Why Did You Stay So Long?

Coercive control and the common playbook across intimate partners, mega-churches, and big tech

“Why did you stay so long?” is a question I get a lot, since suing Meta and becoming a federal whistleblower after working there for nearly 15 years.

It’s a valid question, and one I’ve thought a lot about. It’s one of those easy-to-understand-to-those-who-lived-it-but-hard-to-explain-to-those-who-haven’t things.

The answer has came to mind while processing my own experience leaving the Mormon church as a teenager. It came to mind again this week watching Christian Nationalism on full display at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service. It came to mind reading the internet’s comments questioning Sarah Wynn Williams (“why come forward years later?”) and again this month to Dr. Jason Sattizahn and Cayce Savage and former colleagues (“how can some of them still work there?”).

How did I stay so long and only come forward after years of working there? Because I was part of a harmful system who benefitted from my belief that it was good, and I held firmly to that belief until I suddenly couldn’t. Like a bag over my head, I wasn’t able to fully see the system until the bag was off.

Bags over my head have been held in place with such logical scaffolding: so many platitudes and posters and promises about salvation and making the world a better place. I believed them.

And believing had benefits– yes, literal compensation and health insurance, and food from the Bishop’s storehouse stocked my childhood kitchen, but also a sense of community, sense of purpose.

But when, as a teen, I learned Mormon Blacks could not hold the Priesthood–Mormonism’s path to eternal salvation–until the 1980’s, I was dumbfounded. When I asked my Bishop how this could be, he explained matter-of-fact that Prophets had to impose this restriction in order to be with the expectations of the times and grow as a church. I couldn’t accept that God would allow pre-1980’s Black souls to perish in order to satisfy growth objectives, and so the whole structure crumbled and the bag came off.

If I couldn’t believe the words of the Prophet as true to God’s, I couldn’t accept the premise of a modern day “true church of Christ,” and so core tenets that I once understood as meaningful and virtuous was now only computable as manipulative and coercive.

I’d later believe in Meta with equal if not greater faithfulness to their goodness in the world–truly believing Meta was making the world more open and connected, truly believing that Meta would always try to do the right thing by their employees and customers. When I saw this contradicted with my own eyes, and my efforts to end and escalate resulted in exclusion and retaliation, the scaffolding fell at once after a long, drawn out unsuccessful effort to find an accountable Meta, ready to repair the harm done.

It was only then that I was able to appreciate how things I’d rationalized away as individual bad actors—from the crotch grabs to the threats over promotions—were part of a system that disregarded women, the same one that ended my career and was making the product more harmful for children.

The bag came off.

Science has another name for that scaffolding—coercive control—and the tactics likely look familiar to anyone who’s experienced them, whether in an intimate relationship, mega church, or board room. They share a common architecture to achieve and reinforce compliance:

• Isolation and information control: Systems cut people off from outside perspectives that might challenge the official narrative. In abusive relationships, partners are separated from friends and family. In authoritarian religious groups, outside sources are labeled dangerous or faithless. In corporate environments, dissenting voices are marginalized and outside scrutiny has it’s credibility triangulated away.

• Manufactured dependency: The system becomes a significant source of identity, meaning, and material security. Leaving threatens not just income or relationships, but your entire sense of self.

• Rebranding harm as virtue: Suffering gets repackaged as sacrifice, exhaustion as dedication. The harder it gets, the more virtuous you must be for enduring it, so you keep your head down and continue to do your part.

• Gaslighting: When you notice contradictions or harm, you’re told the problem is your perception, your faith, your commitment. The system’s failures become your personal shortcomings.

• Intermittent reinforcement: Periods of punishment alternate with occasional kindness or validation, creating powerful psychological bonds. With a warped sense of perspective, you become grateful for basic decency, relieved when the pressure temporarily lifts, always hoping to earn back approval.

A group of girlfriends who understand coercive control also understand when their friend shares unexpected news—that she’s leaving the partner who seemed so perfect, so charming, so devoted, but had actually been undermining her confidence, financially abusing her, and isolating her from everyone she cares about. They won’t ask “why didn’t you leave sooner?” or “how could you not see it?” They’ll say “I’m so glad you’re finally seeing it” and “we’re here for you” because they understand how these patterns work.

Or like my girlfriend said to me, “it’s time to share the shame.”

When someone finally leaves a toxic workplace, abusive partner, or hate-mongering religious community, we could respond the way those girlfriends do.

We might say “congrats on ripping that god damn bag off your head” if we understand how these patterns work.

And then some of the attention spent scrutinizing ourselves and one another for our behaviors can be directed toward the harmful systems that benefit–namely patriarchy, capitalism–and why they’re putting bags over our heads to begin with.