DAY ELEVEN | A SECRET BLOGMAS 2025

“Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.”

Oprah Winfrey

Welcome to A Secret Blogmas 2025!

Today is Day Eleven and this eleventh post is all about the beneficial impact there is if you – as a content creator – publish content that is empathetic towards your audience or followers.   I’ll discuss writing trigger warnings and self-care advice and other strategies of showing empathy as a result of the recognition as to how beneficial it can become. Keep reading to find out why and how being validating of your audience can impact the success and popularity of your content and/or your platform…

PART THREE OF THREE | EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ABUSE

Having thoroughly enjoyed writing the ‘everything-you-need-to-know’ style posts in the past, when I checked through previous posts about abuse, I noticed they all seem to be in pieces… Bits of information, parts of my experience, a few tips; all just separated into so many different posts. Of course, they are that way because up to the date they were published, they were the things I knew. The things that had happened. And I’m not suggesting that I’m at a point where I now know absolutely everything about the subject, but I do feel that I’m at a pretty good stage in my mental health recovery to feel I am now able to collate all that I have learnt, and all that I know. Unfortunately, abuse is a subject where I’d argue you will never fully understand unless it’s something you’ve experienced, so posts like this – media content by survivors – can be the best resource for those who want to learn more…

PART ONE: http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2021/02/everything-you-need-to-know-about-abuse.html

PART TWO: www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2021/02/part-two-of-three-everything-you-need.html

 

What Are Triggers?

A trigger is defined as being a ‘cause to function’ but in mental health, I fully believe it can have a completely different definition to each individual. I was once in Accident and Emergency (A&E) and I told a Doctor he was triggering me, and I remember him saying ‘what does that mean?’ I couldn’t understand how he didn’t know and then he corrected himself with: ‘what does that mean to you?’

WHY MENTAL HEALTH IS TAKING A BEATING WITH THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC | IN PARTNERSHIP WITH CUMBRIA, NORTHUMBERLAND, TYNE & WEAR NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

This post is in partnership with the wonderful mental health NHS Trust for my area; CNTW (Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust) so at the end I’ll be including all of their links and one of their most important articles produced during this Pandemic.

I’d like to think I’m a pretty fair and balanced kind of person in that I can usually see a disagreement from both sides, so when I write blog posts and posts on social media I try to imagine the other side to it… You know, in my last post: ‘WHAT I WANT YOU TO KNOW DURING THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC,’ I talked a little about how people are feeling that they can’t talk about how the pandemic is affecting them because they’re sure that there’s someone ‘worse off.’ And I absolutely get it; I mean, there’s tweets about Grandmas dying alone because visiting in hospitals is suspended and people having their lives genuinely turned upside down to coincide with the UK lockdown regulations (which you can read here).

I think that the one common impact that the Coronavirus Pandemic is having on at least the majority of people, is on our mental health. People often make the mistake of thinking that to be struggling with your mental health, you must have some sort of diagnosis, but this isn’t true. Everyone has mental health in the same way that everyone has physical health, and you can struggle with your thoughts and feelings without it being you must have an official ‘label’ or disorder. Someone can feel sad without having a formal diagnosis of Depression. You can feel anxious without it needing to result in a panic attack for it to be worth talking about. And you can struggle with your mental health without needing to feel suicidal for it to be deserving of asking for help and support.

HOW TO COPE WITH TRIGGERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

“Is there any way that you can stop it from happening?”

“I’d have to delete my entire Twitter!”

