Find Your More: The Blog - More Love, More Resilience

The best gift you can give your beloved for Valentine’s Day isn’t roses or chocolates or a candle-lit dinner. The candles will soon burn down, the dinner will be reduced to dirty glasses and plates, the chocolates may last more than a night, but they’ll be gone within a week. If you’re the couple who still does something for Valentine’s Day, even though the rest of the year it’s a bit tense, then you haven’t given up. In that case, the best gift you can give your partner is the work you do on yourself. But maybe you’ve not yet figured out how to do that.

Where will you be on St Valentine’s Day​? Will you be out celebrating with your partner? Or sitting at home together saying ‘bah humbug – it’s so commercialised’. Or will you be sitting at home in separate spaces thinking ‘there’s no point – the spark has gone out.’ If it’s the third option, maybe you've given up trying. You never seem to agree on anything and you get triggered on a daily basis. It seems like nothing you do makes a difference. But if you really want to make this relationship work, read on...

In last week's blog post I talked about how childhood experiences can shape a 'Hero Child'. Hero Children were the responsible ones, the ones who comforted younger siblings and sometimes our parents. In adulthood this tends to show up as perfectionism, having to control everything and the tendency to be harshly critical. It’s obvious that much of this will be like a hand grenade thrown into a relationship. Nobody likes to be controlled or criticised and judged harshly when they get things wrong. Read on to discover how you can soften these Hero Child traits in yourself.

Do you speak harshly to yourself? I know that my harsh inner voice – my inner critic if you like – is something I created in response to what I experienced as a child. I remember my parents being harsh with each other and sometimes with my sisters. So the harsh voice was part of the background noise when I was growing up. I was the eldest child and I’m like many other women I know who were the eldest child. We were the responsible ones, the ones who comforted younger siblings and sometimes our parents, and we often acted as mediators or go-betweens when there was conflict. This role which is so often adopted by the eldest child, is sometimes known as the Hero Child, and it’s not confined to women.

How could three little words be so triggering? ‘The Tuck Shop’ – it turns out that it wasn’t always the happy place for children in boarding school In Tuesday’s workshop I had a flurry of comments about it in the chat... If you’re an ex-boarder and you’d like to contribute to choosing a better name for The Tuck Shop, join us – we start at 12pm next Tuesday.

It takes a degree of humility for anyone to recognise that their behaviour has been unkind or that they could be more emotionally available. So if you have already seen that in yourself, you’ve taken the first step – and it was a brave one. In this blog post I take you through six stages in the journey to discovering who you are and reconnecting with your inner life and those you love.

Talking with ex-boarder clients and their partners I notice a pattern where the partner feels dismissed, shut out, and even lied to. The relationship suffers because the ex-boarder is unable to show up fully with their partner – and often with their children as well. There are very real reasons why partners feel this way. Their experience is a mirror to the survival personality or mask which children create at boarding school to keep them safe. After wearing that mask for 5, 10 or even 13 years it becomes very difficult to take it off – the mask feels like safety, without it there is only vulnerability and fear. But to have a healthy relationship, we have to put the mask aside and let our partners in. Let’s take a look at the mask and how it impacts relationships.

If you really want to understand how the trauma of boarding school affects adult relationships you need to ask the ex-boarder’s partner. The wives and daughters of men who went to boarding school complain about them... * being defensive * avoiding conflict * being afraid to face their fears and other painful emotions * dissociating or disappearing when things get difficult * being dismissive of family members and their needs * being evasive or telling outright lies But there is a reason behind this behaviour - part of the ex-boarder's mask.

I don’t know how many times I have heard this complaint from clients: “I’ve tried everything. Nothing I say makes any difference. I don’t want to keep nagging, but if I don’t nag nothing happens.” It can be about mundane household tasks like putting things away or it can be about big things like honesty and integrity. So when you realise that your partner is being evasive and hiding something from you, what do you do? Or when yet again the milk has been left out and gone sour, what do you do?

Many women who went to boarding school carry invisible wounds that only surface years later - in loneliness, self-doubt, or struggles to connect deeply with others. Real healing begins when we see how we adapted to survive, and start gently laying down the armour we built back then. As we learn self-compassion, reparent the little girl inside, and reconnect with our true selves, love and belonging become possible again. It’s a beautiful journey of coming home - to ourselves, and to the warmth of genuine connection. Join me on Tuesday 18 November at 5pm UK time for a free online workshop, Finding More Warmth in Relationships: For Women Ex-Boarders, and take your next step on this path of healing and rediscovery.

In last week’s post, I wrote about what happens to girls at boarding school: how the culture of separation and shame shapes a survival personality that prizes self-reliance and control. This week, I want to look at how those same traits show up years later, in the places that matter most: our relationships with partners and children. Once upon a time, independence was our armour. It helped us cope, compete, and carry on. But in adulthood, that same independence can quietly block the intimacy we long for.

Many women who went to boarding school grew up learning to cope alone - to be self-reliant, capable, composed, and untouchable. Those strengths helped us survive in an environment where feelings had to be tucked away. But decades later, the very traits that once protected us can make love and intimacy feel confusing, even unsafe. This is the first post in a three-part series which will explore how boarding school shaped our “survival personality” - and how that legacy shows up in our adult relationships. We begin with Part 1: The Creation of the Feminine Survival Self.