Part 1. The Creation of the Feminine Survival Self: How boarding school shapes emotional self-sufficiency and a mistrust of need

The first post in my series, When Strength Becomes a Shell: Women, Boarding School, and the Challenge of Love

Do you remember your first day at school?

I remember a long hallway with a polished wood floor and institutional green paint on the walls. I don’t remember my parents leaving, though I think I can remember them helping me unpack my suitcase in the dormitory.

Most of all I remember the feeling of desolation.

I was 11 years old, homesick, horribly shy and afraid of the other girls.

This was a massive rupture - being sent away taught me that I couldn’t rely on the love and safety of my home, and that self-reliance was essential.

At boarding school in the face of all that grief we give birth to a new self. My boarding school self was the “good girl,” the “clever, competent one.” Survival depended on excelling, coping and pleasing. Above all it depended on hiding my grief. That would have been the same for all of us.

The message we all learned was “Don’t feel. Don’t need. Don’t depend on anyone other than yourself.”

We learned not to feel from the school staff: “You’re just homesick, you’ll get over it soon.” As if separation from parents, brothers and sisters was a minor thing like losing a favourite toy.

We learned from each other the importance of not feeling. To cry was embarrassing, humiliating. But what we didn’t realise then was that to see another girl crying was triggering. We were all busy making sure no-one else triggered those feelings of grief we all carried.

The implicit prohibition on feelings was accompanied by a culture of shaming. We were shamed when we made mistakes, when our handwriting was messy, if we were too nerdy or too stupid, too fat or too thin, too flat-chested or too busty, and on and on.

All that shaming was devastating to our self-esteem – we either sank under the weight of it or adopted a sort of one-up arrogance, which often took the form of bullying. But above all we became self-reliant, self-sufficient, as if we simply didn’t need anyone else.

This self-sufficiency became a sort of armour. Women who went to boarding school sometimes talk about hiding inside a shell, and I remember my Mum and my first boyfriend suggesting I should come out of my shell.

The lessons we learned at boarding school still operate decades later, quietly steering our adult relationships. The women I’ve talked to who went to boarding school speak of being independent, self-reliant into adulthood. We find it so difficult to accept help from others, let alone ask for it.

Maybe that’s because it feels unsafe – unsafe to hand over to someone else the things we’ve always done for ourselves, or perhaps because parting with that self-sufficiency would mean breaking open that shell which kept us safe for so long.

Take a moment to reflect: When did you first learn that needing someone was unsafe? What happens in you when someone tries to help?

Join me on November 18th for a workshop specially for women who went to boarding school. We’ll be exploring how our experience of school shows up in our adult relationships and how we can start to unpick some of the behaviour patterns which we've brought with us from our school days.