fucking furious about it. When he told you that you wanted it, that you started it, that you were imagining things, that you were too sensitive, that what happened was different from what you know happened. He was not confused. He was rewriting the story in real time to protect himself from accountability. He was making you doubt your own mind so that you wouldn't trust your own experience enough to name it, report it, or leave. That is not love. That is someone covering their tracks, and you are allowed to be fucking furious about it. I want to be very direct about this because I think women have been told the opposite their entire lives. Your anger is not the problem here. Your anger is not ugly. Your anger is not something to manage or minimize or apologize for. Your anger is the appropriate, proportionate, fully human response to having your body treated as something that belonged to someone else. Your problem was never the reaction. Your problem was what happened to you. Researchers who study coercive control have documented something important. The behaviors we're talking about, the wearing down, the guilt tripping, the gaslighting, the exploitation of vulnerability, these are not accidents or emotional outbursts. They are patterns, they are repeat, they escalate, and they exist alongside other forms of control in the vast majority of cases. He was not occasionally thoughtless about your body. He had built an entire system where your body was not fully yours. And that system was deliberate. So when the anger arises, when you listen to this and something hot and real moves through you, I want you to let it. Don't breathe it away. Don't talk yourself out of it. Don't rush to the part where you're being fair to him or seeing both sides. There are not two equal sides in this. There is a person whose body was violated, and there is a person who violated it. That is the story. You are allowed to hold that story without softening it. And I will say this one more time because I need you to hear it deep in your bones. He made choices, not mistakes, choices. Sustained, repeated, deliberate choices to override your boundaries because he believed on some level that your comfort mattered less than his want. That is who he showed you he was. And the damage those choices left in your body and your mind and your ability to trust yourself, that is real. That is significant, and it deserves to be treated exactly that serious. You are not dramatic. You are not overreacting. You are a person reckoning with something that was genuinely done to you. And your anger about it, fuck yes, it is righteous. So let's talk about what prolonged sexual coercion does to a person because I think one of the most powerful things we can do is put language to the things that have been living in our bodies without a name. Research published in peer-reviewed journals on intimate partner violence has consistently found that sexual coercion, especially when it happens repeatedly inside of a relationship, is associated with serious and lasting psychological harm. Studies show significant associations between sexual coercion and post-traumatic stress disorder. And I want to be clear about what PTSD actually is because there's a misconception that it only happens after dramatic single events, like war or an assault in an alley. PTSD also develops from prolonged, repeated exposure to situations where your safety feels threatened and your autonomy feels violated. It can develop quietly over years inside of a relationship, also. And the symptoms may look nothing like what people picture when they think of trauma. They might look like dread, like a low, persistent dread in your body at certain times of the day or night, like before bed, for instance, without being fully to articulate why. It can look like dissociation, the feeling of going somewhere else mentally during your physical intimacy. Your body is present, but you are not. This is your nervous system trying to protect you. It can look like flinching. It's an involuntary physical response when someone touches you unexpectedly. Your body remembers even when your mind tries to move on, it can look like a loss of desire, not because there's anything wrong with you, but because your body has learned to associate intimacy with danger, obligation, or loss of control. It can look like hypervigilance, constantly monitoring someone else's mood, their tone, their tightness around their eyes, reading the room with a kind of exhausting precision because you've learned that misreading it has costs. It can look like shame, deep, bone-level shame that you struggle to explain because on the surface, nothing that bad has happened, but your body and your nervous system tell a different story. Research on reproductive coercion specifically, which is the sabotage of birth control, pressure around pregnancy, using pregnancy as a control tactic, found that it independently predicts depression, anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and what researchers called sexual agency, meaning over time women lose touch with their own desires, their own preferences, their own voice in the bedroom. Their sexuality becomes organized around managing his needs rather than expressing their own. And here's something I want to say carefully because it surprises a lot of women. Sometimes the effects of sexual coercion in a relationship don't fully surface until you leave it. While you're inside of it, you're in survival mode. You're adapting, you're managing. You may not have time or safety to feel how bad things are. It's often after, in the new apartment, in the quietness of a life without him, that the body starts to process what it's been holding. If that's where you are right now, newly out or out for a while, and only now starting to feel the weight of what happened, that's not weakness. That is your system working. That is your body finally exhaling. You're not too late, you are right on time. Now