International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 9 2026 44
While participants who are professionals suggested
training them sensitively, survivors often preferred
a more confrontational approach. Participants
interviewed, whether survivors, professionals, or
both, emphasized problematic, widespread bias, lack
of training, and minimal, if any, clear professional
understanding of coercive control. Interviewees
highlighted how these challenges grew when
professionals were unable to accept the reality of glaring
systemic failure. In response to the question, “Did
you feel like what the system did was worse, on par,
or not quite as bad as what the perpetrator did?” P12
responded as follows regarding the female detective’s
investigation of her rapist in HvsF: “It was almost
worse, worse because it shook my belief in justice...I
mean it was a sex crime detective, and it was a female.
She just...She tried to gaslight me.”
Participants concluded from victim-blaming responses
like this that contextualizing coercive control adequately
within systems is an immediate high priority. The sub-
theme Comprehensive CC Lens is integral to the PSQM
and appears within several themes. Interviewees viewed
this sub-theme as mandatory to protect survivors.
The CC Lens contextualizes the major concepts of
coercive control into a new lens through which system
professionals may better perceive situations and
improve system-wide policies and procedures.
P5, an extremist group survivor and survivor of
IPV, discusses DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim
and offender), which is a key component of the
model. DARVO compounds survivors’ trauma when
professionals fail to appropriately contextualize
coercive control and recognize that survivors’
responses are adaptations to coercive control, rather
than character defects. The following quote is from the
Comprehensive CC subtheme.
footage...a lot of learners...need it to be engaging.
When you’re going through something like
this, you’re incredibly incapacitated...you can’t
speak up for yourself. You need somebody else
to do it for you. And things don’t make sense,
and you can’t express yourself clearly. And they
(professionals) just use that as more ammunition
against you. “See, she can’t remember stuff.
She’s incoherent. She’s inconsistent. She must
be lying.” (P5)
P5’s quote also includes themes and sub-themes from
the Story meta-theme. Targeted &Vulnerable (T&V)
under the Victim and Professional Arrogance (PA) sub-
themes under the Systems theme are associated with
systemic coercive control and institutional betrayal
(Smith &Freyd, 2014).
KISS, the third accessibility sub-theme recommends
to “keep it [the PSQM training] simple, stupid.” P10,
a cult and IPV survivor and professional, discusses
this sub-theme within PSQM Positive and adds the
sub-theme Powerful Model &Analogy (PM&A), “The
quicksand model’s brilliant, because it’s easy for the
mind to understand it. And, also, the same with the
videos.” Every interviewee found the quicksand model
and/or analogy to be powerful, making PM&A one of
the study’s most pervasive sub-themes as the following
quotes illustrate.
Participants showed appreciation for simplifying
coercive control’s complexity, facilitating systemic
change, and validating and empowering survivors. P7
states, “It summarized relevant models in a framework
that made clear sense to those who are familiar as well
as new to the concept.” P9 reiterated:
Another quote covers the sub-themes Centers Survivors
(Empowers) and PM&A under PSQM Benefits and
PSQM Positive respectively.
Participants illustrate how centering survivors benefits
them in three important ways: through empowerment,
validation, and healing, under the Validates subtheme.
P5 stated, “Because that is what happened to me.
So, just seeing the words on the page, reflecting my
own experience, that...really hit home.” P2 reported
similarly, “That I knew I wasn’t crazy. I’ve always
known it, but just validated... ‘You’ve always known
Walking through the model was really exciting
to me because I thought, “Oh my gosh! This is
another way we can put that experience into
words for people who can actually help people
who were like me.” So, I’m really excited!”
The double-bind one...“Oh, this is describing
exactly how, no matter what, you can’t win...Oh,
I’m losing no matter what I do.” And that was
actually really empowering because I remember
thinking “Oh, if I’m gonna lose either way, then
I might as well get out, right?” (P9)

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Kate Amber and Roderick Dubrow-Marshall |An Investigation into the Efficacy of the PsychoSocial Quicksand Model™
what you’re talking about.’”
