How to Prove Emotional Abuse in Court: What Judges Can Actually Use
Most women I support describe what they’ve been enduring in their marriage as emotional abuse. They can give very clear examples of the gaslighting that they’ve been experiencing, the common pattern of insults that are thrown at them when they don’t act according to their partner’s unrealistic standards, the constant stress that they live under, not knowing if today is going to be a good day or a bad day.
They can also very clearly articulate the control that they are experiencing. Telling me that they have to lie about how long they’ll be at the grocery store and sit in the car parking lot to take calls with me since their partner tracks their location.
Or how every time that they ask to see the marital finances, they are told that they know what they need to know and that they are bad with money, which is why their partner never shares any information with them.
They mainly refer to this as emotional abuse because they didn’t have the proper language to actually categorize what they’ve been enduring. Their labeling isn’t incorrect, but if their partner is actively taking the steps to limit their autonomy, then coercive control is often the better definition for it.
Emotional abuse is a category of behavior. Name-calling, degradation, humiliation, telling you your feelings are irrational, etc.
Evan Stark defined coercive control as "a strategic course of oppressive behavior in which some combination of physical and sexual violence, intimidation, isolation and control are used to dominate, exploit and/or subjugate a partner and deprive them of basic rights and liberties." The goal is to make their partner feel trapped in the relationship.
There can be emotional abuse without coercive control.
The research has shown for nearly thirty years that this kind of abuse can be just as damaging as physical abuse. The family court system is unfortunately quite outdated in the U.S.
This article expands on what the research has consistently shown about the damage from this kind of abuse, why the family court system is so outdated, how they’ve been trying to catch up and how to document this kind of abuse in the format that the court understands currently.
Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.
What the Research Says About the Damage
Ann Coker and colleagues surveyed 1,152 women recruited from family practice clinics between 1997 and 1999. 13.6% had experienced psychological intimate partner violence without any physical violence.
Those women were significantly more likely to report poor physical health , poor mental health, chronic pain, and a disability preventing work.
“Psychological IPV (intimate partner violence) was as strongly associated with the majority of adverse health outcomes as was physical IPV.”
Women who did not experience physical violence, reported these health problems at rates comparable to women who did.
In 2006, Picó-Alfonso and colleagues researched 75 physically and psychologically abused women, 55 psychologically abused, 52 control subjects.
Both abused groups had higher depressive symptoms, anxiety, PTSD, and thoughts of suicide than the controls. There was no difference between the physically and psychologically abused groups.
Their conclusion: “psychological IPV is as detrimental as physical IPV, with the exception of effects on suicidality.”
Diane Follingstad’s team interviewed 234 women with a history of physical abuse in 1990.
72% reported that the emotional abuse had a more severe impact than the physical abuse. These are perceptions from a help-seeking sample, which means that this evidence is weaker than a measured outcome.
Regardless, most of the women who lived through both said the invisible part hurt more. (This is not to take away from the severity of physical violence. This is just stating data from interviewed women from the study.)
Jacquelyn Campbell’s 11-city femicide study compared 220 femicide victims against 343 abused control women. The risk of being killed by an intimate partner rose 9-fold when a highly controlling partner was combined with separation after living together.
When a controlling partner is present, separation is the most dangerous time for women.
This kind of abuse is very serious, even if the courts don’t treat it as such yet.
Why Emotional Abuse Doesn’t Land in Family Court
Courts adjudicate incidents. Coercive control is a pattern of conduct.
Carrie Leonetti, in the William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice in 2024: courts’ “continued focus on discrete incidents of physical violence between adults conceals the patterned and gendered nature of most interpersonal violence in which women are victimized.”
Stark told Vermont’s House Judiciary Committee the same thing in 2015: “Interventions focused on discrete assaults (rather than course of conduct) miss the significance of abuse in the vast majority of cases.”
