Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: I was unable to perform to the best of my abilities during 2015-2016, my freshman year, due to personal circumstances beyond my control and that have directly affected my academic performance. I am requesting credit standing in BIOL 102, CHEM 112, MATH 121, and PHYS 117, seeking approval to drop BIOL 103 (2016 winter term) past the deadline. I will no longer pursue a theatre minor with my Science major. Below I describe the circumstances that led to my poor performance during my freshman year at Queen's. I then propose my plan to put myself on a path to success at Queen's. Please accept this appeal and grant me the opportunity to continue my undergraduate studies.


CIRCUMSTANCES

1. I have quietly suffered my entire pre-university life from the effects of severe and repeated ill treatment at the hands of my mother. In 1990, six years before I was born, my mother was involved in a car accident that left her with major frontal lobe brain damage. Her mental and emotional faculties are permanently diminished. Post-accident, she was diagnosed as having the intellectual capacity of a 13 year-old and a sub-normal IQ. In 1994 a Court Order was issued against her, declaring her mentally incompetent to manage her own affairs. My mother¿¿s mental condition has impacted me throughout my life. I have been the target of her extreme ongoing mental abuse (sudden mood changes, violent anger, irritability, depression, taunting, insults, shouting hateful things about me, scorn) which has had a cumulative effect on my self-esteem and my overall psychological makeup.

Please see the following documents:
¿¿ Court Order, dated March 1994, against my mother Gillian Broughton (maiden name) brought by her father (Michael Broughton);
¿¿ Neuropsychological Report dated November 27, 1995 assessing the condition of Gillian Garnons Williams by Dr. Geraldine Schwartz, p.8, Summary of Academic Skills, and p. 9, Summary of WAIS-R Scores;
¿¿ Affidavit of Dr. Clement Williams, sworn September 2000, paragraph 13 and exhibit ¿¿A¿


2. My mother¿¿s mental state began to deteriorate significantly in 2009. She refused all attempts at getting her treatment, and she neglected care of my baby sister and myself. She failed to feed us or make us meals, do basic cleaning, or look after our basic needs. It later became evident that she had also developed a gambling addiction. This negatively affected the well being of our family, but when confronted with her addictive behaviour, she would start screaming, storm out the door to the car, and leave. I remember her doing this several times; each time, she did not come home until the next day, leaving my father to look after me and my sister.

Please see the following documents:
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) dated January 10, 2010 to our family physician Dr. Esguerra, regarding Addictive Behaviours, Lack of Judgement and Lack of Impulse Control, and Socially Inappropriate Behaviour;
¿¿ Custody/Access Assessment of the Garnons-Williams Family by Dr. Francis Smyth, October 2010, pages 15,16,17 (Interview with Christian Garnons Williams), and pages 22-23, (Interview with Carol Hill, Principal of Stephan Leacock Primary School).


3. My mother's actions over the course of my parents¿¿ divorce left me shattered. As a result of my mother¿¿s declining cognitive abilities, declining mental health, and refusal to seek help, and because of the real fear that my mother could hurt us children or herself, my father obtained a court order to have my mother psychologically examined at the Royal Ottawa Mental Hospital. After a month-long stay, my mother was discharged. She refused further medical help and immediately filed for divorce. A very vicious and messy divorce ensued. I was 13 years old. My mother was no less hostile after her month of treatment in mental hospital. I remember her shouting at my father, when I tried to intervene and defend him. She shouted ¿¿I don't love Christian any more. You can have him.¿


4. Not long after, my mother took me and my sister to BC, where we stayed with her family (leaving my father in Ottawa). My sister and I were frightened, because Mom had always told us that these people were monsters¿¿in particular her mother and her step-father. But suddenly, we were supposed to love them and obey them. Toward the end of that trip, on Wednesday February 17, 2010, they packed me and my sister into a car and drove us up to the top of a mountain. It was supposed to be a ski trip. Instead, they cornered me and attempted to force me to falsely accuse my father of sexually molesting both myself and my sister. They took away my cell phone, which had been my lifeline to my father during that trip. Then my mother's step-father slung me over his shoulder, carried me to the edge of the mountain, held me dangling over the edge, and told me that I would never come down from there if I didn't agree to testify against my father. Eventually he shoved me back into the car. The fact that I was sobbing did not deter my mother and her relatives from screaming at me and keeping me cornered for many long hours more. They took turns attempting, through the rest of the day, to convince me that I had somehow been sexually assaulted by my father. They warned me that I, a pre-pubescent boy of 13, I was showing unmistakable signs of developing into future abuser of children, a fate that I could only escape if I placed myself utterly in their hands. In an effort to get me to internalize these false and toxic ideas, I was deprived of personal liberty, frequently yelled at for hours on end in confined spaces, shamed by the family, deprived of communication with the outside world, threatened with the potential of future incarceration, and, when all else failed, isolated and threatened with permanent abandonment and death. I never gave in to their demands, because I knew that their rhetoric and propaganda were lies and falsehoods constructed in an effort to alienate me from my father. This kind of psychological abuse carried on throughout the entire stay with my Mother¿¿s family in British Columbia, and was continued, to a lesser degree, by my mother and in phone calls and frequent visits from her relatives, upon my return to Ottawa.


