n.Overwhelming affection early on, used to establish control.
Originated in cult research; now common in abuse-recovery communitiesInternet or community term
Widely used to describe a real pattern. It is a description of behaviour, not a clinical diagnosis of the person doing it.
The Best Six Weeks
Everyone kept asking when it started going wrong, and Nadia kept saying month five, and that was the wrong answer, and it took her two years to work out why.
It started going wrong in week one. Week one was the wrong part. Week one was the whole mechanism.
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Here is week one.
Fourteen messages before lunch on the first day, none of them demanding, all of them funny. A book delivered to her office on Wednesday — not a bestseller, an obscure thing she had mentioned liking in a queue on Monday, which meant he had been listening in a queue on Monday.