Thank you so much. I would be happy to talk about that.
What's most important to recognize about coercive control is that it's a pattern of behaviour that is low-level, repetitive, often doesn't involve physical violence and takes away a person's sense of personal agency. They no longer make decisions based on what their own best interests are or what their driving motivators are, but they make decisions based on fear of what the other person in the relationship is going to do to them if they don't make a decision in a certain way.
The questions that were just asked to Carmen are really pertinent questions also in relation to that loss of personal agency because, when a couple fights, if neither one of them changes their behaviour as a result of the fight, it's not coercive control. It is a mutually conflicted relationship, but if one of the parties starts to change their behaviour, lose their personal agency and lose decision-making that is in their own best interest, where their identity becomes assumed by the other individual's identity, that is how we define coercive control.
There's a wealth of research around identity theories and how coercive control takes away a person's identity, and that is the defining factor more than anything else. It means that when I wake up in the morning instead of eating cornflakes, I eat bacon because my partner has told me to, even if I don't like it.