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

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.

Many women who went to boarding school learned to be independent, capable, and endlessly resourceful. But those same strengths can make adult relationships unexpectedly hard. You might find it difficult to feel truly heard, stay calm in conflict, or believe you’re good enough just as you are. This post explores how early separation and self-reliance shape the ways we connect – and why love can sometimes feel like hard work. It’s not about blame or fixing yourself, but about understanding the protective patterns that once kept you safe. When you begin to meet them with warmth and compassion, new possibilities for closeness start to emerge. If this resonates with you, join me on November 18th for a live online workshop exploring how boarding school experiences shape women’s relationships – and how healing begins when we start to listen to ourselves with kindness.

Whether we’re trying to rebuild trust with a partner or simply feel more at ease in our own decisions, the starting point is always the same: self-trust. It’s built through small, consistent actions - doing what we said we’d do, showing up even when it’s inconvenient, and being kind to ourselves when we don’t quite manage it. When we live in alignment with our own promises, we create a deep sense of safety and reliability, and that safety naturally extends into our relationships. Others begin to feel what we already know: that we’re steady, dependable and honest in our intentions. In this post I explore practical ways to rebuild self-trust, one small action at a time, and how those changes ripple outwards to strengthen the bonds we most care about.

Do you sometimes feel like you just need to get done with all this emotional stuff so that you can get on with the important things in your day. Enough already! Stop crying! We have things to do, places to go, people to see. But hang on a minute. Emotions aren’t just a nuisance. They’re an important guide to how you’re doing moment-to-moment. If you were a civil engineer and someone offered you a really sensitive instrument that would provide you with moment-to-moment data about the state of repair of a bridge and send you an alert every time the bridge got too close to failing, you wouldn’t say “No thanks, I have more important things to worry about.” But that’s what emotions are – a very sensitive instrument which feeds us data about the state of our system – mind, body and soul.

It seems like it’s a common complaint at the moment – from women whose male partners are emotionally unavailable and unwilling to share their feelings. “I’m not that kind of man.” “I’ve never talked about my feelings. I’m not about to change that.” “That’s who I am. I can’t change who I am.” This blog post is inspired by some of my women clients and their obvious frustration. If you're struggling to get through to your man or he refuses to open up about his feelings, there are some perspectives and skills that will make a difference.

Nick and Sally met when they were still at school. It was great to start with, but as time went by the cracks started to show. Sally was away at boarding school most of the year so they couldn’t see each other for weeks on end. Then the holidays arrived and cramming so much into those few weeks meant that things could get very intense. Sally’s Mum pointed out that Nick was very ‘needy’ and ‘emotionally dependent.’ But no one noticed Sally’s tendency to be a bit walled off – or if they did they didn’t say anything. This was the 1970s and no one talked about emotional regulation, boundaries or attachment styles.

Boarding school survivors are everywhere — but you might not realise it. We don’t always talk about our time at school, especially when people assume it was all privilege and opportunity. For many of us, it was also a lonely and difficult experience that shaped how we think, feel, and connect with others. Boarding school syndrome includes a long list of mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and addiction. There are difficulties with emotional expression and with sustaining relationships. Some of us can be very walled-off, while others may be prone to unbridled self-expression. It just seems to be very difficult to find a comfortable centre-ground. But even the most walled-off boarding school survivor can change and start to open up.

Do you sometimes find yourself hesitating to broach a difficult conversation with your partner? You really want to bring it up, but you stop short because you're afraid of a negative reaction. You might recognise this pattern: > You decide you want to talk to your partner about something which is important to you and definitely not trivial > Then you rehearse what you’re going to say > Worry about how you’ll be received > Choose a moment and plunge in without warning > Get exactly the angry, defensive or upset reaction you were expecting

Have you ever noticed that you’re experiencing feelings that don’t belong to you? As if your partner (or someone else close to you) has managed to transfer their feelings into you. This is an extreme form of dissociation where one person is disowning their emotions and projecting them onto their partner. It’s something we find in people who have experienced neglect or abandonment in childhood. And we also find it in people who went to boarding school. Find out why this happens and what you can do about it..

One of the hardest things we do in our relationships is to learn how to rock the boat. After years of not asking for what we need, it can feel very frightening. This is how the fear of hearing a ‘No’ or of being shamed or blamed gets in the way of expressing our needs. And yet it is a wonderful feeling when you ask for something and you receive it. There are definitely two sides to this fear: your beliefs about yourself and your beliefs about your partner - or whoever it is you're afraid to ask.