I want to take a step back for a moment and talk about something we. See over and over again in public life and scandals and courtrooms and the testimonies of women who finally spoke because understanding the patterns in extreme public cases can actually help us recognize the quieter versions of these same patterns in our own lives. There's a pattern that comes up repeatedly in cases where powerful men abuse the women around them. And that pattern is this. These men don't typically start out with overt violence. They start with grooming, small boundary violations, testing to see what you'll tolerate, building a climate where you feel indebted, afraid, or convinced that what's happening is normal, even that it could be desired. And then gradually the violations escalate. What makes this relevant to everyday relationships, not just the high-profile cases you've seen in the news, is that the mechanics are identical. The grooming happens, the slow escalation happens, the gaslighting happens, and the woman ends up in a place where the harm is real and significant, but she struggles to name it because it arrives so gradually that she can't point to a single moment where it all went wrong. There's also a pattern in how institutions respond to these situations or fail to respond in a better term. In family systems, in religious communities, and social circles, the response to a woman naming what happened to her is often not, oh, we believe you, but rather it's, are you sure? Or have you considered what this is going to do to him? Or maybe you're just being too sensitive. This is called secondary victimization, and it compounds the harm because not only did someone violate her, but now the systems around her are violating her. The people who were supposed to protect her or told her the experience wasn't real. I also want to name something specifically for the woman listening who may be in communities where marital or religious frameworks are used to justify sexual access. There are belief systems that teach women that their body is not their own, that it belongs to their husband, that a refusal is spiritual failure, that submission is the definition of a good wife. I want to say this as clearly as I know how. No genuine faith tradition requires you to surrender your body against your will. And if someone has used scripture or tradition or community pressure to override your boundaries, that is spiritual abuse in addition to sexual coercion, and you are allowed to challenge it. These patterns exist across cultures, communities, income levels, and education levels. Sexual coercion inside relationships does not discriminate. It happens in relationships that look perfectly normal from the outside. It happens in homes that look happy on social media. It happens in church pews and at neighborhood barbecues. It hides inside love or whatever love looks like. And that is exactly why naming it matters so much. Then I want to spend some real time with you here. I want to be very careful about this section because I know that women who are inside coercive relationships often feel intense pressure to do something, fix something, leave or not leave. And the last thing I want is for this to be more pressure. This is not a checklist. This is not a timeline. This is an invitation to start paying attention at whatever pace feels safe for you. So the first thing is to just name it. The first act of reclaiming yourself is simply naming what happened to you. Not for him, not for a court, not even for anyone else, just for you. You can start by saying it to yourself internally. What I experienced is sexual coercion. What happened to my body was not okay, and I did not deserve that. Say it again. I did not deserve that. This sounds simple. It is not. For many women, it takes months or years to get here. And if saying it out loud is too much right now, write it in a private journal. Or even just sitting with the acknowledgement in your own mind that counts. That is the beginning. Step two is to just understand what happened so you can stop blaming yourself. One of the most important things that you can do for your own healing is to understand the psychology of what happened, not to excuse him, but to stop torturing yourself with the idea that you should have known better, done differently, left sooner. Coercion is designed to confuse. The self-doubt you feel is not a character flaw. It is a predictable, documented response to a specific type of manipulation. When you understand that your confusion was manufactured by his behavior, you can stop treating it as evidence against yourself. I strongly encourage you to seek out a therapist who specializes in trauma and intimate partner violence, not just any therapist, someone trained in this specific area. Modalities like trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, and somatic approaches can be particularly effective for the kind of body level trauma that sexual coercion creates. If one-on-one therapy isn't accessible right now, there are other paths. Support groups for survivors of intimate partner violence, many of which are free and confidential, can provide a powerful form of you are not alone that is very hard to replicate in isolation. The third thing is to build the conditions for safety. For women who are still in the relationship, I will never, ever, ever tell you to simply leave as though that's a small and easy thing to do. I know it isn't. But I will encourage you to begin building a safety plan quietly, privately, on your own terms. A safety plan might look like keeping a small amount of cash somewhere he doesn't know about, having copies of important documents, your ID, your social security cards, the kids' birth certificates, somewhere accessible, identifying one trusted person you could reach out to in an emergency, knowing the number of your local domestic violence organization, which you can call just to talk and get information with no obligation to do