What happens when two women with portfolio careers, creative minds, and a healthy dose of curiosity sit down to talk about Substack?

A 48-minute conversation about much more than publishing.

In this live discussion, J’K Frederick (Like Me) and Chef Julia (The Recipe for Life) explored how they each found their way to Substack, what they’ve learned during their first six months on the platform, and why authenticity matters more than chasing algorithms.

What We Discussed

Why we joined Substack

• Hulya’s journey back to writing after years of focusing on teaching, coaching and community work.

• How Substack became the unexpected home for J’K’s podcast and writing.

• The surprising freedom of publishing without the pressure of traditional social media.

Finding our authentic voice

• The shift from trying to write “the right way” to writing honestly.

• Why being yourself attracts the right people.

• The dangers of comparing your work to everyone else’s.

Building community over chasing numbers

• What community really means.

• The difference between followers and genuine connection.

• Why meaningful engagement matters more than vanity metrics.

The realities of creating content

• Running businesses while creating content.

• Balancing creativity with earning a living.

• Why consistency looks different for everyone.

• Avoiding burnout in a world full of advice and algorithms.

The next six months

• Turning content into a connected ecosystem.

• Developing products, workshops, retreats and coaching offers.

• Exploring monetisation in a way that feels aligned.

• Creating work that serves both audience and purpose.

Key Takeaways

1. Authenticity scales better than performance.People connect with real voices, not polished perfection.

2. Community is built one conversation at a time.It doesn’t require a massive audience. It requires meaningful connection.

3. You don’t need to do everything.The internet is full of advice. Not all of it applies to you.

4. Create first. Optimise later.Publishing consistently beats endlessly preparing.

5. Your work deserves more than one use.Repurpose, revisit and build upon what you’ve already created.

Memorable Moments

• How a yearly accountability call evolved into a Substack partnership.

• The confession that some people post 30 Notes a day (and why neither of us plans to do that).

• Why “Substack made me write again.”

• The ongoing quest to build something meaningful without losing ourselves in the process.

• Future plans for live cooking sessions, community conversations and collaborative events.

Connect With Us

J’K Frederick

• Like Me Podcast

• The Integration

• Where Responsibility Lands

Chef Hulya - https://substack.com/@chefhulya

• The Recipe for Life

J'K Here

Home of Like Me podcast - honest conversations where the personal and the systemic meet. Writing and reflections on identity, responsibility, and what happens when systems fail the people inside them.

Get more from J'K in the Substack app

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Welcome to THE INTEGRATION,

This is where the LIKE ME podcast episode continues.

This is not a summary or a recap of the episode. Just a space to go deeper, to understand what happens in the body when it happens, and to move from awareness into something you can actually do with it.

Each Integration follows the same architecture. A thread. A reflection. The pattern. A self enquiry. The reaction. The practice. The word. And a recommendation that will be useful.

This one was hard to write. Not because the research was difficult to find. Because the pattern, once seen, is hard to look away from. And because writing about it meant sitting with something that I think a lot of us carry but don’t always have words for.

In May 2026, three teenage boys convicted of raping two girls in Hampshire walked out of court without a custodial sentence. The judge named their futures. He did not name the girls’.

That’s where this episode starts. And this Integration goes deeper.

Listen to the full episode here

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here ~ James Baldwin

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Writing this Integration brought something up. Not just in my mind. In my chest and my stomach. That low, persistent unease that sits there and doesn’t shift easily.

When I look back at what’s been said to me, the looks, the words, the negative self-talk that came out of my own experience of sexual violence. I know exactly how filth gets inside. As a child, I was doubted. And as a child, I was shown through the silence of others how not to hold people accountable.

At first those are just other people’s words, their deflections, their choices. But over time they become something else. A churn. A persistent, sickening weight in the stomach. And without deciding to, I started half-believing them. I started carrying the shame of what was inflicted on me as though it belonged to me.

That’s where Baldwin’s words resonated for me. When he wrote about vomiting up all the filth he’d been taught about himself and half-believed, it clicked. He wasn’t describing a quiet, managed process. He was describing a violent, necessary rejection of what had been forced into him.

I picture him throwing things, howling, crying until he was physically sick. I picture it that way because I’ve had that kind of release myself. And it changed me.

Vomiting is the body’s way of forcefully emptying itself. A protective response. Something is wrong, something is out of balance, and the body decides it can no longer contain it. Anxiety, nausea, the tightening in the throat when something feels unsafe — these aren’t overreactions. These are the body registering something real, often before the mind has caught up.