Physical violence is easy to see. It leaves bruises, hospital records, witnesses that can clearly testify to what happened. Coercive control/ complex emotional abuse is designed to be invisible.
describing these patterns with evidence that pairs could help describe to a judge exactly what’s happening and why it’s dangerous, but the rules that many of them follow were built to see single events
Credibility is decided by demeanor.
Deborah Epstein and Lisa Goodman, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2019: “A woman may tell a story about how her partner sexually assaulted her as if she is talking about the weather outside.”
And the trap: “The symptoms of their trauma, the reliable indicators that abuse has in fact occurred, are perversely wielded against their own credibility in court.”
Hardesty and colleagues tested this on 603 custody evaluators in 2015. Mother’s demeanor was the most consistent predictor of recommendations and of credibility judgments. Evaluators who read about a pleasant mother were roughly 4 times more likely to believe her domestic violence allegations. Those in the hostile-mother condition were over 5 times more likely to recommend father custody over joint.
Demeanor moved the outcome more than the severity of the abuse being reported.
The other side is building a record too. Ellen Gutowski and Lisa Goodman surveyed 222 survivor-mothers across 36 states and built the Legal Abuse Scale. Over half those cases had run 2 years or longer. The strongest-loading item on the entire scale: “was dishonest about your character or mental health to professionals on your case.”
The other side is often telling a story about these mothers to try to discredit them in the legal system.
Why the Law Is Behind the Research
The category is barely in the law, and almost never in criminal law. California wrote coercive control into the Family Code in 2020 through SB 1141, in the restraining order statute. Connecticut followed with Jennifers’ Law in 2021. Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts and Colorado are all civil and family law. As of a 2025 Marshall Project review, Hawaii was “the only state to directly criminalize it so far,” as a petty misdemeanor inside a 5-year pilot. Washington tried for a gross misdemeanor and failed. So in most of the country none of this generates a criminal record.
For 40 years the field looked at physical acts. The dominant research instrument asked whether someone had been pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped. Russell Dobash and colleagues took it apart in Social Problems in 1992: “Confining self-report data to a checklist of acts, devoid of motives, meanings and consequences cannot insure objectivity, validity or an adequate development of theory.” Andy Myhill tested the alternative on a large national survey in 2015. Counting acts produces roughly equal rates between men and women. Measuring coercive control shows abuse that is “highly gendered, with women overwhelmingly the victims.”
Many courts still look at physical acts.
The professionals deciding your case have very little training in this. Daniel Saunders reported in 2015 that custody evaluators had attended a median of 4 seminars and read a median of 18 books or articles on intimate partner violence across an entire career. Surveying 1,187 judges, attorneys, domestic violence workers and evaluators, Saunders, Faller and Tolman found “judges, private attorneys, and evaluators were more likely to believe that mothers make false DV allegations and alienate their children.”
And the counter-move works. Joan Meier coded 4,338 published US custody opinions from 2005 to 2014. Mothers who reported a father’s abuse lost custody in 26% of cases. When fathers cross-claimed parental alienation, that doubled to 50%. Courts credited claims of child sexual abuse 15% of the time, and with an alienation cross-claim, in 1 of 51 cases. These are published, largely appellate opinions rather than a random sample of family court.
Sally Jeffries, studying custody proceedings in common-law courts, found that“When faced with a scenario of coercive control, they appeared unable to recognize it and simply relabelled it as ‘mutual conflict’.”
The research very clearly recognizes the severity of these patterns. The legal system still processes events, staffed by people trained on single physical incidents.
This is where the gap is. If you have experienced complex emotional abuse or coercive control, your experiences are very real, even if not fully validated by the family court system.
How to Document Emotional Abuse So It Can Be Used
Emotional abuse and coercive control can be difficult to prove. The way that I like to frame this to my clients is “we are trying to translate your story into the language that the court speaks.”
Log in the language of the court system. Richard Tolman’s Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, built in 1989, is 58 items and openly published. When your entry mirrors that wording, it stops reading as a complaint and starts reading as a documented behavior evaluators recognize. (The items say “him” because the validation sample was male partners.)
