Behind the mask of the survivor.

NOrth american Boarding School Survivors Workshop

The Outside is both honoured and excited to be organizing the first “Boarding School Survivors Workshop” in North America. This is not to be confused with Indigenous Residential and Boarding Schools, especially as we are hosting in Lnu territory.

The focus of this workshop is largely on the elite boarding schools that children, largely from middle to upper class families, are sent away to from as young as 7 years old.

From Tim Merry: “The experience of the workshops exploring my childhood in British private boarding school was pivotal for me in my personal journey and I hope could be for others. The ability to understand and articulate the experience and trace the filaments of abandonment and abuse that some of us endured in the “classiest” of educational settings, is critical to healing.”

There will be two fantastic workshop leaders coming over from the UK to run the Workshop. One of them, Marcus Gottlieb, has been Tim’s therapist for the last 6 years.

Please read below for more info on the program:

Join us for the first North American Boarding School Survivors Workshop.

Does your humour 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 of healing the scars is in therapeutic groups guided by a strong facilitation team.

This workshop is aimed at men who have lived through the boarding school experience and to some degree recognise that they have suffered from a developmental trauma. The workshop is particularly suited to those who have never fully shared their experiences, as well as to those who feel they may not have yet lived their true potential. They might be struggling in their intimate relationships, or finding themselves at a loss as to how and why they self sabotage. They might be feeling emotionally flat or disproportionately angry or unregulated or simply have a sense that they are not living up to their potential - surviving rather than living, behind a socially acceptable mask. 

Boarding school often proves a disastrous preparation for the adult world. Commonly, ex-boarders emerge as chronically guarded men, defensive, withholding or detached in relationships, ‘strategic’ rather than honest when navigating conflicts with their partners, dominated by the twin imperatives of staying (often covertly) in control and keeping out of perceived ‘trouble’. The child was taught only too well how to be a private, self-reliant, coping individual. When it comes to adult, intimate relationships, there is a need to recover spontaneity, to experience and express our true feelings, including often anger or hurt, and to be willing to take some risks. Excessive caution and calculation are a huge obstacle.

Many ex-boarders struggle to know how to love and to communicate with their partner and connect with their children or meet their needs. Unable to relax, former boarders frequently have a difficult relationship with authority and little idea what they themselves need or want, are terrified of failure, feel fraudulent and unlovable, and bury themselves in work or in furthering the needs of some institution to which they have attached themselves.

It is crucial for a child’s healthy development that someone is so invested in you that they really care if you have a smile on your face in the morning, that they have a close, personal interest in your welfare, and that you deeply know you are special to them. A school can contain, instruct and shape you, and even offer some enjoyment or entertainment, but it is impossible for it to love you. It cannot instil a deep sense of security and self-knowledge, or patiently support the organic, holistic growth process of the child. Parents need to be present in their children’s lives to co-regulate, to mirror back and validate the child’s feelings and experience, whatever their age. Substituting an institution for parents, or other stable attachment figures, deprives a child of a key formative experience - the daily, personal engagement, love and protection which a ‘good enough’ parental relationship provides.

The core concern of any institution is its own welfare, its financial health principally. This is an unnatural context for child rearing and no substitute for parents and a family. The absence of safe touch is also deeply unnatural and toxic. And, as is true for any developmental trauma, the younger the child, the more severe and long lasting the effect. But whether you were sent away at 6 or at 13 - however you consciously felt about it - you were too young to have the bond with your parents and family severed or disrupted.

This common sense perspective is obscured by elements which can be sold as ‘privilege’. The schools are often expensive and socially exclusive, and may come with such advantages as small class sizes and extensive sports facilities. However, the untiring efforts of British psychotherapists such as Nick Duffell and Joy Schaverien - who coined ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ - and a growing number of ex-boarders who have gone public about their experiences, have exposed the true facts about this socially-sanctioned, even prized, form of child abandonment.