What I understood after my own release is that it wasn’t a breakdown. It was my body clearing out what it had been holding. Making space that felt, for the first time in a long time, safe.

This kind of release isn’t a sudden healing. It’s an excavation. A clearing away of a weight that was forced on me. And it’s only when that weight starts to lift that it becomes possible to see a path that is actually mine. Not the one someone else decided I was on because of what happened to me.

For most of UK legal history, if a child sexually harmed another child the behaviour was dismissed — as experimentation, banter, boys being boys. The idea that children could sexually harm other children was largely overlooked.

It wasn’t until the Sexual Offences Act 2003 that a clear legal framework existed covering child-on-child rape, sexual assault, and grooming. And it wasn’t until 2016 — just ten years ago — that schools were formally guided to take peer-on-peer sexual abuse seriously rather than explain it away.

Ten years ago., the law changed, finally.

But in 2026 the accountability gap hasn’t closed. The name has changed. Where it was once dismissal — banter, experimentation, boys being boys — it is now mitigation. Age. Diagnosis. Peer pressure. Cognitive impairment. The outcome is the same. The person who caused the harm is centred. The person who received it is not.

Three cases, three different courts and three different years, held the same thought.

Three courts. Same logic. The offender’s age, circumstances, and future placed at the centre. The victim’s future not named.

That’s not three judges making the same mistake. That’s the framework doing exactly what it was designed to do.

And while these cases were moving through the courts, the numbers were moving in the wrong direction. In 2024, police in England and Wales recorded 122,768 child sexual abuse and exploitation offences. A 6% rise on the year before. Online abuse with a digital footprint rose by 26% and now accounts for 42% of all offences. Half of all alleged perpetrators are children aged 10 to 17. The problem is not shrinking. It is growing.

The framework responsible is the UK Sentencing Council guideline for children and young people, which came into force in June 2017. Written by a body of fifteen people, mostly judges and legal professionals, with one seat for someone with experience of victims. That guideline instructs courts to focus entirely on the child who offended, rather than on the impact of the crime itself. And that impact is exactly what those victims are left to carry.

Rehabilitation matters, and everyone should have a chance to rebuild a life. But when there is no regard for the person harmed, what rehabilitation are they offered to ensure they can rebuild a life where they feel safe, believed, heard, and not othered? The system is actively declaring that one young life matters more than another. It shouldn’t happen at their expense.

And here is the question that sits underneath all three cases. If the consequences for serious sexual harm are consistently light when the offender is young, what does that communicate? Not just to survivors. To anyone who is young, who is watching, who is calculating risk.

A framework that consistently reduces consequence is not neutral. It shapes behaviour. It is worth asking whether the 2017 guideline, as currently written, is doing something it was never intended to do — functioning as a permission structure for harm without consequence.

The Sentencing Council wrote that guideline. The Sentencing Council can review it.

That imbalance is real. There is no simple answer. But the first step isn’t fixing a broken system. It’s refusing to let the system’s verdict become the truth carried about oneself.

Because when authority sends a message that a future is secondary, that message doesn’t stay in the courtroom. It follows people home. It settles into the body, quiet and heavy, whispering that the institution must be right.

That is how a public verdict turns into a private belief.

Trauma doesn’t announce itself. It just happens. And somewhere between the event and the years that follow, it becomes something else. A belief. About who you are. About what you deserve. About whether your voice carries the same weight as someone else’s.

I think most of us are walking around with at least one thing we absorbed from a system, a person, or a process that we never consciously agreed to believe. Something placed there during an experience we didn’t ask for. Something that over time started to feel like our own thinking.

What is that thing for you? Not the event. The belief it left behind.

The comments are open. I’d genuinely like to know what this brought up, if anything….

When authority sends a message about worth, a verdict, a decision, a dismissal and that message contradicts what is known to be true, the body does something specific.

It doesn’t just feel hurt. It fights itself.

Part of the mind knows what happened. But another part starts to wonder whether the system saw something that was missed. Whether it was misread. Whether the authority that has all the information, all the procedures, all the language, might actually be right.

Bessel van der Kolk’s research names this precisely. When the nervous system is caught between what it knows and what it’s being told, it enters a state of chronic activation. Not the sharp alarm of immediate danger. The low, persistent hum of a threat that never quite resolves.

That hum is exhausting. And it is the body’s honest response to being asked to hold two contradictory truths at once.

