Beyond Appearances: Understanding Coercive Control in Family Law
How often do we mistake composure for credibility, or emotional distress for instability?
In this thought-provoking contribution to Issues, Trisha Wright challenges family law professionals to look beyond first impressions when assessing parents involved in difficult and protracted disputes. Her article, The Perfect Defendant: How Calm Performance and Gendered Credibility Bias Can Make the Target of Coercive Control Look Like the Problem, examines the possibility that the person who appears most reasonable may not always be the person whose behaviour is driving the conflict.
Wright draws attention to an important distinction between behaviour that appears similar on the surface and the very different circumstances, motivations and consequences that may lie beneath it. She introduces her Functional Assessment of Behaviour (FAB), a structured approach intended to help practitioners identify patterns of power, fear, adaptation and control over time.
For those working across family law, psychology, mediation and related disciplines, the article raises important questions about the language of high conflict, the influence of gendered assumptions and the need to distinguish coercive control from mutual disagreement.
At its heart is a reminder that effective professional assessment requires more than observing how people present. It requires careful consideration of context, history and evidence, together with a willingness to question our own assumptions.
We thank Trisha Wright for contributing this article and invite readers to consider its implications for their own professional practice.
Fiona Darroch
Editor, Issues · Pacifica Congress
The Perfect Defendant: How Calm Performance and Gendered Credibility Bias Can Make the Target of Coercive Control Look Like the Problem
By Trisha Wright, AccFM, MA (Forensic Psychology), MBA. Insight Learning Institute & Association of Trauma-Informed Professionals.
Read the article ↓How Calm Performance and Gendered Credibility Bias Can Make the Target of Coercive Control Look Like the Problem
Family law professionals routinely form early impressions of credibility from how parties present at court. In files involving coercive control, that presentation can invert the underlying pattern: the parent displaying the effects of sustained control may appear reactive, disorganized, or hostile, while the controlling parent appears calm and reasonable. This article examines how snapshot assessment, gendered observer scripts, and the "high conflict" label combine to produce persuasive but mistaken conclusions, and why the distinction now carries heightened legal significance as Australian and Canadian law increasingly recognize coercive control as a distinct harm. It introduces the Functional Assessment of Behaviour (FAB), a structured screening tool that moves attention from demeanour to observable relational patterns over time. Organized around a single question (what happens when one party sets a boundary?), the FAB examines five behavioural asymmetries, namely power, fear, adaptation, consequence, and recovery, to help distinguish mutual high conflict, impairment-driven volatility, and coercive control. The article closes with practical implications for counsel at intake, in process selection, and in documentation.
He arrives at the courthouse already unsettled. His documents are out of order, and when counsel asks him to walk through the history he starts with dates, loses the thread, jumps ahead, then circles back to apologize for not telling it properly. His voice rises when four years of conflict are reduced to three procedural questions. He stops and says, quietly, "I know how this looks."
She arrives with a tabbed binder. Her account is concise and measured. She describes years of trying to keep things stable for the children and voices regretful concern about his reactivity, his messages, and his emotional state. Nothing she says is threatening. By every visible measure, she is the reasonable parent.
Before the matter is called, a narrative has formed in the hallway: he is volatile, she is credible. That narrative may be accurate. It may also be the most persuasive wrong answer in the file.
Coercive control is longitudinal. Stark (2007) located its harm in a pattern of domination sustained over time, not in discrete incidents, and a court appearance is the most incident-bound view of a family counsel will ever get. What counsel sees may be the end point of years in which one parent's request for written communication produced more contact rather than less, and every attempt at independence was answered with a motion, an allegation, or a call to the children's school. A parent who has learned that disagreement carries consequences rarely presents well. Hypervigilance reads as intensity. Careful documentation reads as fixation. Anger after the tenth boundary violation looks, on its own, much like anger used to enforce dominance.
The calm parent's presentation, meanwhile, tells us very little about how power operates once everyone leaves the building. In Seeing the Pattern I describe the performance of reasonableness that controlling parties refine over years: calm, measured, slightly wounded, focused on process rather than accusation (Wright, 2026c). Beside a destabilized target, that composure reads as reliability. This is gendered credibility bias: scripts that lead many of us to process male distress as threat and female distress as evidence of harm done to her (Wright, 2026a). The behaviour is the same; the inferred cause is not. A skilled DARVO performer (Freyd, 1997) does not need to manufacture that bias. She only needs to let it operate and keep performing the calm that activates it. The mechanics hold regardless of which parent is composed.
The stakes are rising. Australian family law already defines family violence to include coercive and controlling behaviour (Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) s 4AB), New South Wales and Queensland have criminalized coercive control, and Canada's Supreme Court has recognized a tort built on it (Ahluwalia v. Ahluwalia, 2026). Each requires separating coercion from ordinary conflict, and a hallway impression cannot do that.
The "high conflict" label does particular damage here. Both parents may send repeated messages, refuse proposals, raise their voices, and call police or lawyers. On observable behaviour alone, the file looks symmetrical, and a symmetrical file invites a symmetrical remedy.
But behavioural symmetry does not establish functional symmetry. One parent sends repeated messages to maintain surveillance or pressure; the other sends them because information about the children keeps being withheld. One refuses a proposal because compromise would loosen their control; the other refuses because past flexibility was exploited. The conduct matches while the purpose behind it runs in opposite directions.
I developed the Functional Assessment of Behaviour (FAB) to move analysis away from demeanour and isolated incidents and toward observable relational patterns over time (Wright, 2026b). It is a 15- to 20-minute screen that helps distinguish mutual high conflict, impairment-driven volatility, and coercive control. It is not a personality assessment or a diagnosis. It asks one factual question: when one party sets a limit or boundary, what happens?
The FAB examines five recurring asymmetries:
In mutual high conflict, these asymmetries distribute across both parties. Both escalate at times, both negotiate at times, and both show some capacity for repair. In coercive control, they concentrate. A client who says "we both dig in, but we usually work it out" is describing something quite different from a client who says "I comply; they escalate," and that difference should inform process advice, forum, evidence gathering, and whether any joint process is safe.
FAB changes the roadmap. Instead of organizing the file around competing allegations, counsel can organize it around pattern: what happens when a boundary is set, who adapts, where escalation follows, and where the consequences accumulate. That shift reduces the risk of mistaking reactivity for causation or composure for credibility. It also gives counsel a clearer basis for process decisions, evidence gathering, and case strategy. The result is not simply a better intake record; it is a more accurate map of the relational system counsel is being asked to navigate.
In court, counsel gains a chronology testable against affidavits, correspondence, police records, and parenting-time data. A dated, documented pattern, consistent across sources, carries weight demeanour cannot. It strengthens the honest party's credibility, because their reactivity is read against the history that produced it, not as proof of instability. Gendered credibility bias loses its hold when analysis rests on sequence and consequence, not presentation. The parent who looks most reactive may be driving the instability or carrying its history into the courtroom. The FAB offers a measurable way to tell which.
Trisha Wright, AccFM, MA (Forensic Psychology), MBA, has practiced family mediation in Ontario since 2009 and brings more than 30 years of cross-sector experience in child protection, developmental services, and behavioural risk assessment. She is an Accredited Family & Child Protection Mediator, a Family Mediator for the Superior Court and Ontario Court of Justice, and a Law Society of Ontario Accredited CPD Provider. She founded the Association of Trauma-Informed Professionals (ATIP), leads Insight Learning Institute, and is the author of Seeing the Pattern (2026). www.atipcommunity.com
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