Verbatim:
“My partner monitored my time and made me account for where I was.”
“My partner used our money or made important financial decisions without talking to me about it.”
“My partner told me my feelings were irrational or crazy.”
“My partner tried to make me feel like I was crazy.”
“My partner blamed me for his problems.”
“My partner tried to keep me from seeing or talking to my family.”
“My partner restricted my use of the car.”
“My partner threatened to take the children away from me.”
“My partner tried to turn our family, friends, and children against me.”
“My partner threatened to have me committed to a mental institution.”
Here’s the difference it makes. “They made me feel worthless for years” is a statement and a personal opinion. A judge has nothing to rule on. There is no evidence. And opposing counsel can easily poke holes in that.
“On 3/14 at 7:40pm they told me my feelings were irrational when I brought up the joint account, and my sister was in the kitchen. They then told me I was bad with money, which is why I never had access to the marital bank accounts” hands the court 4 usable things: a date, the words said, what set it off, and a witness who can be called.
20 entries like that, in order, is the pattern.
One line per incident. Date, time, what was said, who else was there. When documenting this for your legal team, you do not need to include how it made you feel.
Export message threads whole, with timestamps. If you’re just submitting screenshots of the worst messages, then the opposing counsel can refer to that as cherry picking and claim that the conflict is mutual rather than one-sided The full thread shows the pattern: 14 messages in 40 minutes, 3 weeks of nothing, then a dealing with one the morning of a hearing.
Pull 24 months of statements from every account, including any closed in the last year. Banks purge older records. Economic control leaves a paper trail, and it is the easiest piece of this pattern to prove.
Name the statutory category. “Coercive control” and “economic abuse” are in statutes and in the research. “Narcissist” is in neither and is diagnostic language.
Even if you’re not planning on filing for a divorce for a couple years, start documenting this pattern now as it can help you in the future.
Tie the Abuse to What You’re Actually Asking For
There unfortunately isn’t any research that shows if you tie the documentation of the abuse to what you’re asking for (i.e., if you want an 80/20 custody split then tie the abuse directly on how it impacts the children) is going to increase your chances at getting that.
I spent a long time looking for that, so what follows is additional research that relates to this topic.
Alesha Durfee found petitioners without legal representation significantly less likely to have protection orders granted, even in courts designed to work for people without lawyers.
Anne Groggel analyzed over 1,000 protection order cases in Nebraska and found that being married to the person you’re filing against, sharing children with them, and which county you file in all changed the result, after controlling for the severity, recency and type of the abuse.
The strength of your account does less work than you think. What it’s attached to does more.
If you’re asking for a uneven split of the assets. Emotional abuse on its own rarely moves property division. The behavior with money can. The doctrine is dissipation, sometimes called marital waste: marital money spent for one spouse’s benefit on something unrelated to the marriage while the marriage was breaking down. Courts want specifics.
Ex: “the marriage broke down in 2024 after an affair was discovered. Since then, I have been locked out of shared bank accounts, and a luxury vehicle was purchased.”
These rules vary state by state.
Florida reaches back 2 years before the petition.
Illinois requires a formal notice of intent to end the marriage to claim dissipation, filed 60 days before trial or 30 days after discovery closes, and bars claims older than 5 years. Texas builds a “reconstituted estate,” the value the marital estate would have had if the spending never happened, then divides that.
Negligent mismanagement doesn’t count anywhere. So the entries that matter here are financial: dates, amounts, accounts, and what the money went to.
If you’re asking for more than 50% parenting time:
The standard is the best interests of the child. Always research and confirm with a local attorney what your state looks at specifically regarding the best interests of the child. There is no uniform standard.
Michigan’s best-interests factors include the length of time the child has lived in “a stable, satisfactory environment, and the desirability of maintaining continuity,” the child’s “home, school, and community record,” and separately “domestic violence, regardless of whether the violence was directed against or witnessed by the child.”
Florida and Minnesota list stability and domestic violence the same way. Tying the abuse to your child’s stability argues 2 statutory factors at once.
