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Video transcript

For this session's activity, we’re going to introduce a simple 

Every day, write down one thing that you are proud of yourself for doing. It can be anything, from “I got out of bed this morning” to “I remembered to take out the trash”. Whatever has personal significance for you.

If you want to expand on this, you can start a list of things you are proud of in your life more generally. “I am a really loving aunt”, for example, or any other truth about yourself that fills you up. 

Throughout the course, we want you to stay with your thought diaries, and try to write a bit each day. Through this writing, we will become even more anchored in our own truths, not the lies handed to us by our abusers. 

Remember, this is an investment in your own journey to recovery. Give yourself the best chance to build resilience. You can do this.

is a comprehensive guide on online safety, including tips on staying safe from abusers in our online presence. It’s available in 9 languages!

In this session, we talked about different forms of abuse. We have put them into the list below. Do take care if/when you read through the list — we know that looking at the way we and others have been abused can be very difficult, so make sure to step away if you need to. 

: such as hitting, pushing, or being physically restrained or choked; it involves bodily damage and hurt. 

: having money, property, or personal possessions taken away or stolen; being pressured into giving people money or changing a will; not being allowed your own money or access to accounts; withholding money from you or your children.

: any sexual act to which someone hasn’t or can’t consent - e.g., touching or kissing when it isn’t wanted, being made to touch or kiss someone else, being forced to have sex, or being forced to listen to sexual comments or pornography. Internet-based sexual abuse can involve, for example, being sent unsolicited sexual content, or having sexual images of ourselves shared or used without our consent.

: the use of verbal abuse to threaten someone into silence and isolation, during which they may criticise, shame, blame, or otherwise humiliate us to get what they want. It can also manifest in manipulative or coercive actions, like incessant calling. 

: includes ignoring or withholding physical or medical care - such as failing to provide the needed food, housing, heating, clothes, hygiene, and personal attention to feel human. Neglect can also include refusing or ignoring emotional needs for safety, care, love, acceptance, and attention. 

: includes forced marriage, honour-based violence, Female Genital Mutilation, and any kind of threats, physical assault, rape, kidnapping, forced abortion, and false imprisonment that are performed to defend the so-called ‘honour’ of a person or group of people.  

: the implied use of violence, intimidation threat to control and manipulate the behaviour of another person.

Abuse can happen to anyone — and it’s never our fault. In this course, we discuss abusive tactics, the cycle of coercive control, the science of trauma, and how abuse can affect our boundaries, relationships, and coping mechanisms. We empower ourselves to build positive self-esteem with tools such as journaling, somatic practice, and creating a sense of community. This course was recorded in 2021 and has been re-edited for release. Some of the video quality isn't up to our Bloom standard, but the course contains our usual high-quality, trauma-informed content to support your healing journey. 

Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships

Week 1: Anyone can be abused

Week 2: Why we stay — the mind and body in abuse

Week 3: Discovering our self

Week 4: What abuse is really about

Week 5: Difficult emotions

Week 6: Staying, leaving, coping, and what happens next

Week 7: Relationships and reflections

Overview

We explore different types of abuse, including coercive control, and begin our discussion of different types of abusive tactics. 

Naming abuse and coercive control

Hello! It’s Beatriz & Nooreen here. Welcome back to our Bloom course - for session 2 of the first week on the topic of recovering from toxic and abusive relationships. 

Hopefully you’re all doing well - we know starting anything new is tricky enough on its own - let alone something so heavy and personal. But remember: you’ve got this, and you can take these videos at your own pace. Also, be reassured that throughout these course sessions, our team will take the appropriate breaks between more serious information and uplifting conversations. You should never end a session feeling unsafe. 

But first, we start with our grounding exercises! 

You’ll remember that grounding exercises are a set of strategies that can help us stay in the “present” and not “dissociate” or get lost when pain is overbearing. 

