How the Boarding School Mask Shows Up in Adult Relationships

Talking with ex-boarder clients and their partners I notice a pattern where the partner feels dismissed, shut out, and even lied to. The relationship suffers because the ex-boarder is unable to show up fully with their partner – and often with their children as well.

Why the partners of ex-boarders often feel shut out, criticised or emotionally alone

There are very real reasons why partners feel this way. Their experience is a mirror to the survival personality or mask which the ex-boarder created at boarding school to keep them safe. After wearing that mask for 5, 10 or even 13 years it becomes very difficult to take it off. The mask feels like safety - without it there is only vulnerability and fear.

But to have a healthy relationship, we have to put the mask aside and let our partners in. Let’s take a look at the mask and how it impacts relationships.

Come along on Wednesday 17th to a masterclass on how to reconnect with the self behind the mask.

Emotional distance & shutdown

After years of suppressing emotions or even denying they exist, the ex-boarder may have enormous difficulty naming or expressing them. Being unable to understand their own emotions means that they are ill-equipped to empathise with their partner’s.

When called upon for emotional support, many of us retreat behind logic and dismissiveness – “it’s not that bad, I can’t see why you’re so upset.”

When things get really intense – when emotions are running high – we may dissociate or disappear. With enough pressure, that dissociation may go on for days or even weeks. It may take the shape of longer hours at work (which may seem socially acceptable) or it might be gambling or some kind of substance abuse.

Defensiveness & dismissiveness

Boarding school survivors do not react well to criticism. It’s as if we experience it as a threat – even an existential threat. It may feel like we are facing abandonment all over again. The belief may be “If I’m wrong, everything inside me might collapse.”

There are three ways of coping with criticism:

• Being defensive and trying to prove that we were right to do whatever it was that’s brought this criticism down on our head. In this scenario the ex-boarder may maintain that their view is the only correct view. Or they may make excuses for their behaviour.

• Being dismissive of the person offering the criticism (and this may just be feedback with no criticism intended – but it’s received as criticism). Dismissiveness will look like “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “you’re always criticising me.”

• Doing everything we can to avoid conflict so that we don’t have to experience that fear of collapse.

For women ex-boarders there are similar patterns, but we are often judged more harshly than men for being “cold” or “too independent.”

Hyper-competence & independence

The partner of an ex-boarder may feel shut out or even unnecessary – as if they are just a spare wheel. This reflects the ex-boarder’s tendency to be self-reliant and do everything alone. So we notice:

• Not asking for help – ever

• Doing everything alone and resenting other people’s “neediness”

• The double-bind of our own shame – if we ask for help we feel not good enough, but we also feel shame for not being able to relax and let others in. This may be experienced at an unconscious level, but it is an important driver and it creates additional stress.

The one-up position

In some couples the ex-boarder’s partner may find that their other half dominates and constantly tries to prove that they’re right – about everything. This may show up as:

• Adopting an attitude of superiority or detachment in order to stay safe

• Correcting, lecturing or “educating” their partner

In fact while the one-up position may provide a sense of safety, it may also be a subtle way of keeping intimacy at a distance. And maybe this is the crux of the problem.

Why intimacy feels threatening

Boarding school survivors are certainly not alone in feeling threatened by intimacy. It’s a common trait among men because of the way traditional masculinity has been framed. But for ex-boarder men, it is reinforced by their boarding school experience.

In a relationship adult closeness stirs up the grief of the child who once felt abandoned. Maybe it’s the fear of loss in this relationship or maybe it’s the fear of being exposed in his grief. At school expressions of grief would have been stamped out from the beginning.

The fear, then, is that emotional intimacy will awaken all sorts of emotions which have been kept under wraps for all those years, in the box marked ‘danger’.

There is also the sense that love and emotional intimacy mean dependence, and that dependence equates with danger – which is true in the logic of the old system. The realisation that this is less about dependence and more about interdependence may be the key that unlocks that box.

Finally there may also be some shame around not knowing how to do emotional connection. For someone who has avoided it all their life since starting at boarding school, it’s like learning a whole new way of being, and yes it does involve skills. But actually many of us are good at learning new skills, and we may have a lot of experience of this in other contexts.

It’s worth remembering that there is a self behind the mask – your true self who is wants connection and who can provide the energy needed to do the work to transform that survival personality into one which is relational and comfortable with emotion.

Come along on Wednesday 17th to a masterclass on how to reconnect with the self behind the mask.

In my next blog post I’ll be digging into what change looks like for boarding school survivors and their partners – it’s a bit like a dance which requires both partners to be present to each other so that they don’t collide on the dance floor as the dance changes from the dance of pursuit and avoidance to one which brings them together.