That feeling isn’t confusion. It’s the nervous system refusing to abandon what it knows, even when everything around it says otherwise.

The body knew. It was right.

Baldwin’s word was vomiting. Unglamorous. Involuntary. Necessary.

The release he described didn’t happen because he decided to heal. It happened because he refused, over years, in his writing, in his life, to keep swallowing what he’d been taught.

Here is one small version of that practice.

• Find a quiet moment this week. Somewhere without interruption.

• Write down, just for yourself, one thing a system or person taught about you that has been half-believed. It might be something about credibility. Worth. Whether what happened was deserved. Whether the future mattered.

Write it down.

• Then underneath it, write what is actually known to be true. Not what is wished for. Not what is being worked toward. What is known.

That gap, between what was taught and what is known, is where the release begins.

If prayer is your language: ask for the courage to stop carrying what was never yours to carry. To release what authority placed on you as though it were fact.

If affirmation is your language: What was taught about me is not the truth of me. No verdict delivered about my worth is required to be believed.

You have a right to be here. Walk like it. ~ J’K, EP20

Walk with your head held high. Shoulders back. Back straight. Own every step.

There is no shame to carry for what was experienced. It wasn’t chosen. It was done. And it does not define the right to take up space in this world.

Walk like it today. Not perfectly. Not all day. Just once — let the body lead what the mind is still working out.

That’s enough.

If what the Reflection described felt familiar, the churning, the bracing, the body that won’t quite settle, Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger is worth the time.

When something traumatic happens, the body starts a stress response that never gets to finish. Think of an animal that freezes in danger and then shakes it off once it’s safe. Humans don’t always get that release. The body stays stuck. Levine’s work is about helping it get unstuck.

It’s already part of J’K’s reference library for a reason. Accessible, practical, and clear about why that ungraceful, involuntary release Baldwin described isn’t a loss of control. It’s the body doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Find it here: Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

—

Thank you for being here.

And as always, take what resonates and leave the rest.

J’K

Welcome to THE INTEGRATION,

This is where the LIKE ME podcast episode continues.

This is not a summary or a recap of the episode. Just a space to go deeper, to sit with what the episode brought up for you - if anything and, to understand what happens in the body when it happens, and to move from awareness into something you can actually do with it.

Each Integration follows the same architecture. A thread. A reflection. The pattern. A self enquiry. The reaction. The practice. The word. And a recommendation that will be useful.

Listen to the full episode here

Listen to this 30-second audio snippet from the episode before you read on

It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to connect to a vulnerability that is true. One that can be held.

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In this episode I talked about how a frame doesn’t have to be true to be effective. It just has to find the vulnerability that is real and hold onto it.

That’s not just a media observation. Most of us have felt that from another person. From a family. From a culture.

Sit with these.

Where have you felt manipulated — and was the alarm real, or was it a tester firing from an old wound?

What’s the difference between defensiveness and discernment for you? Do you know it when you feel it?

And when someone shaped your narrative without your consent — how did you find your way back to your own version of it?

2014. Lauren Goodger. She reported intimate footage filmed secretly by an ex-boyfriend without her consent. Standard legal practice tied her hands: she was advised to stay silent while the case was active. But the media didn’t wait. They took the story and ran it without her side, without her voice, and without the context she was legally barred from giving.

The headlines didn’t look at the crime; they looked at her. They questioned her motives. They whispered that she leaked it herself, “cried wolf”. They dismissed a criminal violation as a “PR move.”

He was convicted. The media simply turned the page.

2018. Four years later. The Miami Herald published Perversion of Justice, exposing how Jeffrey Epstein abused over 80 women. For decades, those women weren’t hidden, they were systematically ignored. The press had spent years chronicling Epstein’s wealth, his elite connections, and his glamorous world, effectively writing the victims out of their own lives.

When those women finally forced their way into print, the machine weaponised. Private lives were threatened; personal data was leaked. Some lived inside that terror for years. Some didn’t survive it.

Two cases. Different decades. Different countries. Different scales. The exact same frame.

It’s a pattern that runs on loop. The person who speaks out becomes the target. The violation becomes a footnote. The powerful are protected, and the truth is managed.

But something’s shifting.

Once you see this frame, really see it, you stop being at the mercy of the headline. You start reading differently.

If you’ve got lived experience of this, you realize that the suffocating doubt you felt was never about you. The system was just working exactly as designed.

