We.must retire the term.Reactive Abuse

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Coerced defensive aggression is the term Daniel Ryan Cotler uses in Voiceless No More: The Legal War on Narcissistic Abuse to describe reactive behaviors that are deliberately provoked and then weaponized against the survivor.

It occurs when an individual is subjected to prolonged psychological pressure, threat, humiliation, gaslighting, or entrapment until their nervous system shifts into survival mode. At that point, responses such as yelling, pleading, panic, dissociation, emotional outbursts, or physical defensiveness emerge. These reactions are not acts of aggression in origin. They are defensive reflexes produced by sustained threat.

The coercion is the key element. The abuser engineers conditions where calm communication is impossible. Boundaries are ignored. Reality is denied. Needs are punished. Escape is blocked or made dangerous. The nervous system is pushed past regulatory capacity. When a defensive response finally occurs, it is then reframed as proof that the survivor is unstable, abusive, or dangerous.

This tactic serves multiple functions. It allows the abuser to reverse roles and claim victimhood. It creates false equivalence between patterned coercive harm and isolated survival reactions. It generates “evidence” that can be used in smear campaigns, custody disputes, workplace complaints, or court filings. Most importantly, it shifts attention away from the original abuse.

Coerced defensive aggression explains why many survivors say, “I became someone I didn’t recognize.” Under chronic threat, the brain prioritizes survival over character. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses replace measured behavior. That shift is neurological, not moral.

Legally and clinically, this concept is often misunderstood. Systems tend to evaluate behavior without context. They isolate the survivor’s reaction from the coercive conditions that produced it. Cotler’s framework insists that causation matters. Defensive acts induced by prolonged abuse cannot be evaluated the same way as unprovoked aggression.

This concept also clarifies why abusers often escalate pressure specifically to provoke a reaction. The reaction is the payoff. Once obtained, it can be pointed to indefinitely as justification for continued control, punishment, or retaliation.

In Voiceless No More, coerced defensive aggression is positioned as a predictable outcome of neurological battery, not a character flaw. Naming it restores context, returns agency to the survivor, and exposes a common tactic used to silence, discredit, and punish those who are already being harmed.