Again dissociating means that you “zone out” or disconnect from your body as a protective mechanism. Sometimes this can happen during traumatic events, i.e., it can feel like you are watching an experience or floating above yourself, or it is happening to someone else. Over time, it can also happen, like when you go into an automatic mode or response as you go about your day and lose sense of time or place. Dissociation can also feel like a total absence of feeling, or numbness. Grounding exercises can help because they use our five senses to feel around our physical environment, using our body, and tap us back into the present. 

Sit up straight on your chair and close your eyes, if you are comfortable. Otherwise, look down. Imagine you are standing in sand. Ahead of you is the sea. Behind you, a forest. The sun is shining, but there’s a lovely wind blowing. You are safe. 

Right next to your feet, you will see a wooden stick from the forest. Pick it up and draw a line in front of or ahead of your feet. Now there’s you, then the line, then the sea. The sea tide comes and goes but does not cross your line. 

Now slowly come back to your senses - first in your feet, your legs… all the way up your body. We will be working on drawing this line, these boundaries you choose, in real life. 

The sea may, at times, come close to it and attempt to erase that line, so we will need to keep this internal idea of where it stands - but it will not fade completely. It lives on in our minds.

In situations where you feel yourself dissociating or panicking, draw that line in your mind. Hold against the sea. Even if your boundary is not as firm as you want it to be, or it’s faded, it is still there. Picture it. 

Remember: every one of us is different. A grounding exercise that works for someone may not work for you. That’s totally fine. We’ll be doing a different exercise each week, so we can find the ones that work best for us. Do let us know if you find an exercise difficult, and we can work out what the issue might be together. This course is always a conversation.

Yeah, and thank you for that grounding exercise. I really imagined the sea. 

: If you could live in the world of any book, TV show, film, or other work of fiction, what would you choose?

For me it has to do with my favorite books and my favorite author which is Terry Pratchett. He has fantasy books but they are very very funny, so even though if you find like dragons and evil sorcerers or things like that you know that you will get a laugh out of it. And what about you Nooreen?

Yeah that sounds lovely I think mine would also be part of a fantasy world, just I thought so much about this and I understand JK Rowling is transphobic but growing up reading and watching Harry Potter so much I think it would definitely be the world that they lived in so Hogwarts. And I think it's just the idea of magic that makes it very interesting and you know with magic you can fix some things that you can't under your world so that would be for me! Yeah definitely we would love to live in a magical world!

What do we mean when we talk about abuse?

It’s easy to forget we’re dealing with abuse when our abusers constantly lie or reframe their bad behaviours. We want to continue with our myth-busting by calling these habits what they are, in an absolute: abuse. We’ll use the term abuse throughout today’s session, while of course recognising the points we made last session - that it’s okay if you’re still unsure, and that abusive and toxic relationships cover a huge spectrum. You’re still in the right place, and we hope today’s video can start to provide even more useful information on processing these experiences.

According to UK Charity Refuge, abuse can be defined as “the repeated, random, and habitual use of intimidation to control a partner or family member - regardless of gender or sexuality.” It occurs in any relationship where one person must 

change how they act, what they believe, or how they think to match the wishes of another because of intimidation or fear

. When we’re made to tiptoe around the moods of the person we’re with to prevent them from hurting us, getting upset, or lashing out, that’s abuse. 

In an abusive relationship, ultimately, one OR more persons is always adapting to appease the other; they’re changing who they are to be safe. In abuse, there can be no equality.

You might have been made to feel as though your own actions were abusive if you’ve hurt your partner or family member’s feelings - but this just isn’t true. In fact, it’s a very common abusive tactic, for abusers to try to convince us that actually, it’s 

. Or, that their treatment of us is somehow justified because of some kind of hurt we have caused them or someone else. It’s one of the ways they use fear to try and reduce the chances that we will tell anyone about their abuse, because they say people “wouldn’t believe us” or that the abuse is coming from “both sides”. Maybe you recognise some of these statements, these thoughts that abusers have tried to plant in our heads to undermine our reality. 

