When Food Becomes a Tool of Control: The Hidden Side of Coercive Abuse

When we talk about domestic abuse, we often talk about physical violence, emotional manipulation, financial abuse and isolation. We talk about the obvious ways somebody can take control of another person’s life.

But what about food?

What happens when something as ordinary as preparing dinner, doing the weekly food shop or having a snack becomes another opportunity for somebody to criticise you, humiliate you or remind you who holds the power?

What happens when you become so anxious about getting something wrong that you stop asking for the things you want?

I’ve lived this. And I want to talk about it because I don’t think we talk enough about the relationship between food and coercive control.

When nothing you do is ever good enough

During my abusive relationship, food became another area of my life where I felt I could never get anything right.

It wasn’t necessarily one big, dramatic incident. It was the accumulation of little things, the constant criticism and the feeling that I was always being judged.

If I had a snack during one of the rare weekends we would actually spend together, there would be a sly dig.

The way I cooked was criticised. The way I fed the children was criticised. The way I prepared and presented food was never quite right. There was always something imperfect, something that didn’t meet his expectations, something that gave him another opportunity to make me feel inadequate.

It was exhausting.

Imagine living with somebody and feeling that even putting a meal on the table could become another test you were destined to fail.

You begin to anticipate the criticism before it happens. You question yourself. You become anxious about the simplest decisions.

And gradually, you stop doing things naturally because you’re too busy worrying about how the other person will react.

That is one of the things coercive control can do. It changes the way you behave, not because you want to, but because you’re trying to avoid the consequences of getting something wrong.

Food became another source of insecurity for me.

Something that should have been ordinary became emotionally loaded.

When you stop asking for what you want

One of the things that stands out to me now is how much control the financial situation had over my relationship with food.

He paid for the food shopping, and that meant I felt I had very little say in what we bought.

I stopped asking for the things I actually wanted.

Think about that for a moment. I was an adult, a mother, living in a relationship, yet I felt uncomfortable asking for the food I liked because I was worried about his reaction.

When somebody controls the money, even ordinary purchases can become a source of anxiety. You start weighing up whether something is worth the criticism, the argument or the feeling that you’re asking for too much.

You learn to put your own wants to one side.

You convince yourself that it’s easier not to ask.

And eventually, you can lose sight of the fact that you’re allowed to have preferences at all.

The UK government’s domestic abuse guidance recognises that economic abuse can include restricting someone’s ability to obtain food, controlling household finances and preventing a partner from spending money without permission.

That matters because financial control isn’t just about bank accounts, wages or large purchases. It can reach into the smallest details of everyday life.

For me, it reached the weekly food shop.

I wasn’t simply choosing not to buy something. I had become conditioned to feel that asking for what I wanted was somehow wrong.

Becoming a secret eater

And then there was the secrecy.

I would buy things I wanted when he wasn’t around and eat them without him knowing.

I became a secret eater.

Looking back, I can see how much shame and anxiety had become attached to something as basic as eating.

Instead of being able to enjoy food without giving it a second thought, I was hiding it. I was making choices in secret because I didn’t want to face the comments or judgement that might follow.

There is something deeply sad about feeling that you have to hide an ordinary pleasure from the person you’re in a relationship with.

I want to be clear: there is nothing inherently wrong with eating in private or enjoying food alone. The issue is the fear, shame and lack of freedom behind my behaviour.

I wasn’t simply choosing privacy. I was navigating a relationship in which I didn’t feel comfortable making my own choices.

And when you spend long enough anticipating criticism, that fear can follow you even when the person isn’t in the room.

You can start policing yourself.

You can hear the comments before anybody has even said them.

You can feel guilty about eating something you enjoy, even when nobody else knows about it.

That’s the impact I want people to understand. The control doesn’t always end when the person stops watching. Sometimes, you’ve internalised the judgement so deeply that you carry it with you.

Food, depression and emotional survival

My mental health was also a huge part of my experience.

Living with abuse affected my emotional wellbeing, and there were times when I turned to food for comfort.

I ate when I was sad. I ate when I was happy. Food became connected to my emotions in ways that I didn’t always understand.

And that relationship hasn’t simply disappeared because the relationship with my abuser ended.

Even now, I recognise that connection between how I feel and how I eat.

I think it’s important to talk about this without judgement, because emotional eating is often discussed as though it’s simply a lack of discipline or willpower.

But our relationship with food doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of our lives.

Stress, depression, anxiety, shame and difficult experiences can all affect how we eat. Some people lose their appetite when they’re distressed. Others find themselves seeking comfort in food. Some experience both at different times.

Research into intimate partner violence has identified altered eating patterns associated with avoiding abuse, coping with its psychological effects and responding to the emotional impact of the relationship.

That doesn’t mean every survivor will experience emotional eating, or that every difficulty with food is caused by abuse. But it does help explain why the effects of an abusive relationship can extend into something as personal as our eating habits.

For me, food became tangled up with comfort, secrecy, anxiety and my mental health.

And I don’t believe that healing comes from adding another layer of shame to that experience.

It comes from understanding it.

It comes from recognising why certain patterns might have developed and deciding how we want to care for ourselves moving forward.

How far will an abuser go?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

When we think about coercive control, we might imagine somebody dictating who you can see, what you can wear, where you can go or whether you’re allowed to work.

But control can reach into the ordinary routines that make up our lives.

What you eat.

When you eat.

What you buy.

How you prepare a meal.

Whether you feel comfortable having a snack.

