Healing the Neurological Damage of Coercive Control

Neuroplasticity is a Powerful Tool

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Coercive control—a pattern of behaviors that intimidate, isolate, and dominate another person—creates profound neurological changes in adults (and children, too, but more on that another time). Understanding these impacts through a lens of neuroscience reveals both the depth of harm and the potential for healing through neuroplasticity.

Impacts of Coercive Control on Mental and Physical Health

A review and meta-analysis examining coercive control and mental health outcomes found associations between coercive control and both PTSD and depression. These correlations reflect significant neurological changes in stress responses.

Coercive control can generate biological responses to stress characterized by inhibition of the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, altered immune activity, and changes in both the structure and function of the brain. Because coercive control involves prolonged exposure to interpersonal trauma, it may have particularly strong associations with CPTSD compared to other forms of intimate partner violence.

Altered Sense of Agency

Research shows that for victims of coercive control, there is altered neural processing. Research using electroencephalography has demonstrated that coercion fundamentally alters brain function at a basic level. When people act under coercive instructions, their brains show reduced brain wave activity for action outcomes compared to voluntary actions, suggesting the brain processes coerced actions similarly to passive movements rather than intentional behaviors. The sense of obeying orders affects the degree of responsibility we feel over our lives. Furthermore, there is a complex interplay between social constructs and their relationship to voluntary action, meaning our response to power and authority may be influenced by society, culture, and gender. Human traits like greed, fear, and desire for money are universal.

Coercion diminishes our sense of agency—the subjective experience of being in control of our actions. There are measurable neurological effects. The brain plays tricks with time in a phenomenon called temporal binding, where, in voluntary actions, the perception of actions and consequences is compressed. Temporal binding enhances our feeling of autonomy. This does not occur in involuntary actions.

The brain treats the consequences of coerced actions as if they were passively triggered. The implication is that brains are fundamentally altered by the experience of coercion. Moreover, there’s evidence that this is universal and that we are all susceptible; “ordinary people can comply with coercive instructions,” and there is no individual personality trait or characteristic that makes one more vulnerable to coercion.

Carrying out coercive instructions removes the sense of responsibility for one’s actions. A point of clarity from the researchers, the research doesn’t support the Nuremberg defense (we were just acting under orders…) and should not be used to abdicate responsibility. “Laws are culturally evolved rules for managing impact of individuals’ behaviors on others. Laws must therefore engage with the psychological and neurocognitive mechanisms that drive individual actions… [The] finding of reduced experience of agency under coercion does not legitimate Nuremberg-type defenses: society could still expect agents to try to resist evil,” and, in addition, it merits turning the lens on the perpetrator, flipping the bias around victimization on its head, challenging at its core the tendency to blame the victim and revising the legal approach to the one perpetrating the coercion.

What a revolution that would be. This kind of shift in thinking would require nothing less than upending the legal system.

Hope, Healing and Growth