And if you don’t have that lived experience, you start to see how quietly your own views have been sculpted. You realize how easily a headline taught you to judge people you’ve never met.

Seeing the machine doesn’t undo the damage. But it can change how you look at headlines and newstories from this moment on.

And that’s where the power shifts.

When did you last consume a headline without asking who wrote it, what was left out, and who benefits if you never ask?

I’m genuinely asking. Because I think the answer tells us something important about where we are, individually and collectively.

Come and share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know what this stirred.

When a frame is built around your truth, when your words are taken, your context stripped, your character questioned the body registers it as danger.

Before your conscious mind has processed what happened, the alarm has already rung. This is not weakness. This is design.

Bessel van der Kolk’s research shows that the nervous system responds to narrative threat the same way it responds to physical threat. The same circuits. The same signals. The body encodes the violation before you have language for it.

Which is why so many people who have had their truth framed by someone else describe the same thing, a sense of unreality. A feeling of reaching for solid ground that keeps shifting. A confusion between what they know and what they’ve been told to believe.

That confusion is not a character flaw. It is a physiological response to having your reality contested.

Your body knew before you did. It was right.

Now that you know what’s happening in the body, here’s one thing to do with it.

The next time a headline triggers a strong reaction, before you share it, before you form an opinion, before you react.

Place one hand on your chest. Take one breath.

Ask: is this my alarm or my discernment?

Your body knows the difference. You are learning to listen to it.

If prayer is your language: ask for the spirit of discernment. The capacity to see clearly what is being shown and what is being hidden.

If affirmation is your language: I trust my own reading. My body is not my enemy. It is my first witness.

Buy the truth and do not sell it. ~ Proverbs 23:23

Some truths cost everything to speak about. Your reputation, comfort, sense of belonging, even the feeling of safety.

Truth matters because it often comes with a price. Sometimes that price is rejection, criticism, or becoming a problem for people who would prefer you to say nothing.

But truth does not disappear just because people avoid it.

It shows up in people, families, communities, and culture. It shapes behaviour long before anyone says it out loud.

This is why speaking honestly matters.

Some truths come slowly through healing, reflection, or finally asking the question nobody wanted asked. And often, people’s reactions reveal more than the truth itself.

Deflection. Minimising. Distraction. Silence.

Feeling uncomfortable does not make something false.

Most people who speak up are not trying to destroy everything. They are trying to stop pretending. Naming harm is not the same as creating it.

Some truths will change the atmosphere in a room. So what. Let the truth be the glitch and say it anyway.

Because truth is not only about exposing something. It’s about responsibility. The choice to stop protecting silence.

And once something is seen clearly, the real question becomes: What happens next?

If you recognised yourself in that physical response to having your truth questioned, the tight chest, the racing thoughts, the shutting down, the need to explain yourself over and over, this piece is worth reading.

An Introduction to Your Nervous System by Beatrix Krause Sorio, Nervous System Whisperer on Substack, is a plain-English introduction to how the nervous system works and how the body responds to stress, overwhelm, and threat. No heavy jargon. No talking over your head. Just a clear explanation of the science underneath so many of the reactions this episode touched on.

Sometimes understanding the body helps us stop seeing ourselves as “too sensitive” or “overreacting” — and start recognising that the body was trying to protect us.

Read it here: An Introduction to Your Nervous System

—

Thank you for being here.

And as always, take what resonates and leave the rest.

J’K

A Note on Self-Care

This episode gets a bit deep in some parts. If it stirs something up in you, feel what you feel first. Then explore what the feeling is actually telling you. Does it direct you forward or pull you down? Either is a signal. Neither is wrong. It will guide you toward where you want to be, or away from where you don't.

Support is available for you. Check out the Support Directory UK and contact your local Samaritans UK or specific to your locality. You don't have to process this by yourself.

The Cost, The Work, and the Peace

I was in denial that I was groomed by people I was meant to trust. That was a very hard pill to swallow.

Twelve years of it.

In this latest episode of the podcast, “What the Labels Left Behind,” I go deep into what that algorithm actually feels like while it’s running.

I feel a deep sadness for the little girl I was, but I’m also so incredibly proud of who she was. She is my hero, and I’m thankful for her strength. But I also feel a deep sadness about a few other things, specifically the decisions taken by others that literally erased 15 years from my memory. Not because I was still in the experience itself, but because of the life after. That long period full of internal afflictions. It’s only now that I can really feel the effects of the decisions I made while I was in that “survivor” stage, just trying to keep my head above water. Those decisions affected my life, and I have to make peace with that. I have to know that I did the best I could within my capacity at the time.

