The Healthy Relationship Company

The Healthy Relationship Company I break down the psychology behind harmful relationships so you can see clearly & rebuild confidently

28/09/2026

The back end of the worst week you’d had, and you find yourself looking at venues. Or house prices. Or working out whether you could go part time so there’d be less to argue about. Not leaving. Investing.

Escalation of commitment is one of the most replicated findings in decision-making research: the more someone has already put in, the more likely they are to keep going, even when the evidence says stop. The decision stops being about whether this is good and becomes about not wasting what’s already gone in.

And a coercive relationship actively increases what you’ve invested. Isolation removes the alternatives. Financial entanglement raises the exit cost. Having your reality overwritten means less confidence in the evidence that says leave. The conditions that make this bias strongest were being built around you the whole time.

Comment QUIZ and I’ll send you the free Clarity Check-In.

Did you find yourself investing more at the worst moments? Tell me in the comments.

27/09/2026

You know what happened to you now. You could explain coercive control with real precision. And you still apologise first, still shut down when somebody’s tone changes, still can’t tell whether your read on a new person is accurate.

Here’s why. The understanding you’ve built lives in the thinking part of your brain - deliberate, slow, brilliant when you’re calm. The responses you’re trying to change were learned under threat and stored in the faster system that handles danger, which runs before conscious thought has finished loading. So in the moment, the old response fires first and your knowledge arrives afterwards. That’s why the clarity shows up three days later in the shower.

You can’t think your way into a different automatic response. The Relationship Reality Check is the work of mapping out what your under-threat responses actually are, where they came from, and retraining your nervous system to respond differently - so you can tell by the third date that something isn’t right, instead of three years in and a shell of who you used to be.

Doors close at midnight tonight. Comment RRC and I’ll send you everything you need.

25/09/2026

Someone leans over at your sister’s birthday and says you’re so lucky. A couple of hours earlier, in the car, they’d been talking to you like dirt.

Erving Goffman described social life as having a front stage, where the performance happens, and a back stage, where it doesn’t. Most people’s two versions are broadly continuous. Impression management takes effort, and nobody sustains a performance that costs them something unless it’s doing a job.

The charm wasn’t the real them breaking through. It was the infrastructure that made everything else possible. Every person who told you how lucky you were became part of the reason you couldn’t say anything.

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

Did people tell you how lucky you were? Tell me in the comments.

23/09/2026

Ambiguous loss was developed by Pauline Boss to describe loss with no clarity and no closure - no date, no ritual, no shared agreement that anything has been lost. She identified two forms, and coercive control gives you both. Someone physically present but psychologically absent, which was the relationship. Then someone physically absent but psychologically present, which is now.

Which is why you end up standing in the kitchen on a Sunday crying over a song, grieving somebody who is alive, well and perfectly happy forty minutes away, with nobody you can say it to because everyone has filed the ending under good news.

Her central finding is that this is the most distressing form of grief there is, because ordinary grief at least has a shape. This has none of that scaffolding, so it has nowhere to go and no point at which it’s allowed to be finished.

You’re grieving a real loss with none of the equipment people are normally given.

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

Has anyone in your life understood this as a loss? Tell me in the comments.

22/09/2026

Credibility discounting is what happens when somebody hears an account and reduces the weight of it before they’ve examined it. Law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer named it, and Deborah Epstein and Lisa Goodman then examined how it works for domestic abuse victims specifically. An account gets treated as unlikely, because whoever’s listening doesn’t understand how memory works under stress or what the constraints on that person’s life really were. Then they’re assessed on how composed they seemed while telling it.

In practice it’s telling your sister he goes through your phone every night and checks your mileage against where you said you’d been, and being told he’s probably just insecure because he loves you.

There’s a third layer to that research the video doesn’t cover. Even people who are believed often find the importance of what happened gets dismissed anyway. Being believed and being taken seriously turn out to be two separate hurdles.