But it’s also worth saying, that even if we have hurt a loved one or an abuser’s feelings on occasion, 

there is a difference between hurt or harm, and abuse

. Harm is a one-time act of violence or pain, whether intentional or unintentional. 

 is about a continued and repeated use of violence - whether that violence is verbal, physical, or psychological - that forces that alteration of self. Over time, these criticisms and intentions can damage our sense of reality so much that we no longer see ourselves or the world around us as we actually are. 

Abusers mistreat, disregard, and take advantage of the body, being, and/or feelings of the person in their care - and 

of the following. With abuse, it is important to remember and focus on the actions or patterns of your abuser rather than their words - which is why we’re covering each type with examples today. 

If you are repeatedly or consistently experiencing any one of the following, regardless of the occasional good gesture or kindness, you are dealing with abuse:

 such as hitting, pushing, or being physically restrained or choked; it involves bodily damage and hurt. Most of our lives, we’ve been told this is the only type of abuse - but that isn’t true. 

includes having money, property, or personal possessions taken away or stolen; being pressured into giving people money or changing a will; not being allowed your own money or access to accounts; withholding money from you or your children.

 includes any sexual act to which the other has not consented or can understand - including any touching or kissing when it isn’t wanted, which is sexual harassment, being made to touch or kiss someone else, being forced to have sex, or being forced to listen to sexual comments or pornography. 

The sexual abuse doesn’t have to happen in person, either. Internet-based sexual abuse is a common way predators and abusers can try to shame, manipulate, or exploit us online, for example publicly sharing images we’ve sent them on an online dating platform, or using our pictures to create fake accounts to try and blackmail us. 

This happens when someone is verbally abused or threatened into silence and isolation. Emotional abusers use bullying behaviours to lower a survivor’s self-esteem. Emotional abusers constantly criticise, shame, blame, or otherwise humiliate us to get what they want. It is often the hardest form of abuse to detect - but, if you commonly find yourself hurt, frustrated, confused, misunderstood, worried, upset, anxious, worthless, or scared any time you interact with the other, it is likely the relationship is emotionally abusive. It feels like “walking on eggshells” when you are with them, to avoid setting them off. 

And this emotional abuse doesn’t always manifest in things the abuser directly says, but their actions and how they manipulate us. For example, incessantly calling our phone in a lot of instances is a kind of abuse. If you check your phone and you have 30 missed calls from someone, that’s kind of scary, isn’t it? Unless that person is calling about a life-threatening emergency, that kind of behaviour is a pressure we’re expected to respond to, and can be used as an emotionally abusive tactic to intimidate and control us. 

 includes ignoring or withholding physical or medical care - such as failing to provide the needed food, housing, heating, clothes, hygiene, and personal attention to feel human. Neglect can also include refusing or ignoring emotional care; parents who meet their children’s basic physical needs can still abuse by neglecting their child’s needs for safety, care, love, acceptance, and attention. 

Abuse also covers forced marriage and honour-based violence. The so called “

 can take many forms, including threats or perceived threats, physical assault, rape, kidnapping, forced abortion, and false imprisonment - all in the name of so-called ‘honour’, perceived immoral behaviour which is deemed to have brought shame on the family. It can also include abuse or violence carried out on someone as a punishment for the perceived wrongdoings of someone they are related to.   

If your body has also been altered without your consent or understanding - such as in instances of Female Genital Mutilation - that is abuse. 

We know going through these details can be difficult - as it should be! These behaviours are abhorrent and vile, and it’s hard to remember our past or present experiences. But, our hope is that you can use these examples as a guiding point – like the stars in the night sky that you drew for the previous activity. When we remember what abuse looks like, we can reassure ourselves of our reality, remember our strength - rather than our weaknesses - in what we have dealt with or what we face down each day. And, like sailors, we can keep ourselves aimed towards these truths.