Xyrakis and colleagues reviewed 51 studies on children exposed to interparental coercive control in 2024 and found it associated with harsher parenting, higher levels of child abuse, strained parent-child relationships, children used as tools, increased internalizing and externalizing problems, and increased bullying.
Their conclusion: coercive control is “a unique contributor to adverse child wellbeing outcomes, independent of exposure to IPV more broadly.”
Jane Callaghan’s team interviewed 21 UK children aged 8 to 18 and concluded that children in these households “can be reasonably described as victims of abusive control.”
So when you log an incident, note how it negatively impacted the minor children. Go to your courthouse website if you don’t have an attorney yet and look at the exact language that your state uses as it relates to the best interests of the children
That’s the entry that connects your evidence to the standard the judge is applying.
Whether This Is the Right Arena
What you went through matters. The question is whether family court is the place to have it recognized.
Family court is a legal system and not a justice system. It divides property, sets a parenting schedule, and moves on. Being believed happens there only as a byproduct of winning a specific point, and not the job of any judge to validate your experiences.
I always instruct my clients to confirm with their legal team if what they’re experiencing at home is strong enough evidence to add to the case that they’ve already built to give them a better chance of outcome that they are looking for.
Staying in the legal system has both physical and financial costs
Gutowski and Goodman studied 220 family court-involved survivor-mothers in 2024 and found legal abuse predicted worse post-traumatic stress and depressive symptoms, running through the vocational losses the litigation caused.
Christina Smith and Jennifer Freyd named the mechanism in American Psychologist: “Institutional betrayal occurs when an institution causes harm to an individual who trusts or depends upon that institution.”
You do not need the family court system to validate your experiences for them to have actually happened to you and to cause you this much pain.
There are so many steps you can take outside the family court system to process what you’ve been through and slowly start to remove the power those words once had over you.
The 2023 VA and Department of Defense guideline gives its strongest recommendation to 3 treatments: Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR, and Prolonged Exposure.
Some of this is worth fighting in court. A lot of it belongs with the trauma-informed professionals who actually have the training to support you through recovering from this experience while still having to be exposed to the abuser.
Keep Documenting Even If Your State Isn’t There Yet
Your state might not recognize coercive control.
Document it anyway.
I’ve supported a lot of clients in Colorado, and Colorado passed HB26-1309 in May 2026, one of the furthest-reaching family court abuse statutes in the country. Colorado is now including coercive control in their definition of domestic violence. The burden of proof is high, but it now exists.
On parental responsibilities, the court “may consider any relevant and admissible evidence,” with findings on the record by a preponderance of the evidence. The act also says a person’s protective behaviors are not domestic violence.
That’s a state deciding that what happened to you counts in family court whether or not anyone was ever charged.
It’s slow moving. It’s still happening.
You might not get the custody arrangement you want this time. Keep documenting anyway, because the pattern you’re building now is what a modification is made of later.
Take what you’ve collected to an attorney and ask the direct question: is this enough evidence to file on, and if it isn’t, what’s missing?
Disclaimer: This is educational content, not legal advice. Nothing in family law is guaranteed. Rules, procedures, and outcomes vary state by state, county by county, and case by case. Always consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction before making decisions about your case.
Sources
California Senate Bill 1141 (2020), “Domestic violence: coercive control,” Chapter 248, Statutes of 2020, approved September 29, 2020. Amends Family Code § 6320 only; creates no criminal offense. Text
Colorado House Bill 26-1309, “Abuse in Cases of Separation,” Chapter 163, signed May 27, 2026. Amends the Uniform Dissolution of Marriage Act. Quoted language is from the Colorado General Assembly’s official summary of the act as enacted. Bill page
Connecticut Public Act 21-78 (2021), “Jennifers’ Law,” signed June 28, 2021. Codified at C.G.S. § 46b-1(b)(4); operates through the civil restraining order statute.
