The following is an excerpt of an excellent resource on Abusive Power And Control behaviors from Wikipeda. Please see the link at the bottom of this excerpt for the complete article. It does a great job of showing many of the power and control tactics used by abusive, controlling, and manipulative people in one short article. It is also helpful in that it lists what most would consider as “positive behaviors”, i.e. doing “nice things” for someone. Most articles on abuse, power and control, and coercive control focus on the overtly negative behaviors, but leave out these positive behaviors that are also used to coerce and control others.
However, it does omit Suicidality. Many abusive, controlling and manipulative people also use threats of suicide as a means of coercive control, emotional abuse and blackmail. These suicidal threats can be overt, or more subtle references to suicide, with a manipulative, controlling intent.
“Abusive power and control (also controlling behavior and coercive control) is commonly used by an abusive person to gain and maintain power and control over another person in order to subject that victim to psychological, physical, sexual, or financial abuse. The motivations of the abuser are varied and can include devaluation, envy, personal gain, personal gratification, psychological projection, or just for the sake of the enjoyment of exercising power and control.[1]
Controlling abusers use tactics to exert power and control over their victims. The tactics themselves are psychologically and sometimes physically abusive. Control may be exerted through economic abuse, limiting the victim, as they may not have the means to resist or leave the abuse.[2] The goal of the abuser is to control, intimidate, and influence the victim to feel they do not have an equal voice in the relationship.[3]
Manipulators and abusers often control their victims with a range of tactics, including, but not limited to, positive reinforcement (such as praise, superficial charm, flattery, ingratiation, love bombing, smiling, gifts, attention), negative reinforcement (taking away aversive tasks or items), intermittent or partial reinforcement, psychological punishment (such as nagging, silent treatment, swearing, threats, intimidation, emotional blackmail, guilt trips, inattention) and traumatic tactics (such as verbal abuse or explosive anger).[4]
The vulnerabilities of the victim are exploited with those who are particularly vulnerable being most often selected as targets.[4][5][6] Traumatic bonding (also popularly known as Stockholm syndrome) can occur between the abuser and victim as the result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change and a climate of fear.[7] An attempt may be made to normalise, legitimise, rationalise, deny, or minimise the abusive behaviour, or blame the victim for it.[8][9][10]
Isolation, gaslighting, mind games, lying, disinformation, propaganda, destabilisation, brainwashing, and divide and rule are other strategies that are often used. The victim may be plied with alcohol or drugs or deprived of sleep to help disorientate them.[11][12] Based on statistical evidence, certain personality disorders correlate with abusive tendencies of individuals with those specific personality disorders when also compiled with abusive childhoods themselves. [13]
The seriousness of coercive control in modern Western societies has been increasingly realised with changes to the law in several countries so it is a definable criminal offence. In conjunction with this there have been increased attempts by the legal establishment to understand the characteristics and effects of coercive control in legal terminology. For example, on January 1, 2019, Ireland enacted the Domestic Violence Act 2018, which allowed for the practice of coercive control to be identifiable based upon its effects on the victim. And on this basis defining it as: ‘any evidence of deterioration in the physical, psychological, or emotional welfare of the applicant or a dependent person which is caused directly by fear of the behaviour of the respondent’.[14] On a similar basis of attempting to understand and stop the widespread practice of coercive control, in 2019, the UK government made teaching about what coercive control was a mandatory part of the education syllabus on relationships.[15] While coercive control is often considered in the context of an existing intimate relationship, when it is used to elicit a sexual encounter it is legally considered as being a constituent part of sexual abuse or rape. When it is used to begin and maintain a longer term intimate relationship it is considered to be a constituent element of sexual slavery.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abusive_power_and_control
“A favourite tactic of the bully in the family is to set people against each other. The benefits to the bully are that: a) the bully gains a great deal of gratification (a perverse form of satisfaction) from encouraging and provoking argument, quarreling and hostility, and then from watching others engage in adversarial interaction and destructive conflict, and b) the ensuing conflict ensures that people’s attention is distracted and diverted away from the cause of the conflict.”
