They Thought They Were Turning Me Into Someone Smaller and Easier to Rob – Instead They Walked, One by One, Into a Room a Fraud Attorney Had Spent Years Building Around Them

I let it happen.

That is the part I have had to forgive myself for.

I let a man convince me, one reasonable suggestion at a time, that the sharpest thing about me was a liability, until I had folded myself down small enough to fit the shape he wanted.

People who have never been inside it imagine coercive control as something loud — a man who shouts, who forbids, who locks doors.

It is almost never that, at least not at first, because loud control is easy to see and easy to leave.