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 and it’s a journaling technique that helps us to release our emotions that are weighing on our minds, by writing them down. Different people use this exercise in different ways. Some people like doing this first thing in the morning, to put out a lot of the worries first thing in the day. Other people prefer to do it as and when they feel a lot of emotion. Other people like the routine of journaling right before bed — as always, try out different ways to find what works best for you. 

This technique involves writing freely for a set, short amount of time.

If any overwhelming emotions come up, stop - you can always come back to the present with a grounding exercise ✨

📚 Book: Today we're suggesting Hunger, by Roxane Gay. 

Roxane Gay is a writer and English professor - as well as a survivor. ‘Hunger’ is a memoir of her life, from being raped at a young age through to the present, with a particular focus on her experiences living as a fat Black woman in the U.S.A., and her body’s reaction to trauma and healing. It is a dark story at times, looking at everything from abuse and rape to surviving fatphobic, racist, and sexist prejudices, but Gay is insightful, funny, sharp, and ultimately enlightening, as she “writes into the wound” of her trauma. 

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

In this session we consider feelings of guilt and shame after abuse, look at grief as a response to leaving an abusive relationship founded in betrayal, and re-examine any false sense of responsibility for mistreatment we’ve experienced. 

Guilt, grief, and letting go

Hello! It’s Aiman and Flora here on the subject of “difficult” feelings this week. 

Have you gotten back to us yet with your activity? What have you uncovered about your anger? Was there something that surprised you?

That’s one of our favourite things about learning - when we open ourselves to new information and to change, we receive answers and even ask questions we might not have anticipated, expected, or known were possible. 

On our end, we’ve been considering the ways anger can even be loving - when we can recognise it, breathe through it, and listen to what it is trying to tell us. 

if you feel comfortable, close your eyes. Now think about a calming colour, and as you take a deep breath in, imagine the air that is coming into your body is that colour and it’s calming every part of your body inside you. Now as you exhale, imagine a strong colour like red or orange coming out along with your stress, anxiety, fears. Do this 3 times.

And as for our fun question, continuing our theme of activities from the first session of the week: if you could magically become really good at a sport/type of dancing overnight, what sport/dance would you choose?

So I'll go first. Where I live there was no opportunity to learn ballet and I've always felt like I would really love to learn it. Although I know that it would be like, super difficult if I actually went out and learned it so, it would be great if I could just magically be great at it. What about you Flora?

Yeah, I think ballet is something I would love to be great at overnight. I learned to dance when I was really, really young and I started with just ballet and then I went on to do ballet tap and modern. And it was fun. I was terrible at tap and I think I was all right at ballet. I liked the discipline but when I was really little I hated that it was so strict and like, you know, you had to do everything in the exact time and all that kind of stuff. But I definitely think that outfits are probably my favorite thing and made me go on to study fashion. So I can credit ballet with my love of clothes but yeah, I think I agree with you, I would love, love, love to just be instantly fantastic at ballet dancing. Like, having that kind of exceptional control of your entire body and that grace and elegance that would be really cool, yeah. 

I know I feel like, the grace and elegance and just how beautiful it is to look at, it's just some of my favorite things about ballet 

In March 2020, we received a question from a participant that felt especially relevant to the difficult feelings we bear as survivors. 

They asked: “How do you cope with suddenly feeling sad or guilty for leaving your abuser, then feeling ashamed for holding on?” 

It hit us with a particular impact - one which resonated and stayed with us as we have expanded our Bloom courses. As survivors, we often experience contradictory feelings: settled in a middle-ground between love and loss, between pain and fear, numbness and hyperarousal. 

It becomes difficult to know what is real and okay to feel - which is why we wanted to spend today’s video answering this question, with a focus on three more difficult emotions: 

Let’s start with guilt. Quite simply, guilt is a negative feeling about something we have done that we think we shouldn’t have, or haven’t done that we feel we should have. Now, as we begin our discussion of guilt, it’s important to acknowledge that not all guilt is genuine guilt. What do we mean by that? Well, 

 experience that occurs when we believe we have compromised our own sense of morality with our actions, and we take on 

 for that action. There are real ways of addressing genuine guilt, separately from any standards our abuser has expected us to uphold.

