By Jess Pata orcidID: 0009-0008-6202-7731
Skill-Based Resilience after IPV: Introducing “Intimate-Partner Deskilling” and the “Personal Power Wheel” as a Contextual Behavioral Model of Understanding Coercive Control
Introduction
Within contextual behavioral science, there is a foundational assumption: behavior is always functional within the context.
Yet in the domain of intimate partner abuse, this principle is often inconsistently applied. While there has been important progress in understanding coercive control as a pattern of behavior that functions to benefit the perpetrator, the behavior of those subjugated to that control is still frequently interpreted through pathologizing and mentalistic lenses using terms such as codependency, trauma bonding, or personality-based explanations (Abusive Men Describe the Benefits of Violence, 2024).
These frameworks, while often well-intentioned, risk obscuring a more precise analysis, and lead to circular reasoning (e.g. she stays because she is codependent; she is codependent because she stays.)
From a contextual perspective, the question is not “What is wrong with the person to lead them to choose the behaviors?”
But rather:
“How is it correct? What contingencies, and MOs make this behavior adaptive?”
This paper introduces Intimate Partner Deskilling and the Personal Power Wheel, a contextual behavioral model for understanding how coercive control systematically constrains the conditions necessary for self-determination. It will also show how patterns often labeled as maladaptive are, in fact, highly adaptive and functional responses to those constraints.
The Organism is Always Correct
Behavioral science has long held that behaviors are chosen by selectionism; that is, the organism is always behaving in accordance with its learning history, abilities, and contingencies. In environments characterized by coercion, unpredictability, and threat (whether overt or subtle), behavior shifts accordingly.
Actions such as:
- Compliance
- Appeasement
- Hypervigilance
- Deference or abdication of choice
- Emotional suppression
...are not random or disordered.
They are functionally coherent strategies that:
- Minimize risk
- Maintain access to resources
- Reduce the probability of escalation
- Preserve relational stability where possible
When viewed through this lens, the persistence of these often-pathologized behaviors is not surprising. It is expected and predictable.
Additionally, many behaviors that are seen as functional in a normal context become non-functional in a coercive one. Behaviors are selected when they are effective at gaining reinforcement. In the context of intimate-partner abuse, normally functionally behaviors such as making a request, spending time with friends, making an independent choice of what to wear, expressing a boundary etc. are often not only ineffective at gaining reinforcement, they may cause unwanted consequences. Behavior that is unsafe or unproductive stops being chosen: not because the person is disordered, but because they are doing what healthy humans do. Behavior is selected by consequences. When a controlling partner changes the consequences, it would be maladaptive for the target of that control to NOT change their behaviors.
Coercive Control as Intimate-Partner Deskilling
What is coercive control?
Evan Stark first defined coercive control in his book Coercive Control- How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (2007). He says “the victim becomes captive in an unreal world created by the abuser, entrapped in a world of confusion, contradiction, and fear.” Stark’s work was among the first to apply a contextual perspective to abuse, and instead of viewing intimate-partner-violence as each individual abusive incident, define it as an overall pattern of behavior that works to shrink a victim’s world by changing the environment to limit her choices.
In the time since Stark’s original work, progress has been made to criminalize coercive control in some locations. The UK has laws against coercive control, with the government defining it as “an intentional pattern of behaviour which takes place over time, in order for one individual to exert power, control or coercion over another (Home Office, 2023). Women’s Aid discusses more of the function of coercive control, stating that it is “designed to make a person dependent by isolating them from support, exploiting them, depriving them of independence and regulating their everyday behaviour" (Women’s Aid, n.d.)
How does this control work?
Because behavior is always correct for the context, when an abuser changes the environment (either contingencies, or antecedents) the behavior of the victim will change to match. By making previously effective behaviors now unsafe, ineffective, or inefficient, the abuser reduces these behaviors in their victim.
The process behind Coercive Control can be more precisely understood as:
Intimate-Partner Deskilling:
-Inducing a Context-Responsive Skill Inhibition in an intimate partner by systematically manipulating the environment so that instead of supporting the skills of self-determination, the environment makes those skills unsafe or ineffective.
