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Dear Bloom friends,
Welcome to our final newsletter of the year! This is Zoë writing to you from chilly London.
‘Tis the season for wrapping up the year’s activities, and we here at Bloom are more than happy to get into the festive spirit. This newsletter will be slightly different – instead of a grounding exercise, updates from Chayn, and a deepdive, we’ll be looking back at 2021 for Bloom. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Bloom newsletter.
Our numbers
Are you ready for some facts and figures? Seeing them laid out like this, even we couldn’t quite believe them!
We reached:
583 users
across 1583 course signups
in 62 countries
and messaged with 82 users over live chat.
We offered:
5 courses
with a total of 81 videos
and sent 167 daily messages.
We’re always in awe of your commitment to healing. Thank you for showing up for yourself and others. We’re in this together!
We learned
Our timing works. Last year, we had simultaneous Bloom courses, and learned that the schedule was far too demanding, both for you but also for us as facilitators. This year, we spaced things out – meaning many more people got to take part in multiple courses over the course of 7 months.
Flexibility is our strength. We know that you love being able to pause our courses, go back and rewatch videos, and engage with the course on a timeline that suits your life. And that’s wonderful! We all have different needs. We loved engaging with many of you over the course of months, while you were finishing up our courses or going back to older material.
People’s anonymity and privacy needs vary. While some of you need anonymity from other users and privacy from us facilitators to safely and comfortably participate in Bloom, others don’t. When we opened up our live chat to WhatsApp users, it became by far the most popular messaging platform. Having a service design that can accommodate everyone’s needs, the way we did, is important.
Your feedback is so important. This year, we added so much more content to our courses based directly on your comments. From looking at body image and sexuality in our course on healing from sexual trauma, to exploring narcissistic traits and attachment in our course on abusive relationships, we have loved incorporating new material, researching, and writing about new topics. And your feedback has shown us how much you’ve appreciated these changes.
You said
I feel inspired, empowered, and hopeful that I will continue to heal. I feel more freedom from the past. I feel more understanding and compassion towards myself. I feel some peace. I feel a stronger trust in this path I am on.
I did not imagine being able to open up to my new found friends in Bloom, who are foreigners at that. I felt that no matter what race you have, what age you have, whatever trauma you have experienced, you are an important and loved person. I also felt bolder and stronger, that there is no reason to feel guilty or rude if you have insisted your own rights on someone who treats you like a puppet. It is life changing.
This course could be helpful for anyone, yet has great benefit for those who have experienced abusive behaviors with a very gentle, mindful approach to prevent it from being too overwhelming. It has brought so much clarity to my past experiences, putting words, labels, researched proof to what I didn’t know how to explain or process, I just knew the feelings.
I stopped having therapy because I cannot sustain the expensive sessions. That is why I am so thankful there is BLOOM and kind hearted, dedicated people like you.
We loved
Engaging with you over live chat. We make Bloom for you, and every message is a reminder that there are people on the other side of the screen listening and healing. Thank you for every single insight, memory, challenge, triumph, reflection, and emotion you have brought into this space. Your words have educated, inspired, warmed, and challenged us, and we couldn’t be more thankful.
Learning new ways of thinking. Getting to research our courses, reading everything from survivor memoirs to psychological texts on the somatic effects of trauma, and learning from our conversations with you all is always a joy. If you want to know what we’ve been reading, check out our reading list here.
Our live session. We held a *live session* over Zoom during our last course this year, ‘Reclaiming Resilience in Your Trauma Story’, centred around drawing the timelines of our lives together, and reflecting on all the challenges, joys, and resilience along our journeys. It was the greatest pleasure to get to see some of you in the meeting’s chat - sharing your incredible reflections, insights, and even a joke or two. We’re not ones to pick favourites, but it might have been our favourite session of the entire year!
Making recap videos. Our weekly recap videos, where the team would walk us through insights from our live chat as well as our own reflections, were our greatest opportunity to share what everyone was learning in our courses. Plus, we got to answer our fun questions, so in case you ever wanted to know what superpower Nooreen, Alyson, Flora, or Tiffany would like to have, you know where to go!
Well, folks, that’s it – Bloom 2021 is a WRAP. We hope you have a restful and restorative end of year, and we can’t wait to see you next year.
Our team is heading into our ‘Winter Wind-down’ next week, where we have no meetings and are focussing on tasks for personal growth and skills development, so we’ll be a bit less responsive over email and social media. But in case of any emergencies, you can still always email us, reach out on social media (Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram), or access our directory of services on our website.
And we also know the end of year can be a difficult time for many, so here is Hera, Chayn’s founder, herself to send a message of support, solidarity, and self-care to all throughout this holiday season, in both English and Urdu.
Take care all, and we’ll see you soon.
Until then,
Love from Zoë and everyone over here at Bloom