Patterns of Control: Understand, Recognise and Track Coercive Control in Relationships

By Dee Donaldson

YOU'RE NOT IMAGINING IT. YOU'RE NOT THE PROBLEM.You know you're capable. From the outside, your life works. Yet inside your relationship you keep asking yourself the same questions. Am I over reacting? Why do I keep trying? If it's really that bad, why haven't I left? That confusion may well be the predictable outcome of a pattern built to create it.

Patterns of Control is the clear-eyed, evidence-grounded guide to coercive control written for the competent and empathic women who are often the last to recognise it in their own lives. Author, Dee Donaldson, is a Clinical Psychologist and former police officer with more than two decades of experience across law enforcement, victim advocacy, and clinical practice supporting women who have experienced abuse and trauma . She also brings the voice of lived-experience as a survivor of coercive control herself. Dee has written the book she once needed, and the one her clients have asked for.

Patterns of Control is the full anatomy of coercive control with a step-by-step method for seeing it in your own relationship.

Inside, you will find:

Why it happens - the beliefs that drive a partner to control, and why your confusion, your staying, and your trying harder all make sense.What it looks like - ten behaviour types, from isolation and surveillance to financial control, threats, reality distortion and sexual coercion, and the ten ways they harm your mind, your body, your finances, and your freedom to make your own choices.How it escalates - the patterns and warning signs that matter most, including the heightened risk that surrounds leaving.What to do with what you see - Relationship Clarity Mapping, a structured method for tracking the pattern yourself, until what has been kept blurred, by design, becomes something you can name and evidence.

Coercive control works by keeping you uncertain. This book hands the certainty back to you, so that whatever you decide, you decide it with the full picture in front of you.

A practical guide to recognising coercive control and psychological abuse. Patterns of Control is a 'must-read' for all women wanting to discern healthy relationships from those that harm.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1764632729
• ISBN13: 9781764632720
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Wisewoman Studio
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"