Personal Power Wheel: A Contextual Model
With the baseline assumption that coercive control is intimate-partner deskilling, I wanted to answer the question:
Which behaviors are targeted by coercive control?
Looking at published stories written by women who have escaped coercive control, I analyzed how they described their own experiences and what they chose to include in these accounts. Questionnaires, surveys, or interviews could be leading; by looking at these published stories, I wanted to find out which behaviors the victims themselves found relevant to their experiences.
A pattern of nine distinct skill areas emerged.
- Identifying own experience (tacting internally and externally)
- Choosing
- Requesting
- Daily Living
- Personal Efficacy / Capacity Use
- Interpretation of Situational Safety
- Using Technology to Connect
- Making/Maintaining Meaningful Relationships
- Navigating the Community to Access Resources
When analyzing this list of skill areas for patterns or relations, I noticed that they could be perfectly aligned with the 3 domains of self-determination theory (SDT): autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Ryan & Deci,2017).
This wheel illustrates the skills that abusers most commonly reduce in their victims, effectively reducing their ability to engage in self-determination. Conversely, if we flip the domains of SDT to their opposite, we get: deference, incompetence, and isolation, which can loosely describe what an abuser INCREASES in their victims, to further the control.
Skill-Based Resilience
The break-down of coercive control into 9 specific skill-ares that are systematically reduced in targets of control could be foundational in developing a contextual behavioral science curriculum for recovery after a survivor escapes the abusive relationship. A skills assessment can be developed to find specific areas where a survivor’s personal agency may need to be rebuilt. This can inform care planning, and empower survivors to actively participate in rebuilding what was inhibited through the intimate-partner deskilling.
A skill-based resilience would ideally combine trauma work, ACT, and behavioral coaching/education.
Implications for Clinical and Support Work
Reduces Victim-blaming
Understanding abusive, controlling relationships as Intimate-Partner Deskilling, and the resulting effects that we observe in the victim as context-responsive skill inhibition immediately reframes the dynamic to focus on the CONTEXT. This accurately describes the behavior, and reduces the inclination for mentalistic labels such as “codependent” that may inadvertently place blame on the victim for engaging in contextually-correct behavior.
Safety First
The focus on context also prioritizes safety and stability of the environment before trying to intervene in the victim’s behaviors. If it is assumed that a behavior is context-responsive, or contextually correct, then clinicians and supporters are less likely to encourage boundary-setting or other behavioral changes that could be unsafe within the abusive environment and put the survivor in danger. Environmental safety becomes the prerequisite for behavior change.
Survivor-centric and Empowering
While more pathological models place the clinician as the expert of the survivor’s experience, a focus on identifying and rebuilding lost skills lets the clinician hold an empowering space for the survivor to learn to trust themselves as the expert of their own situation. This is more trauma-informed and helps protect against a clinician accidently gaslighting the survivor and furthering their trauma.
Addresses Barriers
When starting with the assumption that all behavior is contextually correct, barriers are more readily discovered as the clinician is invited to lean into curiosity about the survivor’s context.
Moving Beyond Individual Blame toward Equity and Empathy
The persistence of pathologizing frameworks may, in part, reflect a broader cultural bias: the assumption that individuals operate in environments of relative safety and freedom. In reality, though, many do not have this privilege. Models that assume as a baseline that individuals should be demonstrating the “adaptive” behavior that is appropriate for relative privilege are inherently biased against a person who is underprivileged or in a harmful, unstable, or controlling environment. This results in assigning labels that often shame or disempower victims of IPV.
A contextual behavior science approach brings equity, by starting with the trauma-informed assumption that all human behavior makes sense for the context. This moves the focus or “blame” off the individual, and onto the environment in which they are.
References:
https://www.bwss.org/abusive-men-describe-the-benefits-of-violence/
Home Office (2023). Controlling or Coercive Behaviour Statutory Guidance Framework. UK Government. 5 April 2023. Available online.
Stark, Evan (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
What is coercive control? (n.d.). Women's Aid. Retrieved April 12, 2026, from