There is a particular exhaustion that sets in when you stop trusting your own perception of reality. Survivors of family violence know it intimately.
The fog that descends when someone you depend on tells you, convincingly and repeatedly, that what you experienced did not happen the way you know it happened. Therapists have a name for it and it is called gaslighting.
In the last 48 hours, the entire world has been gaslit. We went to sleep wondering if we were about to witness “a whole civilisation dies tonight” and we woke up to a ceasefire announcement that could dissolve at any moment. This is not foreign policy, it is a control cycle.
On Tuesday, an advocate for women in business and media commentator, Amanda Rose, appeared on Sunrise Mornings and said plainly what millions have been thinking: that Donald Trump is a bully who changes his position from one minute to the next and that Australia should stand up to a bully. She was met with a wave of misogynistic abuse online that included threats, insults, and the ugliest kind of silencing from people who could not argue with her point, so they attacked her person instead. She wasn’t wrong. The reaction to her honesty was itself a demonstration of the dynamic she was naming. Punish the witness, not the act, which is a page straight from an abuser’s handbook.
In the language of family violence, what’s unfolding on the international stage mirrors the Power and Control Wheel with unsettling precision, a framework showing how abusers assert dominance not through nonstop violence, but through a rotating arsenal of coercion, intimidation, minimisation, and denial. Trump has deployed tariffs as economic weapons and then walked them back within 90 days, sending markets into freefall and then partial recovery. He threatened Iran with consequences over the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that was open before his escalation, framing a provocation as a defence. The chaos is not incidental. In abusive dynamics, unpredictability is a tool. It keeps targets in a state of hyper-vigilance, forever adjusting to a shifting reality rather than trusting their own.
The administration around him operates much like what family‑violence advocates call ‘flying monkeys’, people who extend a controlling individual’s reach by relaying messages, exerting pressure, and reframing harmful behaviour. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insists markets are “healthy.” Senior advisers describe deliberate economic destabilisation as “strategic.” Cabinet members who know better stay silent. In toxic family systems, flying monkeys rarely see themselves as enablers. They believe they are keeping the peace, the effect is the same as the person being harmed holds the consequences, while the person causing harm is insulated from accountability.
What makes this moment uniquely destabilising is the scale. When an abusive dynamic plays out in a household, the distortion of reality is contained. When it plays out across the world’s most powerful media ecosystems, it becomes collective gaslighting. The rhetorical shifts happen within hours. One press conference promises devastation whilst another, minutes later, softens to negotiation. Ordinary people are left with the same sensation survivors describe asking Did that actually happen? Am I misremembering? No. You are not.
Framing it as a simple matter of why countries don’t just refuse overlooks a core reality of coercive control because when power is overwhelmingly one‑sided, leaving or resisting is almost never simple. This is the same impossible calculus survivors face — how do you protect yourself from someone who possibly holds your financial lifeline? Countries with long memories know that appeasement does not end a bully’s behaviour. It rewards it. Amanda Rose was right – at what point does the world need to stand up to ‘the bully’ and perpetrator in the relationship and say enough is enough.
The women who understand this most deeply are the ones who have lived it in their own homes, their own relationships, their own bodies. They are watching the global stage, recognising something that political experts keep missing and that this is an abuser protecting his grip on power, at a scale that affects every person on the planet, with an entire administration helping him do it. This isn’t to collapse geopolitics into interpersonal violence but the patterns are uncomfortably familiar.
The rest of us are left doing what survivors have always had to do on their own because the system has failed them. We have to manage the fear, absorb the chaos, and try to stay steady while everything around us shifts. That emotional labour of constantly recalibrating, the second-guessing, the exhausted attempt to make sense of something that is deliberately designed not to make sense is hard work. It is invisible work, and it falls hardest on the people already carrying the most.
We have been here before. Not at this scale, but in this feeling. Women who have sat across a kitchen table from someone who swore, convincingly, that what just happened did not happen know exactly what this is. And they know that the situation does not change until it is named. Not managed. Not accommodated but named. This is coercive control and the target is all of us. The question is no longer whether we recognise it but whether we keep tolerating it.