But we can also experience guilt in another way, which often appears after trauma, where we feel guilty

for something that may not be our personal fault. This is a type of guilt we often encounter in abusive dynamics, when someone attempts to ‘guilt trip’ us for our behaviour. This kind of guilt can be difficult to overcome because: 

So, how do you recognise the difference between these two types of guilt? It’s good to remember the following:

Even though it can be difficult, there are ways we can question our own guilt. For many people, it helps to imagine that someone else is in your situation instead of you. What would you tell a friend if they were feeling guilty about the same thing you are? Does it still feel like real guilt or does it seem unfounded?

And, when it comes to what we “give up” or need to put aside - such as our personal needs or self-care or independence - ask yourself whether or not the person who is asking you to feel guilty has power over you. More often than not, those who ask us to sacrifice our needs are already above us, and merely want to maintain their position. 

As a metaphor: Kings rarely like to bleed their own blood. You do not deserve guilt for refusing to be cut. 

If you were in our Healing from Sexual Trauma course, you’ll recognise some of this material!

Shame is one of our most powerful and tricky social emotions. Unlike guilt, shame isn’t just feeling that what we have 

 is wrong - it is the feeling that there is something wrong with who we 

. It’s usually accompanied by self-critical thoughts and beliefs. Shame is an internal belief of being bad that we just can’t shake off - and, often, something about who we are that means we deserve the violence that’s been inflicted upon us. 

Lots of us feel ashamed about our traumatic experiences. We can feel ashamed about who we are, what we have been through, what it makes us feel like inside, and what we believe other people will think about us if they knew. We might think that if people knew who we really were, they would be disgusted, horrified, or disappointed. We might also experience shame about how we are coping, perhaps if we are being more irritable towards loved ones, or have coping mechanisms that are unhealthy in the long-term like self harm or substance abuse. 

Some of us, through no fault of our own, might struggle to process and overcome these feelings of shame. We might, for example, enter into a ‘shame spiral’ when we make a small mistake; forgetting to message a friend on their birthday turns into feeling like ‘I’m a bad person’, or absentmindedly feeding our child food that is a little too hot becomes ‘I’m a terrible parent’. We filter our experiences and pick out which actions make us responsible - making it incredibly easy to feed our negative self-beliefs and create a cycle of more shame. Tracking these moments in our thought diaries can be useful in stopping them from growing into something bigger than what they really are. 

At the heart of this shame, which relates to the guilt of blaming ourselves for the abuse, is the feeling that we are the bad thing - that we are the thing which caused something bad to happen to us, and therefore that it’s what we deserve. If we’ve experienced repeated abuse, we might have self-critical shame, thinking ‘there must be something wrong with me, for me to keep being abused’. There is a deep, deep loneliness to trauma-related shame. 

But you are not alone. Roxane Gay writes very powerfully of her experiences of abuse after experiencing early sexual assault in her book Hunger. She writes: ‘I let them hurt me because I had already been hurt and so, really, I was looking for someone to finish what had already been started’. She continues, writing about staying in abusive relationships as an adult: ‘I stayed because they confirmed every terrible thing I already knew about myself. I stayed because I thought no one else would possibly tolerate someone as worthless as me.’

Staying in an abusive relationship, or leaving our abuser and then coming back, is nothing to be ashamed of. There are many reasons why we might have done so -- it might have been dangerous, or we were not in a financial position to leave, or we shared childcare with our abuser -- none are things to be ashamed of. You did and are doing what you could to survive. But there may also have been people in our environment who reinforced that sense of shame, by blaming us for our experiences. We know abuse isn’t our fault, but still, other people - even those close to us - may have blamed us because they did not want to have to deal with the discomfort of facing what our abusers did, especially if they know the abuser, and so it is easier to blame us. 