I’m happy for myself in this moment because the truth doesn’t fill me with shame anymore, and I don’t blame myself for a time that was totally out of my control. For my own peace, I lean into forgiveness. Forgiveness toward myself and toward others.

They say time heals all wounds, but time just passes. It’s believing and accepting the truth that actually heals. It’s surrendering to the call of my life and having faith that there’s light waiting at the end of the tunnel. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but I think that’s an insult to the strength I already had. That little girl didn’t need to be broken to be strong, she was the hero of this story from the start. Her strength is the only reason I am standing here today. Her determination is the reason I was determined to figure this life out, using what I had and bringing the pieces back together.

They say the truth will set you free, but they forget to mention that first, it makes you grieve for what was lost. I had to grieve for those twelve years and for the girl who had to hide. But on the other side of that grief is this moment, a moment where the shame has finally evaporated.

I definitely didn’t get here on a wing and a prayer alone. I put in the work, and I’m still putting it in, because I have more evolving to do. There were times I nearly ignored the opportunities to move forward, moments where staying still felt easier than the climb, but I kept going.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand. We run programmes. Installed by experience, culture, societal ‘norms’ by what we were told, by the labels that got there before we did. Some of them protected us. Some of them were never ours to begin with. And for a long time I didn’t know I could do anything about them. I just thought that was the system I was working with had to live with.

Knowing that I have the capacity to uninstall these programmes honestly fills me with excitement. It means those old words and philosophies don’t have to live in me forever. They aren’t fixed. They might leave some traces behind, but they can be deleted. The system might have called my truth an error, but I know better now. It was never my fault.

I created Like Me podcast because I know there are many who share similar experiences as me. It was and is my way of connecting with you. Whereever you are in the world. Letting you know that I know that there’s someone else Like Me, striving to work it out.

Which make me wonder are you still running a programme you didn’t choose. Still operating inside a label that was handed to you so gently you didn’t even notice you’d accepted it. If that’s you. You’re not broken. You’re just due an update.

Until next time

Listen to the full episode here:

Take what resonates and leave the rest.

J’K

The film, The Matrix, showed us so clearly that we create our reality and we have the ability to change it. Reality isn’t fixed. It’s just what we see and, more importantly, what we miss. It’s in the decisions we make and don’t make, in what we believe and don’t believe.

It really comes down to the context of the glitch and how it’s interpreted. In a technical context, a glitch indicates something went wrong. But in the human context, a glitch is a mindset shift, a habit change, or a decision. Each of those activates a disruption which then causes a reality to change.

The Glitch: A Different Way to See Shame

I’ve been sitting with this idea of a “glitch” as a different way of looking at things, especially when it comes to harm and sexual violence. Because alongside the harm, something else often shows up: Shame.

I don’t see shame as something natural or inevitable. I see it as something that’s been created, shaped, and reinforced over time. A weight that quietly says: Stay small. Stay silent. Carry this.

But what if that’s where the glitch is? Not in the harm itself, because that’s real. But in what we’re told to carry afterwards. For me, the glitch is this thought: What if the shame was never mine to hold?

I ask myself this often. Because I’ve come to recognise that my personal operating system had updates installed that should never have been there. Manipulated words. Coercive language. Personal threats. Derogatory labels. Being blamed. Being shamed. None of this is unfamiliar to those with lived experience of sexual violence.

And when I really sit with that… I can see the impact those “updates” have had on how I see myself. So now, the work becomes initiating a glitch, to break the hold of the lie and replace it with the truth.

But let me be honest… uninstalling isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It’s not instant. It’s not clean. And it doesn’t happen all at once. That’s why this isn’t a solution. It’s a lens. Because when I look through it, shame starts to feel less like truth and more like something that’s been assigned. And if something can be assigned, it can also be questioned.

So my self-advocacy game can’t switch off. Why? Because I can’t afford to be passive or compliant in my own life. This is my responsibility to myself, to actively interrupt the story: “This doesn’t belong to me.”

The harm happened. That part is real. But the shame? That was assigned. And now… I get to decide what I carry forward.

The Institutional Agent Smith

I’ve always been curious about Agent Smith. He’s portrayed as the villain, but really, he’s a mirror. A reflection of the institutions and agencies that were created to protect, heal, and support us.

