Hang on a minute – those are not my feelings

Have you ever noticed that you’re experiencing feelings that don’t belong to you? As if your partner – or maybe a close friend – has managed to transfer their feelings into you.

Of course it happens in close relationships. We often pick up the mood of the other person, particularly if we’re tired and not centred. Some of us feel our partner's feelings so intensely because we are overly empathic.

This kind of emotional contagion can happen when we are hyper-empathic or because of blurred boundaries.

When you start feeling what they can’t

But sometimes it can go further than that. Your partner (or someone else close to you) is repressing their emotions and projecting them onto their you.

I had a client a while back who came to realise that she was experiencing feelings that really belonged to her mother. It took a while for her to learn to discern which were her own feelings and which were her mother's. It was as if her mother couldn’t experience her own emotions, and my client had been absorbing those feelings into herself.

This is something we find in people who have experienced neglect, abandonment or separation in childhood. And we also find it in people who went to boarding school.

The legacy of boarding school (or early abandonment trauma)

If you’re married to a boarding school survivor you may have experienced this yourself. He’s telling you that he’s fine, but you’ve noticed that you’re an emotional mess. And where did those feelings come from?

When you notice that you’re having feelings which don’t really belong to you, you’re experiencing a kind of projection on his part which is characteristic of people who are very dissociated. It’s a survival pattern from a childhood spent in boarding school or in a highly dysfunctional family.

Part of the legacy of boarding school is the way we behave in our relationships in adulthood. Those early survival patterns which kept him safe at school will get in the way of the vulnerability needed for a close, loving relationship.

Degrees of dissociation

No matter what he tells you, unless he was already 15 or 16 years old when he started boarding school, he will have suffered some kind of trauma. If he was very young – six to ten years old – there will have been a major disruption to his developing attachment system. In the school environment that young child did his best to cope and very often that entailed repressing feelings which were too painful to bear. We’re not just talking about homesickness, but grief.

This repression of feelings is the first phase of dissociation. This was a simple act of denial – or disowning and repressing – his emotions: ‘I’m not feeling homesick/upset/vulnerable/afraid’. Unfortunately this denial of his emotions got baked into his character and he continued to repress them long after he left school. And of course he is simply doing what men are expected to do: to be strong, unemotional, and never to express any vulnerability.

However at this stage those feelings are still accessible and he can visit them when he feels safe enough to do so. That child part who repressed those feelings and the feelings themselves are not completely cut off; they're more like an island connected by a bridge to the mainland. He simply has to cross the bridge – if he dares.

The next phase is projection. At school, when we still felt unsafe in spite of repressing our feelings, we located feelings of upset and homesickness in other children. It becomes a habit which is hard to break – partly because we're not conscious of it.

Now he’s projecting onto you: “You’re really miserable today. What’s wrong with you? Why are you so upset?” The island is moving further away, the bridge is starting to dissolve.

Finally as if by some quantum magic, you, as his partner, take on and experience the feelings he has disowned. But you didn’t know that this could happen, so you’re wondering “Why am I so upset? Why do I feel so insecure? What am I so frightened about?” And how come he doesn’t seem to feel a thing?

This process of dissociation – disowning, repression and projection of feelings – doesn't just happen to boarding school children. It can also stem from other childhood trauma such as long-term neglect or the pain experienced when parents divorce and the child feels abandoned by the parent who leaves.

How This Shows Up in Your Relationship

So what is happening in your relationship with him?

You may have noticed mismatched emotional states, confusion, blaming, or sudden mood shifts. Or simply a distance which he uses to keep you at arms-length.

Maybe he needs to be in control all the time. Or he has to be right and wins every argument simply because he learned how to (this is what I call the Oxford Debating Society ‘syndrome’).

He won’t talk about his feelings and maybe denies having any. At any rate, now is never a good time to talk.

He disappears behind his phone or his laptop (or maybe the newspaper) even when you’re sitting together. He seems to struggle with being present.

And you? Maybe you’re frustrated, angry, disappointed, distressed. Maybe you have thought about leaving him, but you still love him and want to make this work for you both.

What you can do (without becoming his therapist)

You are not his therapist. He may need to see one, but you can’t take that role on yourself. It’s not your job to fix everything.

Start on your own side of the fence. Start with self-awareness, grounding and your own boundaries. Make sure you are meeting your own needs as much as possible. You are about to start something new and you need to build your own strength.

Still staying on your side of the fence, take a look at your own communication patterns. Have you been pushing him? Or have you been afraid to speak? Has his boarding school experience become the elephant in the room?

If what you’ve been doing isn’t working then try something different. For instance, if you notice that when you push he withdraws, then change that! Stop pushing.

You can gently encourage him to do some personal work. There are books you can both read and videos to watch on YouTube (I’ll put some resources at the bottom of this post). This may be enough for him to take the step of seeking out a therapist. And remember it is important that the therapist be informed about boarding school trauma!

Hope and neuroplasticity: Why change & growth are possible

Remember the islands? This separation of one part of us from another is reflected in the brain. With this level of dissociation, the connections between different parts of the brain are broken or whittled away. There's very little connection between the emotional brain and the thinking brain.

However as psychiatrist Dan Siegel and neurobiologist Juliane Taylor Shore tell us, the good news is that we humans have so much neuroplasticity those disconnected parts can be brought back into connection.

In other words the brain can and does change. We form new connections which strengthen the more we use them. And old pathways which are no longer used wither away.

So reconnection is possible. We can reconnect neurologically, and we can reconnect with our emotional self and with our partner, if we are willing to do the work.

If you’re married to or in a relationship with someone who went to boarding school, no matter how shut down or cut off they are, there is the possibility of change – as long as they want to change. This is about enabling the reintegration of the child part they split off at school and re-establishing those neural pathways which were broken.

While this may be more than you as their partner can or should do for him, you can support him.

Love and survival: Holding complexity with compassion

So hold yourself with compassion and remember curiosity and compassion for this man who you love and who survived such terrible trauma. The fact that he survived shows how much resilience he has always had. You can acknowledge the difficulties he faces, but also his potential for transformation.

To learn more about how to live with (and love) an ex-boarder, come to my workshop on August 12th, where I will share more about why boarding school makes us bad at relationships and how you as his wife or partner can help ease him back into relationship.

Resources

Some of the accounts included here are distressing. You may want to first read or watch them yourself in order to be better informed. But be aware that it may be more difficult for your partner. My own approach to this material has been to take it in small doses as some of it stirs up very difficult memories and emotions.

Books:

Men’s Accounts of Boarding School: Sent Away, edited by Margaret Laughton, Allison Paech-Ujejski & Andrew Patterson

Charles Spencer, A Very Private School

Joy Schaverien, Boarding School Syndrome

Nick Duffell, The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System

Videos:

Inside Boarding Schools, Nick Duffell

Boarding on Insanity, Piers Cross & Gabor Maté

Boarding School Syndrome with Dr Joy Schaverien