But, as with anger, it can be helpful to know 

 we feel shame; after all, emotions are information. Any shame or sense of negative self-worth is simply how we’ve been trained to feel and act by society after traumatic events. It reflects our past and present environments, how others have treated us, and how we feel as a result: like a plant reacting to water, to sun, or to starvation.

Because low self-esteem can be self-protective. If our beliefs about ourselves remain negative, they have less to lose with each further attack to our minds and bodies by abusers. This is why having a history of abuse can be a risk factor for further abuse - not because there is anything wrong with the survivor, but because they haven’t lived in situations where they were allowed to use tools to protect themselves from trauma. It may feel counter-intuitive, but this all links back to our 4th truth - there is a reason we feel the way we do, because of what we’ve done to survive dangerous situations. This is also why shame is so strongly implicated in complex-PTSD, the disorder we introduced you to in the second week. 

So it can be helpful to know that shame is both a reaction to trauma, and in many ways can act as self-protection - it changes how we think about ourselves, to protect us from painful memories and to decrease the pain of any future abuse. Now, you can hopefully see how shame attacks our 

 This is why shame is so strongly linked to trauma - after trauma, we often experience a fragmented sense of self. Who is this person who survived? Our trauma responses are our mind and body trying to protect us from the painful memories of abuse. But in that protection, we stop listening to the parts of ourselves that are vulnerable. The mind has placed a shield around the person who was hurt by trauma, and in doing so placed many parts of our self under shadow and uncertainty. To make sense of this uncertainty, we build a narrative about who we are, even if it is one that is negative and full of shame.

It’s also very natural to internalise shame if we experienced trauma at a young age. Our cognitive abilities as a child mean that while growing up, we struggle to understand why things are happening, because we’re still developing a sense of ourselves as a separate entity from the external world. So when bad things happen to us at that age, often we can only understand them as being caused by our own doing or actions. 

But this shame is not our teacher. If we have done something that hurts somebody else or is against our principles, we can try to make amends -- but this is not shame. This is taking responsibility for our actions in a healthy way. 

But shame itself is not a teacher. Brené Brown, a social worker who researches shame, has said: ‘Shame cannot survive empathy, it cannot survive being spoken”. We can fight the loneliness of shame.

So today, we can rejoice at our first weapon against shame - togetherness. We hope this discussion has reinforced the truth that it’s not your fault if you are experiencing these emotions, and that you are not alone. These are normal trauma responses. And as with self-esteem, our sense of guilt or sense of shame is not who we are: they are 

to traumatic events and to society. They are emotions we can handle, with self-compassion and community.

Grief is a word we commonly associate with death, but it can also be an emotion we feel with the loss of a relationship. When relationships or meaningful events which meant something to us disappear - even the feelings those people or times represented to us - we can feel grief, sorrow and pain, similar to the death of a loved one. 

After all, in a way, when our abusers reveal their true natures, or when we recognise the horrors of the ways that they’ve chosen to treat us, it can feel like a death. It can mean the death of the person they were, whom we recognised and loved in our memories. It can also mean the death of 

: in others, in situations, or in ourselves. 

We also know from our previous sessions that the bonds we build with our abusers, through tactics such as love bombing and traumatic bonds, can be even stronger than in non-abusive relationships. 

The times we’ve spent with our abusers are rarely only negative. If they were, it would be easier to break free or move on from their pull. Our emotions and memories can be knotted, and endings - regardless of circumstances - are usually painful, messy, and unclean. 

Whether you are a part of this course and thinking about leaving or you have left already, it is normal to have overwhelming feelings of loss or solitude in the wake of a split. This is a lot to process - regardless of your present relationship with the abusers in your life - let’s break it down a bit. 

You can get through these feelings - and know that working on yourself and recognising your emotions is a really great place to start! 

A few ideas to help you process and come to terms with grief are:

No feeling, however painful - physical or shaking, needs to be forever.