I see the parallels. Structured. Efficient. Task-driven. On paper, that sounds like a good thing. But when systems become only about delivery, they can lose the very people they were built for. I see organisations with access to stories, research, and data. They know what’s happening, and yet, the connection to real lives, real pain, and real urgency still feels out of reach.

In the UK, 70,000 women and girls are affected by violence every year. I can’t shake the thought of what happens if nothing fundamentally changes. Do we quietly accept that number doubling or quadrupling? That’s not just a trend line; it’s a collective failure.

Institutions hold a duty to centre the citizen, not as a concept, but as a lived reality. Intention without accountability moves nothing. If they continue to operate like “Institutional Agent Smith” efficient, detached, self-preserving, then the risk is escalation.

The Physicality of the Punch

I know what it’s like to be punched in the stomach so hard that you double over and gasp for breath. That’s what the “not guilty” verdict felt like. It was a second punch that left me winded for years.

For a long time, I lived in the “installed silence” that follows a hit like that. I was hitting milestones and looking successful, but I was still living in the verdict. I was compliant with the version of me the system created.

But a glitch doesn’t ask for permission. It happens without warning, a sudden spike in the static.

The power isn’t in initiating the glitch; it’s in being open to it when it appears. It’s that split second where you choose to uninstall the lie. It’s the decision to move away from living in the verdict of “Not Guilty” and instead stand taller in your own truth.

A “Not Guilty” does not invalidate my truth. The system’s failure to record what happened doesn’t change the fact that it happened.

In that split second, you take the red pill. You stop being a “result” of the system’s decision and you start being the person who knows their own story. The glitch is the opening; the truth is what you do with it.

Recording this episode has empowered me even more to continue on my mission: to encourage those with lived experience of sexual violence to consider the narratives that have been sold to us about who we are because of our experience.

We are more than the experience, and we have so much to bring to this world.

Listen to Episode 17: Be the Glitch

J’K

Ps. Thank you! for inspiring this episode and reflection.

Let’s discuss in the chat.

Reflection Footnotes

“The glitch is the opening; the truth is what you do with it.”

• Identifying the Updates: Take a moment to look at the stories you tell yourself about your worth. Which of those stories feel like your own, and which feel like updates that were installed by someone else, such as an institution, an experience, or a verdict?

• The Weight of the Verdict: If you have been winded by a systemic failure, how can you move away from living in that verdict and toward standing in your own truth? Remember that a system’s inability to record the truth does not erase the truth.

• Recognising the Static: Glitches often happen without warning. Are you currently seeing static in your life, such as moments of discomfort or sudden realisation? Instead of smoothing them over to stay compliant, consider what happens if you lean into that disruption.

• Uninstalling the Lie: What is one specific lie you are ready to uninstall today? It does not happen all at once, but the act of naming it is the first step in activating a glitch.

Most people skip this part. They want the structure without the survey. They want to rebuild without understanding the lay of the land, without first sitting honestly with what was broken. But Nehemiah understood something: you can’t build on a foundation you haven’t inspected. You can’t know what you need until you’ve looked at what’s actually there.

What he found wasn’t just rubble. It was a map. A set of specific gates, each with a specific function:

• The Valley Gate: The vulnerable entry point. This is the place where the hidden things lived.

• The Dung Gate: Where the waste was removed. This represents the shame and guilt that had accumulated and didn’t belong to the inhabitant. For a long time, the label ‘Victim’ sat in that gate, blocking the exit. I had to realise that correcting that label wasn’t just semantics—it was a systemic override. I had to become the glitch in the story that said I was damaged, just so I could finally be free.

• The Broad Wall: The thick, massive section built to withstand immense pressure.

I’ve walked my own perimeter. In the dark, mostly. I have found all of these gates in my own life.

I used to think my hyper-vigilance was a character flaw. I thought my “Superwoman Cape” was just who I was. This was the version of me that was the most reliable person in the room while I was crumbling inside.

Dr Gabor Maté describes trauma not as the event itself, but as what happens inside you as a result of the event. It is a disconnection. The nervous system learns over time to stay “on.” It is scanning, bracing, and protecting even when the original danger has long passed.

When survival becomes scar tissue, it stops being flexible. In the clinical world, we talk about the “survivor” stage as a biological success because it reduces immediate distress.

You survived. You are here. However, staying in that stage too long can lead to what researchers call “static endurance.” It protects the wound, but it cannot move the way healthy tissue can.

