This account is shared in the exercise of my right to freedom of expression. It reflects my lived experience, understanding, and perceptions at the time. It does not seek to identify or name any individual, nor to assert findings of fact or legal conclusions. It is written solely to describe personal impact and experience, not to attribute legal or criminal responsibility.

Two Years Forward: How Coercive Control Enters the Courtroom

This piece took time to write: it was first published on 16 December 2024, and the date remains, but it took even longer to rewrite.

I am now two years on from when I first left, and this account forms part of a wider series showing how abuse can continue through the family court system rather than ending at separation. I’ve had to revisit this one carefully because it is central to that wider picture. It does not appear as a single event. Instead, it is part of a pattern that only becomes visible with distance.

Some of the other hearings will be shared in time; others still sit too close to the surface. Trauma doesn’t unfold neatly, and revisiting certain moments still comes at a cost. This isn’t about withholding truth — it’s about writing when my nervous system allows it, and when I can do so without losing myself in the process.

What I know now, two years forward, is that this day was not isolated. It was one of many points where coercive control adapted and found new ways to operate through process, paperwork, and silence. Naming that now doesn’t make it less painful — but it does make it clearer.

The rest will come when it can.

Attending the family court during ongoing manipulation was one of the most difficult experiences of my life.

Before I even entered the building, I had already been on my knees outside. My heart rate was over 140. I was dizzy, shaking, and barely able to stand. The distress had been building for weeks, but it peaked before I even walked through the doors. Relying on Lorazepam just to protect my physical and mental health was something I never imagined needing to do before leaving him.

Walking into a courtroom with someone who has harmed you is not a neutral act. It is a physiological event. Your body remembers what your mind tries to manage. Nothing about it is “just a hearing.”

The Lead‑Up

In the weeks before the hearing, I was still waiting for West Mercia Police’s Protection of Vulnerable People team to return and take a further statement. They had only been out the month before in relation to coercive control. As far as I understood, the investigation was still live and ongoing.

I had also recently shared another file with the police — evidence of continued harassment after separation. I went into that hearing believing I would likely be sitting through further ABE interviews about the domestic abuse that had already occurred.

The Day Itself

I didn’t go to court alone.
My friend, the woman I trained as a nurse with, my child’s godmother, and one of the few people I trust to notice when I’m not okay, even when I won’t say it — came with me. I was genuinely afraid that the stress might trigger a stroke or a myocardial infarction. I needed someone beside me who would know exactly what to do if my body gave out.

Before we even reached the building, my legs gave way. My vision flashed. Waves of dizziness hit so hard I couldn’t stand. Inside the court, I sat, taking ECGs with crushing chest pain, staring numbly at the wall as my vision blurred. I didn’t know if what I was experiencing was cardiac, neurological, or trauma — and that uncertainty made everything worse.

I knew I couldn’t let anyone see how much he affected me.
It was the only way I could survive being in the same room as him, not just because of what he had done to me for years, but because of what I believe he had been doing to my children.

The accusations that followed our separation, accusations I was not given a fair opportunity to defend, compounded everything.

His bail restrictions had been dropped because there had been no contact, not because the investigation had concluded. They were dropped pending further investigation. The court treated that as if everything was finished.

The Distortions in Court

He didn’t say outright that I was someone who complained about everyone; he implied it. With the change in my solicitor and the limited context the magistrates had from earlier hearings, he used that moment to paint me as a person who constantly makes complaints.

suggesting that a misconduct‑in‑public‑office investigation involving a sergeant was somehow linked to me, when in reality the truth was the complete opposite. That investigation existed independently of me, and my later contact with Professional Standards was solely to understand how information connected to my case appeared to be circulating.

Police officers’ names were used during discussions of the coercive control case. This created the impression that I had exaggerated or invented events. As soon as his barrister quoted the name of someone he claimed was a police officer, he said the coercive control case was going nowhere. At that moment, my watch showed my heart rate exceeding 160. Then it dropped to 34!

At that point, I became deeply concerned that he appeared to have access to information he should not reasonably have had at that stage. Professional Standards were contacted because I needed clarity on how this could have occurred, and even they were unable to explain it at the time

By referring to a civilian statement taker as though they were a police officer, the impression given carried an authority it did not warrant, and the distinction was not clarified in court. It appeared very much to be another deliberate attempt to distort the facts and undermine my credibility.

I couldn’t read his position statement myself. Every submission contained another distortion. I had to send it to a friend to read aloud because I already knew it would be full of the same untrue narrative.

That wasn’t avoidance.
That was survival.

All the court saw was a man sitting in tears.
They didn’t see what I was holding together just to stay upright.

After Changing Solicitors

After changing solicitors, everything felt different. I had a wonderful solicitor, and she instructed a great barrister, skilled, prepared, and deeply professional. But by then, the damage had already been done.

My solicitor had warned me that we were seeking a fact‑finding hearing. Given how the previous hearing had unfolded, it would be challenging. The way this was being played added to the challenge. No matter how good my barrister was, we didn’t have a leg to stand on the moment the court fell for his manipulation and textbook DARVO tactics.

