Your safety comes before your recovery.

Keeping a dated record is the single most useful thing you can do, and I say so everywhere else on this site. It is also the thing most likely to be found, so the where matters as much as the writing.

A record found is not read as a record. It is read as disloyalty, or as proof you are building a case, and in households where someone is already controlling, that discovery is often what escalates things. Please take the ten minutes to put it somewhere real.

The places people think are private, and are not

• A notes app that syncs — the same note appears on their phone, tablet or laptop if the account is shared, or was ever shared.
• A shared iCloud, Google or Microsoft account, including a family plan. Photographs of a handwritten page sync too.
• Messages mirrored to a second device, a car, a watch or a smart speaker.
• A browser with saved passwords, on any device they can pick up.
• A shared email account, or a draft left in one.
• Location sharing inside a family plan, which can show that you visited a refuge, a solicitor or a police station.
• A diary in the house. Any diary in the house.

Places that usually work

• Paper, kept outside the home. A locker, a drawer at work, a sealed envelope with someone who will not ask questions and will not mention it.
• A new email account made on a device they have never touched, with a password they could not guess and no connection to your usual accounts. Email yourself the entries.
• A trusted person who keeps a copy for you and knows not to raise it unless you do.
• If it has to be on a device, nothing in the filename. Not evidence, not a name, not a date that means something.

Two lines is enough. What was said, who was there, the date. It is not a diary, it is not for anyone else, and you do not have to decide now what it is for.

There is an order to this, and it is not the order most people are given. If you are afraid of what this person would do, then speak to a specialist advocate before you document, before you confront anyone, and long before you announce that you are leaving.

An advocate is not a counsellor and they are not there to tell you to go. They do one specific thing extremely well: they sit with you and work out the sequence — what to move first, who to tell, what the legal position is where you live, what to do about money, children, animals, the lease, the job. They do it free, they do it confidentially, and they have done it hundreds of times.

You do not have to have decided anything to call one. “I do not know if this counts and I do not know what I want to do” is a completely normal way to start that conversation.

This is the thing nobody says plainly enough, so I will. In the largest study of its kind, estrangement — the period around leaving — was one of the risk factors most strongly associated with a partner being killed, and the association was strongest where the partner had been controlling. Control held for years is threatened by departure in a way it is threatened by nothing else, and some people respond to that.

This is not a reason to stay. It is a reason to leave with a plan rather than in the middle of an argument, and a reason not to announce it in advance. Advocates plan exits for a living. That is the single best use of one phone call.

And if you have already left and it has not stopped — through the courts, the children, money, your employer, mutual friends — you have not failed, and it is not evidence that you were the problem all along. It has a name, it is well documented, and it is one of the most common experiences there is after separation.

If any of these are part of your situation, the right next step is a specialist service or the police — not coaching, not a podcast, and not me. I will tell you the same thing if you book a call, so I would rather tell you here, for free, now.

• Strangulation or chokingEven once. Even with no marks. One of the strongest warning signs recorded.
• Threats to killYours, their own, the children’s, an animal’s. Said once counts.
• Access to a weaponOr talk about getting one.
• It got worse when you pulled awayAfter you said you might leave, or started saying no.
• Being followed, watched or trackedTurning up where you did not say you would be. Knowing things they should not know.
• Forced or coerced sexIncluding inside a marriage or a long relationship.
• Threats about the childrenTo take them, to report you, to have you declared unfit.
• Harm to animalsVery frequently a step toward harm to people.
• You are pregnant or have just had a babyA recognised period of raised risk.
• You are thinking of ending your lifeThen that is the emergency, and it comes before everything on this website.

Monitoring is more common than people expect, and it is usually not sophisticated — a shared account, a known password, a family plan, a laptop left logged in.

• Use a device they have never had access to. A library computer, a work machine, a friend’s phone. This is better than any setting you can change.
• Private or incognito browsing hides less than people think. It does not hide the network you are on, anything installed on the device, or an account that is syncing.
• Do not start changing passwords from a monitored device without a plan. Sudden lock-outs are noticed, and being noticed is the thing you are managing.
• If you think something is installed on your phone, a specialist service can walk you through it. Do not confront the person about it first.

Different route, same care. A helpline for domestic abuse is not the right call for a workplace that turned on you — but the pattern is documented, it has been studied for decades, and you are not the first.

