Expert Insights: Kelsey Decker on Why Survivors of Abuse May Enter Another Harmful Relationship

What you’ll find in this article:

• Why survivors can become vulnerable to another abusive relationship or coercive system after leaving

• What the “vulnerability window” is after exit, and why this period can be especially high risk

• Why entering another abusive dynamic is not a sign of weakness or failure

• How coercive control changes the way survivors perceive trust, danger, and manipulation

• The patterns predators often look for when identifying vulnerable people, and how survivors can better protect themselves

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Welcome back to Expert Insights, where feature conversations with professionals, researchers, advocates, and writers whose work helps us better understand domestic abuse, coercive control, and survivor recovery.

In this article, I interview Kelsey Decker, a researcher, survivor advocate, author, and Founder of Morning Glory Global, a survivor-led nonprofit serving women affected by human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. Drawing on a 45-year personal case study of coercive control—from the familial to the institutional, the intimate to the systemic—Kelsey has observed, experienced, and sought to deconstruct the psychological architectures that bind individuals to high-control systems.

Kelsey created the Exit Costs framework and writes a Substack publication with the same name: Exit Costs: Coercive Harm, Healing, and Reclamation. She is a Crime Victim Advocate in training, pursuing national accreditation; a Certified Anti-Trafficking Survivor Leader; a sought-after speaker; and a member of the International Cultic Studies Association and the International Coercive Coalition. She believes that understanding is the first act of liberation and that survivors deserve research that speaks their language.

Across this two-part conversation, we explore both why survivors can become vulnerable to further coercive relationships after leaving, and how they can rebuild trust, identity, healthy relationships, and lasting freedom. This first part focuses on understanding the psychological conditioning that makes survivors vulnerable after exit, while Part 2 turns to the process of healing and rebuilding.

Throughout this conversation, Kelsey combines remarkable insight with profound compassion. Her perspective helps explain experiences that many survivors blame themselves for, offering something far more accurate in their place: understanding.

The conversation begins with one of the biggest misconceptions about abuse recovery: that leaving automatically means you’re finally free.

1. You’ve spoken about experiencing repeated cycles of abuse across very different environments, from a spiritual cult to trafficking and an abusive marriage. Many survivors believe that once they leave an abusive dynamic, they’re finally “safe,” yet your own experience tells a different story. Why can survivors become vulnerable to another coercive relationship or system after leaving, and how did the conditioning from one environment make you more vulnerable to the next?

I love this question. The greatest misconception is that leaving one abusive environment automatically removes the effects of the abuse. In reality, people leave a relationship, a cult, or an exploitative situation with a nervous system shaped by prolonged coercive control.

Abuse changes the way you perceive danger, interpret love, evaluate trust, and understand yourself. When you’ve spent years adapting to survive in one coercive system, those adaptations don’t disappear the day you walk away. They often become the very things another manipulative person or system recognizes and exploits.

In my own life, I didn’t move from one identical environment to another. As you stated, they were entirely different systems—a high-control family, followed by eight years in a spiritual cult, in which I was trafficked, an abusive marriage, and later commercial sexual exploitation and intimate partner violence. The cycle felt never-ending.

On the surface, the systems looked unrelated. But underneath, they all relied on the same mechanisms: grooming, dependency, isolation, shame, intermittent reinforcement, and the gradual erosion of autonomy.

The first system taught me to normalize abuse. Then in the cult, I was trained to ignore discomfort, distrust my own perceptions, sacrifice my needs, spiritualize suffering, and believe that obedience was evidence of love and maturity. When I left, those beliefs became the lens through which I interpreted every relationship that followed.

That’s one of the reasons I developed the concept of Exit Costs. Leaving is not the finish line. It creates a period of profound vulnerability while survivors are grieving losses, rebuilding identity, regulating their nervous system, and trying to make sense of reality without the framework they once depended on. During that period, the risk of re-traumatization and re-exploitation can actually increase if we mistake physical exit for psychological freedom.

The tragedy is that survivors often blame themselves for “ending up there again,” when in reality they’re navigating the predictable consequences of conditioning that was intentionally designed to outlast the abusive environment itself.