Whether you can make a simple choice without anticipating criticism.

And, sometimes, whether you feel you have the right to ask for something you want.

Not every criticism about cooking or every disagreement about food is abuse. Relationships involve differences of opinion, and people can have preferences.

The distinction is the wider pattern: repeated humiliation, intimidation, restriction or financial control that undermines someone’s freedom and independence.

In an abusive relationship, food can become another opportunity to assert power, impose rules, reward compliance or punish behaviour.

And that is what makes it so damaging.

It isn’t necessarily about the food itself. It’s about who gets to decide, whose needs matter and what happens when you don’t do things the way the other person wants.

You can begin to feel that nothing is really yours anymore. Not your money, not your choices, not even the simple pleasure of eating something you enjoy.

I want people to understand that this is not trivial just because it happens in a kitchen.

The everyday nature of coercive control is part of what can make it so difficult to recognise.

Taking back control without punishing yourself

For me, recovery has to include looking at my relationship with food and understanding how my experiences have shaped it.

That doesn’t mean blaming myself for how I ate during the relationship. It doesn’t mean judging myself for seeking comfort in food or feeling ashamed that I hid what I wanted to eat.

It means recognising that I was living with circumstances that affected my confidence, my mental health and my ability to make choices freely.

And now, I have the opportunity to make different choices.

I can begin to ask myself what I actually want.

I can think about what makes me feel good, what supports my health and what helps me feel stronger, both physically and emotionally.

I can learn to distinguish between eating because I’m hungry, eating because I’m seeking comfort and eating because I’m responding to a habit I’ve developed over time.

And I can do all of that without treating myself as though I’ve done something wrong.

For some survivors, taking back control might mean learning to cook the meals they love without worrying about criticism. For others, it might mean buying their favourite food without feeling they need to justify it, enjoying a meal without guilt or seeking support for a difficult relationship with eating.

For me, improving my health and understanding my eating habits is also about reclaiming an area of my life that became associated with anxiety and control.

If I choose to lose weight, improve my fitness or change how I eat, I want those decisions to come from a place of care for myself.

Not because I need to prove anything to the person who abused me.

Not because I need to punish myself for the way I coped.

And certainly not because I believe my body makes me more or less deserving of respect.

Taking back control should feel like freedom, not another set of rules to live under.

If your relationship with food feels difficult or overwhelming, you deserve support rather than shame. A GP or an appropriately qualified health professional can help if emotional eating, restrictive eating or distress around food is affecting your wellbeing.

You do not have to work through everything alone.

The freedom to choose your own life

One of the things I find most enlightening about life after abuse is discovering just how many little decisions are yours to make again.

You can decide what to eat.

You can decide what to buy.

You can decide how to spend your money, where it’s safe and possible to do so.

You can cook a meal without worrying about whether somebody will find fault with it.

You can have a snack without anticipating a sly comment.

You can enjoy food without feeling that you have to hide.

These things might sound small to someone who has never experienced coercive control. But when you’ve spent years feeling that your choices are not really your own, those ordinary freedoms can feel enormous.

You start to rediscover yourself in the little things.

You realise that you don’t have to ask permission to have a preference. You don’t have to justify every decision. You don’t have to organise your life around somebody else’s expectations.

And slowly, you can begin to rebuild trust in yourself.

That doesn’t mean every habit changes overnight. It doesn’t mean the emotional impact disappears as soon as you leave. I know from my own experience that the relationship between food and emotions can continue long after the abuse has ended.

But awareness gives us somewhere to start.

We can recognise the patterns, understand where they may have come from and decide which ones we want to change.

We can take responsibility for our future without blaming ourselves for what we experienced in the past.

And we can begin to make choices that support the lives we want to live.

Your recovery belongs to you

I am sharing this because I want other survivors to recognise that coercive control can affect far more than the obvious parts of our lives.

It can affect our confidence, our mental health, our finances, our relationship with our bodies and our relationship with food.

It can make us feel ashamed of wanting something as simple as a favourite snack.

It can leave us hiding food, questioning our choices and carrying guilt into situations where we should feel free.

If any of this feels familiar, please know that you are not weak for the ways you learned to cope.

You were navigating circumstances that may have made ordinary decisions feel difficult or unsafe.

You deserve compassion as you work through that.

And if you are now free from the person who controlled you, you deserve the opportunity to rediscover what freedom looks like in your everyday life.

For me, that means learning to understand my relationship with food, my emotional wellbeing and the choices I want to make for myself.

It means taking back control in ways that might seem small to somebody else but feel significant to me.

It means recognising that I am allowed to have needs, wants and preferences.

And it means learning to care for myself without criticism being the driving force.

Because this was never just about food.

It was about power. It was about control. It was about gradually losing the confidence to make decisions for myself.

And recovery is about rebuilding that confidence, one decision at a time.

I want my choices to belong to me again. Not to my abuser. Not to the fear of criticism. Not to the shame I carried for years. To me.

And if taking back that control helps me feel healthier, happier, stronger and more confident in the person I am becoming, then that is something worth celebrating.

Because I am not here to spend the rest of my life punishing myself for the ways I survived.

I am here to build a life in which I am free to choose.

And that includes what’s on my plate.

Sources

• Home Office: Domestic Abuse Act 2021 statutory guidance (GOV.UK)
• Wong and Chang (2015), Altered eating behaviors in female victims of intimate partner violence, Journal of Interpersonal Violence (PubMed)