By Stephen Barry
Irish marathon runner Sinead Diver has opened up about the abuse she suffered at the hands of a former teacher and how, after more than three decades, she is finally coming to terms with it.
Diver, from Mayo, has spoken publicly for the first time about the mental and physical abuse she endured over almost three years as a pre-teen in primary school.
She told Jarlath Regan’s An Irishman Abroad podcast about being beaten across the head and forced to kiss her teacher’s shoe in one incident after being wrongly blamed for spilling paint in art class.
“A friend of mine spilled one of the paint bottles and some paint fell on her shoe. She knew it wasn’t me who did it but she picked on me and was whacking me across the head for not being careful with the paint.
Then she made me kiss her shoe because paint had spilled on her shoe. I have so many crazy stories about the things she did.
“I’d go to school and she would hit me a lot and she’d try to humiliate me. It was often more the mental side of things that was difficult.
“I could handle the physical abuse but she’d try to break me mentally a lot. But I wouldn’t cry, I wouldn’t let her [break me]. I would just switch off and that used to frustrate her no end.”
Diver was one of the quieter, more studious kids in the class which made her a target, knowing Diver wouldn’t tell her parents.
The teacher left the school when Diver was halfway through sixth class. “It was the best day of my life,” she says, but the abuse lived on.
She remained resentful of what she had taken from her as a child and struggled to deal with social anxiety.
“I became very anxious in social situations as a result of the abuse from her. That was for 20 years of my life so I blame her for that, absolutely.
“It’s taken me a long time to get over that and not be anxious in certain situations, particularly talking in front of large groups, because of the things she would have done in the classroom in front of all of the other kids, just humiliating things.
The worst thing was I kept it all to myself, I didn’t tell mum and dad. I was afraid because I was the child, she was the adult, I thought I must be doing something wrong.
“It’s definitely not a good idea to bottle it up and feel like you’re the person in the wrong because it takes years to fix that. The longer you leave things bottled up, it festers a bit more.”
Diver, who took up running in 2010 after the birth of her eldest child, has never sought the help of a professional therapist, which she suggests contributed to it taking her so long to fully learn to live with that aspect of her past.
Now, she is on track to represent her adopted Australia, where she has lived since 2002, in the marathon at next year’s Olympics. She is the fourth-fastest Australian female marathoner of all-time, and second-fastest Irishwoman behind Catherina McKiernan, having finished seventh at the London Marathon last April.
Diver even says she has managed to turn her bullying demons into a form of mental toughness to help with her running.
“I’ve never spoken about it before. My family knows, and a couple of friends. It took me a long time to get over a lot of the abuse she inflicted but I think it has, bizarrely, made me a lot stronger mentally.
“It’s taken me 30 years or more to almost come to terms with it and to kind of get a benefit from it. It’s had a huge impact on my life negatively so it’s good to finally get a positive out of it.
“When I think of it now, I was Eddie’s age. And I look at Eddie, my son, who’s nine, and when I think of the things she used to do to us, I just think what a horrible person.”