Callaghan, J. E. M., Alexander, J. H., Sixsmith, J., & Fellin, L. C. (2018). Beyond “witnessing”: Children’s experiences of coercive control in domestic violence and abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 33(10), 1551–1581. Qualitative; interviews with 21 UK children aged 8–18. Record
Campbell, J. C., Webster, D., Koziol-McLain, J., et al. (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: Results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089–1097. 11-city case-control study of 220 intimate partner femicide victims (via proxy interviews) and 343 abused control women. PDF
Coker, A. L., Smith, P. H., Bethea, L., King, M. R., & McKeown, R. E. (2000). Physical health consequences of physical and psychological intimate partner violence. Archives of Family Medicine, 9(5), 451–457. Cross-sectional survey of 1,152 women recruited from family practice clinics, February 1997 to January 1999. Archive
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Can a debt collector contact me about a debt after a divorce?” Page
Dissipation and marital waste: Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act § 307 (”contribution or dissipation”); Fla. Stat. § 61.075(1)(i) (2-year lookback); 750 ILCS 5/503(d)(2) (notice deadlines, 5-year outer bar); Tex. Fam. Code § 7.009 (reconstituted estate); N.Y. Dom. Rel. Law § 236(B)(5)(d)(12)–(13). Doctrine summarized in Driskell, E. (2006), Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 20(1), 135–154. Rules vary substantially by state; check yours. AAML PDF
Dobash, R. P., Dobash, R. E., Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The myth of sexual symmetry in marital violence. Social Problems, 39(1), 71–91. PDF
Durfee, A. (2009). Victim narratives, legal representation, and domestic violence civil protection orders. Feminist Criminology, 4(1), 7–31. The study reports the representation effect as statistically significant and gives no published effect size. Record
Epstein, D., & Goodman, L. A. (2019). Discounting women: Doubting domestic violence survivors’ credibility and dismissing their experiences. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 167(2), 399–459. Legal scholarship synthesizing trauma research and court practice; not an empirical study. PDF
Follingstad, D. R., Rutledge, L. L., Berg, B. J., Hause, E. S., & Polek, D. S. (1990). The role of emotional abuse in physically abusive relationships. Journal of Family Violence, 5(2), 107–120. Interviews with 234 women with a history of physical abuse; the 72% figure is self-reported perceived impact, at p. 114. Corroborated in Street, A. E., & Arias, I. (2001), Violence and Victims, 16(1), 65–78.
Gutowski, E. R., & Goodman, L. A. (2023). Coercive control in the courtroom: The Legal Abuse Scale (LAS). Journal of Family Violence, 38(3), 527–542. 222 survivor-mothers across 36 US states involved in family law proceedings; convenience sample, 77.5% White. Open access
Groggel, A. (2021). The role of place and sociodemographic characteristics on the issuance of temporary civil protection orders. Law & Society Review, 55(1), 38–69. Over 1,000 civil protection order cases, Nebraska. Record
Gutowski, E. R., Goodman, L. A., Riley, M., & Slocum, A. (2024). Vocational and financial losses as mediators between legal abuse and mental health for family court-involved survivor-mothers. Journal of Family Violence. Mixed methods; n = 220 quantitative. Record
Hardesty, J. L., Hans, J. D., Haselschwerdt, M. L., Khaw, L., & Crossman, K. A. (2015). The influence of divorcing mothers’ demeanor on custody evaluators’ assessment of their domestic violence allegations. Journal of Child Custody, 12(1), 47–70. Multiple segment factorial vignette design, N = 603 custody evaluators. The 4x and 5x figures as reported in California Judicial Council, Beyond the Bench 25 preconference materials. PDF
Leonetti, C. (2024). Missing coercive control in family court proceedings. William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice, 30(3), 447. New Zealand–focused analysis drawing an explicit parallel to the United States. Repository
Jeffries, S. (2016). In the best interests of the abuser: Coercive control, child custody proceedings and the “expert” assessments that guide judicial determinations. Laws, 5(1), Article 14. Analysis of common-law family courts, primarily Australian. Open access
Maccoby, E. E., & Mnookin, R. H. (1992). Dividing the Child: Social and Legal Dilemmas of Custody. Harvard University Press. Longitudinal study of 1,124 divorcing California families; 10% substantial legal conflict, 15% intense conflict.
