Boarding School Survivors Workshop.

Inaugural north american workshop

Boarding school survivors are characterized by many positive qualities. Often there is an individuality and a creativity, a self-confidence, resilience and stoicism, an ability to tough things out, and a capacity to endure privations with good humor. But there are costs too.

Does your humor cover profound emotional and spiritual wounds?

Did you separate a part of you to survive your schooling?

Is it difficult to trust others, be vulnerable and experience love?

For more than thirty years therapists in the UK have been pioneering recovery programmes for adult ex-boarders. Experience has shown that the most effective means is in therapeutic groups of men or women guided by a strong facilitation team.

This programme is open to those who were sent away to boarding school as children and who now want to consider the effects on their lives and look for pathways to recovery. The workshops are particularly suited to those who have never fully shared their experiences, as well as to those who feel they may not have yet fully lived their true potential.

The participant experience will form the foundation of the sessions, to help us understand the past and choose the future. Participants are never required to go further than they wish. No previous workshop experience is necessary. There is no age limit.

Want to know more about the Workshop experience?

The participant experience will form the foundation of the sessions, to help us understand the past and choose the future. Participants are never required to go further than they wish. No previous workshop experience is necessary. There is no age limit.

The workshop uses a range of methods, including meditative, gestalt and cognitive techniques, but as a participant you are never required to go further than you wish. The ways you adapted to boarding school in order to survive there are due respect, and it is not an expectation or requirement that you start to dismantle them overnight. But there is value in exploring them.

Recognition of each others’ wounds

We were taught only too well how to be private, self-reliant, coping individuals. When it comes to adult, intimate relationships, we need to recover spontaneity, self-expression, the willingness to risk and be hurt. Our caution and calculation are a huge obstacle.

Boarding school was sold to us as something that made us special and uniquely loved. We had the good fortune to have parents able and willing to make great sacrifices so that we would have a head start in life. These were places renowned for breeding strength of character, self-confidence and the qualities of leadership that would guarantee us status and success.

Is it surprising, then, that we find it such a challenge to speak about the actual joylessness of our lives back then, the pain of enforced separation, the emotional withdrawal, the sense of being trapped, the torment of isolation that was in reality a large part of our daily existence, along with the shame we may still feel for apparently ‘failing’ despite such a ‘privileged’ start?

Accepting our wounds and healing our scars

We were sent away to an institution that could feed us, educate us, teach us sports and social skills and how to be a confident manipulator, but one that could never give us a parent’s love.

The boarding schools we attended were full of contradictions and paradox. Within their security many of us learned to do well without our parents being around, but also to disown our fears and our needs.

While excellence was pursued, many were bullied or intimidated; while individuality was encouraged, hierarchical structures produced conformists or rebels, and sometimes casualties.

While physical, intellectual and religious values were professed, we learned to repress our feelings and fear our sexuality, thereby losing a sense of being whole.

Understanding our ‘strategic‘ behaviour as adults

We adapted, of course, to this abrupt, bewildering, catastrophic alteration in our young lives. We learned the rules, kept ourselves busy and, hid our longing for our home and family. We could not share our needs and vulnerability with others, and pretty soon we cut ourselves off from our loving feelings, because to miss as much as we did would be too painful to bear for long. How did we survive in a cold, rule-bound place where everything soft, warm and feminine was starkly absent? How did we learn to compensate, and how do we live this out today?

Now we may find ourselves experiencing problems in our lives – with our emotions, our relationships, our careers – which could have their roots in our schooldays, and in the need to survive which drives us to this very day. These difficulties could offer an invitation to look back, to tell our story, and perhaps to redeem something from our childhood.

The Facilitation & Organizing Team

MARCUS GOTTLIEB, WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
Marcus works in his native city of London as a psychotherapist seeing individuals and couples, and also as a teacher of the Alexander Technique, and as a Pesso-Boyden Psychomotor therapist and group facilitator. He is an experienced leader on Men’s Boarding School Survivors workshops, and does voluntary work on ‘Heal For Life’ residentials and with the charity Mavar supporting young Hasidic men looking to explore new paths beyond ultra-orthodoxy.

