Counselling & Psychotherapy
with adults who went to Boarding School
or have family members who went to Boarding School
Since training in The Boarding School Experience in 2011/12 with Nick Duffell (author of The Making of Them, Arrow Press 2000, and co-author of Trauma, Abandonment & Privilege, Routledge 2016) and Joy Shaverien (author of Boarding School Syndrome, Routledge 2015), I have been working with former boarders and partners of former boarders. A core part of my overall training has been my personal therapy, and ongoing curiosity and commitment to my own process – see drawing above and photograph below: my ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures.
I am a member of Boarding Recovery’s group of therapists – www.boardingrecovery.com.
This particular form of education is still predominantly regarded as ‘privileged’ due to educational opportunities and cost. What has largely been ignored until recently is both the impact of being separated from family, friends, pets and home, and the impact of survival 24/7 amongst peers in an institution – whether at a young age or during early teen years: the cost of hiding vulnerability behind a persona that ‘works’ in the highly competitive, achievement-driven environment.
The effects of adapting to the core requirements of Boarding School can linger long into adulthood.
- Are relationships hard for you to sustain? Do you both long for and resist intimacy?
- Are emotions difficult to express?
- Do you dread goodbyes – prolong, rush or avoid them altogether?
- Do you hoard food, money, belongings?
- Are you a ‘workaholic’?
- Are you ‘institutionalised’ – afraid of life beyond comfort-zone?
As an ex-boarder, you may judge yourself a failure for needing help, resist or scorn ‘making a fuss’. As a human being, however, you may discover that sharing with another person how it really was, and identifying the means by which you managed, can make all the difference.
My work is informed by professional study and practice, by personal experience of boarding and by my own therapeutic process, my view being that each and every child – whether or not he/she acknowledges – pays a psychological price for being sent away to school. Even when neglected, emotionally deprived and/or abused at home.
Opportunities of top jobs and positions of leadership are indeed, in our hierarchical-patriarchal culture, increased, though not guaranteed. But however much conditions improve – heating, diet, pastoral care, contact via technology – the intrinsic competitive-in-all-things environment and ‘stiff upper lip’ ethos based on military lines, remains unchanged and applies to both genders; as do the mores regarding being grateful for such a privileged education.
Each child or teenager, transferring from all that is familiar to a strange environment with no loving adult in situ must fit in quickly. Emotional responses are ignored at best, shamed at worst. More than adapting, more than growing resilience or developing coping strategies, the boarding school child must construct a Persona to serve survival. This means splitting off the emotional self, means suppressing, often repressing (‘forgetting’) and dissociating. The outer ‘face’ becomes the known one, to its owner as well as to peers and staff. Which leaves the ‘hidden’ part lurking, dormant, with unmet needs unattended to; and this ‘shadow’ self is liable to present in compulsive-addictive behaviours.
These ‘problems’ may surface due to the birth of a child or death of a parent, or redundancy, illness, moving house, any event or change at all.
If any of what you have read resonates, and you would like to make an initial appointment, or simply ask questions, please email me: jane.barclay@jbcounselling.co.uk or telephone: 33(0)7812983803.
Session fees £70
For additional information, literature and links to documentaries, please visit the website of Boarding School Concern at www.boardingschoolconcern.org.uk and/or email info@boardingschoolconcern.org.uk
Article I wrote for ‘Self & Society’, Vol 38 no 3, 2011
The Trauma of Boarding at School
My attempt to address a collective misunderstanding about boarding, grown from the cultural normalisation of this form of education and promoted as privileged, is based both on my work as therapist and personal experiences of boarding.
Being transported from home to a place utterly strange, and left there, is a traumatic experience – of being rendered unsafe in an instant. The initial startle/shock, unless mobilised into Fight or Flight (the instinctive physiological response to any situation that threatens safety) turns into prolonged shock. This position of held tension will last as long as it’s needed, until deemed safe to release (which may be years ahead, or never). Children away at school are forced to fend for themselves. Whatever the help from peers and encouraging supervision from staff, both likely to be in limited supply, the very process of adaptation that is so highly-regarded as character-building – having to be independent, reliable, tough, on the outside at least – necessitating the formation of an entire survival personality, carries a psychological price that can lead to life-long limitations in adulthood, if not sooner.