Remember: our abusers’ actions will give them away. We know the truth. We can name it.

It is also incredibly important to say these threats do not have to be direct or obvious to be effective or abusive. This is actually known as 

, which is the implied use of violence. 

More often than not, we know our abusers better than anyone - and they know us, because we’ve shared the most intimate parts of our lives with them. We can interpret their smallest gestures - like the motion of a hand, or the slight pause at the mention of the wrong subject at the dinner table - in public or private - we know they’ll call out later. 

Coercive control is when abusers manipulate us to do exactly that - control us. This often involves isolating us from people who can support us, limiting our independence and the freedom of our lives - we’ll go more into this in Week 4. They threaten by intimidation - shouting, threatening physical harm to us or our loved ones, even to themselves, maybe switching between loving attention and cold rejection to coerce the behaviour they want.

But this control can also happen through the smallest action - using that comment at dinner, a minor change in plan, an unexplained text from someone else at an unexpected time, the tiniest of occurrences as evidence for something we’ve done wrong. 

All the while they are denying that this is what is taking place. 

The more subtle the gesture, the crazier we feel. After all, it’s just the quirk of an eyebrow. That couldn’t actually mean they’re going to hurt us, right? 

 the threat or insult, the harder it is to believe, and so we doubt ourselves even 

 After all, no normal person would actually say or do what they just did or said. So it must be us—we just misheard them, or misread their intent. It must have been a joke, or they were just having a bad day!

But you aren’t “crazy”, even when you might feel anxious or over-alert. Coercive control - the subtle implication or violation, humiliation, or shame - is absolutely abuse.

The issue becomes, of course, when surviving the day affects how we feel in the long-term. But know that you can always relearn new habits if you are now somewhere safe, and - for those still in contact with their abuser - there are always tools to cope and to care for your wellbeing.

Phew, the list is done. Let’s just take a moment to breathe, and ground ourselves in the present. 

We haven’t gone through this list so you feel powerless. Your abuser overestimates their own abilities - and we, as survivors, can notice them, name them, and build the resources to cope.

There is always, always something we can do, if not by removing the abuser from our environment, then by protecting ourselves from their surveillance and influence. 

We go into many of these safety measures in our Do It Yourself Online Safety guide.

And just as a heads-up, we will be discussing the biology of fear, trauma bonds, and the ways our abusers keep us dependent. Throughout, we will focus specifically on this role of self-esteem in abusive relationships - not because you are responsible for how you’ve been treated - but because our abusers rely on lowering our self-esteem so they’re able to dominate us - and, really, to feel good about themselves. 

This is why it becomes important to take care of our self-worth when we’re recovering from or living with abuse. It’s also why Bloom’s model is to inform 

 to empower; the second is just as important as the first. Caring for yourself is actually one of the most powerful tools to undermine any experience of abuse. 

We’re going to continue with our thought diaries! 

As we went over last time, our thought diaries can help connect with the thoughts and feelings of the present - as well as guide us forward in our recovery. 

Last time, we asked you to write down anything you learned from the video that felt important to you - mapping these truths as guiding stars in the night sky. Please continue to add to your night sky as we go through the course, with any other facts or ideas from the videos that resonate with you, or your own revelations. 

 we’re going to introduce a simple daily journaling prompt. Every day, write down one thing that you are proud of yourself for doing. It doesn’t have to be anything big - it could simply be “I got out of bed this morning”, or, “I remembered to take out the trash”. Whatever has personal significance for you.

This is one of our first tools in rebuilding our sense of self and self worth after abuse, like we were just talking about. We’re not just examining the truth of abuse - we’re empowering ourselves with the truth of our own self worth. 

Please let us know if you have any concerns, questions, or feedback by messaging our live chat, we would love to hear from you. We are here to support you, so get in touch!

Thank you everyone for coming to this session and showing up for yourself and others who are here because they know they are not alone. We’re in this together. 