Diane Crocker
SALTWIRE
February 21, 2023
CORNER BROOK, N.L. — Looking back at her life as a follower of the Advanced Training Institute, Christine Faour believes she was “ripe for the picking” to be swept into a life in what she now recognizes as a cult.
Born and raised in Corner Brook, the daughter of Danny and Freida Faour, she now lives in Coldbrook in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia.
In June 2022, she released her memoir “Behind the Dress,” sharing the story of her life in a religious cult.
“I didn’t have much confidence in myself,” Faour told the SaltWire Network as she reflected on how she was so easily brought into the cult by her ex-husband.
She had been raised Catholic and attended university at St. Francis Xaiver University in Antigonish, N.S., then went out west teaching.
Every time she’d visit home, she’d hear of friends who were either getting married or having children and Faour felt like she was being left on the shelf.
She was 29 when she met her ex on a plane and remembers him asking her if she was a Christian. She said yes.
“But he was talking about being a born-again Christian,” and Faour said she was interested in that.
He told her about an Institute in Basic Life Principles seminar that he had attended.
“And that was the beginning of the cult,” she said.
The beginning
The Institute in Basic Life Principles was founded in the United States by Bill Gothard. In seminars. Gothard taught people how to lead successful lives according to his interpretation of Biblical principles.
His followers have included the Duggar family, led by parents Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, and has been featured on TV in shows like “14 Children and Pregnant Again” and “19 Kids and Counting.”
Gothard stepped down from the organization in 2014 after being accused of sexual harassment.
The Duggars’ “19 Kids and Counting” show was cancelled in 2015 after it was revealed their eldest son had assaulted four of his sisters as a young teen. Josh Duggar was convicted in 2021 of downloading child pornography and is currently serving a 12-and-a-half year sentence.
In 1983, Faour attended her first Institute in Basic Life Principles conference with her ex in Toronto.
“It was there that I got indoctrinated.”
Strict rules
The couple later married and settled in Quebec, where they lived by the principle that the husband was the head of the home and the wife had to submit.
That was something her ex told her right after they got married, and while Faour wondered then what she had gotten herself into, she did whatever was required.
They attended an advanced conference after their first child was born. That's where they were introduced to the principles of Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI). It was all about homeschooling and how to protect your children from the evils of the world.
By the time her children reached school age, the family was fully immersed in ATI.
They homeschooled and weren’t allowed to watch TV. Faour said the only time the TV came out of the cupboard was during football season when her ex would watch a game taped for him by a friend.
There was no rock music allowed and the family only listened to Christian hymns and classical music. They were vegan for a few years. She stopped wearing pants.
“I didn’t wear a pair of pants for 14 years because women were supposed to wear long skirts. We were supposed to cover up all our body parts.”
Eventually, they started house churching.
“We just got in every bandwagon going," she says.
“We became so weird. Nobody could put up with the likes of us.”
“We became so weird. Nobody could put up with the likes of us.”
— Christine Faour
'I was the weirdest person that I knew'
While she followed along with everything, Faour was unhappy. She felt like she could never satisfy her husband and was mentally, physically and sexually abused by him.
He was in control, and she felt like a failure.
When her mother would ask her if she was happy, Faour would say everything was OK. Under ATI, women were never supposed to give a bad report.
Because she had been so brainwashed, Faour still had no idea that she was in a cult.
In 2004, her marriage ended when her ex, a man who had given courses on marriage and how to have strong relationships, left her for another woman.
“And when he left me, I realized that I was the weirdest person that I knew because my thinking was so different than everybody else’s," she says.
"I was very judgmental and opinionated.”
Starting to heal
She spent the next five years alone but carried her old life with her.
“Every time I put on a pair of pants, I would feel guilty,” she said.
She reconnected with an old friend from her university years, moved to Nova Scotia and got remarried, but found managing her life difficult.
“Because I was thinking differently than everybody else,” she explains.
She had always written, and in 2014, just before her mother died, she wrote a series of blogs about being positive. During her research, she stumbled across a song from the cult that led her to the Recovering Grace website.
Advanced Training Institute | Recovering Grace
recoveringgrace.org
Through the website, she found an ATI parent recovery group on Facebook and joined.
It was only then that it hit her that she’d been in a cult.
With the realization came a time of deprogramming that took her seven years. She sought help from psychologists but found that none of them could relate to what happened to her.
She is lot better now, but the healing continues.
She knows her ex-husband got her into the cult but also recognizes that she went along with it. Now, she realizes, she thought that by doing so, and always trying to do things better, that her life would be easier.
“But my life was never easier.”
Along the way, her writing became an outlet to help with her healing as she wrote about her life, at times looking at the situation she was in and the way she lived with humour, and would then share it with members of a writing group she is in. Those writings would form “Behind the Dress.”
It took her four years to write the book.
She was afraid it would hurt her children, who suffered under ATI, or inflame her ex-husband, but she wanted to tell her story.
“It made me see clearly. I felt understood finally,” she said.
Her children have read the book. It’s given them an understanding of those years, but Faour herself has yet to read the completed book.
She wishes her mother was alive to read it and see who she is now and that she has come back to her old way of thinking.
“I guess what I feel more than anything now is I feel free and I feel like I can see clearly. As a result of writing my book and telling my story my confidence is back, my moxie is back.”
https://www.saltwire.com/newfoundland-labrador/news/how-a-newfoundland-woman-found-herself-trapped-in-a-cult-by-her-ex-husband-christine-faour-sharing-story-of-her-life-with-the-advanced-training-institute-100826846/
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