Entrapped

Detecting Coercive Control with The Quicksand Model®

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The complete reference guide that makes coercive control visible: the entire pattern, named, illustrated, and backed by seventy years of research you can cite.

Special thanks to the Connecticut Women’s Business Development Council for its commitment to women, and for helping support the writing and publishing of this book through an Ignite Grant. 
Coercive control is one of the most misunderstood aspects of domestic violence. It isn’t always visible or defined by one incident, but rather a pattern of manipulation, isolation, intimidation, and control that gradually takes away a person’s freedom and sense of self. The Quicksand Model® explains coercive control in a powerful, relatable way, helping us understand how someone can become trapped in an abusive relationship. As Gabby’s mom, I believe education is essential to recognizing these warning signs and responding with understanding rather than judgment. Entrapped brings these hidden patterns into the light and helps us better understand abuse and prevent it.
- Nichole Schmidt, Mother of Gabby Petito, Co-Founder, Gabby Petito Foundation
Kate Amber, MSc has written an important book that can and will both change and save lives. I write as the father of a young woman, Deputy Abigail Rose Bieber who had the tragic misfortune to be targeted by an abuser, also a cop, who murdered her when she tried to leave him. Kate provides a very useful framework to use as a lens to really see the full spectrum of abusive behaviors and the systemic and historical responses to them that have kept us locked in a longstanding malevolent cycle of suffering. Kate supplies a creative lexicon to accompany her framework which allows the reader to understand the dynamics of coercive control. Don’t miss Kate’s two letters at the end of the book. As Kate points out, while the abuser is responsible for all of their harm, they cannot do it without enablers. We must all become co-liberators. Kate’s book shows us how and why we must do so; for Abby and for the next, unknown victim who will surely perish if we do not.
– Bruce Bieber, Father of Hillsborough County (FL) Sheriff’s Office Deputy Abigail Rose Bieber
– Bruce Bieber, Father of Hillsborough County (FL) Sheriff’s Office Deputy Abigail Rose Bieber
Entrapped is an evocative and enduring reminder of how coercive control entangles so many in our society. The Quicksand Model® it portrays is a powerful and illuminating framework that shines a vital explanatory light on this phenomenon. This beautifully illustrated book is a beacon of hope, for all who are ensnared and who have survived, that they might find justice and that coercive control may one day be vanquished from our world.
- Dr Rod Dubrow-Marshall and Dr Linda Dubrow-Marshall, Co-Programme Leaders, MSc Psychology of Coercive Control, University of Salford
- Dr Rod Dubrow-Marshall and Dr Linda Dubrow-Marshall, Co-Programme Leaders, MSc Psychology of Coercive Control, University of Salford
As someone who has experienced coercive control firsthand, I know how difficult it can be to explain something that is often invisible to the outside world. With remarkable clarity and depth, Kate Amber uses the powerful metaphor of quicksand to make the invisible visible, transforming complex patterns of manipulation, abuse, and entrapment into something we can finally recognize and understand. Comprehensive, illuminating, and urgently needed, Entrapped should be required reading for anyone working in our judicial, educational, and healthcare systems—and anyone committed to preventing abuse before it’s too late.
- Sarah Edmondson, NXIVM whistleblower and co-author of A Little Bit Culty
Everyone in leadership should read Entrapped. Ms. Amber has given all of us, professionals and non-professionals, a non-jargon, holistic approach to recognizing coercive control. This knowledge will empower you to be a better supervisor, manager, and executive to the people you work with and work for and create a safer workplace for everyone. It will help make a difference in ending coercive control wherever and whenever it occurs. Entrapped helped me see the reality of what was going on in my workplace and professional organizations. I especially valued the detailed notes at quicksandmodel.com/sources that added explanation without interrupting. I encourage everyone to bookmark the link. I did. You will need it if you want to be a co-liberator. I do. Now, I am spreading the word. I hope you will, too.
- Jan Triplett PhD, small business owner and advocate
Coercive control does not stop at the front door, yet nearly every law written to address it does. In cults, high-control groups, workplaces, and trafficking, the same pattern of domination goes unrecognized and unpunished because our legal systems still treat it as a problem only between intimate partners. In Entrapped, Kate Amber makes a compelling case that coercive control must be recognized and criminalized across every context where it operates, and The Quicksand Model® shows exactly why that change is so urgently needed.
- Janja Lalich, PhD, Professor Emerita of Sociology and Founder & CEO of the nonprofit Lalich Center on Cults and Coercion
Entrapped is an important new book in the field of coercive control, which brings together research on cults, trauma, policing and coercive control in an accessible way, helping readers understand how coercive control works. It explores the behaviours and tactics involved and shows how they can appear in different relationships, settings and institutions, making it easier to recognise coercive control in everyday life and beyond. Kate’s use of metaphor is both illuminating and rewarding, which I hope victim-survivors or targets of this abuse, as Kate writes, will find validating.
- Dr Elizabeth Dalgarno, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, England and Director and Founder of SHERA Research Group
I know of no other book that brings coercive control to the surface so clearly, across every environment where it takes hold, with such a thorough account of its tactics. As someone who explains this patterned harm to the courts, I witness firsthand how easily targets are misunderstood and how easily the pattern is missed, because no one can be expected to recognize what they have never been taught to see. The Quicksand Model® changes that, rendering coercive control in images so powerful that any attorney, judge, or family member can finally see what the target has been living.
- Jennifer French Tomasic, PhD, Forensic Consultant
Kate Amber’s Entrapped: Detecting Coercive Control with The Quicksand Model® offers an original, insightful, and thought-provoking framework for understanding the complex dynamics of coercive control. What makes her approach particularly valuable is her ability to identify patterns of manipulation, intimidation, exploitation, and entrapment that often remain invisible to outsiders, including the very professionals tasked with recognizing and addressing them. Her Quicksand Model® moves beyond traditional explanations of power and control, examining not only the tactics of coercive individuals but also the social structures, institutional failures, and enabling behaviors that allow abuse to flourish. I particularly appreciate Amber’s ability to connect seemingly disparate forms of abuse through a common framework. Her emphasis on recognizing patterns rather than isolated incidents, understanding the role of enablers, and identifying the ways perpetrators disguise their intentions reflects an important and often overlooked dimension of this work.
- Rachel Bernstein, LMFT, MSEd, Therapist, Educator, Cult Specialist, Author of the upcoming Cult Therapy and host of the IndoctriNation podcast
For years I’ve watched organizations tell talented women to fix themselves: speak up, grow a thicker skin, stop mentioning bias. Entrapped explains why that advice fails. The harm is a pattern, and the systems around it are built to miss it. Kate Amber gives us language for what has always felt vague and hard to pin down, and shows how every one of us can become a co-liberator.
- Cindy Gross, PCC, Board Member, Leadership Eastside; Founder, Befriending Dragons