Since the mid-twentieth century, research has led to a greater appreciation of children’s need for secure attachment to their central caretaker/s, more recently confirmed by neuro-scientific findings. Children who feel safe will naturally venture forth into the world with curiosity towards healthy independence, as and when they are ready; not, as some fear and often scorn, remain ‘tied to apron strings’. It is the children who are forced to become self-reliant ahead of their natural development who meet the world warily, and form a mistrustful, defended way of being in the world that sets up patterns and habits which later on can severely undermine intimate relationships of all kinds.
The traumatic moment for the child is the realisation that return home isn’t possible. This may happen on the front steps, unpacking the trunk, at the first meal, at bedtime. The protesting energy that surges forth has no outlet and can only collapse into submission. This is indeed the third survival course – the Freeze response – that animals, human ones included, rely on when trapped. In the moment, surrender serves its purpose (often a source of debilitating shame later on), bringing relief from the frustrated Fight/Flight arousal energy (hence striving to discharge it by acheivement in classroom or sportsfield) and allowing for day-to-day functioning. But, whilst surviving thus under enforced conditions comes instinctively, shedding the survival personality afterwards doesn’t – unlike other creatures who return to ‘relaxed alertness’. Ex-boarders have as much difficulty rejoining the wider world as combat veterans, released prisoners and prisoners-of-war (see ‘Trauma & Recovery’, Judith Herman), conditioned to continue living as if still captive, condemned once home to a sense of strangeness, of not-belonging, of islation and of failure (to be happy).
For the first three weeks at prep school, contact with home is firmly discouraged, on the grounds this would upset both children and parents (see documentaries ‘Leaving Home at 8’, 2011, ‘The Making of Them’,1994, and Boarding on Insanity’, 2025). Distress must be avoided at all costs, or the brutality would be exposed and the highly lucrative and power-motivated business cave in. In terms of grooming, this is on a par with any version of ‘It’s for your own good’. I invite you to imagine, if you haven’t experienced the wrench of the first goodbye, or to recall if you have: after parting – whether the brisk kind or distraught clinging – the measures the young child must resort to, to bear the vanishing of all that s/he knows as familiar, replaced with all that is new and scary. (Excitement is akin, hormonely, to fear: release often takes the form of giggling.) Fear and distress are automatically stifled, discouraged by all concerned, and will remain so, to avoid being shamed. In addition, there’s a bewildering amount to discover, usually without help and quickly, without respite. Privacy is non-existent; staff promote occuption as the antidote to homesickness. The adults in charge know that three weeks is the length of time it takes to break a young child’s hope of rescue. By the first outing, each one will have learned to put on a brave face, to withhold complaints, even to count blessings.
At boarding school, as in any institution, inmates are not loved by their caretakers. Children are taught, fed, housed but not day-to-day parented, let alone cuddled. No amount of contact, outings, speech- and match-day visits and weekends home; of teddy at bedtime (if allowed – often shamed into leaving behind), treacle stodge and tuckbox makes up for the certain knowledge that aother goodbye looms. Nor do glossy brochures selling well-furnished study-bedrooms, extra-curricula activites and career opportunities.
Life is a matter of survival, of ‘getting on with it’, dependent upon suppressing (brave face) then repressing altogether (scorning) intolerable longing; upon eking out rations of both food and affection; making the most of things; refusing to think about home and then when holidays finally come blotting out the ‘other place’. And, this is where I claim: even if home is a place of other kinds of torment, boarding is not the place to find care and address abandonment/abuse issues, but simply compounds the deepest sense of isolation and wounding that comes from keeping secrets.
