Are There Different Types of Boarding School Syndrome?

Boarding school syndrome is a term coined by the psychotherapist, Joy Schaverien, to describe the pattern of emotions and behaviours which she witnessed in her clients who had been sent to boarding school.

It’s really helpful to have this kind of description as it points to the origins of the mental health problems experienced by boarding school ‘survivors’ where medical diagnoses just describe the symptoms (eg depression or generalised anxiety disorder).

But lately I’ve been wondering whether boarding school syndrome takes different forms in different people. Does it differ between men and women? Schaverien says it does and it’s hardly surprising given the differences between boys’ and girls’ schools, and the way that we are socialised into the two genders of male and female.

And what about the form it takes in people who are neurodivergent, or who have very different levels of self-confidence when they start school? I know that when I went away to school, I was painfully shy (actually, probably on the autistic spectrum) and had very low self-confidence. Other girls, particularly the popular ones, were confident and apparently socially skilled. They had no problem making friends and making conversation with other girls – something which I found very difficult.

But we all had to develop adaptations to keep us safe at school, no matter what we brought with us and those adaptations come to form a sort of survival personality. In fact it becomes an intrinsic part of the personality we inhabit as we move into adulthood. So I have to ask the question, ‘Did the confident, socially able, girls develop a different survival personality from the shy, unconfident girls?’

When I consider all the people I’ve met in the last few years who went to boarding school, I can see some very clear differences between the way each of them are as adults. It’s not just that the men are different from the women. The men are as different from each other as they are from the women. And the women are also very different from each other. Of course at school, this was a very binary division between male and female, masculine and feminine. There was no space for young people who were non-binary or trans.

Different types of survival personality

Perhaps I should start by pointing to some things which are common to almost all adults who spent many years in boarding school. Boarding schools are very anti-relational places. You are actively discouraged from getting close to anyone else and feelings are tightly contained, as any display of emotions is likely to result in being bullied.

I was one of those children who cry very easily and I spent at least one year without friends, probably because I represented the deepest fear of the other girls – their fear of their own grief. This is grief, not just ‘homesickness’. But eventually I learned to manage the crying. I learned some tricks to stop the tears, and I found that when I couldn’t hold it back, I could retreat to the toilets where I could cry in privacy.

I know that some of the popular girls took a different approach. A few years ago I ran into a woman I knew as a girl at school. I’ll call her Jo, but that’s not her real name. When we met she told me that when in her first term at school she realised her mother would not let her come home, she decided she would have to survive by whatever means. I was at the wrong end of those ‘means’. She and I shared the experience of grief, but we handled it in very different ways. She was one-up and along with her best friend held sway over the rest of us. I was one-down and retreated inside myself, into my books and letters home, in order to feel safe.

Jo and I created very different survival personalities, and I’ve no doubt that at the age of 11 we were drawing on character traits we had already formed within our families before starting school. Jo’s survival personality was brash and insensitive. Mine was withdrawn and fearful.

I have met boarding school survivors who:

• are emotionally shut-down and one-up, unable to show empathy or compassion for others

• feel utterly crushed and are rarely able to experience joy or love

• are forever on the run, exiting as soon as their relationships become challenging

• are deeply suspicious of authority and appear to rebel on principle

• are strategic and always on the look-out for situations which present an opportunity for profit

So clearly there must be different types of survival personality. The challenge is to find the patterns that we can group into distinct types. Nick Duffell who has been working in this field for 30+ years has identified three types: Conformist or Complier, Rebel, and Casualty or Crushed.

Maybe there are other types, and I think it is fair to say that while we share a common experience – the separation from home and family, and all that brings with it – we have each of us created our own unique survival personality to cope with the loss of home and the terrors of boarding school.

But I don’t consider myself a survivor

Not everyone who went to boarding school remembers the experience as distressing. Some may have found it easier than being at home – a highly structured and scheduled institution will feel safer if the child has grown up in a home which is wildly dysfunctional.

People who went to school in the 1990s or later are likely to have had an easier time of it. There was more care, corporal punishment had been banned in private schools, and the culture of our boarding schools had changed. Maybe schools were friendlier places. But nonetheless the child still had to cope with the separation from home.

Children who go to day schools can go home in the evening and experience the full range of emotions – or at least some of them – with their parents and siblings: Joy, sadness, love, hate, anger, grief, guilt, shame, excitement. At boarding school none of those are acceptable. The emotional tone is contained, shut down. It’s not unlike being on anti-depressants – no highs and no lows. And the effort of containing all that emotion is exhausting. Because of course there is a lot of emotion. You just aren’t supposed to let it out.

The sad truth, though, is that many of us don’t realise the impact of school for two or even three decades. We manage well enough through our 20s and 30s, and then something happens – often in our 40s or 50s – which makes it impossible for that childhood survival personality to cope any longer.

It may be a loss such as divorce or a death, or perhaps the loss of your job or the failure of your business. Under the intense pressure it seems like the survival personality cracks open, like a broken shell. In fact for most of us, the survival personality was a shell, a shell in which we contained all our emotions and with which we fended off other people so that they could not harm us. Nick Duffell and Joy Schaverien refer to that shell as the armoured self.

The armoured self works well in environments where emotional expression is frowned upon. Boarding school prepares us well for the military and the upper echelons of the business world, even the medical world. But it does not make for happy relationships at home. It is thoroughly anti-relational. That armoured self is incapable of all the finer nuance of an emotional life.

A brief history of my armoured self

Looking back on my life since my years at school, I already knew that I had formed a protective shell – I remember my boyfriend talking about it. It broke open early on, when I was 20 and that same boyfriend took his life. My grief was unbearable and I had no understanding of emotional regulation, no tools for managing my emotions. So eventually, with great difficulty, I patched up my shell and carried on. To the outside world it probably looked like I had ‘got over’ Andy’s death, but I hadn’t. I had simply repeated the same adaptation that I had always used – locking my feelings away inside.

I reckon I patched up my shell over and over again. It remained in place protecting me from all the men who got close to me. But each time I got hurt, it broke open again, I almost let the world in and then closed it up again. That level of vulnerability must have been unsustainable. I couldn’t cope with the sadness or the grief.

My shell broke open again when I met my partner in 2020. But this time I let it happen. It felt safe to experience all those feelings I had held inside for all those decades. He was very loving and very careful. I had the support of my sisters, my supervisor and a couple of close friends. The tendency to retreat into shell may never go away completely – it is an adaptation which I have lived with for more than 50 years. But now I am aware of it and I know that I don’t need it, I can be mindful of when it appears.

And perhaps more importantly, we can all replace that solid armoured shell with a more appropriate boundary, one which allows us to let other people in when we wish to and which will protect us from anyone who intends to hurt us.

This more porous boundary allows for the sharing of emotions and for co-regulation – the process in which we support each other in handling our emotions without slipping into codependency.

If you’d like to explore your own boarding school experience further, download my e-book, coming home: Beyond Boarding School.