When Abuse Looks Like Loyalty: A Trauma Therapist on Elizabeth Holmes and You Can See Everything

Content note: this post discusses emotional and sexual abuse, coercive control, and grooming. If you're in an abusive relationship and need support, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.

I saw You Can See Everything last night, and I'm still sitting with it. Honestly, I could write a book about this movie. I'm not going to, at least not today, and this isn't a review. I haven't finished digesting it, and I don't think the film wants you to finish. It's built to keep you turning it over.

But there's one moment I can't stop thinking about, and it's the reason I'm writing this.

Somewhere in the last forty minutes, the question of abuse comes up. Not as a headline, just as a question hanging in the room: is Elizabeth Holmes being controlled? And Nathan Fielder's read, roughly, is that he doesn't see her as being under duress. She seems fine. She seems like she agrees. She seems like she's choosing this.

I understand why he'd see it that way. I also think it's exactly the kind of read that keeps people in abusive relationships for years, because it's the read most of us would make. And as a trauma therapist, I want to slow that moment down.

What I'm not saying

I'm not saying Elizabeth Holmes didn't commit fraud. A jury convicted her, and the people who were harmed by Theranos were real people who got real, wrong blood test results. I'm not saying she's simply a victim, and I'm not saying she's simply a manipulator. I'm also not diagnosing anyone. I don't know what happens in that house when the cameras are off, and neither does anyone else who watched this film.

What I'm saying is narrower than that, and I think more useful: the absence of visible distress is not evidence of the absence of abuse. Sometimes it's evidence of how well the abuse has worked.

What's on the record, and what's on screen

Here's what we know. At her 2021 trial, Holmes testified that Sunny Balwani, her former partner and Theranos's second-in-command, nearly 20 years her senior, abused her emotionally and sexually for years. She described him controlling what she ate, telling her she needed to "kill the old Elizabeth," and telling her she didn't know what she was doing in business. She also testified that she was raped as a student at Stanford, and that when she met Balwani shortly after, he told her she was safe now that she had met him. Balwani denied the allegations. The jury convicted her anyway.

Read that line again. He said I was safe now that I had met him. If you work with trauma, you know that sentence. That is what grooming sounds like when it's working.

Then there's what the film shows us about her life now with Billy Evans. He finishes her sentences. He takes the whisk out of her hand because the way she's stirring the eggs bothers him. While she's in prison, he posts as her on social media using a power of attorney, and allows an AI model of her likeness. He pursues a share of the film's profits that, by the film's account, she may not have known about. When he's asked how she'd feel about all of it, he calls it another piece in "the monument of love" they're building. And when Holmes is asked, she says he has his own way of doing things, and that she trusts him to make decisions for her.

Fielder looks at that and sees a woman who isn't under duress. I look at that and see a woman who may no longer need to be.

Narcissistic abuse doesn't always come with the language of abuse

There's a version of narcissistic abuse most people recognize. The person knows something is wrong. They have words for it: I'm being manipulated. I'm being gaslit. I'm being abused. They might not be able to leave yet, but they can see it. In my office, these clients often arrive with a lot of awareness and a lot of grief, and part of the work is helping the body catch up to what the mind already knows.

But there's another version, and it's the one I think the film walked right past. It looks a lot less like fear and a lot more like loyalty. The person defends their partner. Explains them. Agrees with them. Speaks in a shared "we." Seems calm, even content. From the outside, it reads as consent. Clinically, it often looks closer to cult mentality, and that's not an insult. It's a survival strategy.

When you live inside sustained control by someone who has real power over your safety, your nervous system has a few options. Fighting costs too much. Leaving may feel impossible, or dangerous, or simply unimaginable. So the system does something very intelligent: it stops experiencing the control as control. It merges with it. The partner's view becomes your view. Their judgment becomes "I trust him to make decisions for me." The threat goes quiet, not because it's gone, but because you've organized your whole self around never triggering it.

That's not weakness. That's adaptation. And it's exactly what we see in people coming out of high-control groups, who will often tell you later that they didn't feel trapped at the time. They felt chosen. They felt held. They felt safe.

Why "duress" is the wrong test

The word duress implies something visible: pressure, fear, a gun to the head. That's the picture most of us carry. But the most effective control doesn't need to look like that. Sociologist Evan Stark, who developed the concept of coercive control, made this point years ago: the harm in many abusive relationships isn't primarily the dramatic incidents. It's the slow, cumulative takeover of someone's everyday life. Who they talk to. What they eat. How they spend money. What they say in public. Whose voice speaks for them.

California recognized this in 2020, when it added coercive control to the Family Code's definition of domestic abuse. The law describes a pattern of behavior that unreasonably interferes with a person's free will and personal liberty, including isolating them, monitoring their communications, and controlling their finances or access to resources. Notice what's not in that definition: any requirement that the person look scared.

If you only count abuse when the person in it can name it, you'll miss most of the people who are deepest in it.

When control feels like home

This is the part I think matters most, and it's the part the film can't show us, because it lives in someone's history.

When someone has been groomed before, when an earlier relationship taught them that being controlled is what being loved feels like, a new controlling partner doesn't register as a threat. It registers as familiar. The nervous system doesn't sort experiences by "healthy" and "unhealthy."