“This is an extremely vulnerable time for survivors, and abusers are using it as an excuse to find new ways to exert control. Some of those tactics include feigning illness, not allowing family members to interact or go outside the home at all, withdrawing all money out of bank accounts, contacting the survivor’s work and falsely stating they were exposed to the virus, etc. While some of these tactics may be new and based on the public health crisis, the dynamics of power and control remain the same.
Across the country and world, there has been a serious uptick in domestic violence related crimes. Direct service agencies are seeing an influx of new cases and in some jurisdictions, law enforcement are responding to more calls. This means that survivors need support, resources, services, and shelter more than ever. Fortunately, shelters and other resources remain open during this time as essential businesses.” 
“For the first time (In the UK), numerous psychological and coercive behaviours became unlawful. For example, isolating a person from friends and family, monitoring their time, destroying their possessions, monitoring via online communication tools or using spyware, taking control over where people can go and who they can see, and accessing personal communication (phone and email accounts). All typically justified by perpetrators as “caring”, “because I worry about you,” or argued as acceptable because “you don’t answer my calls” and “I never know where you are or who you are with, so what do you expect.”
At the end of the day, focusing on every minute detail of the web of corruption just takes time away from living our own lives, free from their exploitation.
A child comes into the world in a state of innocence, and the right to this sovereignty of the self is the responsibility of adults to protect. This is our parental responsibility – to protect our children from awareness of adult problems, so they may develop age appropriately to maturity. Your mother would have given her right arm to be allowed to protect you. 
You were a vulnerable child who deserved to be protected from adult hatred, adult issues, and the family court racket. You deserved better. How could a child ever be expected to stand against a group of adults? 
So, to any kids who may be reading this: please know that your mother grieves for you every day. She loves you with the fiercely protective, tender love of a mother’s heart. A love you’ll never comprehend until you have children of your own.
Our kitchens and homes are empty without you. And we wait, hoping every day is the day we can reconnect with you. So please, if you are in this situation or know someone who is, tell your mother you love her. She’s prayed for this every single day.
In the opening scene of The Sound of Music, Maria sings “I go to the hills when my heart is lonely, I know I will hear what I’ve heard before…” 
I’ll never forget the corrupt Child Representative Natalie Koga’s Machiavellian sneer, and her arrogant, fake, sing-songy, patronizing voice: “Lisa, you just need to 
And who could ever forget Dr. Fisher’s disturbing, cringe-worthy performance for a packed courtroom during one of his several days of false testimony!
When I objected, he noted that I had an “anger problem”. But his psychological testing showed the opposite, which of course he omitted from the custody evaluation, like the good little hired gun that he was. When I showed the natural indignation of any normal, decent person to his disgusting questions, he wrote that I was “emotionally labile“.
They are the bottom feeders of their professions who need you trapped, or they won’t have a job. 
I developed “Broken Heart Syndrome” with such severe chest pain, I struggled with my teaching job. I went from the woman doing it all, all the time – raising her child mostly alone, running a teaching studio, singing, and maintaining a large wooded property – to bed-ridden, after these vicious people finished running me through their Kids for Cash machine.
I knew that in order to survive, I had to go back to the country. I fell asleep listening to the music of crickets singing. Walked my dog in the rolling, wooded hills with the sun on my face.
“The mountains are calling and I must go.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there screwed over by our woman-hating, abuser-loving, greedy, corrupt family courts. Mothers are amazing! It takes a really remarkable woman to survive it all. You are loved!♥♥♥You are appreciated!♥♥♥You matter!!!♥♥♥
Mothers create the beauty and magic of holidays! They are keepers of traditions. They are gift buyers and wrappers. They clean, decorate and prepare. They hostess, entertain, then they pack it all up again. They are memory makers, and photo takers. They remember anniversaries, birthdays, and special occasions. They are the card and gift senders.
Mothers are forever connected to their children at the most basic, fundamental, core physical, cellular, mitochondrial, neurological, spiritual and emotional levels. They are all of this and so much more…they are your only, irreplaceable Mother!
AMother'sHeartSongsUnsilenced 