I like to think of myself as quite a fair and balanced person so that whilst I stand by the fact that I’m NOT Disordered has been hugely life-saving in many different ways, I’ll also talk about the fact that social media can sometimes be very negative and harmful. And it is my recent experience of this that has inspired this blog post…

A few accounts I follow on Twitter, follow an account that is largely connected to my abuser and so occasionally that account’s content will appear on my newsfeed. Last week, a photo appeared. It was of my abuser back at work and in a position where he could re-offend. So many difficult emotions came to the surface; ones that I hadn’t felt in a very long time and I reverted to old coping mechanisms. I felt frustrated that no matter what I – and others – say, he seems untouchable. Invincible. I had to go through so many obstacles and challenges in order to finally report the abuse to the Police; and the fact that CPS are refusing to prosecute, just makes it feel so frustratingly pointless. It was like: ‘why did I bother working so hard if it was all for nothing?!’ I was so blinded by these overwhelming thoughts and feelings that I didn’t stop to consider how I was responding to them. I didn’t use my Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skills or ring someone to talk it through; I just turned all of the frustrated anger on myself. I knew I wasn’t the right person; I’ve learnt that I don’t deserve to be in pain or to be going through everything I have experienced; and that suicide isn’t the best revenge. My Nana and Mum always brought me up to believe in karma and that what goes around comes around, and if this is true then I want to – and need to – be alive to see him get his comeuppance.

WHY “LOOK HOW FAR YOU’VE COME” & “DON’T LET HIM WIN” ARE BECOMING MY NEW PET PEEVES

This is going to be one of the very few posts where I actually have to be really careful with how I phrase things because it’s about the abuse.


You don’t have to read many of my blog posts to realize that I’m a very honest and open person so to have to regulate what I say and watch how much detail I give is very challenging! The most frustrating thing is that even saying the bare bones of things - that the abuse happened while I was at High School – everyone who knew me during that time of my life will easily guess who it was that hurt me. You see, my abuser and I also had a public relationship – interactions that others witnessed – and it was to the extreme that when others who were closely involved in that time of my life were interviewed by Police, they all said that they thought something had been going on between us! I mean, I’d like to think that if I were ever in a situation where I had suspicions like that, I would bloody well do something about it! As infuriating as it is for me to think that if just one of those people had spoken up maybe a lot of what has happened, wouldn’t have; I try to keep in mind that those people have to live with the knowledge that they could have stopped it. But instead, everyone – especially me - kept quiet; and I was left with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refusing to prosecute him after his arrest because they worried there wasn’t enough evidence! Of course, this was a frustrating response – for the Police too as they explained that they believed me but that their hands were tied – and it has left me having to constantly remind myself that at least I have done all that I can to protect others and prevent him doing it again to someone else.

“HOW CAN YOU BE SO HONEST ON SOCIAL MEDIA?”

I was recently telling a neighbor about my latest post: ‘THE REALITY OF LIFE AFTER ABUSE | TW’ and describing what I’d talked about in it when she asked me that question; how could I be so honest so publicly? And it got me thinking… then one of my inspirations; Victoria from InTheFrow wrote a piece titled ‘The Problem with Social Media & The Removal of Instagram Likes’ and I was even more confident about writing a piece on my thoughts and rationale behind being honest and upfront on social media.


You know that whole saying about having ‘a weight lifted’ and ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’? I had no idea what that meant or felt like until I started blogging on, I’m NOT Disordered. From November 2006, I wasn’t being 100% honest until January 2013 when the blogging began. That includes the times when I first told someone about the abuse, when I reported it to the Police, and when I had to tell my Mum what had happened to me. Yes, I was telling them something I’d kept a secret, but I wasn’t honest about all of my thoughts and feelings surrounding the abuse. I guess that I was still warming to the idea of talking about what had happened to me and so talking in more detail and in more depth? Well the only reason that didn’t scare the hell out of me was because I didn’t consider it would ever happen. If we went back to that day I was being interviewed in the horrible, falsely home-y room at the Police Station, I could never have imagined that I would end up writing the posts that I write these days. Keeping a huge aspect of my life a secret and then talking about it only halfway…? Well I hadn’t realized what a weight it had been until it was lifted.