What mattered to me more than winning — more than walking out knowing I would never be able to fully share what he had put me through, or what he had put my children through — was that she saw it. She could see exactly what he was doing, even when others couldn’t. And she cared.

Like most people who have actually seen the evidence, or taken the time to look, she was visibly dismayed by what had unfolded over those twelve months — not just with the police, but within the court system itself.

She showed humanity. She was professional, but she was also human. And that mattered far more than any grand performance or a big flying wig ever could.

How Coercive Control Moves Into Legal Spaces

Coercive control doesn’t stop at separation; it adapts.

In the courtroom, it often shows up as narrative control: selective facts, official‑sounding detail, name‑dropping professionals, and using process as pressure.

It isn’t always loud.

It can be calm, organised, and “reasonable” on the surface — while the victim is left looking dysregulated, unwell, or “difficult” simply because their body is reacting to harm.

The courtroom reads behaviour, not history.
That is where victims are so often misunderstood.

The Paperwork I Couldn’t Face

The statements weren’t read out in court, but I still had to live with them. I no longer open any of his emails. I had learnt in April just how far he would go. With every statement came a new distortion, a new attempt to turn himself into the victim.

It felt as though he was choosing lines from my original non‑molestation order application, the acts he had committed, and twisting them around. I didn’t know what DARVO was at the time; I do now. And i wish i had at our very first hearing.

I underestimated the cruelty.

Yet those written assertions stood, largely unchallenged.

My mental health was raised — not as the predictable outcome of prolonged abuse, but as something used to discredit me. I remember being asked whether a GP had diagnosed me.

No.
A psychologist.

I found myself having to evidence weight loss and PTSD while his narrative was given space to land.

After

When it ended, my body finally gave up.

Outside the courtroom, I vomited from stress. I couldn’t regulate my breathing. My vision was full of stars. My best friend knelt beside me, holding my hair back, trying to keep me conscious, trying to interpret the ECGs I’d taken.

The magistrates didn’t see that.

They didn’t see the smirk he gave as he left — a look directed at her, not at me. She saw it.

Others can put on a façade and fake it.
I can’t.
My body tells the truth whether I want it to or not.

Professional Standards and Leaked Information

After the name was dropped during the hearing, I contacted the Professional Standards — not because it was about my ex‑partner, but because I needed to understand how he appeared to have access to information from my coercive control case.

Even she didn’t know. She attempted to help; his name was passed to the anti‑corruption for checks.

For me, this fit a pattern I’d been living with: information that seemed to reach him that he should never have had.

Financial Abuse Continuing Through the Process

The coercive control didn’t stop at court. It ran alongside it.

He dictated that I had six weeks to sort the mortgage and pay him out in July. I managed it in two. Then I waited — deliberately — until a week before this hearing.

He refused to engage, stayed uncontactable (even to his own solicitor), and delayed signing for months. He finally signed only shortly before court, despite repeated chasers. In the meantime, from July to December, I was covering an extra £600 per month on the mortgage alone.

Not a single one of the £7‑per‑week payments he threatened me with if i ever left him — taken from benefits — ever arrived on time. I didn’t rely on it; I claimed it purely to see whether the control would continue.

And it did. The CMA couldn’t even locate him at the address he had declared to the court.

It didn’t seem to matter that significant inconsistencies and inaccuracies went unchallenged, including his residential status, which was inaccurate. His dad had informed the police in May 2024 that he resided elsewhere. So every safeguarding check was carried out at an address he didn’t actually live at — an address never challenged.

Eventually, the CMA switched him to “take and pay” because he wasn’t paying anyway. That didn’t change when he got a job either. But that will be dealt with in hearing seven of eight.

It was crippling and certainly not in the best interest of the child he was claiming to want to protect.

Looking Back

This was one of the hardest days of my life.

Looking back now, it still is.

This was experience six of eight in the family court process, and at no point that day did anyone really talk to me. I looked emotionally numb and detached. In reality, I was in an absolute state.

I genuinely believed I might walk into that building and not walk out again.

What haunts me most is watching someone with a long‑established pattern of behaviour appear credible in a professional space, while I was silenced and left unable to show that what I later came to understand as DARVO tactics. Patterns I could evidence, but was never given space to present.

A diagnosis that existed because of the trauma he caused was used against me, while his own history of needing mental health input for the very conditions he falsely accused me of “diagnosing” him with went unchallenged. That day changed the way I saw the world.

It showed me how easily truth can be overshadowed by performance, how quickly harm can be reframed as credibility, and how effortlessly a victim can be positioned as the problem.

My children and I had our lives invalidated again — no safeguarding, no recognition of risk — and I was left standing there unwell, fighting to stay upright, while he was treated as the one who needed protecting.

The lead‑up was awful.
The day was awful.
The aftermath was awful.

And through all of it, the one thing that should have mattered most felt like it was barely protected:

My children — especially our shared child.

That week i founded the original website NurseAgainstAbuse.co.uk.

This is my personal account of events as I experienced and understood them at the time.