What Coercive Relationships Have in Common With Fiction
After thirty years as a psychotherapist, I’ve come to see manipulation the way I see a story: it has acts. A beginning that draws you in, a middle that traps you, and an ending that tries to keep you from leaving. I didn’t plan to write a novel about it — but by the time I sat down to create the antagonist in The General’s Princess, I realized I’d been collecting his blueprint in session for decades.
Act One: The Love Bombing
Every control dynamic I’ve studied starts with intensity. Attention, praise, a sense of being finally, fully seen. It’s not affection — it’s an audition. The person is testing your reactions, learning what moves you, cataloging what to use later. I’ve written about this before: love bombing works because it hides its real purpose behind something that feels like devotion. By the time the warmth fades, you’re already invested in getting it back.
Act Two: The Collection
Somewhere in the middle, the relationship — or the group — starts asking for more than affection. It asks for your fears, your regrets, the things you’ve never told anyone. It feels like intimacy. It’s inventory. Every confession becomes something the other person can hold, and holding it quietly becomes leverage. I’ve sat across from people who stayed not because they still loved the relationship, but because they were terrified of what would happen if they left and someone else knew what they knew.
Act Three: The Smear
And if you do leave, the story changes fast. Suddenly you’re the liar. The unstable one. The villain of a narrative you didn’t write. This isn’t incidental; it’s strategic. Painting the person who left as dangerous does double duty — it discredits them, and it warns everyone still watching: stay, or this happens to you. The smear was never only about the person who left. It’s a message to the ones who stayed.
Fiction as a Mirror
This is the arc I built into The General’s Princess. My protagonist, Cara Florés Hart — nearly fifty, capable, unprepared for what she’s walking into — lives Acts One and Three opposite her boss, Amir Assad, a malignant narcissist whose charm and standing mask what he actually runs on the palace grounds: a brothel built on trafficked women. My secondary character, Kyle, is eighteen, and she is one of them. Her captivity isn’t metaphorical. There is a locked door, and getting her out takes Cara, a special forces team, and Kennedy — a decorated combat soldier carrying his own PTSD from the wars that shaped him.
Reviewers have called Assad “eerily realistic.” I take that as the highest compliment a clinician-turned-novelist can receive, because it means the pattern held up outside the therapy room — right up until it turns into something no metaphor can soften.
I didn’t write this story to frighten anyone. I wrote it because fiction can show people the shape of something before they’re standing inside it — and because naming a tactic out loud is often the first step toward not accepting blame that was never yours to carry.
If you recognize this arc, in your own life or someone else’s, you’re not imagining it. It’s not an accident. It’s the story it was always designed to be.
Want to see this arc play out on the page? Meet the general, and the woman who outlasts him, in The General’s Princess — available now on Amazon.