5. While we were in BC, my mother and her lawyer had a formal accusation delivered to my father, claiming that he had sexually assaulted both myself and my little sister. The accusations were groundless, and common enough in vicious divorce cases, but think my father believed that we, his children, had been turned against him. He was 45 years old. He had a stroke upon reading the accusation. He stayed at the Ottawa Civic Hospital for one month, spending two weeks in the 12-bed Neurology Observation quiet area (for patients in danger of having another stroke), and then another two weeks in a bed on a general recovery ward.

Please see the following documents:
¿¿ Fax dated February 18, 2010 from Gillian Garnons-Williams and her lawyer to my father¿¿s lawyer;
¿¿ Medical Notes dated March 15, 2010 from Dr. Condrut, March 31, 2010 from Dr. Dasilva, and December 3, 2010 from Dr. K. Staples re my father¿¿s hospitalization for his stroke.


6. I heard the news of my father¿¿s stroke from my mother¿¿s family while my sister and I were staying with them in BC. My mother and her family made no attempt at hiding their glee at the possibility of my father's death. For any show of grief or fear for my father¿¿s health, I was chastised, shamed, yelled at, and not allowed to retreat from this cruel treatment or be alone, over extended periods of time. The uncertainty of my father¿¿s condition had me facing the possibility that the constant emotional abuse of my mother¿¿s family would become the norm in my life, and the only option for my adolescence. It was at this point that I seriously considered suicide as a means of escaping the seemingly inevitable fate of constant psychological torture at the hands of my own mother and her family.


7. The relief I felt when I finally did see my father alive and recovering was, to say the least, palpable, since it provided an alternative to suicide as a way out of my mental and emotional suffering. When I was allowed to visit my Dad for the first time during his long recovery from his stroke, I could not bring myself to leave his house and return back to my mother¿¿s, regardless of the temporary court order that required me to do so. I refused to leave him, and my mother called the police, demanding I be returned to her house. The police quickly determined that I was clearly not being held against my will by my father and that I was old enough to decide for myself. To my immense relief, they did not make me go back to my mother's house.

Please see the following document:
¿¿ Custody/Access Assessment of the Garnons-Williams Family by Dr. Francis Smyth, October 2010, pages 15,16,17 (Interview with Christian Garnons Williams), and pages 22-23, Interview with Carol Hill, Principal of Stephan Leacock Primary School.


8. I have lived with my father ever since. (That is, until I moved into Waldron Tower, Queen¿¿s University last September.) I have rarely seen my mother. I would occasionally attempt to talk to her, however her poor mental health, emotional immaturity, and lack of grip on reality drove me to limit our contact to an hour at Christmas and an hour on her birthday. During this time I relied on my father's love, and my participation in high school and community theatre productions as an emotional and psychological support to allow me to attempt a normal life, and to pretend that I had had a perfect childhood.


9. I developed a social support system and coping mechanisms, during elementary and high school years. I coped with my emotional and psychological scars by relying on my father and my one or two friends, and achieved academic success despite my ongoing inner turmoil. I turned out to have some talent for singing and acting: I am the only person ever to win an international Cappie Award for Best Actor in a Musical two years in a row. By the time I left high school (that is, this time last year), I looked and felt successful. At Queen¿¿s, however, the supportive coping mechanisms that I had kept in place to protect myself in my younger years were no longer there. I am, in truth, painfully shy. I still, secretly, feel unworthy, and so I have had difficulty making friends. At Queen's, I tried to build an instant support network by throwing myself into Theatre productions. I exhausted myself and skipped classes, looking for friends and moral support. Gradually over the year I regressed, from the confident and competent young man I try to be, to the shy and severely abused boy who lives on in my mind.


10. Being in this regressively shy state I found myself crashing and completely unable to cope. With the end of the Queen's University theatre production came the loss of the support system I thought I was establishing. I fell into despair in mid-November and began to succumb, struggling with self-image and motivation, and as such had remarkably poor attendance for the last month of the first semester, resulting in sub-par mid-year grades.


11. Throughout my freshman year at Queen's, I hid my predicament from my father and step mother. I was secretive about my problems as I wanted my father, my step mother, and my old drama friends from high school and community theatre to see only the positive side of my new life at university. I shared with no one my true inner state of guilt, self loathing, and self-disgust. In first-year University I showed floor mates, friends and my parents only what I thought they should see: a person who can be successful, despite having lived through a long nightmare of mistreatment.

Please see the following document:
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) and step-mother (Donna Williams) dated May 6, 2016.


