Every Mission Has a Story
This Is Mine
WHERE IT BEGAN
My Story
Long before coercive control became the focus of my research and professional work, I saw firsthand what can happen when a woman believes she has no way out.
As a child, I experienced abuse by my mother's husband. When I disclosed what was happening, my mother said she didn't believe me and ultimately chose to remain with him. I spent many years trying to make sense of that choice.
Years later, after my mother's death, I learned something that changed the way I understood our story: she had believed me. She had told people close to her that she simply did not know how she would survive financially if she left.
My mother lived with rheumatoid arthritis, did not have a high school education, and had spent her working life waitressing. For the first time, I began to understand just how limited she believed her options were.
And eventually, life would bring me face-to-face with that same question myself: What happens when a woman knows something has to change, but the financial and systemic realities of leaving make the way forward feel impossible?
WHERE EVERYTHING CHANGED
My Why
By the time I confronted that question in my own life, my circumstances looked very different from my mother's.
I was able-bodied. I held two graduate degrees. I had professional experience, legal-adjacent training, and years of experience navigating complex systems. And still, when coercive control became increasingly financial, I began to understand in a way I never had before what my mother had been afraid of.
But by then, I was also a mother.
I knew I wanted something different for my children. I did not want my daughter to inherit a pattern in which women felt they had to remain because they had nowhere else to go, and I did not want my son growing up believing that pattern was normal.
So I made a decision: the pattern would stop with me.
I drew on my faith, my education, my professional background, and everything I knew about navigating systems to begin finding a way forward. I connected myself to resources, navigated complicated institutions, documented what was happening, asked questions, researched, and kept going.
And somewhere along the way, the question stopped being only “How do I find a way through this?”
It became:
“What would make the way forward clearer for the women coming behind me and what do the institutions they rely on need to understand in order to respond differently?”
TURNING EXPERIENCE INTO EVIDENCE AND ACTION
My Work
That question became the foundation of my work.
I began listening systematically to other women's experiences, ultimately interviewing more than 100 women about coercive control and the systems they encountered afterward. I immersed myself in the research and wrote a forthcoming white paper on the topic. I also brought researchers, practitioners, and other experts into the conversation, and began examining the patterns that emerged across individual experiences.
What started as an effort to understand my own experience grew into a body of work focused on coercive control, institutional response, and what happens next.
Today, I carry that work forward in two ways.
Through Crystal Fedeli Collective, LLC, I work with individuals and institutions through research and policy analysis, speaking, professional training, consulting, and individual support bringing together evidence, systems knowledge, professional experience, and survivor perspectives to create greater understanding.
Through You Made a Way, the nonprofit I founded and lead, we support women navigating the complex systems and practical realities that can follow when coercive control turns financial.
What began as something I needed to understand for myself has become something much larger:
helping individuals better understand and navigate coercive control, while helping institutions better understand and respond to it.
Because I know what can happen when a woman believes she has no options.
I also know what can happen when she finds a way forward.