Whether sent away to the classic British boarding school, or institutionalised by the Catholic church in continental choir schools, or reared in hot-house residential sports academies, or Eastern European orphanages, or residential schools for Canadian First Nations and others, similar phenomena can be seen in the products of these places - adults who find themselves trapped in unregulated anger and other behavioural and emotional states that are hard to comprehend or master. Some are very functional in institutional and professional settings but find themselves hopelessly ill equipped to regulate their feelings. So they struggle with addiction, self harm or self sabotage, or find it hard to form healthy relationships and once in them are at a loss as to how to feed and sustain them.

Want to know more about the Workshop experience?

This highly innovative and welcoming workshop consists of two distinct parts: a 5-day residential intensive and a 2-day residential ‘process’ workshop, 4 months apart. And, since the schools were, in general, single sex, we are offering this particular workshop for men only.

What we are aiming for can be summarised as: the unlocking of agency, tools for emotional regulation, psycho- education to give context and perspective on the trauma suffered, body-oriented experiential learning and uncovering structures and, most importantly, a group experience that can begin to reverse and ‘antidote’ what was in all likelihood a harsh, unsafe and wounding experience of group settings.

Five-Day Residential Intensive

The 5-day intensive will focus on how you are living and experiencing life in the here and now while also diving deep into the experience of the school. The first step is to recognise the effects of what you learned as a child in the pressured environment of boarding school. This involves acknowledgement and often a fairly painful acceptance of the survival strategies you used and adaptations you made which will have long since become second nature to you. Sadness or anger or grief sometimes need expression. We then move on to the task of starting to re-learn ways of living a rewarding life outside of institutions. The ultimate goal is to become an adult at ease and in ‘right relationship’ with himself, with full access to agency and natural spontaneity, equipped with the empathy, openness and capacity to set boundaries - the necessary qualities for enjoying satisfying, rewarding emotional bonds with those around you, fulfilling and truly intimate adult relationships and finally to be able to ‘enjoy the blessing of being you’.

Two-Day Follow-Up ‘Process’ Workshop

The 2-day follow-up ‘process’ workshop is designed to help the participants refocus their healing work, to look at main stumbling blocks that might have appeared in the interim, and to refresh and re-energise the process of recovery.

The workshop is 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.

Participants are never required to go further than they wish. No previous workshop experience is necessary. There is no age limit.

The Facilitation & Organizing Team

INGO VAUK, WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
Ingo is a psychotherapist working with individuals, couples and men’s groups in his practice in Erlangen, Germany. Though Ingo was not sent to boarding school, in the 1940s his mother had been, and from the age of 10 his brother was. With boarding normalized in his family system, Ingo witnessed it from the perspective of a younger sibling. Ingo is trained in Gestalt and Body Therapies, as well as Process and Embodiment focussed Therapy (PEP), and Creative CoupleWork.

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

MARCUS GOTTLIEB, WORKSHOP FACILITATOR
Marcus is a psychotherapist from London, England, working in the tradition of humanistic, integrative, formative and existential psychology. He is an accredited Pesso-Boyden Psychomotor therapist and his approach is also informed by the Alexander Technique, in which he trained for many years, and other forms of bodywork. An ex-boarder himself, since 2005 he has been learning from foremost BSS experts Nick Duffell, Helena Løvendal and Joy Schaverien.

He sees individuals and couples, volunteers as a workshop facilitator with ‘Heal For Life’ and works with Mavar to support ex- Chasidim looking to explore new paths beyond ultra-orthodoxy.

Learn more by visiting: https://nottinghilltherapy.co.uk and www.bodyinmind.london

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 6-10, 2024
Session 2: October 5 & 6, 2024
*participants are required to commit to all of the dates above.

Cost: $1,750 USD / participant
Location: Oak Island Resort & Conference Centre, Nova Scotia, Canada
Application*: CLICK HERE

*Space is limited to 20 participants

Cost includes registration, snacks and lunch. 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.

The organisation Boarding School Survivors has a longstanding programme based in London, England. Please click HERE for a full list of all Workshops, for men and women, taking place in 2024/2025.

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 (1986-1995) & Workshop Organizer