Revisiting Boarding School

This week I’ve been in recovery mode… From a weekend which was brutal, gruelling and exhausting.

I was on a weekend workshop for women ex-boarders. During those two days I revisited my own time at boarding school and I listened to 13 other women share about theirs. I'm not sure which was harder to be honest.

To go back to memories like these is only worth it if you know you’ll be able to process them and move on. The moving on – I hope – will happen at the second weekend of this course at the end of March.

But what can I share with you?

That I’m still angry – especially with the psychiatrist who told my parents that if my sisters and I didn’t go away we might end up with schizophrenia – because my father was depressed. FFS.

That I’m still grieving the separation from my two younger sisters (who were left behind when I went away and then went to a different boarding school from me).

The facilitator had me stamp and shout out the anger. There was a lot swearing which felt good. I’ve been angry with my parents, but that passed a while back – it might have been the worst decision they ever made, but it was probably the best decision they could have made at the time.

The school was Victorian in outlook, churchy (as I said in a letter home) and severe. There was no affection, no TLC, no sense that children need emotional care. It was all about rules, hard work and competition, and punishment if you stepped out of line, made a mistake or was late to breakfast.

The Tiny Architect

At the weekend we were also shown a new model of how the child at boarding school creates their survival personality.

There is only one way to survive in such an institution – to wall yourself off.

Home may not have been perfect, but as a baby or small child there was some likelihood that crying or asking for your needs to be met would be answered by the parent giving the child what she needed.

But at school that all stopped. Crying was met with disapproval and shaming. The only place you could expect some TLC was the infirmary.

In fact I remember a girl telling our housemistress that a younger girl was crying and the housemistress saying “Let her stew in her own juice.” That little girl had recently lost her mother.

So instead of getting your needs met, reaching out only brought in shaming, bullying and hostility.

It wasn’t safe to reach out. It was only safe to hold it all in and build a wall around yourself to protect you from what was, in effect, a hostile environment.

This was on Sunday towards the end of the workshop. When the facilitator told us we were about to do some theory, there was a palpable sigh of relief – because we could stop remembering.

The ‘Tiny Architect’ who built those walls also decided what was housed inside them – what that child became. Clever or not-clever, sporty or not-sporty, shy or outgoing, bully or bullied.

The Tiny Architect worked with whatever we already had. So I was shy, sensitive, clever, not-sporty and had difficulty making friends. Inside those walls these characteristics polarised (or fossilised?), so there was little hope of me suddenly discovering that I could be sporty or good at making friends.

The problem with walls of course is that they keep other people out and in the end this becomes a major disadvantage. Boarding school survivors are notoriously incompetent when it comes to relationships and it feels really scary when anyone tries to breach our walls.

The difficulties with relationships come with symptoms such as depression, anxiety & hypervigilance and a tendency to dissociate including addiction and withdrawal. This is what the late Professor Joy Schaverien called Boarding School Syndrome.

I can testify to this: I've suffered with depression and anxiety for decades and I've made four attempts at relationships and it’s only now that I seem to be getting any good at it. I know I can still do better, but I do feel good enough – at last.

If you'd like to find out more about how the boarding school experience impacts us, download my e-book, coming home: Beyond Boarding School Survival. Or just get in touch!

The photo is of the page of my notebook with a sketch of the moated castle I built inside to keep myself safe at school, along with my notes about the Tiny Architect.