anything else. Knowledge is safety. Understanding your options is safety, and you deserve to have options. The next step is to start rebuilding trust with your own body. This one takes a lot of time, and it's the part that people talk about the least. When someone has repeatedly overridden your physical boundaries, your body can become a place that doesn't feel entirely safe to live in. You may feel disconnected from your own sensations, your own desires, your own physical self. That disconnection is a form of protection, and healing it requires going slowly with great gentleness. Some things that support this process are somatic therapy, which is body-based therapy focused on reconnecting with the physical sensation and safety. So other things are gentle movement, like yoga or walking or any physical practice that makes you feel at home in your body. Clear conscious boundaries in everyday life, practicing saying no to small things, building that muscle again. And time. Time with people who ask before they touch you. Time in spaces where your no is respected without question. Time in your own company, where your body gets to simply exist without being someone else's object. Healing is not linear. There will be good days and harder days. There will be moments where you feel completely free and moments where something small triggers a memory that your body hasn't released yet. All of that is part of the process, and none of it means that you are failing. If you are experiencing sexual coercion or sexual violence in your relationship currently, I want you to know that support exists and it is available to you right now. Wherever you are, there are hotlines and advocacy services available. Nationally, you can reach the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE. That's 1-800-656-4673 or visit rain.org r-a-in-n.org to chat online, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-SAFE. That's 1-800-799-7233. You can also text START to 88-788 or chat at the hotline.org. Also 24-7, also confidential. Advocates there are trained specifically to help with sexual coercion inside relationships and you don't have to be physically hit to call. If you feel like your internet use is being monitored, please use a private browser or window or call rather than going online. Your safety comes first. And if you are in immediate danger, please call 911. So instead, I want to say a few things and I want you to actually hear them. Whatever happened to you, whether you have a name for it now or whether you're still in the fog figuring it out, it was real. Your body knew it was real, even when your mind tried to talk you out of it. Your nervous system registered it even when you told yourself you were overreacting, the dread, the exhaustion, the flinching, the going somewhere else in your mind, that was your body trying to protect yourself from something that should have never happened in the first place. Trust that body, your body. It has been telling you the truth this whole time. And now let's talk about the anger. If you're sitting somewhere right now in your car, in your kitchen with your earbuds in at the gym and something inside of you is burning, I want you to know that fire has a name. It's called truth. It's called justice. It's called a woman finally, finally giving herself permission to stop being small about what was done to her. You were probably taught to manage your anger, to soften it, to worry about what it would mean for him if you were too loud about it, too clear, too unwilling to see his sigh. You were taught that your rage was the dangerous thing, that it could break something, ruin something, or hurt someone. But here's what I know to be true from my own life and from the lives of every woman that I have sat with who has walked through this. The anger does not destroy you. The suppression of it does. The women who heal fully, deeply in their bones are the ones who let themselves feel the full weight of what happened, who stop minimizing it, who stop saying it wasn't that bad, or he wasn't always like that, or I stayed quiet, so it must have been partly my fault. They are the ones who look at it squarely and say, that was wrong, and I did not deserve that. And I am furious, and I'm gonna let that fury move me forward instead of burying me alive. So if you need to cry, cry. If you need to scream, do it. If you need to write it all down and then burn the paper, do that too. Just don't burn the house down with it. If you need to call someone and finally say out loud what you've ever thought, call them. Today, let the anger be what it is. Because on the other side of it is something extraordinary. On the other side of it is a woman who knows exactly what she will and will not accept, who does not negotiate with her own safety, who trusts herself so completely that no one can talk her out of what she knows to be true, who takes up space in a relationship, in a room, in her own body without apology. That woman exists inside of you right now. She has always been there. She has been there through every moment. He made you doubt yourself. She is the part of you that knew. She is the part of you that sent you to this podcast today. I want to close with three things I need you to carry with you. Not just here, carry. First, your body is yours completely, unconditionally, not sometimes, not when he's in a good mood, always. No relationship, no history, no vow changes that. Your body is yours. Two, what happened to you was wrong. Not complicated, not nuanced, not a gray area where he has a point to. Wrong. You are allowed to call it that. You are allowed to hold that without softening it. And three, the anger, keep it. Refine it, use it. Not to destroy yourself, but to refuse ever again to be made small. You came here today because some part of you is ready. Honor that part. She is trying to get you home to yourself. Until next time, keep breaking every pattern that was never yours to carry on.