It sorts them by "known" and "unknown." Known feels safe, even when it isn't.

So a person with that history can walk out of one controlling relationship and into another one and feel, the whole time, like they're finally home. Not because they're foolish, and not because they want to be hurt. Because the template was set early, and every relationship since has either matched it or felt strangely wrong.

In Internal Family Systems terms, there are often protector parts holding this together. A part that defends the partner, because defending him is safer than seeing him. A part that says "he just has his own way of doing things." A part that genuinely loves him, too, because these things are rarely simple. Underneath, there may be a younger part that learned a long time ago that agreement was the price of safety. None of those parts are lying. They're doing their jobs.

Both things can be true

Here's what makes this film so uncomfortable, and I think it's what Fielder is actually wrestling with. Elizabeth Holmes is also someone who was extraordinarily skilled at telling people what they wanted to hear. She convinced investors, board members, and patients of something that wasn't true. So when she presents as calm and in agreement, is that a survival adaptation, or is it performance?

I'd gently suggest it may be both, and that this is the point. People who've survived long-term control often become very good at reading the room and becoming what it needs. That skill can protect them. It can also be used to harm others. Those two things don't cancel each other out.

A person can be responsible for real harm and be living under real control at the same time.

And to be fair to Fielder, skepticism here isn't unreasonable. Holmes's defense raised the abuse at trial, and the jury didn't find that it excused what she did. That's a legal question, and it was answered. The clinical question is a different one. It isn't "Is she guilty?" It's "What would we expect to see if she were being controlled?" And the honest answer is: maybe exactly what we saw.

The film seems to know this. By the end, Fielder himself isn't sure whether he's been manipulated, or by whom. That uncertainty is the most truthful thing in it. It's also what it feels like to be close to a high-control relationship, whether you're inside it or watching from the edge.

What none of us can see

The film is called You Can See Everything, and the honest truth is that we can't. We see what made the edit. We see a person who knows she's being filmed, in a house where the cameras were invited in to create better control of a narrative that got muddled, inside a story that every person involved has a stake in. That's not context. That's a frame.

And with Holmes specifically, there's a real argument that what we're watching isn't her at all.

She has done this before. The black turtleneck, the lowered voice, a whole persona built for boardrooms and magazine covers. Plenty of people watching this film believe the soft-spoken mother in the kitchen is simply the newest version of that character, presented to protect her case and her public image. I don't think that argument is unreasonable, and I can't rule it out.

Which puts anyone trying to talk about this in a real bind. If I say she looks like someone living under control, I'm diagnosing from a distance a person I've never met, based on an edit. If I say she's just performing, I'm doing the exact thing that keeps real victims from being believed: deciding that someone's calm proves they're fine, or that their story must be strategic. Both moves skip the same step. They fill in context we don't have.

This is the piece that gets lost almost every time someone asks why a person responds to abuse the way they do. Why is she so calm? Why does she defend him? Why doesn't she just say it? Those questions get asked as if the response is happening in a vacuum. It never is.

There is always a history between two people that no one outside the relationship can see: what happened the last time she disagreed, what was promised, what was threatened, what they now share, from children to money to a public story they both depend on. A response that looks strange from the outside often makes complete sense inside that history.

Then there's the history each person brought in with them. A response to abuse isn't shaped only by the relationship it's happening in. It's shaped by every relationship that came before, every one that taught that person's nervous system what to expect, what's dangerous, and what keeps them safe. Someone who learned early that going quiet and agreeable was the way through will reach for that again, often without ever choosing it. We know a few pieces of Holmes's history because she spoke about them under oath. We don't know the rest, and the same is true of almost everyone whose response to abuse gets questioned. When I hear "I don't get why she'd react that way," what I usually hear is: I don't have the history that would make it make sense.

So here's where I land. I'm not making a claim about Elizabeth Holmes. I'm making a claim about the conclusion. "She doesn't seem under duress" is a conclusion no one watching can actually draw. Not Fielder, not me, not you. And when that same conclusion gets drawn about the people in our own lives, by friends, family, courts, and sometimes therapists, the cost is real.

If this is landing close to home

If you watched this film and recognized yourself, not in the fraud but in the quiet, here are some things worth paying attention to:

• You find yourself explaining or defending your partner's behavior to people who didn't ask.
• You've stopped noticing your own preferences, or you check his before you know yours.
• Someone else manages your money, your phone, your communication, or your public voice, and it feels normal.
• You feel calmer when you agree and anxious when you don't, even about small things.
• The relationship feels deeply familiar, in a way that's hard to explain.

You don't need to have the word "abuse" yet to deserve support. A lot of people don't find that word until they're safe enough to use it.

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I work with complex and developmental trauma, relational trauma, and the long tail of narcissistic abuse, using EMDR, IFS, and somatic therapy. I see clients in person in Pasadena and via telehealth across California, New Jersey, Maryland, Wyoming, and Idaho. If something in this stirred you up, reach out to schedule a consultation.

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Thomas Blake, MA, LMFT (CA #136903) is a trauma therapist and founder of Thomas Blake Therapy in Pasadena, California, specializing in EMDR, IFS, somatic therapy, complex trauma, psychedelic integration, and LGBTQ+ affirming care. This post is for educational purposes and is not a diagnosis of any individual or a substitute for individual therapy.

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