Part 2. Does Love Sometimes Feel Like a Threat? Maybe that’s your survival personality playing out in your relationships

This the second post in my series, When Strength Becomes a Shell: Women, Boarding School, and the Challenge of Love

Many of the women I’ve spoken to who went to boarding school have longed for closeness and yet feel safest when they’re slightly distant. That’s not because they don’t care; it’s because caring once hurt and they’ve found it difficult to feel safe when they open up emotionally. At school we longed for love, but it was the love we left behind at home. We longed for friendships too, but they never really felt safe. A girl could be your best friend one day and betray you the next.

In last week’s post I wrote about how we all created a survival personality when we were at boarding school. It kept us safe by being self-reliant, contained, high-functioning and by keeping a lid on emotions. This was essential then, but while it was adaptive at school, it’s maladaptive in adult relationships and can quietly sabotage intimacy and trust.

If this is you, your partner may experience your independence as withdrawal, your competence as control, and your calm as emotional unavailability. And it may well be that when you take the lid off your emotions there’s an explosion which rocks you both.

But it’s worth realising that underneath it all lies fear – of being rejected, shamed, or seen as being too much. Love can trigger the same alarm bells as vulnerability did at school.

In parenting, this pattern can appear as over-responsibility or emotional reserve: wanting to protect children from pain but struggling to be with their feelings. Or it may be a distance as we expect our children to grow up fast – just as we did at school.

Ex-boarder women often feel lonely in relationships that “should” be fine or they find themselves in dysfunctional relationships where there is very little love. You can’t help but wonder why connection feels so difficult, such an effort.

There may be things you’ve been doing for years without being aware of what you’re doing. Things like trying to be in control all the time, having to prove that you’re right, and walling off whenever you feel threatened.

But if you know that it’s not a lack of love – there is love there, but somehow you can never quite step up to it – then it’s your nervous system that learned early on that closeness was unsafe. Recognising this is the first step towards change.

In my upcoming workshop on November 18th, we’ll explore how these patterns show up and how you can begin to relate from the real you, not your survival self.

To explore these dynamics in more depth register for the workshop.