Unfolding Origami: Coercive Control, the Body That Keeps Receipts, and the Slow Sacred Work of Coming Back to Yourself
Content note: This episode discusses sexual assault, coercive control, gaslighting, and the physical effects of trauma. Please take care of yourself as you read. If you are in a difficult situation right now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233 or by texting START to 88788.
The Body That Kept Receipts
Loren Galese spent years carrying something she didn't yet have words for. The manipulation, the distortion of her own reality, the slow unraveling in her body — none of it had a name yet. It does now. She has written all of it in her memoir, and she has become the therapist she needed then.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Loren Galese — licensed professional counselor, trauma therapist, and author of Unfolding Origami: The Abuse, the Delayed Unraveling, the Body That Kept Receipts, and the Slow, Stubborn, Sacred Work of Coming Back to Herself — for a conversation about a particular kind of story that is very hard to tell.
Not because the events are too dramatic, but because for a long time there weren't words for them. You know something is wrong. You can feel it. But without a name for what's happening, it's hard to see clearly. Very hard to leave. Very hard even to believe yourself.
Loren was that person in college. This conversation covers what she carried in her body afterward, how it eventually named itself, and what she has built from the understanding that followed.
What "Folded" Actually Felt Like
The title of Loren's memoir — Unfolding Origami — comes from an experience she can still access, even now. She describes it as a kind of conscious shrinking, not physical but something closer to awareness: a stepping back inside herself, sitting emotionally in a corner, folding smaller. An instinct toward not recognizing what was happening, because recognizing it felt impossible to survive.
"It was as if I took a step back, was sitting emotionally in a corner, folding myself smaller. It's easier to just accept whatever someone is telling me, whatever someone is doing to me — to survive."
— Loren GaleseShe now understands this as dissociation — not being fully present in a moment as a protective response. She didn't have that word then.
Language for What Was Happening
Two terms come up in this conversation that Loren takes care to define precisely, because both are used loosely and imprecisely in popular culture in ways that can make it harder — not easier — for people to recognize them in their own lives.
Coercive Control
A form of abuse in which the primary goal is to degrade, isolate, and deprive a person of their rights to physical security, dignity, and respect. It can include monitoring movements, restricting social contact, limiting access to finances, employment, education, or medical care. It places the victim in a state of terror and entrapment. It operates on a spectrum, and it is not always immediately visible — to the person experiencing it or to those around them.
Gaslighting
A form of psychological manipulation and emotional abuse in which the perpetrator persistently distorts the truth and denies the reality of situations — causing the victim to doubt their own memories, perception, and judgment. Loren emphasizes: this is not a disagreement. It is a pattern, persistent and deliberate. If you suspect it may be happening to you, she recommends looking up clinical definitions through a licensed professional or the National Institutes of Health rather than relying on social media descriptions.
Loren walks through what both looked like in her experience — the way her sense of reality was gradually shifted, the way the people closest to her at the time repeatedly told her that what she was feeling was the problem, and the way she eventually adopted that framing herself. Believing she was the one who was overreacting. Rehearsing her own concerns before voicing them to make sure they sounded plausible.
"Because I didn't have people I could bounce ideas off of who weren't saying 'you're being weird, you're the weird one' — I was like, okay, I'm the weird one. And so when things started getting worse, I went back to the rationale that it was my problem."
— Loren GaleseWhen the Body Starts Keeping Track
Loren is now trained in trauma response, and she understands in clinical terms what was happening in her body during and after the experience. At the time, she just knew she couldn't eat. Couldn't rest. Her body was rigid — she describes lying down and feeling like a piece of wood, her shoulders and neck and head tight everywhere. Fever sores appeared. She became absorbed in cleaning, in ways that didn't follow logical patterns, trying to restore a sense of order and cleanliness that the experience had disrupted.
She describes the internal experience of that time without going into detail she doesn't need to share: constant negative self-talk, a sense of being contaminated. She carried it quietly while continuing to function, until her body stopped allowing that at 23.
"I turned it into a reality where if I was still functioning, I was okay. Until I couldn't function — and I collapsed. Not physically, but my body was like: we can't do this anymore."
— Loren GaleseWhat followed was a Crohn's disease diagnosis and a cluster of autoimmune illness. Loren is careful here — she is not a physician, and she notes that the research is ongoing. But as someone now trained in trauma, she understands the vagus nerve, the brain-gut connection, and the relationship between chronic hypervigilance and physical breakdown. When the nervous system is running survival mode continuously — when the body never gets the signal that it's safe — it eventually cannot hold.
She puts it simply: the body can only hold so much.
The Realization That Took Years
Loren didn't realize the full scope of what had happened to her while it was happening, and not for a long time afterward. Research now suggests it takes an average of seven to ten years for someone to fully recognize that they have been through domestic, sexual, or emotional abuse. Loren notes this is part of why many states are revisiting statutes of limitations — because recognition itself is delayed.
For Loren, the moment of reckoning came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was confined to her room with long COVID and her father was on hospice downstairs. She began watching a documentary about a cult in Albany. Something about the manipulation tactics she was seeing — the pattern of control, the way reality was distorted for members — felt intensely familiar. She couldn't initially say why.
Her therapist helped her see it. The tactics used on the women in the documentary were the same tactics that had been used on her. She had understood parts of her experience before. This was the piece that completed the picture.
The Therapist She Wished She'd Had
Loren found her own therapist about ten to eleven years ago. She says, without qualification, that this person saved her life — not just in terms of the body, but the mind. She had thought, when she entered the field herself, that she could manage it intellectually. That understanding trauma academically would be enough. It wasn't.
What helped her was EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Bilateral stimulation, either through eye movements or physical tapping, while the therapist guides a person through a memory — gradually reducing the emotional charge of the memory until it no longer has the same grip. It was hard, she says. It worked.
"When people say 'I'll just deal with it, I don't need to think about it' — it's going to come out in the most wild ways. I was one of those stubborn people who thought I knew better. I didn't."
— Loren GaleseWhat she means when she describes becoming the trauma therapist she wished she'd had: when she was in crisis, she did try to get help. The counselors she saw at the time didn't have the language, or didn't follow the thread when she offered it. Something would surface and they would move past it. She thinks that would be handled very differently today. She tries to be the person who notices, who follows the thread, who stays.
Why She Wrote a Memoir
The book was not planned. It came out of the period when she was in her room during COVID, watching the documentary, processing her father's approaching death. Someone suggested she write angry letters to the people involved. She did. They became an outline. The outline became a book.
She never intended it to be clinical. A copy editor later suggested including some definitional framing alongside the narrative, and she came to love the combination. But the starting point was always: get it out. Stop carrying it internally. Let someone else read it and feel less alone.
"I just wanted someone to read it and feel: somebody else felt like this? Okay. There's change. There's hope. I'm not going to feel like this forever."
— Loren GaleseThe reader she most hopes to reach is someone who has gone through something they haven't fully named yet. Someone for whom a page is sticking out of the binder but they can't quite read it. Someone who, on finishing the book, finds that they can no longer un-know what they've recognized — and that this is the beginning of something changing.
Why This Conversation Matters
Healing is not a straight line. It doesn't end when the situation does. It lives in the body, resurfaces in health, and asks things of us that no one warned us to expect. But it also offers something no one warns us about: the possibility that surviving gives you language, clarity, and a capacity to sit with others in their hardest moments and say — I know what this is. I have a name for it now. You are not alone in it.
If you are carrying something right now that you don't yet have words for, this conversation was made for you.
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