The Relationship Reality Check is open until Sunday. Comment RRC and I’ll send you everything (or get it from my link in bio if you want to stay anonymous).

Who was the first person you told, and what did they say? Tell me in the comments.

21/09/2026

You wanted the course. You said the timing wasn’t right, because you’d already worked out what asking for the car, the childcare and the money would cost you that week.

Researchers call this space for action, meaning the choices you actually have once you’ve counted the cost of each one. Coercive control shrinks it across seven areas of life, from money and friendships to confidence in your own judgement. After leaving it grows back, though never all at once. Your finances might recover long before your trust in your own decisions does.

The Relationship Reality Check is open until Sunday. Comment RRC and I’ll send you everything.

Which area of your life came back first after you left?

🇬🇧 UK: 0808 2000 247 · economic abuse: 0808 196 8845
🇮🇪 1800 341 900 · 🇺🇸🇨🇦 1-800-799-7233 · 🇦🇺 1800 737 732
🌍 nomoredirectory.org

19/09/2026

Someone asks how it made you feel and you can give them the whole sequence of events in forensic detail, and nothing at all in the feeling column.

Alexithymia means, almost literally, having no words for feelings. A 2024 systematic review pooling seventeen studies found it significantly elevated in survivors of intimate partner violence. It develops because your feelings were consistently the wrong answer - naming one started an argument, having a reaction became the thing under discussion instead of whatever caused it. So you stopped consulting them, and a system that goes unused for years stops running properly.

You haven’t gone cold. The equipment is intact. It was switched off because using it was unsafe.

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

Can you describe what happened but not how you felt about it? Tell me in the comments.

18/09/2026

Institutional betrayal was named by Jennifer Freyd and Carly Smith. It describes wrongdoing by an institution against people who depend on it, including failing to respond supportively when someone discloses harm. What makes it so damaging is that you can’t walk away - not from the family court, not from the police, not from the housing department. The research shows it measurably worsens the original trauma rather than simply being disappointing.

If some of your worst memories are of waiting rooms rather than your own home, that has a name and it’s documented.

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

Did asking for help make things harder? Tell me in the comments.

17/09/2026

The migraines. The stomach problems nobody can find a cause for. The infections you keep picking up. The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch. Bloods come back normal, so you’re told it’s probably stress, and you leave feeling faintly ridiculous.

Allostatic load describes the cumulative physical wear and tear caused by prolonged stress. The stress response system is built for short bursts followed by a return to baseline, not for years of continuous activation. Research on intimate partner violence has found exactly this pattern - HPA axis dysregulation, irregular cortisol, an inflammatory response that stays switched on, and a reduced ability to heal.

It wasn’t hypochondria. It was measurable physiological damage from an environment that required your body to stay on alert for years.

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

What did your body do during that relationship, or after it? Tell me in the comments.

16/09/2026

A car you never drove. A credit card you didn’t apply for. A loan you did sign, in a week where saying no would have cost you more than saying yes.

Coerced debt was named by law professor Angela Littwin, who identified that abusers had begun using consumer credit itself as a method of control. It covers cards taken out in your name without your knowledge, loans you were pressured into that benefited them, and property signed away under pressure. Surviving Economic Abuse found 95% of victim-survivors experience economic abuse, and 60% of those are coerced into debt.

It works after you’ve gone. A damaged credit score follows you into every rental application and every attempt to start again. Leaving doesn’t end it - it hands you the bill, with your signature at the bottom.

Support if you need it:
🇬🇧 UK - 0808 2000 247 (National Domestic Abuse Helpline) · economic abuse support 0808 196 8845
🇺🇸 USA - 1-800-799-7233
🇦🇺 Australia - 1800 737 732
🇮🇪 Ireland - 1800 341 900
🇨🇦 Canada - 1-800-799-7233
🌍 Everywhere else - nomoredirectory.org

Comment CLARITY and I’ll send you my free masterclass, Clarity After Good on Paper.

Did leaving come with a bill you didn’t run up? Tell me in the comments.

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