Some children at school learn to be canny; some play the ‘fool’, some rebel, many ‘keep their head beneath the parapet’. Every transaction is competitive, friendships often strategic. Hungry for attention, the boarder will strive for recognition, to fill the emptiness that comes from packing away (‘splitting off’) the Self for safe-keeping – and at the same time dread exposure. Achievement, winning, coming top, whether in class, at sport, at music, is promoted – in service of the school, which are all competing with each other. This leaves the child’s sense of identity and confidence totally dependent upon ‘success’ or ‘failure’.
Defence of the boarding system is cast-iron amongst protagonists. Not only are livelihoods dependent upon its survival, but also the heirarchical-patriarchal order centuries’ old. The ultimate aim is to produce leaders, and the core quality that resists all challenge is ‘power-over’ – to ensure defeating the ‘other’.
What could lie beneath steely denial of misery that ensues from replacing Self with a Survival Personality, a process necessary for all existential trauma, of which living in a boarding school is one..? To step outside centuries-old beliefs that maintain patriarchy can be truly terrifying – to women as well as to men. For it means valuing the Feminine as well as the Masculine: valuing the need for nurturing, tenderness, love. It means being ‘soft’, it means being inter-dependent. Need for others is primitive and instinctive; unsatisfied, this need will continue to present in varying guises. No wonder boarders turn to sweets, and to certificates of excellence as substitutes, and later to addictive substances and compulsive behaviours as illusions of love satisfied. Intimacy can be equally longed for and avoided in an agonising battle that can last a life-time if not given care and attention to heal in a safe and nurturing relationship.
The adult ex-boarder may want help but be loathe to seek it, mistrustful of others and self-critical of being needy, full of shame at ‘failing’ to be independent and/or a high-achiever. I work with clients who have listened to their own cry for help and dug deep for the courage to reach out. Together we join up the pieces that years earlier had to be buried, a tortuous process of daring to risk living without the hyper-vigilance of the Surival Persona. To recognise that that part, too, was formed from a loving heart, to serve protection in a hostile environment, is a core piece of the grief work.
As both therapist and ex-boarder, I recognise missed appoinments, self-criticism, arrogance and all judgement and prejudice as defences against connecting more fully, as representing terror. Who I hear is the small child saying ‘managing alone is what I had to do’. As much as this child, tucked within the adult, longs for contact and craves affection, safety continues to rely on going solo. The pack is the enemy, authority and peers alike; so can be the therapist: no wonder, then, glueing to the edge where it’s easier to scuttle away. (No wonder that my own therpist’s holidays, parting with the words ‘See you in three weeks’, was a time I pined, enduring the wrench by ticking off calendars. I was more of a cling-er than a push-away-er. I did that duing the sessions….)
The work for the ex-boarder takes courage. There are essentially three parts, that do not fall into a neat linear pattern: together identifying the habits that keep the client imprisoned living in survival-mode, and honouring how these strategies worked as well as understanding the cost; accepting, by connecting with the physical sensations/emotions, what really happenend, moving from denial to truth; and reconnecting with love, for Self – who I call ‘Real-Me’ – and thence with others, rediscovering joy. A process of repair that cannot be forced out of guilt or shame, but depends upon tender care from another.
I conclude with emphasis on what defines this particular form of trauma that renders the child within the adult so reluctant to speak out: recognition of the core pain of abandonment still has to be fought for, on the outside as well as within. To be not-heard compounds the original trauma and deepens the wound. Sexual abuse, rape, torture, imprisonment, corporal punishmet – these and more are now more widely recognised, more readily evoke shock, anger and a desire to protect. The experience of boarding is becoming better acknowledged thanks to the production of documentaries and literature and therapists who ‘work at the coal-face’.
WORKSHOPS
The Boarding School Experience
workshops for Counsellors and Psychotherapists to raise awareness:
– to understand what it means to board at school:
- in terms of disrupted attachment
- in relation to hierarchy of needs
- in terms of adaptation to institutional living
- in terms of trauma, survival and recovery
- to explore ways the therapist can facilitate re-integration of the boarding-school child
Next date to be arranged.
