Abuse isn’t just the experience of your needs not being met.

The control lies in our needs being met with harm and conditioning us to believe that our needs are the problem. When we believe our needs are reasonable, if they aren’t met, we will continue to voice them or eventually leave the relationship. If the abuser can convince us that our needs are unreasonable - and the cause of their abuse - then we begin trying to suppress them.

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The past few memoir essays described moments that, at the time, felt isolated and confusing. This monthly reflection steps back from those experiences to examine one of the patterns that connected them: unpredictability.

In my new series, The Unspoken Story of Abuse, I have described moments that, at the time, felt confusing. Moments such as when I asked a simple question at the supermarket or searched online for why my partner seemed to hate me. Each moment appeared small in isolation. There were no visible injuries, no (obvious) public scenes, and nothing that would clearly signal it was abuse for me to anchor myself to.

Yet moments like these are often where coercive dynamics take hold.

What was not obvious then was that these incidents were not isolated; they were a pattern. Part of that pattern was establishing control through unpredictability. When the abuser’s reactions are inconsistent, such as kind one moment and hostile the next, the emotional environment becomes unstable. Without stability, we lack emotional safety. It becomes difficult to know what behaviour is safe and what behaviour might be met with escalated incidents. This coerces us into a role where we self-censor and centre ourselves on trying to predict the abuser’s reaction, in an attempt to stay safe.

How unpredictability creates control

If the abuser was always angry, at least their behaviour would be predictable. You may still feel hurt or frightened, but you can anticipate what is coming. Our nervous system loves to map out likely outcomes. It’s a fundamental way to create safety. Predictability means we know what kind of reaction to expect and can make decisions with that knowledge.

When the abuser is sometimes warm and affectionate and at other times distant, critical, or explosive, there is no reliable way to assess how they might respond. The same words or actions can produce completely different reactions on different days. This uncertainty keeps survivors alert at all times, scanning for subtle changes in mood, tone, or body language.

Over time, this constant alertness can lead to what is often described as walking on eggshells. Ordinary interactions get filtered through a silent calculation: Could this cause a problem? Could this be misunderstood? Is it safer to stay quiet?

This conditioning to censor yourself happens through repeated experiences in which your harmless behaviour is followed by disproportionate or unexpected consequences. Survivors begin to associate normal actions with risk, even when there is no obvious reason for the reaction that followed.

Unpredictability does not just create fear in the moment. Instead, it begins to change how survivors think about themselves and their own responsibility for what is happening. We begin to gather “false evidence” that there must be something wrong with the way we communicate to warrant such a heightened response in the abuser.

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