Meier, J. S. (2020). U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: what do the data show? Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 42(1), 92–105. 4,338 published US custody opinions coded from 2005–2014; 2,351 in the analytic dataset. Mostly appellate, so not a random sample of family court. See also the NIJ report, Meier, Dickson, O’Sullivan, Rosen & Hayes (2019), NCJ 304419. Full text PDF
Myhill, A. (2015). Measuring coercive control: What can we learn from national population surveys? Violence Against Women, 21(3), 355–375. Record
Michigan Compiled Laws § 722.23; Fla. Stat. § 61.13(3); Minn. Stat. § 518.17, subd. 1(a). Best-interests factors naming both stability/continuity and domestic violence. Custody statutes vary by state; the weight given to domestic violence varies sharply. See the NCJFCJ chart, State Custody Statutes Relevant to Domestic Violence. Chart
Picó-Alfonso, M. A., Garcia-Linares, M. I., Celda-Navarro, N., Blasco-Ros, C., Echeburúa, E., & Martinez, M. (2006). The impact of physical, psychological, and sexual intimate male partner violence on women’s mental health: Depressive symptoms, posttraumatic stress disorder, state anxiety, and suicide. Journal of Women’s Health, 15(5), 599–611. Cross-sectional; 75 physically/psychologically abused, 55 psychologically abused, 52 controls; Spanish sample.
Saunders, D. G. (2015). Research based recommendations for child custody evaluation practices and policies in cases of intimate partner violence. Journal of Child Custody, 12(1), 71–92. Reviews Bow & Boxer (2003), n = 115 evaluators, for the median 4 seminars and 18 readings. PDF
Saunders, D. G., Faller, K. C., & Tolman, R. M. (2016). Beliefs and recommendations regarding child custody and visitation in cases involving domestic violence: A comparison of professionals in different roles. Violence Against Women, 22(6), 722–744. Survey of n = 1,187 judges, legal aid attorneys, private attorneys, DV program workers and custody evaluators. Record
Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. PDF
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press.
Stark, E. (2015). Written testimony on H.103, Vermont House Judiciary Committee, February 25, 2015. PDF
The Marshall Project (June 28, 2025). Reporting on state criminalization of coercive control, source of the finding that Hawaii is the only state to have directly criminalized it and that Washington’s attempt failed. Article
Tolman, R. M. (1989). The development of a measure of psychological maltreatment of women by their male partners. Violence and Victims, 4(3), 159–177. 58-item Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, 2 subscales (Dominance–Isolation, Emotional–Verbal). Item text as published by the UNC SABI instrument repository. Instrument PDF
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense (2023). VA/DoD Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Acute Stress Disorder. Strong recommendation for Cognitive Processing Therapy, EMDR, and Prolonged Exposure. Synopsis published as Schnurr, P. P., Hamblen, J. L., Wolf, J., et al. (2024), Annals of Internal Medicine, 177(3), 363–374. Full guideline
Somatic Experiencing evidence base: Kuhfuß, M., Maldei, T., Hetmanek, A., & Baumann, N. (2021). Somatic experiencing: effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy: a scoping literature review. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1929023 (16 studies, 2 RCTs, mixed quality). Positive trial: Brom, D., et al. (2017), Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30(3), 304–312 (n = 63, waitlist-controlled). Null trial: Andersen, T. E., et al. (2020), European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1797306 (n = 114). Listed as an emerging recommendation by ISTSS; absent from the VA/DoD guideline.
Xyrakis, N., Aquilina, B., McNiece, E., Tran, T., Waddell, C., Suomi, A., & Pasalich, D. (2024). Interparental coercive control and child and family outcomes: A systematic review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1), 22–40. Systematic review of 51 studies; narrative synthesis, no pooled effect size. Record
