In Bloom: sign up for our 2022 courses
We’re here to welcome you to another year of courses, support, and blooming.
Access an audio version of this newsletter here.
Like what you read? Share it with your friends 🙌🏽
Hello to our wonderful community,
This is Zoë here, writing cheerfully on a warm, windless day - with a rare glimpse of late April sunshine - and with a special announcement: Bloom 2022 is here!
We’ve been hard at work on getting the new Bloom platform ready for this year’s courses, so head over to our website to create an account and start blooming!
Today’s newsletter is a special edition dedicated to Bloom 2022: where we’re going, what we’ve changed, and more. You’re getting this email because you subscribed to our newsletter.
What is Bloom?
Whether you’re new, or want a reminder before coming back for more courses, here’s what you can expect while taking a course with Bloom:
Course sessions: These are 30 to 35 minute videos with our course content, presented by two of our lovely facilitators. You can watch the videos whenever it’s convenient for you. Each video starts with a grounding exercise to bring you into the learning space, and that you can use in everyday life whenever you need a moment to centre yourself and relax.
1-1 chat: While you’re working through our sessions, you can message our team directly to reflect on the course content, and share your insights, questions, and thoughts. This is our favourite part of doing Bloom - we love speaking to all of you!
Bonus content: We’re always learning here at Bloom, and love to share tools, activities, and resources that we’ve used, with all of you. Whether it’s a template for the journaling exercise in one of our sessions, a book we used to write the course, or a blog from a mental health expert, we upload loads of extra resources to support your learning as you participate in Bloom.
What’s new?
You can now work through our courses anytime, at your own pace. Or choose to join us live, with extra messages of friendly support. We know your learning doesn’t end when the final week of our course is over. And life happens; you get busy, or tired, and you don’t have as much time as you usually do. Sometimes, you want to come back to Bloom weeks or even months later.
That’s why this year, we’ve decided to make it even easier to take courses whenever you want. We’ll be running half of our courses with the option to receive messages ‘live’ over a series of weeks, and the others you can work through at your own pace.
All courses: We’ll release courses throughout the year. You can always message us directly on our 1-1 chat service to share your thoughts as you’re going through the course. We’d love to hear from you!
Live courses: For some of our courses, you can sign up to receive messages from us through WhatsApp or Telegram. These messages will prompt you to watch the weekly course sessions, so you’re going through the course alongside others at the same time. You will be completely anonymous to the rest of the group. Plus you can connect with the Bloom team by messaging us via the online 1-1 chat, as with all our courses.
Simpler sign-up process. In feedback from last year’s Bloom courses, you said you wanted a smoother process to sign up and get started with our courses: we listened. All you need to get started is to create an account with your email address. It’s as simple as that. Fewer emails, fewer messages, less hassle. And if you want to get messages from us as part of a live course, it’s just a click away: we’ve laid out all the steps in a simple form on our platform.
Track your progress. Having a Bloom account means that every time you sign in, our platform will remember which sessions you’ve started. Plus you can mark sessions as ‘completed’, meaning it’s easier to track your journey throughout the course. Learning with Bloom has never been simpler.
Our courses
Read more below about all the courses we’ll be running this year, and when. And we’re working on new material, so stay tuned!
Live courses
Healing from sexual trauma: May 9, 2022 → June 17, 2022
In this course, we’ll identify how sexual trauma can affect our body image, sexual desire, emotions, stress response, and more. We’ll also explore different trauma-informed recovery tools, including journaling exercises and somatic care, to bring forward in our journeys of recovery.
Reclaiming resilience in your trauma story: July 18, 2022 → August 20, 2022
Trauma can leave us with many different complicated emotions, fears, and concerns. Based on narrative therapy and journaling techniques, we explore how to identify triggers, understand the science of trauma, re-build self-esteem, work through shame, and recognise the ways we’ve already been resilient.
Recovering from toxic and abusive relationships: September 19, 2022 → November 4, 2022
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 community.
Courses you can work through anytime
Society, patriarchy, and sexual trauma
We don’t experience sexual trauma in isolation from the world around us. Here, we’ll identify victim-blaming stigmas and myths, look at how these prejudices might have impacted our healing journey, and understand how sexual violence is facilitated by individual predators and patriarchal power structures.
Managing anxiety: releases July 18, 2022
Designed for survivors of trauma, this course helps users uncover the relationship between anxiety and trauma, and identify different methods for managing negative thought patterns and physical symptoms of anxiety. We also explore a variety of grounding techniques to improve both mental and physical health, in the short- and long-term.
Creating boundaries: releases September 19, 2022
Boundaries are an essential part of all our lives, but are often difficult to foster and maintain. After identifying different boundary types and styles, in this course we learn how to understand our own needs, identify toxic and unsafe behaviour in others, and centre our wellbeing in personal relationships.
If you were in Bloom last year, you might have noticed that we’ve split our course on sexual trauma into two courses, each of which focusses on different aspects of understanding and healing from sexual trauma.
What’s next?
‘Society, patriarchy, and sexual trauma’ and ‘Healing from sexual trauma’ are already available for you to work through anytime on the Bloom platform. But if you want to take ‘Healing from sexual trauma’ live with us and receive our messages, we’re getting started on 9 May, so make sure to mark it in your calendars.
We are also excited to be expanding our Bloom community through a collaboration with the dating apps Bumble and Badoo. We are working with them to provide support to their members who’ve experienced assault, abuse, and harassment. We’re thrilled to get to engage with even more survivors. Read more about this exciting, industry-first partnership here, here, and here.
We are so excited to welcome you all back to Bloom. We’ve missed talking to our community these last few months, and can’t wait to start learning, reflecting, and growing with you again. We’ll see you soon!
With love,
Zoë and the Bloom team