The Architecture of Domination

A year ago, I was sitting in the office of my TCM practitioner when the floor dropped out from under a conversation that started as small talk. I hadn’t seen her in a while, asked how she’d been, and she went silent in a way that changed the shape of the room.

She said she hadn’t worked in February because ICE had taken her, and then she said something that carved itself into the wall of my memory — Cala, I’ve told no one. You’re the first one, but I am not okay. I stopped our session immediately, sat down on the floor, hugged her, and said the only thing I had: I’m listening.

What she told me over the next hour was a story I’ve been unable to stop thinking about for the past year:

Her green card had expired by one day. One day. Because her husband, the man she’d married had “forgotten” to renew it. He’d always handled her paperwork. She also shared he’d also been laid off from his tech work and had become fixated on gaining access to the financial accounts of her business, something she’d deliberately kept separate from their shared assets.

When she wouldn’t include him in her business finances, her immigration paperwork slipped through the cracks by “accident”. Whatcom County ICE came to her office on a tip, arrested her there, and shipped her to Tacoma Detention because of ONE DAY.

The month she in Tacoma were still living in her body as she spoke of the experience — not enough food, not enough water, “fresh” produce that was slimy and rotten when it existed at all, processed foods she doesn’t eat as her only option, and a feeling of constantly being cold because there was sufficient heat.

She old that the guards weren’t cruel. The medical staff tried. But she was hungry the entire time and she was always, always cold. I could see the psychological weight of it hadn’t fully surfaced into her conscious awareness yet. Her body was carrying what her mind wasn’t ready to hold, and the story kept getting worse.

Once released, she hired a lawyer with her own money — a Black woman in Seattle she trusted. Her husband’s response was to refuse to let that attorney represent her, calling her attorney a “n*gger”, and then dragging her to a white male attorney in a conservative Whatcom County town. Her husband felt a man was a better choice. A “Christian” man who would only speak to her husband and looked at her like she was something that belonged to him.

The layers of dehumanization in that sequence still make my hands shake when I think about it — a woman who built her own practice, maintained her own finances, kept her own professional life intact for twenty years, reduced to property in a legal office by two white men who agreed she wasn’t worth addressing directly.

What She Said Next

I asked her what she needed from me to help. She said, nothing. I needed you to listen. I needed to know someone cared about me. That sentence landed in my chest like a fist — not because she was defeated, but because she wasn’t. The entire apparatus that had been deployed against her — a husband, a legal system, a detention facility, an attorney who wouldn’t look at her — and she was standing in her office telling me she would not be reduced.

I’ve thought about her regularly since, and in the first weeks it was pure rage on her behalf.

Rage at ICE for taking her.

Rage at the husband who weaponized her immigration status out of spite because he couldn’t access her money.

Rage at every system that conspired, whether by design or indifference, to make a woman who’d done nothing wrong disappear into a cage for a month.

But the rage eventually settled into something heavier, a question that keeps surfacing in the patterns I see around me and that connects directly to work I’ve written before about empowerment and disempowerment. The question is ancient and it is blunt:

Why does one person feel the need to dominate and control another person at the expense of that person’s safety, dignity, and autonomy?

The Psychology Behind the Need to Dominate

The research on this topic is vast and unsettling, and it converges on something that strips domination of its authority. Researchers at UC Berkeley spent years studying what they call the Dominance Behavioral System — a biologically-based system that governs motivation toward power, dominant and subordinate behavior, and responsivity to perceptions of control (Johnson, Leedom, & Muhtadie, 2012).

What they found is that heightened dominance behavior correlates reliably with narcissistic traits, mania-proneness, and externalizing disorders, which means the people most driven to control others aren’t operating from surplus or strength — they’re operating from a failure of self-regulation so profound that the only way they can experience stability is by managing someone else’s behavior, movement, and emotional landscape.

What this means is that the engine underneath domination isn’t power. It’s a confession of interior collapse that the controlling person cannot afford to make consciously, dressed up in the language of authority and entitlement.

Evan Stark, the forensic social worker and sociologist who co-founded one of America’s first battered women’s shelters, spent decades building a framework that fundamentally changed how we understand intimate partner violence.

His 2007 book Coercive Control argued that domestic violence isn’t primarily about individual incidents of physical assault — it’s a pattern of domination more analogous to hostage-taking, built from both direct tactics like violence and intimidation, and indirect tactics that are harder to name but no less devastating. This includes, isolation, deprivation, exploitation, and what he calls micro-regulation: the monitoring and management of daily life down to what someone eats, wears, says, and spends.

