How does boarding school trauma affect adult relationships?

If you really want to understand how the trauma of boarding school affects adult relationships you need to ask the ex-boarder’s partner.

The wives and daughters of men who went to boarding school complain about them...

• being defensive

• avoiding conflict

• being afraid to face their fears and other painful emotions

• dissociating or disappearing when things get difficult

• being dismissive of family members and their needs

• being evasive or telling outright lies

• taking a one-up position

You could sum it up as defensive, evasive and dismissive.

For female ex-boarders the list of complaints is probably much the same, although I would add excessive self-reliance (which is less acceptable in women than it is in men). My ex-husband didn’t like that I insisted on making decisions without consulting him and in the end I recognised in this my own dysfunctional level of independence.

Many of these characteristics reflect a deep unwillingness to change the survival personality which we ex-boarders created at school to keep ourselves safe.

Take dismissiveness as an example. When someone disagrees with something we think, the prospect that they might be right and we might be wrong is too much to bear. Maybe it’s because when you remove one brick in a wall, it’s a short step to removing another and then within a short space of time, the whole wall collapses. That wall is the survival personality you created so painstakingly at school, where it was essential to your psychological safety.

Or evasiveness. How hard was it to be honest at school where there was nowhere to hide and no home to go to?

Now as an adult, the inner child or teenager running that survival personality finds it so difficult to believe that you are safe, that you can open up and be truthful, vulnerable and authentic with your partner and your children.

Why we learn to hide, harden and forget in order to survive at boarding school

People outside of the UK see early boarding as brutal – it makes no sense to them. But it would seem that for generations of British parents it was just the normal thing to do – to send your sons and daughters away at the age of eight or even younger. There was little or no recognition of the trauma of that early separation.

It starts with the shock of separation and the sense of abandonment

I remember being left at school – the memory is of a long hallway with polished floorboards stretching back away from the front door of the boarding house. There are no people in my memory – no parents, no other girls, no housemistress. Just an empty space.

The feeling of being alone, abandoned in a strange and frightening space combines with an overwhelming sense of loss.

We lost so much – home, Mum & Dad, siblings, pets, favourite toys, and friends. There was no love, no comfort, no hugs or bedtime stories, no nurture at school.

There was a message, though, which may have taken a little while to land: “No one is coming. Don’t need anyone. Don’t have any needs.”

So we coped the best way we could: we shut down our feelings, we kept busy with school work, sports, music practice, and we learned to shut people out.

The Birth of the Mask

We quickly learned that vulnerability would be punished, mocked or exploited, so we followed a set of unconscious internal rules

• Don’t show weakness

• Don’t trust closeness

• Don’t cry or show any emotional vulnerability

• Handle everything alone

From these rules we built a mask – or a kind of armour. With the mask on we seemed competent and self-contained.

• Boys took on a “good chap” persona: polite, capable, invulnerable.

• For girls there was the added pressure to appear agreeable, high-achieving and self-reliant.

Short-Term Protection, Long-Term Cost

These strategies may have worked brilliantly at school. They did keep us safe, but they kept us disconnected as well – disconnected from other people and disconnected from the inner self.

Over the years we spent at school the mask hardened and became our personality – our survival personality.

The fact that we were unaware of creating that personality or mask meant that it remained unchallenged – sometimes for decades – and hardened still further.

But in the end someone or something does challenge the mask. It’s usually our relationships that become the arena where these protective strategies meet with opposition and the mask starts to crack.

It might be your partner or an adult son or daughter who finally points out that they don’t like the dismissiveness, the defensiveness and the evasiveness. They want you to show more emotional vulnerability and more openness to their own emotions.

This is an opportunity! It’s an opportunity to look behind your own mask and find out who you really are – the messy, emotional, needy self who is full of love, who has been hiding away all these years.

Come to my masterclass on December 17th to learn more about getting behind the mask

https://www.sorrelpindar.co.uk/beyond-survival-masterclass

My next post will be about how the boarding school mask shows up in adult relationships. That will be followed by a post about healing and reconnection.