How boarding school syndrome shows up in our relationships

You’re never far from a boarding school survivor. What you’re reading right now was written by a boarding school survivor.

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. In this post, I want to share how “boarding school syndrome” can show up in relationships, and what you can do if someone you love is still living with its effects.

You probably know a boarding school survivor

These days I’m more willing to ‘admit’ that I went to boarding school because it’s relevant to what I offer my clients. Perhaps that makes it easier for others to tell me that they went to boarding school or that someone in their family did.

That means partners, parents, siblings, cousins, colleagues and managers.

Many of us keep quiet about our education because it’s seen as a privilege. We’ve had the experience of being shamed for that privilege, and it’s not always comfortable trying to explain that the so-called privilege was actually pretty traumatic.

Why the privilege of boarding school leaves us scarred

Why am I telling you this? Because like other types of childhood trauma, the experience of boarding school can go a long way to explain why the survivors behave the way we do. That’s what we call boarding school syndrome.

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!

It also includes some very anti-relational behaviour, like needing to be right all the time or to be in control. And all of this comes with the famous British stiff upper lip but on steroids.

Change starts with seeing and accepting

The good news is that we can all change. Even the most walled-off boarding school survivor can change and start to open up. We can all grow and become the person who is unafraid of emotional expression, vulnerability and intimacy. We may have buried all this when we were at school, but it’s not lost forever.

It starts with the recognition of what we’re being and doing and moves on to acceptance of those traits.

It was a big moment when I realised I had an overwhelming need to prove that I’m right. Once I’d recognised that and could see how it had served me at school, I could accept myself – I knew that what I’d been doing wasn’t helpful, constructive or relational, but I could understand why I’d been doing it and that made it possible to accept it.

The process of change follows the acceptance, because it depends on showing compassion for the self who has been caught up in the survival patterns. That self-compassion starts to rebuild neural pathways which have long been disused, so that the brain can reintegrate its emotional centre with the more rational neocortex. And from that comes the ability to self-soothe and

How to be a supportive partner or friend

If you have a boarding school survivor in your life and you want to support them in becoming more open and communicative and maybe losing some of their survival patterns such as needing to prove that they’re right, you can make a difference.

You can do the sequence yourself first:

• Recognise what they’re doing and why they’re doing it

• Accept them warts and all, because this behaviour served them well at school. Show compassion both for the child who had to adopt this behaviour and the adult who is having so much trouble letting go of it.

• Help them understand that they can change. It’s just neuroscience: The brain is enormously plastic and can bring about deep character change.

If your partner – or another family member, friend or colleague – decides to seek professional help, let them know that it’s important that the therapist or coach is familiar with how boarding school affects the child’s development. Otherwise months or years can be wasted as questions remain unasked and therefore unexplored.

But you also have a role - you're not his therapist or his coach, but you can help him feel safe. And that safety makes it easier for him to start the process of recognising, accepting and changing those old programmes that form his survival personality.

If this speaks to your own experience, I’d like to invite you to join me and a small circle of women this September. We’ll sit together each week for six weeks, share the journey, and learn how to gently help the men we love open the doors they’ve kept closed for too long. There will be no more than ten of us, so there’s room for each story, each question, each moment of insight. I’ll be your guide, but we’ll make the journey together.

The Bridge Back to Us is for women who want to support the ex-boarder men in their lives. We start on September 1st at 6.30pm.