The strategies that kept me alive eventually began to cost more than they gave. These included:

• Chronic overworking.

• Personal and professional rigidity.

• An endless, exhausting “yes.”

• A need for everything to be exactly right.

• Mental and behavioural problems.

Realising that these issues weren’t me failing, but were signals and information as to what was going on internally. This is the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. To help me survive, respond, and make sense of life.

Understanding the role of my nervous system has changed the way I relate to myself. I don’t force change the way I used to. I don’t beat myself up in the name of growth.

Instead, I find myself asking, “What would make this feel safe?”

Because real change… doesn’t happen through pressure. It happens through safety.

I keep thinking about how a pearl is formed. Not through force or control. But through a natural process… over time… under the right conditions.

So… If nature allows that level of regulation… why wouldn’t I allow it for myself?

What I know now is this: My nervous system has been a faithful, loyal companion long before I had the awareness to recognise it. Protecting me, responding for me, and holding patterns I didn’t yet understand.

And maybe that’s why it felt so abstract for so long…

Because I was trying to fix myself instead of learning how to listen.

The shift from Survival to Thriving is a distinct psychological leap known as Post-Traumatic Growth. It is the moment where you stop asking how to get through today and start asking who you are becoming because you are still here. Data shows that this shift happens when we move from pessimism to possibility.

The Japanese practice of Kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold. The cracks are not hidden. They are filled with gold and made visible. The philosophy is that the breakage is part of the history of the object. It is not something to conceal. It is something to integrate.

Healing is not erasing the past. It is integrating it into a limitless future. It’s recognising that while my “Broad Wall” was built for a siege, I am now living in a season of peace. I don’t have to tear down the wall to enjoy the garden, but I do have to learn how to open the gates.

The pearl is still forming. The cracks are still being filled with gold. The fortress is under maintenance. This is not because it failed, but because the inhabitant is growing.

That is what I know now. Not because someone told me, but because I walked the perimeter in the dark and looked honestly at what was there.

The architecture you built was always brilliant. The question is only whether you are ready to live in a larger room….

J’K

If you haven't already, listen to Episode 16 of the podcast, where I go even deeper…

Let’s discuss in the chat.

Article Footnotes & Reflections

• Key Concepts: Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG), The Nehemiah Framework, Nervous System Regulation, Gabor Maté’s Trauma Theory, Kintsugi.

• The Big Question: What is the difference between surviving and thriving after trauma? (This piece explores the shift from “static endurance” to the “architectural growth” of integration).

• A Prompt for the Reader: I walked my perimeter in the dark. If you are walking yours right now, which gate are you standing at? Is it the Valley, the Dung, or the Broad Wall?

Thanks for reading Like Me After Episode reflection! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work..

It was permanent because nobody knew about it. Now we know. And what we know, we can move. It is not cement.

The aim, for all of us, is to shift it from permanent to temporary. But that requires work. From everyone in the ecosystem. The survivor advocating for herself. The supporter showing up. The workplace making a deliberate choice.

That is what this episode is about.

What’s in this episode

This is the third episode in a trilogy on gender-based violence and its economic consequences. EP 13 named the hijack. EP 14 named the tax. EP 15 names the responsibility.

You don’t need to have listened to the previous episodes to follow this one. But if you want the full picture of where the 12% comes from and what it costs, they’re there when you’re ready.

The story I open with

During one of the most difficult periods of my life, a court case, clinical depression, a five-day week I couldn’t sustain, I made a move.

I approached a colleague. She was looking to reduce her hours. I needed room to breathe. Between us, we built a proposal for a job share. I researched the process, made the case, presented it. It was approved.

Two and a half days back. Days I gave to myself.

“I had to look for the room to breathe. And go after it.”

I’m not telling you this because job shares are the answer. I’m telling you this because I had to find the answer myself. Nobody handed it to me.

What this episode covers

For the survivor, at whatever stage you’re at: your legal rights under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, how NDAs work both ways, workplace rights and leverage, financial documentation, and your personal strategy.

“There is no single template. But there is a principle: find the lever, build the case, make your move.”

For the supporter: you are already in it. The moment you know, there is no neutral position. This episode is direct about the difference between comfort and action, and what both look like in practice.

“Choosing not to act is still a choice. And it has consequences for the person you say you care about.”

For HR and the workplace: in female-managed organisations, perpetrators are significantly more likely to be dismissed. In male-managed organisations, the female employee leaves. Same act. Different outcome.

