Healing, Reconnection and Becoming Fully Available: How ex-boarders can soften the armour and re-learn closeness

I started this blog series by talking about the things the ex-boarder’s partner most often complains about, which includes dismissiveness, evasiveness and defensiveness.

It takes a degree of humility for anyone to recognise that their behaviour has been unkind or that they could be more emotionally available. So if you have already seen that in yourself, you’ve taken the first step – and it was a brave one.

Join me tomorrow, Wednesday 17th, for a masterclass on how to reconnect with the self behind the mask.

Perhaps your partner wishes you could change overnight, and that being there for them would take root and become a new habit. But it will take time and require some patience – sometimes the demands of our partners can feel like tremendous pressure, so be kind to yourself.

You can expect a journey something like this:

1. Naming Your Survival Personality

If you’ve ever thought ‘this is just who I am’ you may find it helps to realise that while it is your personality, it is not who you actually are. This is your survival personality; but behind it is your true identity. So see it as an old pattern one which you can let go of.

Your new understanding is that you built it to survive in the frightening environment of boarding school. Your survival personality may have been there in some small way before you ever went away to school – it may have been the personality you needed to survive at home with your parents. At school it’s most likely that you leant on the strengths you already had so that they became really dug-in at school.

There are three parts to this stage –

• First is the recognition that what you have been doing and being since your school years is a function of that survival personality, and to accept yourself just as you are even though you want to let go of some of these old patterns.

• The second is knowing that there is a deeper part of you which created that survival personality. You weren’t just reacting passively to circumstances – you had agency!

• The third part is that you can separate your adult self from the frightened inner child who needed that survival personality, and from that place of separateness your adult self can re-parent that little child inside you. This process is known as unblending and it’s a powerful force for change.

2. Developing Emotional Literacy

Some of us are so shutdown we may feel that there are no emotions in there. But this can’t be true – there is no such thing as a human being who doesn’t have feelings. So if you believe that you don’t have any emotions just know that they are there – but you’ve got them really well hidden or suppressed. It’s as if you’ve built a wall around them or put them in a box marked ‘danger’.

At the other end of the spectrum are those of us who give vent to our feelings without holding anything back. We shout and scream and often end up pursuing our partners who back off and become even more emotionally unavailable to us.

It may seem counter-intuitive but the venters and the walled-off may have the same inability to really name their feelings. Even the venters may only be able to identify feelings in a very general was, such as ‘angry’ or ‘upset’. I used to be a venter and for years I couldn’t really be more precise in naming my emotions than ‘upset’, ‘angry’ or ‘distressed’.

There is a skill to getting granular with our feelings.

You can start learning a vocabulary for your feelings: Are you angry, frustrated or resentful? Are you upset, sad or grief-stricken?

But start with small steps: “I feel tense,” “I feel overwhelmed,” or even “I’m not sure what I’m feeling yet.” Then sit with it a while and see what comes to mind when you look for a more precise description of what you’re feeling.

This is about tolerating emotions instead of shutting them down. You’re working towards being able to sit with any emotion, even the most uncomfortable. But there’s no need to sit with it for longer than you can tolerate. As you take more opportunities to sit with them your tolerance will gradually increase.

It’s a bit like taking a cold shower. The first time you do this, 5 seconds may be all you can bear. But if you stand under the cold water every time you take a shower you find that your tolerance increases until a minute feels easy.

When we start to connect with difficult emotions – particularly traumatic memories – it may be helpful to come out of the memory or emotion and reconnect with what’s around you here and now. I’m not suggesting you spend much time in those traumatic memories. What we’re aiming for at the moment is the emotions you feel in response to what’s happening right here, right now.

3. Repairing, Not Reacting

What’s the main pattern in your relationship with your partner? Is it conflict or distancing. Or do you have a pattern where one of you pursues and the other withdraws? Take a little time to identify and name the pattern.

Now recognise that this pattern will in part be a product of your childhood experiences and your partner’s. That’s just the way relationships work.

Can you replace defensiveness and judgement with curiosity? Curiosity simply means not blaming each other, just asking what lies behind the behaviour.

If you can name your pattern, you can talk about it. Then you can practise coming back to each other after a conflict or a moment of distance.

Repair doesn’t equal weakness – it doesn’t mean you’ve given in and acted the doormat. Repair is about owning your part in the conflict, recognising that you were both caught up in something you no longer want to do, being compassionate and forgiving to both yourself and your partner and coming back into that deeper connection.

I should probably add that the emotional literacy makes all of this easier, but you don’t have to wait until you’ve got good at emotions before you start repairing! You’re always going to be an apprentice, learning on the job.

4. Letting Your Partner In – Slowly

Like I said, you’re an apprentice, learning on the job – no one ever taught you how to do this, and if you were away at school for a long time you didn’t even get many opportunities to observe your parents repairing.

So be transparent in your communication: You can say “this is hard for me.” That’s not an excuse – it’s an explanation. You’re doing the hard thing and sometimes you’ll get it wrong. You can say “I’m sorry I messed up, but I’m still learning.”

If you’re a man and you’re not used to it, allow small moments of support. I mean emotional support (not just expecting your partner to pick up after you).

When you’re sharing with your partner, share your internal experience – your thoughts and feelings – rather than facts. Facts can become a sort of crutch. And besides many so-called facts are just things we believe to be true, which other people see differently.

5. Healing Through Connection

We heal best in relationships – they are a powerful catalyst for transformation. And what we’re talking about is exactly that.

Relationships are not entirely safe, but they can be brave, supportive spaces. It could be your partner or perhaps a friend, but it could also be a therapist, a coach or a group of peers – in other words, a group people who are like you boarding school survivors.

As you start to open up to your inner world, your partner can offer you three gifts:

• Witnessing you in your vulnerability for the first time, with compassion and gratitude.

• Supporting you as you start to explore your emotional life and reminding you that you are so much more than your mask.

• Helping you realise that closeness is not a trap, but a resource.

Your partner will also have their own healing to do, and as you become more emotionally available, you can reciprocate that witnessing and compassion. Being available in this way means listening without judgement and without trying to fix things.

6. What Changes Over Time

As you go through this process you’ll start to notice changes – some of them subtle and some of them which may feel huge (hopefully in a good way).

• You’ll develop more empathy and have a softer presence – you’ll find you are more open-hearted.

• You’ll be less reactive and therefore have more choice – when we can respond slowly and with presence, we are able to see more options than we’d ever realised.

• Your connection with your partner, your children and yourself will deepen. It will be easier to stay present for longer and to know when your partner has disappeared behind their mask, but you’ll meet that with compassion rather than judgement.

• There will be a sense of coming home to the self beneath the mask – the source of your creativity, love and compassion. This is the part of you which created the mask and which can now dissolve it as you no longer feel a need for it.

This may sound challenging, and the truth is that it can be just that. But letting go of the mask, opening up to your inner life and creating deeper connections with the people we love is one of the most amazing things a human being can do.

Come along tomorrow evening to my masterclass, Beyond Survival: Reconnecting with the Self Behind the Mask, where we’ll be exploring this journey together.