The Fragmenting Fog of Contradiction: How Coercive Control Disrupts Knowing and Protects Connection

Posted on by Chele Yntema

Coercive control is a pattern of domination that works to erase a person’s freedom and sense of Self.

Jess Hill

The Fragmenting Fog of Contradiction:
How Coercive Control Disrupts Knowing
and Protects Connection

There is a stirring within. A tension that moves quickly from the belly to the brain, a flood of fear, an overwhelming panic that rises and crests before shifting into a fog of fuzzy numbness. It is a spontaneous transition, where contact with body and mind feels quietly smothered beneath a coloured haze of contradiction. Nothing feels clear. Perplexity deepens into a disorienting dissonance.

What is this fog, this internal, discombobulating contradiction?fog of confusion in coercive control

This is the embodied anguish of a Self in confusion.

A deeply felt Self-state where a sense of ungrounded contradiction overtakes one’s felt knowing of what is known. Confusion can exist across a spectrum of intensity, yet the confusion spoken of here is an embodied form that paradoxically disembodies. Rather than remaining within conceptual thought, it arises as a relational vulnerability that quietly pulls us away from ourselves, often without our awareness.

Such vulnerability can emerge when care and fear coexist. The contradiction forms a paradoxical interface between threat and protection, where the swirl of not-knowing becomes the Self’s way of staying safe enough to remain connected.

In this way, embodied, fragmenting confusion reflects a neurobiological response to relational danger. What appears as connection, protection, or belonging may also contain subtle expressions of power, dominance, or control. This is the quiet terrain of coercive control, and the way relationship can belie our Self-knowing through fragmentation and confusion.

Here, embodied confusion begins to reveal its relational origins. The very sensations that fragment us are shaped within the dynamics we are trying to understand.

Confusion as threat and defence

Affective and Perceptive Correlates:
The Push Toward Safety in Coercive Dynamics

Fragmenting confusion can develop within relationships where the underlying dynamic carries an imbalance of power. Often without conscious intent, moments of hierarchical dominance are interwoven with acts of care or kindness. This creates a perplexing pattern of relational reinforcement, where doubt, hope, and fear cycle together, and safety is continually sought within unpredictability.Parallel Circuits of Attachment and Fear

Relational uncertainty, particularly sharp shifts between warmth and contempt, can accumulate into a storm of affective activation. These shifts awaken vigilance for danger alongside the innate drive toward attachment when distressed. Parallel motivational currents arise: one orienting toward distance for survival, the other pulling toward closeness to preserve connection.

As these circuits activate together, affective disorganisation unfolds. The body oscillates between the impulse to move away and the longing to stay near. This is felt as ambiguity and heightened arousal, a lived experience of “move away to survive” alongside “stay close to remain safe.”

This push–pull dynamic forms the embodied ground of many oppressive relational systems, particularly those shaped by coercive control. Within such environments, affective and neuroceptive processes are repeatedly exposed to contradictory cues, comfort entwined with fear, love entwined with humiliation. Over time, this generates a wordless sense of lostness, a deeply embodied experience of alarmed aloneness.

Interpretive Confusion:
The Pull to Logic, Coherence, and Self-Protection

Where embodied confusion reflects conflicting signals of threat and attachment, interpretive confusion reflects the mind’s effort to create coherence when these signals resist integration.

Confusion can function both as an experience of threat and as an interpretive protection. When unpredictability saturates the relational environment, the drive to make sense intensifies. Clarity and certainty offer a sense of safety, and the mind naturally moves toward coherence through understanding others and the world.

Interpretive confusion emerges when clarity threatens attachment. In these moments, knowing is suspended, and experience circulates within a psychological and physiological blur often recognised as cognitive dissonance. Two incompatible truths are held together, generating painful friction that resists resolution.

To reduce this tension, the mind seeks logic through many pathways, often gravitating toward interpretations that preserve attachment and minimise terror. In the short term, this protects against unbearable realities and losses. Over time, however, these dynamics are internalised. Self-doubt and self-blame emerge as attempts to restore coherence, only for confusion to return, deepening the sense of uncertainty and the longing for safety.

Again, the embodied sense of alarmed aloneness is awakened.

From Unintentional Patterns
to Awareness and Accountability

Cognitive Dissonance as a Relational DefenceSometimes, within the anguish of confusion, awareness begins to stir. This often arises within attachment itself, where care, longing, and fear are interwoven, making clarity both essential and perilous. A comment from a friend, a sentence in an article, or a pattern suddenly noticed. For a brief moment, the fog thins.

Panic often follows. The impulse to protect the relationship arises quickly. There may be a sense that the partner does not intend harm, that controlling or oppressive behaviours emerge from unintentional unawareness, shaped by autonomic reactions beyond conscious choice. This understanding can momentarily ease fear, allowing connection to continue.

Yet something remains unsettled. The confusion returns, often with greater intensity. A new longing appears, a desire to understand and to be understood, to notice together what is happening in the space between, to restore predictability and safety.

