💻 Keeping Your Website: A Valid and Empowered Choice
Your website is more than digital real estate. It’s your business, your identity, your contribution to the world. It may also be your emotional anchor — something you’ve built brick by digital brick, especially when other parts of life have felt uncertain.
Things you can do to secure it:
- Change all passwords immediately — and use a password manager like Bitwarden or 1Password.
- Two-factor authentication (2FA) on everything — email, hosting provider, CMS (like WordPress), social accounts linked to the site.
- Limit who can access your site backend — if anyone else had access in the past, revoke it.
- Backup your content regularly — both on a hard drive and in the cloud.
- Install security plugins — like Wordfence for WordPress. It monitors and blocks suspicious activity.
- Consider a cyber security audit — a small investment now could save you distress later.
🚨 Advice from Guardia Civil: Safety Without Constriction
What they’ve advised is wise: increase security and limit the flow of personal info — but not your life. Not your joy. Not your routine. Abusers thrive on control and fear, and the worst aftermaths happen when we shrink ourselves down to avoid conflict.
Here’s a survival strategy that blends courage with caution:
- Special phone connected to Guardia Civil: keep it charged, with alerts on. Let it be your lifeline, not your leash.
- Daily life routines: Keep them. Yoga class? Go. Work meetings? Attend. Coffee with trusted friends? Absolutely.
- Secrecy ≠ Isolation: Don’t tell everyone where you are, but stay emotionally connected to safe people. Use encrypted apps like Signal for trusted conversations.
- Stay visible professionally, invisible personally: Post your work content, not your location or movements.
⚔️ Living With the Abuser vs. Nuclear Fallout After Separation
“I am not sure what is worse: living with the abuser or the nuclear fallout after separating.”
This captures what so few outsiders understand.
Leaving an abuser is not the end of the nightmare — it can be the beginning of a new warzone. You’re facing what psychologists call post-separation abuse, which often includes:
- Legal intimidation and manipulation
- Stalking or surveillance
- Character assassination
- Financial sabotage
- Isolation tactics or attempts to erase your social identity (like pushing you off social media)
But here’s the truth:
- Living with an abuser erodes your core sense of self.
- The fallout after separation tests your resilience, but it does not destroy it.
And here you are — speaking, choosing, refusing to be erased. That matters.
🛡️ Emotional & Psychological Anchors
Even when you’re in survival mode, you need nourishment — emotionally, spiritually, somatically.
- Affirm your reality daily: “He may try to break what I’ve built, but I am not what he breaks.”
- Grounding rituals: Carry a stone in your pocket. Touch your heart when you feel panic rising. Light a candle when you work — symbols of light and control matter.
- Journal in code if needed — even a few words in a locked note app. Your voice deserves a space.
- Hold onto your future self — the one on the other side of this, telling your story to inspire others. Because that woman exists, and she’s waiting.
🧠 Remember This (Neuroscience + Healing Insight)
Your nervous system is likely in high alert. Fight/flight/freeze/fawn — they may all cycle through in a single hour.
But regulation is possible even in chaos.
Every act of agency — updating your website, replying to a client, choosing your lunch — reinforces that you are not helpless. This is how trauma recovery begins: not with grand peace, but with micro-moments of choice.