12. The 17th of February is the anniversary of the horrific treatment inflicted on me by my mother and her relations. It is the one day of the year when I typically need the most support. On February 17, 2016, after several months of general isolation from social contact, and having long stopped meaningful talks with my father and friends from Ottawa, I found myself vulnerable to a final resurgence of grief, worthlessness, oppressive debilitating anxiety, and painful shyness. On that date this last academic year, I was alone with my demons and without any coping mechanisms within reach. In short, I broke down to a point at which I would not leave my room to eat, felt very anxious about leaving to use the washroom, did not care for my personal hygiene, and refused sleep. It goes without saying that during a time when I was too anxious to leave my room to eat, or even to use the washroom, that I was not able to bring myself to go class. My crippling anxiety kept me out of the classroom, and held me in an unproductive, self-loathing state. I missed out on a considerable amount of class material and learning. I was ill-equipped to properly handle my course load, furthering my lack of participation. My academic performance was as a result poor throughout the year, most notably in the latter half of the winter term.

Please see the following document:
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) and step mother (Donna Williams) dated May 6, 2016.


13. An unfortunate consequence of the psychological abuse at the hands of my mother is that I have difficulty trusting people, and even more difficulty divulging weakness or failures (she would often try to use any weaknesses or fear that I confided in her as a destructive tool against me). These issues were magnified by the resurgence of my trauma and grief. As a result, I refused to seek help, and I lied to acquaintances, to my Don, friends, and father about my academic and emotional wellbeing, in an attempt to hide my weakness. I did not allow myself to even think about dropping the courses I was having difficulty with. This initially self protective measure served only to further alienate and isolate me.

Please see the following documents:
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) dated January 10, 2010 from our family physician Dr. Esguerra, regarding Addictive Behaviours, Lack of Judgement and Lack of Impulse Control, and Socially Inappropriate Behaviour.
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) and step mother (Donna Williams) dated May 6, 2016.



ACADEMIC PLAN FOR SUCCESS

14. To better my chances of a successful future at Queen¿¿s, I must develop healthy methods of dealing with my past. I have a doctor's referral and will be seeing a psychologist in Ottawa over the summer. At Queen¿¿s in the 2016-2017 academic year I will continue treatment with a psychologist in Kingston, ideally one working in partnership with Queen¿¿s. When at last I did reach out and accept help, I first sought emotional and spiritual guidance from Four Directions Aboriginal Student Centre. At Four Directions I have begun developing positive relations with the staff and faculty, who have been consistently supportive and compassionate. During my time of crisis I spoke to Laura Maracle, Aboriginal Student Success Strategist. She has been kind enough to link me up with Taylor Bluhm, Aboriginal Peer Mentor, for the 2016-2017 academic year, so that I may have a resource for academic success as well as success in student life. In the 2016-2017 academic year I will stay in touch with Four Directions so that I may begin the long journey to reconnecting with my Plains Cree status Indian heritage and further express and explore my culture as a member of Moosomin First Nation. I hope to develop a healthier understanding of self, so that I will be less susceptible to a resurgence of grief, and better equipped to develop meaningful, long lasting relationships that will help me to become a more active and more successful member of the Queen¿¿s Community.

Please see the following document:
¿¿ Note from Laura Maracle of Four Directions Aboriginal Student Centre dated April 28, 2016.


15. To begin tackling my personal difficulty with trust, I have finally reached out to my father and step mother about my ongoing emotional conflicts and mental health issues. Although this was at first very difficult for me, it¿¿s been a very healthy and cathartic experience. I was, perhaps irrationally, afraid that in sharing my experience with others I would be setting myself up to once again have my vulnerabilities used against me. I have managed to overcome my fears and begin a new, more honest relationship with my family in which I can feel comfortable reaching out to them for emotional assistance and guidance in times of stress and difficulty. Since sharing with my family I have been able to actively seek out solutions and treatment for the cumulative psychological damage done as a result of my mother¿¿s mental condition, such as getting a referral from my physician for a psychologist in the Ottawa area. This is the start of a new and healthier relationship with my family, and it is my hope that this will be remembered as my first step in completely overcoming my inner sense of unworthiness so that I may never again feel helpless, alone, or unable to ask for aid in times of personal crisis.

Please see the following document:
¿¿ Note from my father (Wayne Garnons-Williams) and step-mother (Donna Williams) dated May 6, 2016.


16. I have developed an academic plan in consultation with my Academic Advisor, Ms. Spring Forsberg. My degree plan is to progress into a Life Science Major, as my true passion has always been to understand the function of the human body. I will no longer pursue a minor in theatre or get involved with time consuming theatre productions. I realize that my missed classes have left gaps in my knowledge of biology and as such, I am currently re taking BIOL 103 over the summer as an Online Course from my home, in Ottawa. This will ensure that I can receive counselling starting in Ottawa and continuing in the fall in Kingston to resolve my longstanding psychological abuse survivor issues. Through professional counseling, frank and honest communication of my real emotions with family and friends, and by accessing support structures at Queen¿¿s (such as Four Directions) I feel I can redress my deficiencies to realise my potential as a strong, passionate, and successful student.