“The question is not whether you have a role. It’s whether you’re playing it deliberately or by default.”

On the restitution vision

I’ve been thinking about how to make perpetrators pay. Really pay. Not just with time. Not with a verdict that lets them walk. Not with a sentence that leaves their financial foundation completely intact.

And the answer that kept coming back was money.

So I went digging. And what I found was this: the tools to reclaim the 12% already exist in UK law. The Deduction from Earnings Order. Pension Sharing Orders. The Proceeds of Crime Act. Each one created to correct a financial imbalance. Each one already working in other contexts.

“Connect the pipes. Apply these same tools to the 12% survivor tax to creates an Restititution Fund for surviours.”

Automatic. Offender-funded. Structural.

“This is not radical. This is accounting.”

Who is already doing this work

Surviving Economic Abuse, the only UK charity dedicated specifically to raising awareness of and transforming responses to economic abuse, successfully campaigned to get economic abuse legally recognised under the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. Their work is directly connected to everything this trilogy has been exploring. survivingeconomicabuse.org

The Prime Minister has named economic abuse a national emergency. UK Finance has called for perpetrators to stop keeping the proceeds of their abuse. The conversation is happening.

“The question is whether it moves from conversation to consequence.”

The anchor line for this episode

“The gap doesn’t close itself. Everyone in the room has a move to make.”

Listen to EP 15 here

If this episode moved something in you, share it. Not because the numbers matter. Because she might need to hear it today.

Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

J’K

April is always an interesting month for me. For years, it has been the start of a season of endings, new beginnings, and transition, a reminder that life never takes a break from serving the ying and yang of life.

As I finished recording this episode, I felt the timing of this topic align with my soul in an unexpected way. My aim was to share the truth behind the numbers of the 12% “survivor tax”. To follow the money, essentially, to find an anchor to vent the injustice. Because why are those with lived experience penalised, and how is this okay and normal? That question wasn’t answered, but I did come to my own conclusions.

What I got was an acknowledgement of my own journey, navigating, fighting, and being creative to ensure I got what I needed during those dark seasons, which had no defined duration or expiry date. Honestly, I was grateful to just make it through the day.

I have a sense of pride in myself because I didn’t drown. I survived and made it to the shore, carrying with me the lessons and wisdom as my certificate of accomplishment. If you can call it that.

But alongside that pride, there is a weight. A sadness that doesn’t sit in my head. It settled in my body. Specifically in my stomach, in the space where I’ve come to understand emotion truly lives.

The body often knows before the mind has the words. The gut responds to grief and unprocessed experience long before we have rationalised it. What I felt in my solar plexus wasn’t just a mood. It was physiological. It was my body finally meeting a truth that my intellect had been given a cost to. Twelve percent.

Sitting with that number, I felt a ripple of grief for what can’t be reclaimed. I felt it for the ones who couldn’t keep swimming. And for the fact that it took until 2026 for this theft to be measured. But empathy is only the first movement.

The system was never built for those of us with lived experience. This is even more true for African, Caribbean, Asian, and the global majority. For many, a twelve percent tax on their energy is the difference between sinking or surviving.

This episode reminded me that my natural nature is not to wait. If I want or need something, I will do what’s needed. So honestly, how much have I been affected by this rude, invisible tax? Somewhat. But because I didn’t know about it, it didn’t have power over me. However, I can see where it has indirectly been the shadow.

I am not waiting for the system to catch up. I never have. What I know for sure is that I am more interested in the alternative route. The sustainable wins we can claim right now when we stop fighting ourselves and start navigating the weather.

As I continue to glide through this enquiry, I’m leaning into three places to stand:

• Your body is not wrong. The heaviness you feel isn’t a lack of resilience. It is a response to a structural weight. You didn’t fall behind because you weren’t enough. You were taxed in secret.

• Discretion is not a safety net. We cannot rely on a system where support is a feeling rather than a rule. Recognising the gap allows you to stop blaming your performance. It lets you start protecting your peace.

• Autonomy is the oxygen mask. The data is clear. Financial and professional autonomy is a shield. Building your buffer is a radical act of self-care. It was swim or sink for me. I chose to swim, and the shore was worth the thrash.

I’m learning to sit with the discomfort because that is where the light breaks through. That isn’t toxic positivity. It is the reality of the journey. I’m starting to trust that the enquiry itself is the content.

What question is this leaving you with that you want to sit with this week?

Take what resonates. Leave the rest.

J’K

Listen to previous episodes