Quick summary: This article uses the BBC drama “The Jetty” to examine how power imbalances shape what people are genuinely able to choose in relationships, particularly when early experiences of neglect, grooming, or coercive control have distorted their sense of boundaries and self-worth. Drawing on cognitive analytic therapy, the author argues that vulnerability to exploitation is not a personal failing but a predictable outcome of environments that normalised harm and failed to foster autonomy. For practitioners and readers alike, the piece offers a framework for recognising the structural and relational webs that constrain choice, and for approaching those caught within them with greater clarity and less judgment.

The Jetty  portrays how power imbalances lead to exploitation. While the most visible imbalance is between older men and younger women, power asymmetry runs across many kinds of relationships and situations, causing harm when exploited. The show illustrates that power is rarely binary or neat.

In the drama, detective Ember investigates a current arson case alongside a decade-old cold case involving a missing teenager who was drawn into the lives of older men, only to discover that her late husband and his best friend are implicated.

As Ember uncovers the details, she begins to identify with the victim’s experiences. She suspects her husband was a perpetrator, and she starts to see her own marriage differently. She realises it began during a period of vulnerability, when she was a naïve teenager, and gradually recognises that she was groomed by her older late husband, and that her mother failed to protect her.

A plot twist reveals that the missing girl died accidentally at Ember’s own hand. Overcome with guilt, she takes on full blame until another survivor helps her see the broader picture: the tragedy was rooted in grooming, neglect, and coercive control. She could not have caused the accident had she not already been exploited and trapped inside a power web.

The idea of a web reflects DI Morgan’s early suspicion that Ember is entangled in the cold case. Later, he and others implicitly frame her present-day involvement as a form of collusion, which risks obscuring both the power dynamics that were at play when the girl originally went missing and Ember’s own age at the time.

The series shows how the lines between consenting, deciding, complying, taking responsibility, and colluding can blur. Power is often active yet ignored, denied, or minimised by observers or complicit others who reinforce this through group influence. It shows how communities normalise power breaches when support networks and influential figures ignore or even encourage them.

Those caught in power webs, whether complicit or victims, may misinterpret their involvement as genuine choice or autonomy, just as teenage Ember did. Although we all have personal agency, we may not see the wider context shaping our choices, or the risks hidden within it.

The web is not only structural but also audible: the messages we absorb through relationships, culture, media, and society. These shape our thinking and behaviour, becoming so familiar they feel like the air we breathe.

As an adolescent woman in the late 1990s and 2000s, I absorbed media without clearly seeing the victim-blaming and misogynistic narratives running beneath politics, film, and culture. The Lewinsky-Clinton scandal, for example, framed Lewinsky as seductress while ignoring Clinton’s power. Such framings suggest that victims of grooming were willing or manipulative, excusing perpetrators and embedding shame in those who were harmed.

Jamie Loftus highlights similar distortions in The Lolita Podcast, showing how fetishised portrayals of underage females misrepresent grooming and coercive control as consensual or desirable, and even project perpetrator motives onto victims. Details of Epstein’s network later exposed how widespread, systemic, and coordinated abuse can be when powerful individuals and institutions enable it.

When social narratives normalise harm, they infiltrate our thinking.

Within a cognitive analytic therapy (CAT) framework, these experiences form reciprocal roles: internalised templates for how we experience ourselves, others, and situations. We end up learning our values and sense of limits from people who routinely disregard them. Over time, our boundaries blur, our choices narrow, and our values development becomes stunted. To survive, we may dismiss our own needs, particularly when disrespect feels ordinary. If others minimise grooming or abuse, we learn to respond as if these experiences are unremarkable. These templates shape later expectations and can draw us back into familiar but unhealthy dynamics.

Early emotional or material neglect compounds this further. It can embed low self-esteem, a sense of being unlovable, and a strong need for affection and care, all of which can make a person vulnerable to those who appear to offer it, regardless of their intentions.

Within patriarchal systems, double standards distort our sense of worth. Appearance or desirability can seem to offer superficial power or choice, but these function as systemic survival resources rather than genuine leverage, and those with greater power can exploit the vulnerabilities they create.

We internalise dominant voices, social and personal, and these influence our decisions as though they were our own. Perpetrators feel justified or protected when the web’s stickiness is hard to notice. When others normalise what is happening, the spider can seem like an ally.

Dependence, whether emotional, material, or social, creates a pull to comply. Someone else’s wants can come to feel like our own. Fear of rejection erodes the internal compass that guides autonomy, pushing us to please others or tolerate discomfort.

These dynamics often replay in adult relationships. Power imbalances fuel coping patterns such as seeking rescue, driven by unmet childhood needs. Choosing partners can feel like gambling when we are drawn to what is familiar rather than to what is safe or values-aligned, especially when our sense of the latter has been distorted.

After repeated disappointment or neglect, and within systems that conflate exploitation with affection, we may idealise relationships and confuse intensity or chemistry with safety and care. This is not poor judgement. It is the result of environments that never fostered boundaries or autonomy, and of connections with individuals who misused power and exploited vulnerability.

Amid the relational ambiguity and power misuse in the drama, there is also a clear example of a healthy boundary being upheld. When Ember flirts with her therapist, he responds with honesty, naming how attraction alongside the inherent power imbalance within a therapeutic relationship would distort it. He models the ethical conduct expected of any professional with greater power.

Although both are adults and professionals, Ember has sought him out as a grief counsellor, which shifts the dynamic. His expertise places him as the more powerful figure in that context, and he takes responsibility for protecting her vulnerability.

It is worth noting that power misuse is not limited to gendered or romantic relationships. It occurs wherever one person, group, or organisation holds authority, influence, or resources over another. Power can also shift across contexts, as the drama illustrates when the missing girl exploits her friend’s feelings for her.

Key power disparities include professional authority (clinician and client), organisational hierarchy (employer and employee), economic control (breadwinner and dependent), age or experience differentials, caregiving relationships, specialist knowledge, physical strength, housing and resource control, and social, class, cultural, or generational privilege.

None of us can easily see the web from inside it. If this piece prompts you to ask where you are in the web, and how you learned that pattern, then it has served its purpose.

Lorraine Welch is an NHS cognitive analytic therapist and supervisor, trained in EMDR and MBT, with a background in community and forensic mental health nursing.