This chapter is devoted to questions about why intimate partner violence is understood in terms of its psychological impact on individual women. It suggests alternative ways that the serious psychological and emotional impact of intimate partner violence might be understood and addressed so that policy and practice may be more beneficial. The notion of coercive control has become an important explanatory concept, exposing how intimate partner violence is almost always experienced as repeated, patterned violence, intimidation, isolation, and fear. This chapter shows how gendered discourses, practices, and power relations that are embedded in domestic violence erode women's sense of themselves as persons, and hence their capabilities to exercise their citizenship.