The Healthy Relationship Company

You were the one who kept the peace. Smoothing things over. Reading the room. Saying sorry first.

That’s called the fawn response - a survival strategy, not a personality trait.

Fight, flight, and freeze get talked about. Fawn rarely does. It develops when conflict feels dangerous and keeping someone calm feels safer than being honest.

You weren’t passive. You were adapting to a threat in the only way that felt available.

Free masterclass in bio if you want the full psychology behind it.

There’s a reason leaving felt impossible, even once you’d stopped believing it would get better.

There’s a concept in psychology called intermittent reinforcement - the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive. It’s not the reward itself that hooks you. It’s the unpredictability of when it arrives.

Apply that to a relationship with unpredictable warmth and withdrawal. Most days brought nothing. Every so often, a good day arrived. Because there was no way to know which day that would be, the nervous system stayed switched on, watching, waiting.

That’s why some part of you couldn’t leave, even after you’d stopped hoping things would change. Your nervous system wasn’t running on hope by that point. It was running on conditioning.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s a documented response to exactly the conditions you were in.

Free masterclass in bio if you want the full mechanism behind it.

There’s a concept in coercive control called future faking - and it’s why you kept waiting for a version of the relationship that was always just about to arrive.

The holidays talked about but never booked. The promises to change once this one thing was sorted. The plans for next year that never quite materialised.

Future faking isn’t lying for fun. It’s a way of keeping you invested without ever delivering anything.

The plans were never about the holiday. They were about buying time without buying any actual change.

Free masterclass in bio if you want to understand how to spot this.

There’s a concept in coercive control called triangulation - and it’s why you somehow always felt like you were competing for a place that should already have been yours.

A third person gets pulled in. An ex. A friend. A colleague. Sometimes a child. And you get measured against them, without ever agreeing to the comparison.

She never used to make a big deal out of this. My ex was so much easier to talk to. My mum thinks you’re being really sensitive about it, you know.

Different people, same job. Comments dropped in like observations, not accusations. But they do exactly the same thing an accusation would.

That’s not jealousy you imagined. It’s a deliberate mechanism. The second you’re worried about losing your place, you stop noticing what’s actually being done to you.

Link in bio if you want to understand exactly how this operates.

There’s a concept in nervous system science that explains why calm can feel boring, flat, or even suspicious instead of feeling like relief.

Your nervous system builds its baseline from whatever environment you spent the most time in. If that involved constant unpredictability, your body learned to read tension as normal and calm as the lead-up to something else.

So when you meet someone steady and consistent, your body doesn’t recognise it as safety. It reads it as nothing happening yet.

This is one of the reasons people end up back in similarly intense relationships after leaving. Not because they don’t know better - because intensity still feels like the only thing that registers as connection.

Free masterclass in bio if you want to understand how to recalibrate this.

There’s a pattern in coercive control called JADEing — Justify, Argue, Defend, Explain. It’s something you end up doing in response to coercive control, not something they do to you.

You say, you were forty minutes late and didn’t text, I was worried. They say, you’re so insecure, I can’t even go for a pint without you kicking off. Now you’re explaining you’re not insecure. They say, you always make me feel like I’m in trouble. Now you’re defending that too.

By the end of it you’re apologising for how you brought it up. The original forty minutes has disappeared from the conversation entirely.

JADEing isn’t a personality trait. It’s a trained response — if every limit got met with pushback, your brain learned that limits need defending before they’ll be respected.

Except the goal was never agreement. It was keeping you talking instead of holding your position.

A limit doesn’t need a defence to be valid.

Free masterclass in bio if you want the psychology behind it.

There’s a concept in perpetrator psychology called instrumental empathy - and it isn’t really empathy at all.

It’s the performance of warmth, switched on when it serves them and switched off the moment it doesn’t.

Real empathy doesn’t disappear depending on whose needs are involved. If it does, it was never actually about you.

This creates a specific trap - you lean in when they’re warm, try harder when they withdraw, and feel relief when it returns. Which feels like connection, but is actually a cycle they control the timing of.

Free masterclass in bio if you want the full psychology behind it.

There’s a concept in perpetrator psychology called criminogenic thinking - and it’s not one pattern. It’s a whole cluster of thinking habits that work together to make accountability almost impossible.

Externalisation. Minimisation. Instrumental empathy. An unspoken emotional hierarchy. And underneath all of it, entitlement.

Your empathy met their minimisation. Your fairness met their externalisation. Your strengths didn’t fail you. They filled the gaps created by patterns you were never taught to recognise.

I’ve put up a free preview of the actual lesson on this from inside The Relationship Reality Check. No catch, no sign-up wall - just the lesson. Link in bio. 👆

There’s a concept in perpetrator psychology called minimisation by proxy.

Most people focus on what the perpetrator did to minimise harm. This is the secondary version almost nobody talks about.

It’s when people around you - friends, family, sometimes professionals - unintentionally repeat the same minimising language. “Are you sure it was that bad?” “They’re not a bad person though.”

None of them are trying to cause harm. But the effect is identical to the minimisation you experienced inside the relationship.

This is one of the reasons leaving doesn’t automatically bring clarity. You leave the person who minimised you and walk into a world conditioned by the same assumptions that made it possible in the first place.

Their reaction isn’t a verdict on what happened. It’s a reflection of how little most people understand about coercive control.

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“We just had communication problems.”

Here’s what working directly with perpetrators taught me about that.

The people I work with are often extremely effective communicators - at work, with friends, with people they’ve just met. The communication doesn’t break down in every context. It breaks down specifically with their partner, specifically when accountability is required.

That’s not a communication problem. That’s a choice.

There’s a difference between someone who genuinely struggles to express themselves and someone who has learned that deflecting, going silent, or turning hostile protects them from consequences.

One is a skill deficit. The other is a strategy.

You cannot fix a communication problem that isn’t one.

Free masterclass in bio