However, we recognise how difficult it can be when our relationships have been so distorted and we’re left uncared for. 

Abusers are like thieves. They take from us, stealing our time, our joy, finances, our attention - even our thoughts in repetition, as we’re made to think of them over, and over, and over, whether we’re still with them or have left. 

And it’s natural to try and unpuzzle these memories. Many times, we’ve been gaslit so often that we no longer trust ourselves to know something the first time we see it or feel it. Gaslighting, as we covered, is a tactic abusers use where they lie or deny what we’ve seen, felt, or been through - sometimes even blatantly - that makes us second-guess our own reality. 

The abuser is also tied to important memories, events, and people in your life. It’s also normal to want to make sense of your own story - to know what was or is true, as the person living your own life. 

We might ask whether the person we were with did what they did on purpose; if they lied to get what they wanted (in the good moments together, or during the bad). You might wonder: 

Did they mean to hurt me? Did they actually feel sorry? Which version of the person I loved was real? 

With no obvious answers, and with the rules and their disguises always changing, it can feel like our abusers not only took parts of our past but also our present, as we spend our days trying to make sense of it or continue to brainstorm strategies to keep ourselves safe – even for those who have left. You might also wonder: 

Is there something wrong with me if I didn’t notice they were pretending? 

 they pretending? How can I trust anyone else again? 

In this, it can also feel like the people who’ve betrayed us have taken away our futures, too. 

To this, we want to say that it is easy to make someone think of you by making them afraid. It’s a strategy abusers use: if someone is scared you’ll hurt them, then they have to think of you all the time; they have to worry about what will keep them safe; and take care of your needs, your anger, and your greed.

It is easier for people to control with fear rather than love. It is harder to be loving long-term - to yourself and to others. It takes more work - just like the work it takes to self-reflect, as you’re going through this course.

This makes you incredible - and stronger than the people who’ve hurt you. 

This is the fact that matters: that you will always know is true, 

no matter what answers you miss out on, or what you have to grieve. By self-reflecting and giving yourself care in ways that don't harm anyone else, you are more incredible and amazing than they could ever hope to be. 

You are worth being seen, known, and loved by someone who is capable of more than just the aggressive defense of their own ego - someone with the sight, the compassion, and tenderness for real connection. Without shame, guilt, or confusion. 

And the more you show yourself love and spend time with those who are loving, whether you’ve left your abuser or not, the easier it will become to let go. And - as we all hope to - live our lives as brilliantly and as bright as we wish.

a new journaling technique! It’s called stream-of-consciousness journaling, and involves writing freely - no plans, no set structure, not even full sentences necessarily - for a set, short amount of time.

Stream-of-consciousness journaling can provide us with a release of emotions like guilt and shame that we don’t get from other, more conscious types of journaling. In that way, it can be very cathartic. There aren’t any expectations here! Nothing to measure or judge or change! Just write, and know that whatever comes out is exactly what you should say.

Some tips and tools for stream-of-consciousness journaling:

This also brings up another important point: you might find yourself starting to write about a trauma from the abuse during this journaling. While this is absolutely fine, and can be a sign of you seeking healing through processing the trauma, it is important to take care of yourself and stop if it feels like too much. And if you have to stop, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed this exercise, or that you’ll never be able to process these emotions. Everyone is at a different stage of their recovery, and also these things aren’t always linear; you might find that one day you feel fine thinking about your trauma, but other days are overwhelmed with emotion. So notice how you’re feeling as you journal, and make sure to take care of yourself afterwards. 

Finally, the point of this exercise is in the name - stream-of-consciousness. This exercise isn’t about considering details or structure, it’s about letting your thoughts run free. You can always go back and read it if you want to see what you processed or remembered.

And of course, please get in touch with us to let us know how this exercise works for you! Especially if it brings up difficult emotions - we can work together to identify what is going on, and what techniques might help. We are here to support you!

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

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. 