Stark reframed abuse as a liberty crime rather than an assault crime, and that distinction is everything because assault happens in moments while liberty crimes happen in atmospheres, and atmospheres are what you drown in slowly enough that you can’t name the moment you stopped being able to breathe.

What makes coercive control uniquely corrosive is its cumulative nature — researchers describe it as a repeated pattern of behavior directed at shrinking the victim’s autonomy and closing down what scholars call their “space for action” (Tolmie et al., 2023). To further support this theory, a meta-analysis synthesizing 45 studies found that coercive control exposure is linked to both PTSD and depression, with the connection to PTSD strongest among survivors in shelter settings — suggesting the trauma compounds specifically under conditions of entrapment (Lohmann et al., 2023).

The damage isn’t the single explosive event everyone pictures when they hear the phrase domestic violence. The damage is the daily atmospheric pressure of living inside someone else’s surveillance system, where your choices are filtered through their approval before they become available to you, where the person who claims to love you has systematically removed every exit from the room and then asks why you won’t leave.

When the State Becomes the Weapon

Let’s now layer in immigration status and look at a study conducted by the University of Washington examining domestic violence protection orders in King County, Washington — the county immediately south of where my practitioner’s story unfolded. The study found that when petitioners described immigration-related circumstances, the coercive control tactics included threats to contact immigration authorities, threats of deportation, and threats designed to separate families (Alsinai et al., 2023). In many of these cases, victims reported that immigration-related threats specifically prevented them from leaving, seeking help, or reporting the abuse.

The study’s conclusion landed in my body when I read it: violence against immigrant women operates within an interconnected system built on social structures, systems of oppression, and individualized context, and an abusive partner exploits all of these sources to manufacture fear. The structural becomes the personal becomes the structural again, a feedback loop that tightens with every rotation.

That’s exactly what happened to my practitioner. Her husband couldn’t regulate his own fear about money and status after losing his job, so he tried to regulate her. When she maintained autonomy over her finances — the one boundary she’d drawn and held across twenty years — he escalated.

When direct pressure failed, he conscripted the state. He let her paperwork lapse so that immigration enforcement would do what his own hands couldn’t, which was remove her from the board entirely, strip her of her practice, her freedom, her ability to function as an independent person with legal standing.

The research maps onto her experience with disturbing precision: immigration-related threats that prevent victims from leaving, barriers to legal representation, the exploitation of language and legal systems to keep the controlled person dependent on the controller for access to their own rights.

She wasn’t dealing with a bad marriage. She was dealing with a man who turned every available institution into an extension of his need to dominate, and that pattern — the one where a person who has lost control internally reaches outward to seize it from the person closest to them.

What It Looks Like When It Doesn’t Work

I checked in on her this week. She is okay. She’s working through everything, and she’s moved her practice to a bigger, better location without her husband’s interference. She kept her attorney. She kept her money. She kept herself. The relationship with him is a mess.

Domination depends entirely on the target’s invisibility — on isolation, on silence, on the controlled person believing that no one will care enough to sit on the floor and listen. The moment someone does, the architecture starts to crack, not because empathy is magic but because witnessed pain can’t be weaponized the way hidden pain can.

Once someone else holds the story with you, the person who built the cage loses their monopoly on the narrative, and what seemed airtight suddenly has seams.

I don’t have a neat ending for this because the reality of domination doesn’t resolve neatly. What I have instead is a woman who held onto herself through all of it, and every time I think about her, the question shifts from why do people dominate to something that matters more — what does it look like when it doesn’t work? It looks like quiet authority that no one had to give her because it was always hers.

References In Detail

Alsinai, A., Reygers, M., DiMascolo, L., Kafka, J., Rowhani-Rahbar, A., Adhia, A., Bowen, D., Shanahan, S., Dalve, K., & Ellyson, A. M. (2023). Use of immigration status for coercive control in domestic violence protection orders. Frontiers in Sociology, 8, 1146102. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10175620/

Johnson, S. L., Leedom, L. J., & Muhtadie, L. (2012). The dominance behavioral system and psychopathology: Evidence from self-report, observational, and biological studies. Psychological Bulletin, 138(4), 692–743. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3383914/

Lohmann, S., et al. (2023). The trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Interpersonal Violence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10666508/

Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/coercive-control-9780195384048

Stark, E., & Hester, M. (2019). Coercive control: Update and review. Violence Against Women, 25(1), 81–104. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077801218816191

Tolmie, J., et al. (2023). Understanding intimate partner violence: Why coercive control requires a social and systemic entrapment framework. Violence Against Women. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10666472/