How Assumed Autonomy Becomes Therapeutic Violence

Therapeutic violence emerges when clinicians apply a model of autonomy that was never structurally available to the client, and then interpret the client’s inability to perform that autonomy as psychological failure. This is not accidental. It is built into the training pipeline.

1. Training Assumes a Universal Subject

Most therapeutic models in the United States are built around an imagined client who is:

• autonomous
• resourced
• socially protected
• free to leave relationships without consequence
• culturally rewarded for prioritizing self
• not punished for boundary-setting

This “universal subject” is not universal. It is a white, cis, straight, economically buffered man. Everyone else is treated as a deviation from the model.

2. Deviation Is Interpreted as Pathology

When a client does not behave like the imagined subject, the therapist is trained to see:

• dependence as pathology
• loyalty as pathology
• endurance as pathology
• relational attunement as pathology
• self-sacrifice as pathology

Instead of recognizing these as culturally enforced survival strategies, the therapist interprets them as individual defects.

3. The Problem Is Located Inside the Client

Rather than asking:

• What structures made leaving unsafe?
• What cultural scripts shaped endurance?
• What power dynamics constrained choice?

the therapist asks:

• Why didn’t you leave?
• Why did you allow this?
• Why didn’t you set boundaries?

The model cannot see the system, so it blames the person inside the system.

4. Survival Strategies Are Labeled “Codependency”

Codependency becomes a catch-all diagnosis for:

• trauma-shaped bonding
• religiously enforced endurance
• gendered socialization
• economic constraint
• fear-based compliance
• coercive control dynamics

The therapist pathologizes the very strategies that kept the client alive.

5. The Abuser Becomes Irrelevant

Intrapsychic models focus on the client’s:

• behavior
• patterns
• “choices”
• “role”

The abuser becomes a background detail. Harm becomes a mirror for the client’s supposed issues. This is how victims are blamed for the violence enacted against them.

6. The Client Is Pressured to Perform Impossible Autonomy

The therapeutic goal becomes:

• more autonomy
• more boundaries
• more independence

But if the client is in a system where autonomy is punished, boundaries are unsafe, and independence is impossible, this treatment becomes violence. It demands the client behave as if they have freedoms they do not have.

7. Accurate Descriptions of Constraint Are Pathologized

When the client says:

• “I couldn’t leave.”
• “It wasn’t safe.”
• “I didn’t have options.”
• “I was trapped.”

the therapist hears:

• “You’re codependent.”
• “You’re enabling.”
• “You’re avoiding responsibility.”

The client’s accurate description of structural constraint is reframed as psychological dysfunction.

8. The Result: Systematic Misdiagnosis of Victims of Coercive or Narcissistic Partners

Victims of coercive control are consistently misdiagnosed because:

• their survival strategies look like enmeshment
• their trauma responses look like lack of boundaries
• their adaptive bonding looks like attachment issues
• their endurance looks like self-abandonment
• their entrapment looks like poor choices

The therapist, trained in a model built for someone else entirely, interprets all of this as the client’s fault.

9. Training Produces This Outcome by Design

Clinicians are not misapplying their training. They are applying it exactly as designed. The model itself is the problem. It was built to discipline clients into a relational ideal that only the most socially protected people can perform.

When she applied that model, she wasn’t treating the client. She was enforcing the model she was trained to uphold — a model that collapses entirely when applied to anyone outside the narrow demographic it was built for.

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