Entrapped: Detecting Coercive Control with The Quicksand Model®

The complete reference guide that makes coercive control visible: the entire pattern, named, illustrated, and backed by seventy years of research you can cite.

Updated October 31, 2026

Coercive control rarely looks like abuse from the outside. There may be no bruises, no police report, no single incident anyone can point to that professionals are trained to take seriously. What there is instead is a pattern: isolation from family and friends, control of money, monitoring, intimidation, manipulation, humiliation, rules that keep changing, and the slow erosion of a person’s freedom to think and decide for themselves. Systems built to look for a punch do not see it. Entrapped is designed to make it visible.

Written for targets of coercive control and the people trying to help them, Entrapped is an illustrated reference guide to the whole pattern. Open it anywhere and you get a full page of artwork facing a page that tells you exactly what you are looking at. The diagrams map what the coercive controller is actually doing, named and organized by The Quicksand Model®. The scenes show what it is to live inside the Quicksand of coercive control. Find the one that matches your life, put your finger on it, and say: “This. This is what they do.”

That is what makes it a working tool rather than a memoir or a theory. If you are in family court, or heading there, you will meet attorneys, evaluators, mediators, and judges who have never been trained to recognize coercive control. Entrapped helps you understand what happened to you, describe it clearly to the people on your case, and point them to the research that documents it. The References section lists the peer-reviewed research behind the guide, and the companion Notes at quicksandmodel.com name, page by page, which researchers support each claim and what each source does and does not say. When you need to show that what happened to you is documented, recognized, and studied, Entrapped details it.

For a fraction of one hour of an attorney’s time, you get seventy years of research on coercive control, organized so that you can find what you need in minutes and share it with the people who decide your case.

Entrapped also serves advocates, therapists, attorneys, educators, and anyone else who needs a shared, accurate language for coercive control across every setting where it occurs: intimate partnerships, families, workplaces, religious organizations, community groups, trafficking, and institutions.

Hardcover, 8.5 by 8.5 inches, full color, 176 pages. Published by End Coercive Control USA. Publication January 7, 2027. Preorder now.