Abuse is commonly described as a pattern of harmful behaviors, but its primary effect is structural: it creates a cognitive environment that reshapes how a person perceives, interprets, and navigates reality. This paper argues that abuse functions by altering the salience, meaning, and predictability of the world the victim inhabits, producing a self reinforcing system of distortion, dependency, and containment. Rather than operating through force, abusive environments work by reorganizing the cues and interpretations that guide cognition, gradually replacing external reference points with the abuser’s framing. This model explains why individuals in abusive systems experience diminished agency, why leaving is often cognitively inaccessible rather than merely difficult, and why recovery requires rebuilding the underlying environment rather than correcting isolated beliefs. Understanding abuse as a cognitive environment clarifies its mechanisms, dissolves common misconceptions, and provides a structural account of how manipulation persists and how orientation can be restored.
Denis Bailey (Mon,) studied this question.