In Bloom: healing as growing, shedding, and pruning
Like what you read? Share it with your friends 🙌🏽
Access an audio version of this newsletter here.
A warm welcome to the Bloom community!
This is Bloom’s August newsletter, written by Zoë. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Bloom newsletter. In this newsletter, we’ll be grounding ourselves with a gentle exercise, rooting ourselves in connection with the Chayn community, and branching out on a deep dive into trauma, disability, and mental health awareness.
Ground: settling into our bodies and the present
As much as I love the freedom and familiarity of working from home, I have been aware that my posture is not ideally supported by my own desk chair: a leopard print swivel chair — my 10th birthday present — which was deemed important enough to travel the 5000+ miles when my family moved from California to the UK when I was 15. In case you were wondering.
And often, I’m not even aware that my posture is terrible. After hitting ‘send’ on an important email at 5.30, I’ll suddenly become aware that my head is down, my neck is leaning forwards, and my entire torso is bent around the contour of the front of my desk — and that it’s probably been like that for hours. Whether you work at a desk or not, being mindful of our posture can help us shape it for the better, to protect our back, neck, and overall health.
So today, let’s bring some gentle awareness to our posture and body position. You’re probably sitting or lying down as you read this, but even if not, just take a moment to notice how your body is positioned. If you’re sitting, what is your back doing: is it straight, or bent? Are you leaning forward? What are your legs doing: are they crossed, are your hips evenly supporting your weight? If you’re lying down, it’s also important to think about what your back is doing: are you leaning on one side, or the other? And if you’re standing up, are you holding your head up? Are you leaning on one leg or the other? In any position, being aware of what part of your body is supporting your weight is important.
Some great stretches for the back are: Child’s Pose or Shashankasana, and Cat-Cow Pose or Marjariasana, as led on these pages by yogi Shammi Gupta. But even if you aren’t able to stretch, remember that this simple physical awareness can do a lot to bring us back into our bodies and more comfortable positions.
Root: connecting with the Chayn community
We have some very exciting news...we at Bloom have partnered with Bumble to bring emotional support to their users who’ve experienced sexual harassment or abuse through the app. Read more about this partnership here. And do you use Bumble, or their sister app Badoo? Answer this short survey about whether you’ve experienced sexual assault or harassment through the app.
Bloom course updates
Our course on ‘Managing Anxiety’ wraps up this week; as always, you can still catch up with the course via Telegram, by signing up on our website. Next month, we’re delighted to be launching a new, updated course on ‘Recovering from Toxic and Abusive Relationships’ (formerly ‘Coping with Domestic Abuse’). We’ve added new material on narcissism, attachment, and tactics of power and control in relationships, so please, do head over to our website to sign up. We’ll see you there!
We’re still looking for anyone who has taken a Bloom course to share their experiences with us for our research on the design of a custom digital platform for Bloom. Take this quick 5-minute survey to tell us how and when you signed up to Bloom. And if you’re happy to take part in a paid research interview, email us at team@chayn.co!
Flowerbed updates
Flowerbed is on a short hiatus, but as we continue hearing new updates about Britney Spears’ case against her unjust conservatorship, why not have a look at Hera and Elysha’s session just a few weeks ago on this topic. You can watch all of our previous Flowerbeds on our Facebook page.
Chayn updates
Another day, another survey. We promise it’s not all surveys here at Chayn...but that being said, we’d really appreciate your help with these as well.
Our team is still hard at work on our podcast on reporting sexual violence in the UK. We’re still looking for survivors’ anonymous, confidential stories about reporting. So if you’ve reported your experience of sexual violence to institutions (police, university, workplaces, religious organisations, etc.) and want to contribute your story, please have a look at our survey here.
We’re creating a new resource for online safety, including online dating. If you’ve had any experiences with online dating that have made you feel unsafe, upset, or just uncomfortable, we’d really value your input via this anonymous survey.
Remember you can stay updated with Chayn on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Contact us via these accounts or by email (team@chayn.co).