• Write it down as it happens, with dates, and keep the copy somewhere that is not your employer’s system. Not your work email, not your work drive.
• Get advice before you escalate. A union, an employment solicitor, a professional regulator, a free advice service. One conversation before a formal complaint changes the outcome more than anything you will do afterwards.
• Try not to resign in the first week without that advice. It can affect what you are entitled to, and the decision feels urgent long before it is.
• A body that investigated and cleared them has not established that you were wrong. Institutions are poor at seeing patterns, and the harm done by the one that was supposed to protect you is its own injury, separately from the original.

Free, confidential, and used to people who are not sure whether their situation counts. It counts.

• Any abuse, any hour800‑799‑7233 The National Domestic Violence Hotline. 24 hours, free, confidential, more than 200 languages. Text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org
• If you are thinking of ending your life988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.orgThis one comes before everything else on this website.
• Sexual assault, at any point in the past800‑656‑4673 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline, 24 hours · rainn.orgIncluding inside a marriage or a long relationship, and including years ago.
• If you are young, or it is your child866‑331‑9474 loveisrespect, for dating abuse. Text LOVEIS to 22522 · loveisrespect.org
• Native and Indigenous callers844‑762‑8483 StrongHearts Native Helpline · strongheartshelpline.org
• A phone or laptop you think is being watchedtechsafety.org The Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence · techsafety.orgWritten for survivors, not for engineers. Start with the cell phone safety plan.
• A shelter or advocate near youYour state coalition The National Network to End Domestic Violence lists the coalition for every state, and they list local services · nnedv.org/get-help
• Outside the United Statesfindahelpline.com Verified helplines by country · findahelpline.comOpen it from a device the person cannot see.

Everything above that is a claim about risk rather than about me is taken from published research. The references are here so you can check them, take them to a doctor or a lawyer, or hand them to somebody who does not believe you.

• Leaving, and why the timing matters. Campbell JC and colleagues, “Risk Factors for Femicide in Abusive Relationships: Results From a Multisite Case Control Study”, American Journal of Public Health 93(7), 2003, 1089–1097. An eleven-city study. Estrangement — particularly from a controlling partner — access to a gun, a previous threat with a weapon, stalking, forced sex and abuse during pregnancy were all associated with raised risk.
• Strangulation. Glass N, Laughon K, Campbell JC and colleagues, “Non-fatal Strangulation is an Important Risk Factor for Homicide of Women”, Journal of Emergency Medicine 35(3), 2008, 329–335. Prior non-fatal strangulation carried roughly 6.7 times the odds of a later attempted killing and 7.5 times the odds of a completed one. It had happened to 10% of the abused women who were not attacked again, and to 43–45% of those who were.
• Coercive control as a pattern rather than a set of incidents. Evan Stark, Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, Oxford University Press, 2007. The argument that this is a liberty offence — closer to false imprisonment than to assault — and the reason systems built to judge single incidents cannot see it.
• Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The pattern was named by Jennifer Freyd. Harsey SJ & Freyd JJ, “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender (DARVO): What Is the Influence on Perceived Perpetrator and Victim Credibility?”, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 2020. People shown the same incident with DARVO added held the victim more responsible and the perpetrator less. Related work finds that being on the receiving end of it raises self-blame, and that a short explanation of it beforehand reduces the effect.
• When the institution that owed you protection does the harm. Smith CP & Freyd JJ, “Institutional betrayal”, American Psychologist 69(6), 2014, 575–587.
• Workplaces. Leymann H, “Mobbing and Psychological Terror at Workplaces”, Violence and Victims 5(2), 1990, 119–126. The documented sequence: a conflict, sustained hostile acts, management recasting the target as the problem, expulsion.
• What recovery is made of. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, Basic Books, 1992. Safety first, then remembrance and mourning, then reconnection — in that order, which is why this page comes before the rest of the site.
• Devices. The Safety Net Project, National Network to End Domestic Violence — techsafety.org.

Helpline numbers and web addresses checked 1 October 2026. If a number has changed by the time you read this, the organisation’s website beside it will have the current one.

I am not a clinician. I do not diagnose, I do not treat, and nothing on this website replaces therapy, medical care or legal advice. I am a recovery strategist and coach, and the work I do begins after the danger has passed. See the Disclaimer for the full position.

If you tell me something that belongs with a doctor, a lawyer or the police, I will say so plainly, and I would rather say it early than take your money first.