The idea that the PSQM essentially inoculates survivors
against feeling “crazy” was repeated by several
interviewees. Feeling “crazy” is so frequent in survivor
populations that the literature has termed many
coercively controlling abuse tactics “crazy-making”
(Simon, 2022). P3 describes her insights gleaned from
the PSQM, in the Healing subtheme: “Recently, I’ve
been more...partly because of your model, more aware
of the damage ...the harm that (coercive control) did
to me.”
Centering the experiences of survivors and the
importance of psychoeducation are both emphasized
in the literature (Hill, 2020 Mandel &Wright, 2019
Phoenix, 2007 Whitworth, 2016). Participants found
these elements critical to empowerment, healing, and
validation, and they were reflected in their comments.
Several survivors expressed hope and excitement for
possible future harm reduction by incorporating the
PSQM into training. P6, for example, commented
on precisely these points, in the Empowers, Validates
and Healing subthemes: “So yeah, the validation
and the empowerment...understanding...is part of the
psychoeducation...getting educated...empowers me
to be, like, responsible...“OK, now I know. Now I can
watch out for it.”
Within the PSQM Benefits theme are sub-themes
pertaining to benefits for professional practice and
systemic transformation. The following examples show
how participants viewed the PSQM’s potential benefits.
P9 expressed hopefulness for the possibilities, in the
Raises Awareness subtheme: “I’m so excited about
your work...This is so cool, so cool!” P3 illustrates the
Inspires Action subtheme: “I think that anything that
gives us more awareness is really important.” While
P13’s quote is an example of the Inspires Collaboration
subtheme: “I just want you to know there’s an open
invitation to have a conversation about collaborating.”
The hybrid theme Coercive Control was found in the
PSQM and Story meta-themes, and sub-themes echo
the literature’s emphasis on the invisibility of coercive
control, the need for a new lens (Stark, 2007 Weiner,
2017), and a more controversial sub-theme, Intentional.
For example, within the Invisible subtheme, P8 stated:
“Because in the beginning, they don’t come off pulling
out a knife. In the beginning, of course, you sink into
the quicksand very slowly.” P1 reported similarly, from
The New Lens subtheme: “It cuts a clean space that
people can look at things freshly, without bringing a
lot of baggage with them. And I think that’s one of the
great benefits of using that term [coercive control].”
P7 identified personal impacts, in the Intentional
subtheme: “She would smooth things over so nice they
didn’t suspect anything...It was intentional, and she
was very good at trying to explain it away and cover it
up and gaslight me.”
The second meta-theme, Story, is comprised of themes
and sub-themes from participants’ life experiences
that exposure to the PSQM indirectly elicited. Themes
include Professionals, Coercive Controllers, Victims,
Systems, and Children. While interviewees’ experiences
were not the research focus, and therefore not analyzed
to the same degree as PSQM, this meta-theme gleaned
substantial and valuable information.
New research proposes that “coercive violence” be
recognized as a distinct form of IPV and defined as:
Monterrosa and Hattery (2022) suggest that coercive
violence is differentiated from coercive control
by opening victims up to coercion and/or state-
sanctioned violence. For example, threatening to
obtain custody of a victim’s child is coercive control,
but contacting child protective services to lodge false
allegations against the victim is coercive violence. To
emphasize the systemic nature of coercive violence,
the researcher expanded on the three contexts of “the
state” proposed by Monterrosa and Hattery (2022)
(the legal system, law enforcement, and healthcare) to
include the other systems where coercive controllers
abuse by proxy: family, community, and cults. This
The double-bind one...“Oh, this is describing
exactly how, no matter what, you can’t win...Oh,
I’m losing no matter what I do.” And that was
actually really empowering because I remember
thinking “Oh, if I’m gonna lose either way, then
I might as well get out, right?” (P9)
A form of intimate partner violence in which the
abuser intentionally engages in acts that expose
his partner to state surveillance and violence at
the behest of institutions or the state, including
the child welfare system and the criminal legal
system (Monterrosa &Hattery, 2022, p.1).