Part 3. The Journey Home: Healing Women's Boarding School Trauma

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

There’s no doubt that for many women being sent away to boarding school as a child was traumatic. But strangely the impact of that trauma on our adult lives can take decades to reveal itself. We often don’t join the dots between present difficulties and our experiences at boarding school until we are well into middle age.

Perhaps the reason for this is that our understanding of trauma has got stuck in the outside-in notion that the circumstances of boarding school made us feel the pain that we’ve associated with our memories of school. But in it’s the way we responded to those circumstances that created the pain.

Traditionally there have been three ways boarding school survivors have approached their boarding school trauma:

• Pretend it was all OK, shove all the pain and fear into a box and close the lid firmly. In the end this doesn’t work – the box bursts open and all that buried stuff comes back to haunt us.

• Rationalise it away: ‘It’s over now, it didn’t really do me any harm and it made me independent and self-reliant.’ This approach has the consequence of denying the reality of the trauma and therefore the experience of that little girl inside.

• Attempt to heal it, through therapy, with an emphasis on talking about the memories and how your school experiences ‘made you feel’ in an attempt to help you feel better now.

My path was the third path, including counselling and EMDR which did help to reduce the pain, but left me still pretty dysfunctional. That’s overwhelming loneliness, a constant sense of not belonging three failed relationships and the inability to recognise what I might be doing to sabotage them.

Until recently. Until I discovered a different way of healing those old scars.

There is another path to healing. This is the path which recognises that the way you showed up at school was an inside-out job – you created the self, the personality, which you needed in order to survive safely at school. And believe me, if you are here now reading this, then you did survive!

I’ve laid this out in five steps, but in fact much of this happens at the same time, as you continue to integrate and grow into greater alignment with your true self – who you truly are. That is the healing that makes the difference.

1. Recognising how old patterns of feeling, belief and behaviour continue to show up in the present. These old patterns often form a sort of armour or mask, and they hide the person you truly are. So while you may realise you need to shed the armour, it needs to be done with care.

2. Practising self-acceptance and self-compassion in relation to these old patterns, especially when you realise how they are sabotaging your happiness now.

3. Reparenting the little lost girl inside, nurturing and caring for her, acknowledging and honouring what she did to keep you safe at school, while at the same time placing limits which tell her what is and what is not appropriate or acceptable now in adult life.

4. Reconnecting with your true self who has been hidden away for so long within the armour or behind the mask. This is often made easier by the realisation that it was your true or higher self who was the source of the wisdom and creativity needed to build that armour and keep you safe.

5. Building loving and authentic relationships and finding a community where you have a sense of belonging. All of this becomes easier as you go through the transformation of peeling back the armoured self to reveal your true authentic self.

I see this in my women clients. Women who went to boarding school and suffered terribly are reclaiming connection and a sense of wholeness, of being true to themselves. It always involves tracing current behaviour, thoughts and feelings to patterns they first developed at school, and then having the courage to let those old patterns go and try something different.

This can be challenging work, as it means we have to step outside of the comfort of the familiar. But it is hugely rewarding, and it benefits us, the women, our partners, our children and friends, and it ripples out to the wider world.

It is a process of coming home, coming home to ourselves, to the understanding of who we truly are and who we are capable of becoming.

Join me on Tuesday June 18th at 5pm UK for a free online workshop - Finding More Warmth in Relationships: For Women Ex-Boarders.