Coercive Control Intensive Trainings
Dr. Ellerman offers intensive trainings on the coercive control model for survivors and professionals. Participants gain a vastly expanded understanding of how abusers control survivors and their children within the home and other settings. They will gain a big picture understanding of how abusers manipulate systems and use gender bias and stereotypes to silence survivors. They will also learn about the micro-level, with a detailed knowledge of abusers’ tactics against adult and child victims, how the tactics work, and how survivors are impacted.
Coercive Control Intensive Training for Protective Mothers
Why are these trainings only for mothers?
The majority of adult survivors and caregivers are women. Mothers are particularly vulnerable to coercive control, especially when they share custody with their abuser. While abusers often practice coercive control directly over the children, it is seldom recognized for what it is, and protective parents often end up blamed for the abuse and their children’s trauma responses. Coercive control over children is a new field, and is not well understood within the court system. Therefore, educating women survivors is critical, so they can in turn educate the courts and others about how they and their children have been abused and controlled.
What is coercive control and why is it essential to understand it?
Coercive control describes how abusive individuals control their victims and use fear, isolation, intimidation, threats, psychological control, and other tactics to coerce them to do what the abusers want. Some of the categories of abuse may include: psychological abuse, financial abuse, legal abuse, immigration abuse, physical or sexual abuse, faith-based/spiritual abuse, animal abuse, and medical abuse. Abusers try to control aspects of their victims’ day-to-day lives and decision-making. They may try to control anything from how their victims care for their children to how they dress, talk, eat, have sex, sleep, work, move through the house, clean, drive, shop, or spend money.
Children are directly affected by coercive control, and almost every tactic used against an adult can also be used against children. Once survivors escape an abusive relationship, abusers often turn to controlling their children in order to keep the protective parent fearful and silent. Survivors need to know how to identify and describe the complicated tactics that are used against them and their children.
What will participants learn in this training, and what can the coercive control model explain?
I will teach participants everything I cover in my expert coercive control reports and more. They can use and adapt the structure of my reports for their own needs.
Participants will receive a list of references, related to the different forms of abuse and control, which they can use to back up their narratives.
Participants will receive the detailed powerpoint from each training plus a list of forms of coercive control.
Survivors will become familiar with the coercive control model, and will be able to use their new knowledge to frame their and their children’s experiences of abuse and control. One day will be dedicated to coercive control over children.
Participants will learn about how and why coercive control changes from the start of the relationship, through pregnancy/motherhood, till separation. They will learn why abusive parents tend to present themselves differently post-separation, and how they use different systems and tactics to continue to control their adult and child victims.
Because of the continued trauma and victim-blaming, it takes survivors a long time to untangle and identify the many ways in which they’ve been coercively controlled. This training will rapidly accelerate participants’ ability to understand and articulate their own experiences, in essence, they are training to become their own experts.
Participants will learn in great detail about the many tactics and forms of coercive control, and how they work, so they will also be able to recognize new tactics as they appear. Survivors can take what they have learned from the training, and create a detailed linear narrative of the coercive control, which they can use to advocate for themselves in different situations.
The trainings will be taught live over zoom to a limited group of participants and will not be recorded for safety purposes. A portion of the fee for the training will go towards funding coercive control research, education, and advocacy efforts. Dr. Ellerman will teach you everything that she includes in her expert reports, which take weeks or months to write, and cost thousands. For the equivalent cost of hiring a lawyer or expert for 1-2 hours, participants will gain a solid, practical, and detailed foundation in coercive control that they can then use to educate, advocate protect, and heal.
How do I sign up for the training?
Please fill out the google form at the bottom of the page.
Intensive Training on February 24, 26, 28
Note: The February 2025 live training will be held during school hours and will end before 2pm. The times are approximate, in case I need to extend the training as I work on it. I will update participants on the exact start and end times once they are set. I expect the training minus breaks to last at least 9 hours.
Monday, February 24, 9-1pm (including 1/2 hr. lunch break)
Wednesday, February 26, 10-11:30am
Friday February 28, 9-1pm (including 1/2 hr. lunch break)
February 24 Day 1: Coercive Control over the Protective Parent
This training will introduce the model of coercive control and an overview of how it progresses as abusive partners gains further control over their adult and child victims, their lives, autonomy, and decision-making. We will take a deep dive into the many forms of coercive control used over protective mothers, how they work, and the impacts. You will learn about how abusive partners use various forms of psychological abuse, isolation, fear, intimidation, and other tactics to confuse the mother and disguise the coercive control. They entrap, confuse, and traumatize their targets, and cut off the resources that would help the survivors to escape. We will study how multiple forms of coercive control are used to harm the survivors, to increasingly take away their independence and sense of safety, and coerce them to fall in line with what the abuser wants. We will also learn about the specific harms, including the signs of trauma.
February 26 Day 2: Understanding How Abusers Manipulate Systems to Discredit and Silence Protective Parents
This training will focus on post-separation abuse, and how abusers use tactics such as DARVO, allegations of parental alienation, and draw upon gender stereotypes within different instutitions such as the courts or schools, to discredit and silence protective mothers, while they continue their abuse and control. I will introduce one of my own new concepts that is useful in capturing these dynamics. The coercive control framework can explain how abusers wield certain tactics post-separation in order to continue their abuse. We will study how abusers are often “invisible” to the systems, while their victims are blamed regardless of whether they stay or leave, which then elevates their risk of losing custody.
February 28 Day 3: Coercive Control over the Children
For this training, we will take a deep dive into an abusive parent’s tactics used against the children, both pre- and post-separation. We will study how and why the forms of abuse and control may change significantly post-separation, and the impacts on the children. Nearly every tactic used against adult victims can be used over children. Many of the forms of coercive control used over children are subtle and easy to overlook on their own. But once they are identified and described together, it becomes more apparent how the children are direct victims of coercive control. The picture becomes more complex because post-separation, the abusive parent tends to control the children in multiple venues, including his home. Participants will learn how to identify these different venues and tactics, and explain how their children have been affected.
A coercive control framework is essential to explain how abusers can present themselves and be accepted as seemingly protective and involved parents. It will become clear how coercive control over the mother and children are intimately linked, and how increased control over the children is used to prevent the mother from speaking out and protecting them.
Training fee for the week: $695
Link to Google Form to Sign Up for Coercive Control Intensive Training for Protective Mothers
FAQs
Safety and Participation: The trainings for protective mothers are restricted to a limited number of participants, and will be taught live for safety reasons. Each participant is asked to fill out a brief survey which will gather information about their interests and which will help screen out those who are not protective mothers. Participants will be asked to keep their cameras on during the training. For the safety of the participants, the live trainings will not be recorded. Participants will have a chance to ask questions during the trainings and will receive the detailed powerpoint slides.
Do you offer scholarships? Yes, I want my trainings to be accessible, so I will offer three full scholarships per training for protective mothers who earn under $30,000/year. Please write to me directly about the scholarships.
How many trainings will you offer this year? I will likely give between 6-10 trainings over the next year, depending on the demands of my research.