Detecting Hidden Harm: Using AI to Spot Emotional Abuse in Text Messages
🧠 Why I Built This
I built Tether because I lived through emotional abuse — and I know how hard it is to name something when it doesn’t leave a bruise.
I’m a behavioral scientist, a survivor, and someone who spent years trying to make sense of messages that didn’t feel okay, but also didn’t seem “bad enough” to be abuse.
Turns out, emotional abuse has patterns. And AI is really good at patterns — if we teach it what to look for.
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🔍 What Tether Does
Tether is an AI model that detects emotional abuse patterns in text, including: • Gaslighting • Control • Blame Shifting • Guilt Tripping • Dismissiveness • DARVO • Recovery-phase manipulation
It’s not just about labeling. It also estimates: • Abuse score (how likely the message contains abuse) • Emotional tone (e.g., anger, disgust, fear) • Risk stage (early, escalating, high-risk) • Motifs (repeated psychological tactics)
All of this happens in real-time through a free Hugging Face Space.
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🧬 How It Works • Base Model: Fine-tuned roberta-base using multi-label classification • Emotion Layer: j-hartmann/emotion-english-distilroberta-base • Training Data: Hand-curated abuse dataset with over 2,000 real-world message examples, labeled by survivors and reviewed for clarity • Explainability: Pattern weights, threshold tuning, emotional tone overlays, and DARVO scoring help users understand why something was flagged
Tether isn’t just a binary detector. It’s a mirror.
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🛑 Why It’s Different
Most toxicity detectors fail when abuse is subtle, coded, or wrapped in “love.” Tether is built for the invisible tactics — the psychological patterns that: • shift blame • reframe harm as care • manipulate the survivor into silence
And unlike most AI tools, Tether isn’t commercial. No logins. No data storage. No upsells. Just clarity.
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📈 What We’ve Seen So Far
Since launching the live Space: • Users have run over 6,000 messages • Most high-abuse messages showed elevated neutral tone, not anger — highlighting how calm can still be controlling • Recovery-phase manipulation (the calm after escalation) is one of the most misunderstood abuse types
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⚖️ What It’s Not
Tether isn’t therapy. It’s not a court witness. It won’t decide your relationship for you.
But it will help you ask better questions — especially when you’re in that fog of “Is this okay or am I overreacting?”
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📌 Try It Here
🧠 https://huggingface.co/spaces/SamanthaStorm/tether 🌐 More info: usetetherai.com
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💬 Want to Collaborate?
I’m actively improving the model with more data — especially around: • Narrative control • Reverse victimization (DARVO) • Multilingual abuse • Survivor-led response generation
If you’re a survivor, researcher, therapist, or developer who wants to help — I’d love to talk.
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👋 About Me
I’m Samantha Parnham, a behavioral analyst, survivor, and founder of Tether. I build tools that combine trauma-informed psychology and machine learning to support real-world healing and accountability.