How Financial Abuse Works
The hidden infrastructure behind coercive control—and what to do next.
How to read this, strategically: If reading about abuse tends to light up your nervous system, try a “headings-first” pass: skim the section titles, then choose one part that feels useful today.
Keep your hand on something steady (ya coffee, a heated blanket, chair), and take breaks on purpose—stay in tune with how your breathing is, how your body is, and let the body cast a vote. If you start to feel flooded, numb, or pixelated, pause and orient to the present (name 5 things you can see in your present environment, 4 you can feel, 3 you can hear, 2 things you love about yourself, 1 thing that you are grateful for), then decide whether to continue or take a break.
As a survivor, you have experienced various traumas. The way you read can take this into account. You can exercise executive level functioning to engage with texts, get what you want or need, while avoiding re-triggering. Trauma-informed care emphasizes choice, safety, and empowerment—including while you read.
Take care of yourselves. And without further ado—
Overview
1) A ritual I didn’t want
2) What financial abuse is—and why it’s so effective
3) A short history of money as control
4) How it begins, escalates, and gets excused
5) Resisting financial abuse—especially after separation
1) A ritual I didn’t want:
The electric glow of my phone screen in a dark room, the tiny loading wheel of the bank app spinning like a dare, like a blade. I’m on the Wheel of Fortune, but never the winner.
I can hear the refrigerator hum, the house settling, the faint ticking of a clock I didn’t notice until now. My balance refreshes—again—and the number is wrong in a way that makes my body feel instantly deflated, compressed.
My ribs scathe inwards and slice at the heart.
I scroll through transactions I don’t recognize. A subscription. A transfer. A charge in a city I haven’t visited. “Huh? How?” I tell myself there must be an explanation—there is always an explanation.
Later, my partner talks about money the way people talk about weather: casual, inevitable, unworthy of scrutiny. A passing of the tides.
“It’s just easier if it all runs through me,” they say, as if they’re doing me a favor. Sure, right, who doesn’t want more ease in their life? Sounds legit, in its own way.
Or: “You’re anxious—don’t look at the accounts so much.” Oh, he’s got me on this one, truly—it does make me anxious to look at the accounts. His concern seems like care.
Or: the favorite line, soft as a sigh: “Why don’t you trust me?” He is eminently convincing; his look of light wincing draws out my care taker, the forgiver in me. A role I have learned for a long time now.
That’s the thing about financial abuse: rarely does it arrive with a slammed door or clenched fist. It arrives with access, under the guise of help, with the framing of “teamwork”—and then, quietly, I have fewer choices than I used to have.
2) What financial abuse is + why it’s so effective
Financial abuse (also called economic abuse) is a pattern of behaviors that controls a partner’s ability to access, use, or maintain economic resources—so that dependence replaces freedom. The National Network to End Domestic Violence describes financial abuse as tactics that conceal information, limit access to assets, and restrict access to family finances. [See PDF here]
One reason it works: it doesn’t to be extreme to be devastating. If you can’t access money, you may not be able to access housing, transportation, childcare, legal help, or medical care—the practical infrastructure of leaving. NNEDV notes research indicating financial abuse occurs in the vast majority of domestic violence cases and can be a powerful method of keeping someone trapped and ensnared with the abuser.
It’s not separate from other abuse; it’s often the turbine that powers it, a critical infrastructure for all other forms of abuse:
Isolation becomes easier for him to maintain when you can’t afford gas or a phone plan
Intimidation from him hits harder when you’re already financially cornered
Threats he throws out land differently when your credit, job, or lease is on the line; he sharpened the stakes
That’s why financial abuse appears explicitly in widely used domestic-violence frameworks like the Power and Control Wheel (“Using Economic Abuse”). There’s a 2 minute economic abuse video at The Duluth Model website.
