If you’ve ever survived domestic violence, you already understand how oppression works. Abusers don’t just use brute force—they use control. They iso
If you’ve ever survived domestic violence, you already understand how oppression works.
Abusers don’t just use brute force—they use control. They isolate you. They turn your safe spaces into traps. They twist your support system until you feel like there’s nowhere left to go.
Oppression works the same way.
When women, Black communities, Indigenous people, or any oppressed group create spaces to heal and reclaim their power, those spaces quickly become targets. People on the outside notice.
- Shelters meant for safety are infiltrated or defunded.
- Movements for justice get hijacked and silenced.
- Healing spaces are co-opted, rewritten, or erased.
- Sports, Title IX
Why? Because real power doesn’t just want to harm you—it wants to own you. And one of the fastest ways to do that is to take the very spaces you built for freedom and turn them against you.
Oppression isn’t just about violence—it’s about control. And control is most effective when it takes over what was once yours—your voice, your choices, your safe spaces. The way it does in toxic relationships. You no longer recognize yourself anymore.
This is exactly how domestic violence works. This is exactly how takeover works. This is exactly how domination works. This is exactly how power and control works.
A Survivor builds a life—her own friendships, her own confidence, her own independence. But an abuser doesn’t just strike with brute force—he isolates, he infiltrates, he convinces her that her safe spaces belong to him. Her home becomes his control center. Her relationships become his to dictate.
The solution? We must guard our spaces fiercely. We must recognize when they’ve been captured. And we must never stop building new ones.
Oppression always wants control. It craves it. We starve it.
That’s why we must protect our spaces fiercely—in our homes, in our communities, in our movements.
What we create for our own freedom must never be handed over to those who wish to cage us.
Exploring the Link Between Enmeshment and Male Violence: Breaking Unhealthy Cycles