Branch: exploring together
Trauma, disability, and chronic illness; or, why can’t people just get over it! A deep dive into what it means to ‘heal’ from trauma, and the relationship between mental health and disability activism.
Having wrapped up our course on ‘Healing from Sexual Trauma’ last month, we at Bloom have been reflecting a lot recently on what it means to ‘heal’ from trauma. In the public cultural discourse, ‘healing’ is often spoken about as a journey. True: so far, so good. It’s even increasingly recognised that this journey is not linear: again, an excellent point.
However, the underlying implications of these statements, which are often well-intentioned, is that it is a finite journey. That is, at one point it’s finished. Over. The healing is done. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find a deep discomfort with the complicated, long-term effects that trauma can have on the mind and body. People insist that healing is a return to ‘normal’, to how someone was before the trauma — even to a ‘stronger’, ‘better’ version of themselves. You may have heard the expression ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ (which is also, admittedly, a *fantastic* song by Kelly Clarkson. But I digress). Trauma survivors are expected to uncover a profound, cosmic truth about the resilience of the human spirit, coal coerced into a beautiful diamond.
Or, if you can’t do all that, stop being affected by the trauma. And stop talking about it! Why can’t she just get over it? Or, It’s been such a long time, why is he still talking about this?. And it’s not only survivors of trauma who are subjected to these kinds of statements; people who are grieving loss are also expected to wake up one morning with the last sliver of a lifelong trauma exorcised from their bodies.
Some of these opinions derive from stigma against mental health issues, and our society’s refusal to treat mental illness as a medical concern, or at the very least a valid issue requiring care and attention. But our society’s inability to extend sympathy to people experiencing the long-term effects of trauma doesn’t only derive from mental health stigma. It also comes from a much larger prejudice: an ableist perspective that refuses to accept that there is a health problem which cannot be overcome with enough determination, grit, and so-called ‘resilience’.
I am frequently reminded of this tweet by user @chronicparent30, who last year said: “Tired of hearing “what if we talked about physical health like we do mental health?” tweets. We do. The difference is acute vs chronic. Broken leg? People have empathy. Mental health issues, chronic illnesses, anything more long term? People lose patience when it’s long term.”
She continues: “People say “you wouldn’t tell someone who struggles to walk to just try harder”. Erm people do that ALL the time? People with chronic conditions are constantly gaslit just like those with mental health issues. The difference is not physical vs mental. It’s acute vs chronic.”
She’s right: our insistence that ‘mental health is as important as physical health’, while undoubtedly true, obscures a larger form of prejudice, and stops us from uniting communities experiencing chronic health conditions in resistance against the ableism of the larger system. Our society’s ableism asserts that there is no disability which cannot be overcome, or at least ameliorated, by exerting greater effort — leading to a variety of prejudices and stereotypes, including ‘inspiration porn’ narratives in media, a term originally coined by activist Stella Young. At the root of this refusal to accept that there is pain or difficulty which cannot be conquered by simply trying hard enough, a belief which affects those experiencing mental and physical health problems, is an ableist belief that health problems should not extend into the long term — and that those who experience them as such are ‘weak’ and ‘deserve’ whatever difficulties they are experiencing. Or, that they must be making up their problems: another prejudice that we also see weaponised against people healing from trauma or mental health issues.
So in our resistance against mainstream narratives of flourishing after trauma, we need to also amplify the voices of disabled people, many of whom may also be trauma survivors themselves — and, indeed, probably are, by virtue of living in our ableist society.
We could (and still might!) devote an entire newsletter to the many manifestations of ableism, and its intersections with mental health activism, but for today we’ll return to a final point. When we say our work with Bloom is trauma-informed, we accept ‘healing’ in all its complexities — including uncertainty about whether there is an endpoint to this journey, or what that might look like. ‘Healing’ doesn’t necessarily mean not being affected by the trauma — and you are exactly where you need to be on this journey. Plus, you’re not alone.
That’s all for this month, folks. We hope you have a calming, mindful, and *healing* next few weeks — whatever that means for you.
With love and warm wishes,
Zoë and the Bloom team