At the tender age of 12, to the utter delight of his second generation British father, he was granted a scholarship to a highly prestigious English ‘public’ school. Five years there turned him into a furious, albeit confused, young man, who exacted a certain revenge, albeit in a self defeating way, by sabotaging his university career and then legal career. Hitting rock bottom at 35 he entered therapy and at 38 he embarked on a re-training and an exploration of humanistic, integrative, existential, formative and somatic therapies, subjects which still enthral him a quarter century later.

Learn more by visiting: https://nottinghilltherapy.co.uk

INGO VAUK, WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
Ingo is a psychotherapist working with individuals, couples, families and men’s groups in his practice in Erlangen, Germany. Though Ingo was not sent to boarding school, his mother had been in the 1940s, and from the age of 10 his brother was. With boarding normalised in his family system, Ingo witnessed it from the perspective of a younger sibling and retains an outside, as it were ’naive’ position. 

After a twenty year career in the music industry as a musician / producer and writer that took him into studios and the live circuit around the world, Ingo embarked on a life changing journey into psychotherapy.  He trained in Gestalt and Body Therapies, Process and Embodiment focussed Therapy (PEP®), Creative Couple Work and Sexual Grounding Therapy®. As well as being one of the main facilitators in the UK Boarding School Survivors organisation he is part of a team who runs Sexual Grounding Therapy group workshops in Hungary, Germany, France, Russia (until very recently) and Mexico. 

Learn more by visiting: http://www.therapie-wirkt.com/welcome.html

TIM MERRY, WORKSHOP ORGANIZER
I was born into a family with a multi-generational tradition of boarding schools. From age 7, I was in private school as a “day boarder” and started boarding full time from the age 11 until I was 18. The survival skills I learned in these institutions served to make me professionally successful but in a daily internal battle with my own demons. I was lucky to get married to a person and then later find a business partner who both saw the good in me and supported me on my journey to healing and health. It is an absolute privilege to leverage my business, The Outside, to host the first Boarding School Survivors Workshop in North America. I look forward to hosting you.

Tim is an engagement specialist and systems change strategist who works with organizations from all over the world to lead break through change. For over 20 years Tim has helped major international businesses, government agencies, local communities and regional collaboratives to create the conditions for people to organize together and solve their own problems. Tim founded The Outside with Tuesday Ryan-Hart in 2018, and together they have built a remarkable team to spark systems change towards greater equity.

Tim is one of the co-founders of the Art of Hosting and is a supporter and past board member of the Berkana Institute. He founded the Split Rock Learning Centre, a youth drop in centre in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, was one of the founders of Engage InterAct in the Netherlands. In 2019, he launched Mahone Bay United an all inclusive soccer club in his home town of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia.

QUICK OVERVIEW:

Session 1: June 7-10, 2024
Session 2: October 5 & 6, 2024

Cost: $TBC USD
Location: Oak Island Resort & Conference Centre, Nova Scotia, Canada
Application*: CLICK HERE

*Space is limited to 20 participants

Cost includes registration, meals and non-alcoholic drinks (breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner). Payment plans are available.

Accommodation and transportation costs are the responsibilities of each participant.

Please note we reserve the right to reject applications and to cancel or postpone courses, if necessary, in which case full refunds will be made.

INTERESTED?
LET US KNOW by clicking HERE >

“In 2018, following advice from my therapist in Canada, I travelled to the UK for two Boarding School Survivor Workshops. They transformed the trajectory of my life. I managed to get into the root system of my anxiety, struggles in relationships and dysfunctional family dynamics. Since that time I have experienced a steady growth in the happiness of my life, depth of my relationships and fulfillment in my career. The more I get to know myself, the more peace I am able to find with who I am.”

— Tim Merry, Boarding School Survivor (DATES HERE) & Workshop Organizer