The Autonomy Erosion Index™

You require permission — explicitly or through ingrained habit — before making routine decisions that other adults make freely.

Your daily schedule, movements, or activities are structured around another person's expectations, moods, or monitoring.

You have lost contact with friends, family members, or professional networks — and the loss can be traced to one person's influence.

You have abandoned goals, interests, or career aspirations — not because you lost interest, but because pursuing them created conflict or punishment.

You do not have unrestricted access to your own financial accounts, identification documents, or legal records.

You censor your communication — texts, calls, social media, even therapy sessions — based on the possibility of surveillance or consequences.

You have developed health issues — chronic pain, insomnia, digestive problems, autoimmune responses — that coincide with or escalated during this relationship.

You struggle to identify what you want — not because you're indecisive, but because wanting has been trained out of you.

You have accepted living conditions, relationship terms, or treatment that your former self would have found unacceptable — and you cannot pinpoint when the threshold shifted.

If you were asked to leave with nothing and start over, the logistics would be overwhelming — not just financially, but because the infrastructure of your independence has been systematically removed.

You experience an internal alarm system that activates at the thought of asserting a boundary — as though your nervous system has learned that boundaries invite punishment.

Other people have expressed concern about your situation, but you found yourself defending the very dynamic they were worried about.

You have been isolated from professional support — therapists, attorneys, advocates — through discrediting, financial restriction, or manufactured crises that prevent follow-through.

You feel more like an employee in your own life than a decision-maker — performing tasks, meeting expectations, managing someone else's emotional state as your primary occupation.