Sarah Patrick recalls the headlines “looming ominously” on the front pages of The Globe and Mail in September and October of 2007.
They included, ‘Born into the abusive grip of a cult’; ‘light sessions and school’s dark past’ and ‘apology for hurt and pain’.
In her book, Binding Shame: Life in a Cult of Obedience, the Algonquin Highlands resident says she could not believe her eyes at the time. She was intensely panicked as she read the articles, in which students she had once taught at Grenville Christian College, near Brockville, related “horrors” of abuse they’d experienced at the school where she’d lived, taught, and before that, been a student for four years.
Fast forward to November 2023, and former students of Grenville Christian College won a class-action lawsuite against the college for physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
Patrick started writing about her experiences at the Community of Jesusi-nspired institution when The Globe broke the stories. She said it began with her recounting her boarding school antics. Then, she wrote about the ‘light sessions’ at Grenville. Patrick describes those in her book as, “where an individual’s faults were publicly and humiliatingly exposed, eliciting a forced confession and change of behaviour.”
She had professor at Metropolitan Toronto University, and author, Sarah Henstra read the work. She said Henstra advised her, “there’s a real story here” but she needed to dig a little deeper.
“But it was incredibly difficult to write about it,” Patrick says. “ My biggest driver for wanting to write was to try to bring these two sides of me together; the person who’d been abused by them, and then the person who became part of the abusive system.”
She said writing the book has been a type of therapy.
Patrick said she was raised in “the tough love” era, and felt Grenville staff were paid to do a job. “At the time, I hated it, but never would have thought it was abuse.” It is only now, as an adult, she concedes there were “aspects of that discipline that were really bad… I can acknowledge that as abuse; public shaming, ostracization, beatings, light sessions…”
She said she was never sexually abused or beaten.
Later becoming a teacher, Patrick recalls she was at times “angry” because her students had freedoms she did not as a pupil, “so I took it out on them.”
Asked about the worst thing she ever did, Patrick said she outed a gay student to the headmaster. “I was worried about getting in trouble for not exposing it… that I would be corrected and disciplined myself, and that kid was disciplined heavily for it.”
However, she said she had been brainwashed from the time she was a student, despite having rebelled and left the college at times.
Nonetheless, she views the book as an apology to former students she may have hurt.
“I can’t please everybody. It’s not going to be enough. I had to write it for me and let the chips fall where they may. I really wanted to bring these two parts of myself together. I was hoping the book would solve that problem and it hasn’t because they are two divergent sides of me and I’m understanding them more and I’m starting to accept it’s OK that it’s not completely reconciled with me.”
Asked about her relationship with God today, Patrick said it’s taken a long time but she has started as a new Christian with a Baptist church – not that she ever blamed God.
“I put my faith in people and not in God and that’s how it went sideways. People are so fallible. I’m not a bad person… things have happened to me… I didn’t cause this to happen and I didn’t deserve it and nobody deserves abuse or perceived abuse.”
Patrick adds living in the Highlands has been healing for her, as “there is a peace here I hadn’t experienced in my life.”
The book is available at Amazon and Master’s Book Store in Haliburton.
