For the record, when you are stuck in deep poverty and someone occasionally sends you some work for 10 bucks or so, a handful of words to translate, so that you can buy food or keep the lights on for a few more days (prepaid power in England) and the person always does this just in time, you feel so grateful and you feel like you have a friend until you suddenly realize that this also the person who is keeping you trapped and isolated and powerless and also the same person who’s been hurting animals for example as punishment for having gone to the police again or just to spite you, and you realize that this is “coercive control”. Except it’s more subtle.

Then I googled it, after I wrote that. Heck, no, re that last half sentence.

This is 100% what my situation in Portsmouth was like: https://www.relationshipsvictoria.org.au/news/what-is-coercive-control/

Oh, sure, it’s complicated. I know that.

Would those idiots in Portsmouth have listened to me if I had used the phrase “coercive control”? I doubt it. They didn’t consider me human, after all. They felt it was okay for someone to vandalize my flat, too, and steal my postal mail and all the rest. It means that they didn’t see me as human.

Profound otherization.