The trauma- informed counsellor and author opens up about love, loss, and the making of a survivor’s lifeline by Emma Hartley
The café is quiet except for the low hum of conversation and the soft clink of coffee cups. Outside, a pale Australian morning settles in, the kind of light that makes everything look honest. Across from me sits Geoffrey Clow, trauma-informed counsellor, writer, and now author of ENOUGH: What Coercive Control Steals, What Recovery Makes Possible, released today on Kindle.
He smiles when I congratulate him, but there’s something else in his expression, a mixture of pride, relief, and the ache of arrival.
“It’s my birthday today,” he says gently. “So yes, it’s emotional. There were tears. I wish Georgie was here.”
“It gives language to what has no language.”
I ask him what Enough is really about, not in the marketing sense, but in the marrow.
“It gives language to what has no language,” he says. “Coercive control is one of the most insidious forms of abuse, it’s psychological torture. In some parts of the world, people call it narcissistic abuse, but that term can miss the depth of what it really is, the systematic demolition of a person’s confidence, autonomy, and sense of self.”
He leans back, hands clasped. “Most survivors think they’re going crazy. But they’re not. They’re being dismantled by someone who says they love them. That’s what makes it so cruel.”
The book, he explains, was born out of both heartbreak and frustration. “I saw a gap. Many therapists don’t understand coercive control. Survivors go to therapy and leave feeling worse, because they’re told to communicate better, to compromise, to forgive. But you can’t use healthy-relationship tools with an abuser who’s using your empathy as a weapon. I wanted to make something that actually helps. A survival map.”
“None of it was their fault.”
When I ask what he hopes readers feel when they close the book, his answer comes without hesitation.
“Relief,” he says. “And recognition. That none of it was their fault.”
He pauses. “Survivors spend years trying to be smaller, quieter, more patient, believing if they just behave differently, they’ll be loved. But coercive control isn’t a communication problem. It’s not a bad patch. It’s a deliberate, strategic campaign to erode someone’s confidence until they doubt their own perception of reality. It’s psychological torture.”
He shakes his head. “So I want readers to finally see that it had nothing to do with them. Not one bit. There’s no redemption in trying harder for someone who enjoys breaking you.”
“Her heartbeat runs through every page.”
The conversation turns to Georgie, the woman whose name, and presence, seem to move through every line of Enough.
“Georgie was extraordinary,” he says softly. “She’d lived through childhood neglect, teenage rape, and a violent first marriage. But the thing that broke her down the most was the non-physical stuff, the betrayal by someone who said they loved her, but slowly dismantled her from the inside out.”
He stops for a moment, staring into the middle distance. “She called it her frog pot period. You know that story, the frog in the slowly boiling water that doesn’t realise it’s in danger until it’s too late? That was her. She said by the time she realised, she’d already disappeared.”
When Georgie died unexpectedly in August 2022, Geoff found a manuscript on her laptop titled Never Too Late. It was, he says, “both a love story and a record of survival.”
“It was beautiful,” he says quietly. “It was about how we found each other, how we travelled, how she finally started to live again. Reading it after she died was both stunning and unbearable. Editors told me it was incredible, but that it needed a front half, the framework, the context, the bigger picture. I couldn’t do it at first. I was wrecked.”
He exhales, a long, steady breath. “Then one day, I just sat down and started writing. I didn’t stop for six months. It was like she was there, guiding my hands. Every line, every practical step, it was her essence coming through. Writing Enough was grief and love all at once. It was also relief. I knew I’d finally brought her story home.”
“Recovery is a becoming.”
The book isn’t only about recognising abuse. It’s about what happens after. About the long, slow, beautiful work of recovery.
“Recovery,” Geoff says, “is coming back to trusting your intuition. It’s realising that the voice in your head that tells you you’re not enough, that isn’t your voice. It’s theirs. It’s every bit of conditioning they left behind.”
He speaks with the calm certainty of someone who has sat beside hundreds of people learning to breathe again. “It happens in tiny increments,” he says. “Little moments of coming back to yourself. A bright flicker of something you thought was gone, your soul, your spark, your curiosity.”
He smiles, eyes glassy. “Most people who’ve been through coercive control come out with their sense of worthiness stripped. They’ve been told no one will ever want them. That their needs don’t matter. That they’re lucky to have anyone at all. And they start to believe it. Undoing that isn’t just leaving, it’s unlearning. It’s a whole reclamation of self.”
He pauses. “Recovery’s not a straight line. It’s gritty. It’s tough. But it’s beautiful. Survivors are some of the strongest, kindest, most extraordinary people you’ll ever meet. They’ve learned to survive in systems that were never built for them.”
“A walk beside you companion.”
Enough isn’t just philosophy. It’s practical, down to the bone.
“It’s 14 parts, over a hundred practical steps,” Geoff says. “It’s written in survivor language, no jargon, no psychobabble. I wanted it to feel like someone walking beside you, not lecturing you from a distance.”
He takes a sip of water. “There’s embodiment work in there too, how trauma lives in the body, how to regulate your nervous system again, how to soften the hypervigilance. Because it’s not just in your mind. Your body carries the story long after the relationship ends.”
He smiles softly. “And I wanted it to be accessible. Especially for single mums, for people who can’t afford therapy. When you’re shaking at three in the morning, you don’t need a theory. You need something that helps you breathe again.”
“Tender. And defiant.”
When I ask what it felt like to see Enough go live on Kindle, he goes quiet.
“It was tender,” he says finally. “There were tears. I was sitting there looking at the screen, thinking about Georgie, thinking about how proud she’d be. It’s my birthday today, too, which just… adds another layer.”
He takes a long breath. “But it’s also defiance. Making sure she isn’t extinguished. All the conversations we had about helping people, about making something meaningful, they’re real now. They exist.”
“I just want to do work that helps people.”
The conversation widens beyond the book. Geoff’s social enterprise, Twinkling of the Soul, offers trauma-counselling and education for survivors of coercive control, grief, and institutional betrayal.
“I just want to make resources that help people,” he says simply. “There’s so much noise, so much cruelty in the world. I can’t fix all that. But I can make something useful. Something kind.”
He shakes his head slightly. “The world’s in a tricky place. Every day you hear about people destroying each other, politically, socially, personally. It’s heartbreaking. So I’m focusing on what I can build: understanding, safety, and real help. That’s my rebellion.”
“You are worthy of a good life.”
Before we finish, I ask what he most wants survivors to remember.
He thinks for a long time, then smiles. “It has to be something Georgie wrote,” he says quietly. “That even if you found yourself in something like coercive control, it was never your fault. You are worthy of a good life. A good relationship. Good things.”
He pauses, his eyes steady. “That’s the message I want the book to carry. That you were never broken, just silenced. And you can find your way back.”
The ebook for ENOUGH: What Coercive Control Steals, What Recovery Makes Possible is available now Amazon, Booktopia, Indigo, Google Books, Kobo
The hardback and paperback are available from 30 Novemeber 2025 from all good book stores, worldwide.
To learn more about Geoff’s counselling and survivor resources, visit twinklingofthesoul.com.
