How can I undo the damage done by my boarding school experience?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the damage done by boarding school is mostly due to physical brutality or worse still, sexual abuse.

But that’s not all there is.

There was no sexual abuse at my school, and very little in the way of physical brutality. As girls we were spared the cane and although we could be pretty nasty to each other, there was very little physical violence.

The one time I know of that a member of staff did engage in violence, she was summarily dismissed.

The men I have spoken to about their boarding school experience do speak of physical brutality from both the masters and other boys. However the scars are not simply a result of physical or sexual abuse.

For men, like women, the more lasting damage often arises from the boarding school experience in the context of their family relationships.

As a friend said to me recently, “It wasn’t so much about the school, as the sheer fact of being sent away.”

The experience of feeling abandoned is more or less universal to those who went to boarding school, even if in some cases, boarding school may have seemed like the only sensible option. And for some it was an on-going situation because going home in the holidays was impossible as home was on another continent.

But for many of my clients it seems like the parents added insult to injury, as if it didn’t occur to them that their children had an inner life. There were:

• Parents who divorced within months of the child being sent away

• Parents who moved to a new town during term-time without telling the child

• Parents who failed to realise that their child was lonely in the holidays because they had lost touch with friends

In the face of this kind of abandonment, we are forced to become really self-sufficient. As a client recently told me, we had to stand alone. Many of us ended up with dysfunctional levels of independence and a real sense of disconnection from others.

The lasting impact of the boarding school experience is often a sense of self which is either less-than or entitled.

You can probably think of some politicians who demonstrate that entitlement. But for many of us the feeling is of inferiority, or perhaps just a deep unwillingness to experience our feelings or to take care of our own needs. And that comes down to a lack of self-esteem.

The end result is difficult or even disastrous relationships, anxiety, dissociation, and even addiction. This latter may take more socially acceptable forms such as working too much or engaging in retail therapy. Or it can take the form of substance abuse or sex addiction.

Making a change

The long shadow of boarding school does not have to be a life sentence, though.

We are all capable of change, and this is as true of boarding school survivors as it is of anyone else.

It’s worth realising that the symptoms of ‘boarding school syndrome’ (as it is sometimes known) are no different to the symptoms of people who experienced other forms of childhood trauma. As such they are susceptible to therapeutic treatment – but it does help if the therapist knows that their client went to boarding school.

Therapy alone may not be enough. It may not be helpful to spend long periods of time revisiting the past. What really helps is to understand how you responded to that experience as a child, creating your own ‘survival personality’ which was designed to protect you and keep you safe.

Your survival personality may include strategies for avoiding abandonment. Some of us handle this particular fear by people-pleasing as a way of keeping others close. Others handle it by always being the first to walk away. After all you can’t be abandoned if you just walked away from the person you were afraid would abandon you.

It’s also worth getting into the fine details about our behaviour in relationships. For instance, humans in general seem to have a really strong need to be right, but boarding school survivors have it in spades!

Is needing to be right your thing? Or is it needing to be in control? Do you explode or do you withdraw and shut down?

Whatever you’re doing that isn’t helping, you can start to do things differently.

If, like me, you want to prove that you’re right and show the other person what’s wrong with what they’re saying, you can learn to stay quiet and just listen!

Whatever your particular version of ‘boarding school syndrome’ may be, you can choose to reinvent yourself. You have the power to change the way you are in your relationships, including your relationship with yourself and with your work, as well as family and colleagues.

This is partly about learning new skills and partly about healing your childhood wounds. When I work with clients who went to boarding school I help them to connect with their adult part so they begin parenting their inner child. And I teach them new ways of being in relationship with others which enables them to be close without being clingy, and to have firm boundaries without being shut dowmn.

If you’d like to make a start on this now, download my guide to rebuilding your ‘survival kit’. It will take you through a process of reinventing yourself by replacing the survival personality you created as a child with something better suited to your adult life.