A three-part documentary series that began streaming on Netflix this week has pushed a term most Americans have never heard into national conversation. Death of the Pastor's Wife reconstructs the marriage of Mica Miller, a 30-year-old worship leader at Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, whose death in April 2024 was ruled a suicide, and centers on what her family and friends describe as more than a decade of coercive control.
Coercive control is a recognized pattern within domestic abuse. It works through accumulation rather than incident, and it is defined by domination of a person's movement, money, communication, body, and sense of reality. The reason it matters clinically is simple. Almost none of it produces an injury a doctor, a nurse, or a police officer can photograph.