THE REALITY OF LIFE AFTER ABUSE | TW

Funny you’re the broken one

But I’m the only one who needed saving

Cuz when you never see the light

It’s hard to know which one of us is caving

Rihanna – Stay

After the popularity of my post; ‘THE REALITY OF LIVING WITH SELF-HARM SCARS | TW’ I thought I’d write a different post but with a similar theme because whilst I promote content being original and unique, I think that it’s also important to harness a success and use it to inspire future work.

So, here’s a few things that I, and some abuse survivors, go through following the abuse… 

First speaking up…

With the title of this post being ‘after’ I’ll start with the day it ‘ended’ - when I first told someone I’d been abused, and I was called a ‘manipulative liar.’ It’s difficult to explain this day because, for legal reasons, there are details I have to omit so as not to give away this person’s identity but what I can say is that my abuser put me in a position where I was almost forced to disclose what he’d been doing. It’s frustrating because I know he would only do that if he honestly thought that he would get away with it and that I wouldn’t be believed. Part of me has always wonders if he believed that because he had convinced himself that there was nothing wrong with what he had been doing to me. Another part of me thinks that he probably did know it was wrong and just didn’t care. And he didn’t believe the person I reported to would care either. My abuser was a very powerful and well-respected person who people looked up to and even in our public arguments about actual, appropriate things, he was defended. People took his side. And the fact it was for the most unimportant issues and completely trivial matters meant that my head was filled with doubt that anyone would believe he could be capable of abusing someone. Of abusing me. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was called a ‘manipulative liar’ but I must have had some hope that I’d be believed by – someone who seemed to be - the only person in a higher position of power than my abuser. By the time I reported it to this person the abuse had been going on for six months. 

TW: A DISCUSSION ABOUT SUICIDE | FROM THE WARNING SIGNS TO THE STIGMA

A little while ago I got a phone call on the train telling me that someone, I’d worked with at a few events had just committed suicide. There’s no easy way to say it, is there? Suicide. You can’t really sugar coat it with ‘we lost him’ or ‘he passed away.’ It’s almost as though the act of committing suicide is so… honest(?) - it’s such a stark reminder of the darkness and unhappiness that can lurk in the people we love and care for - that it deserves to be spoken about as equally honest. Though there is controversy and… discussion(!) around the term ‘commit suicide’ with some feeling that it insinuates the person has committed a criminal offence. *Personally, I believe that ‘commit’ is purely referring to the action of it as opposed to it having any legal definition but out of respect for others, I’ll be avoiding using the phrase in this post*

COPING WITH TRAUMA TRIGGERS | IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GREATER MANCHESTER MENTAL HEALTH NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | Ad

Note: although this post is part of my partnership with Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust following the recent terror attack at Manchester Arena; the entire contents of it can apply to anyone who has suffered from any trauma

Image created by the GMMH_NHS Twitter staff

trigger

ˈtrɪɡə/

verb

verb: trigger; 3rd person present: triggers; past tense: triggered; past participle: triggered; gerund or present participle: triggering

1. 

cause (an event or situation) to happen or exist.

• 
  

  "an allergy can be triggered by stress or overwork"

  
  

  synonyms:

  precipitate, prompt, trigger off, set off, spark (off), provoke, stir up,  cause, give rise to, lead to, set in motion, occasion, be the cause of, bring about, begin, start, initiate; "the incident triggered an acrimonious debate"

• (of an event or situation) cause (someone) to do something.

  
  

  "the death of Helen's father triggered her to follow a childhood dream and become a falconer"
• (especially of something read, seen, or heard) distress (someone), typically as a result of arousing feelings or memories associated with a particular traumatic experience.

  
  

  "she started crying and told me that my news had really triggered her"

It’ll sometimes feel like the trauma is never going to be over. You'll find that you are always come across things in life that remind you of what has happened to you.
Personally, I suffered abuse when I was younger and it's hard for me to discuss my triggers because, for legal reasons, I can't go into details about the trauma; and some of my triggers are really specific to it... I feel like there are two types of triggers: 'specific' ones and 'obvious' ones but I don't think that one is worse than another.