Keep a dated, factual record of incidents, messages, and transactions so that your memory and your account cannot be rewritten, and store it only where the other person cannot find or reach it, because your safety comes before any record.

How to do it

1. 1Decide first whether it is safe to document at all. If the other person checks your phone, accounts, bags, or belongings, a discovered record can put you in danger. An advocate can help you weigh this; if in doubt, do not keep a record yourself, and let a trusted person or a professional hold it.
2. 2Record facts as close to the time as you can: date, time, place, what was said and done in the words used, who else was present, and any injuries or damage. Leave out interpretation; a plain log is more credible and more useful to you later.
3. 3Preserve originals rather than descriptions where possible: screenshots that show the sender, date, and time; voicemails; emails with full headers; bank and card statements; photographs. Do not edit or crop them.
4. 4Store the record outside the other person's reach: with a trusted friend or relative, with your lawyer, doctor, or advocate, or in an account they do not know about, created and accessed only from a device they cannot touch, with a password and recovery details they could not guess or intercept.
5. 5Tell your doctor or another professional what is happening when it is safe to do so. Records made by third parties in the ordinary course of their work often carry more weight than a private diary, and they exist outside your home.
6. 6Reread the record when you start to doubt yourself. Much of its value is private: it lets you see a pattern across months that is invisible from inside any single incident.

When to use it

• •Someone repeatedly denies things they said or did, and you have begun to doubt your own memory.
• •A pattern of harassment, stalking, workplace mistreatment, or financial exploitation may eventually need to be shown to an employer, a bank, the police, or a court.
• •You are dealing with an institution that keeps changing its account of what it told you.
• •You are supporting someone in one of these situations and can safely hold copies for them.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

Keeping contemporaneous records is standard advice from domestic-violence, stalking, and workplace-harassment services; the US National Network to End Domestic Violence publishes documentation guidance for survivors through its Safety Net project, with the same condition attached here, that documenting must not increase risk. The rationale has two parts. Practically, courts, employers, and banks act on evidence, and coercive control in particular is a pattern offense that is hard to show from any one incident (Stark 2007). Psychologically, gaslighting works by making the target distrust their own perceptions (Sweet 2019), and memory is known to be reconstructive and open to suggestion after the event (Loftus 2005); a record made at the time is an anchor that does not shift. The safety condition is also evidence-based: qualitative research with survivors and professionals documents how routinely abusers access partners' phones, accounts, and cloud storage (Freed et al. 2018). Evidence strength: practitioner and legal consensus, supported by well-established memory research; there are no outcome trials of documentation as an intervention.

1. National Network to End Domestic Violence, Safety Net Project (2025). Documentation Tips for Survivors of Technology Abuse and Stalking. techsafety.org
   Advocate guidance on what to record, how to preserve digital evidence, and the condition that documenting must not compromise safety.
2. Stark, E. (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press
   The argument that coercive control is a cumulative pattern that individual incidents fail to capture, which is why a running record matters.
3. Sweet, P. L. (2019). The Sociology of Gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851-875
   Analysis of gaslighting as the undermining of a person's confidence in their own perception and memory.
4. Freed, D., Palmer, J., Minchala, D., Levy, K., Ristenpart, T., & Dell, N. (2018). "A Stalker's Paradise": How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
   Qualitative evidence of how abusers gain access to partners' devices, accounts, and cloud data, which grounds the storage cautions.
5. Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361-366
   Review of research showing that memory can be altered by later suggestion, the vulnerability a contemporaneous record protects against.