399. Michele Locke interviews Bill Mitchell for the "LoveLustLaw" Podcast

survivors to hear the stories of others because one, it makes you feel like you're not alone.

It makes you realize that your story is one of survival and you can help identify with some of the stories you hear because everyone's trauma is different and how everyone receives and heals from traumas is very much an individual thing.

But we're in Domestic Violence Month, and this is one that's near and dear to, I think, both of our hearts.

But one of the issues that I've seen come up, and it's being talked about in legislatures across the country, Canada has passed some civil statutes about coercive control because it's the, well, I didn't get hit, I didn't get a black eye, so I wasn't being abused issue.

And I think how often do we hear that? He never hit me.

Coercive control is one of those that seems to me finally to be getting more recognition than it ever has before.

And people talking about it in a way that spreads awareness to others.

Because I don't know that if you're in that type of relationship where you're not getting recognition, you're not getting hit, right? But you're definitely miserable.

And when you're living to survive each and every day, you can never really identify what's actually going on.

Like you don't have the time to sit and process, oh, I'm being abused.

You simply don't.

And then you get some space in the back and go, oh, holy cow.

And I think that's what happened with your daughter a little bit, right? Like there wasn't anything physical at the beginning.

We're under the impression that it wasn't Now we live, my wife, my son and I live outside of Baltimore.

Kristen at that time had just graduated from St. Joseph's University outside of Philadelphia.

It's about 125 miles apart.

So it wasn't like we were in constant contact.

I mean, she's in college.

She's in her last semester.

She had a job lined up with General Mills.

She was about to start.

We didn't really know the day-to-day of her life, not that she would share that with mom and dad anyway, but her friends did.

And so we really learned most about what was going on after by sitting down with her friends and then over the course of months and years, talking with them a lot.

So this guy was all those things that we put into our warning signs, all the course of control, power and control stuff and everything.

The kind of guy that if you do what he wants, you're rewarded somehow.