A conversation occurs. Fear or vulnerability is named. Experiences of threat or control are spoken aloud. In this moment, actions move into awareness. Intention becomes less central than impact.

Here lies a pivotal shift. When harm becomes known, responsiveness matters. With ownership, there is recognition of impact and a commitment to accountability through changed action. Without this, responsibility may be spoken while accountability remains absent. Apologies may occur, moments of closeness return, yet the underlying pattern persists.

When harm repeats without meaningful change, confusion deepens. Over time, this can mark a transition from unintentional harm to conscious neglect, where awareness exists without protective action. Defensive responses, minimisation, reversal, or avoidance of support may follow. The misalignment between words and actions widens, and self-blame fills the gap.

We do this to survive. We do this because we care. We do this because the fear of losing connection can feel greater than the fear of staying.

Confusion becomes a form of protection. It is, in a paradoxical manner, its own affective form of preservation and safety.

Importantly however, when awareness is present without change, harm continues. Impact matters, even when intentions remain unclear.

Safety Matters:
Returning to Our Bodies and Our Grounded Knowing

Within the fragmenting fog of contradiction, the question often becomes how to re-orient toward a grounded sense of Self, breath by breath.

The beginning is rarely found in decisions or conclusions. It often begins in the body. Confusion first unsettles our physical grounding. Returning gently to sensation, feet on the floor, the support of a chair, a breath that lengthens slightly on the exhale, can offer an anchor. These small movements restore enough steadiness for quiet knowing to emerge.

From here, reality can be traced with care. Confusion reshapes experience to protect against loss. Writing down simple facts, words spoken, bodily responses, moments of feeling small or unseen, creates an external orientation when internal knowing falters.

Connection also steadies us. Trusted others who listen without agenda can reflect our experience back to us when doubt thickens. Their presence supports remembrance rather than direction.

Over time, the delicate boundary between caring for the relationship and caring for the Self becomes clearer. Both longings often coexist, and neither needs immediate resolution. Honouring both reduces fragmentation.

When readiness emerges, or when safety requires structure, safety planning can serve as a scaffold. It is an act of care for the future Self, a widening of choice rather than a demand for action.

Safety unfolds through small, compassionate movements toward rootedness.

As you move through your own fog, may you find moments where the ground steadies beneath you. Moments where breath anchors you. Moments where clarity glimmers and connection feels safe.

And if the fog thickens again, may you hold this knowing:

Your confusion is protective.
Your safety is worthy.
Your knowing is already stirring within you.
And even in the murkiness, you are not alone.

Whenever you are ready, you can take the next breath, the next step, the next small movement toward your own coherence.

Welcome, my name is Chele, I am a therapist primarily specialising in Trauma – specifically as it presents as Burnout and Breakdown.   As a psychotherapist & PACFA & CCAA Clinical Counsellor I work individually with beautiful humans such as yourself who feel alone, lost, confused, & overwhelmed; those of you who are longing for something different.

As such, I offer my knowledge, skills, and inherent gifts with ears that listen to hear, and a heart open to receive who you are, no matter the suffering you bring; to support you in an exploration of how your past has impacted you and the ways that shows up presently. Together we will rediscover your hope and your sense of Self; we will reconnect you to what matters reclaiming the joy and delight in life you so deserve.

I welcome you to view my services or connect with me to explore how I can assist you in your journey.

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References & Resources

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Siegel’s work offers a foundational understanding of how human experience is organised through relationship. His model of integration across sensation, perception, and interpretation provides a clear framework for understanding why coherence becomes fragile under relational threat. Within coercive control, this framework helps situate confusion as an embodied response to unpredictability and power imbalance, rather than as a lack of insight. The fragmenting fog described in this first post reflects what occurs when integration is repeatedly disrupted by relational environments that oscillate between care and danger.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Schore’s work deepens this understanding by tracing how relational threat shapes right-hemisphere organisation and affect regulation. His focus on the bodily and emotional foundations of experience helps explain why confusion in coercive control is felt somatically, often preceding conscious awareness. The fog of contradiction described in Post One aligns with Schore’s account of how chronic relational stress unsettles bodily grounding and emotional coherence.

Badenoch, B. (2018). The heart of trauma: Healing the embodied brain in the context of relationships. W. W. Norton & Company.
Badenoch offers a relational synthesis of interpersonal neurobiology and trauma, emphasising how coherence emerges through attuned connection. Her work supports the framing of confusion in coercive control as protective, arising from a system attempting to preserve continuity and belonging. The practices of gentle grounding and relational steadiness described in Post One closely mirror Badenoch’s emphasis on restoring coherence through relationship rather than through interpretation alone. 

Annotated synthesis
Together, these works support an understanding of confusion within coercive control as an embodied response to relational unpredictability. The fog that fragments knowing is not random or deficient, but reflects a system adapting to environments where safety cannot be reliably assumed.