The Reinvention of a Boarding School Survivor

About 17 years ago, after a conversation with a fellow ex-boarder, I came to think of myself as a ‘boarding school survivor’. My friend introduced me to the work of Nick Duffell, who had set up a therapy organisation dedicated to working with boarding school survivors.

I read Nick’s book, The Making of Them, but it was focused mostly on the experience of men who had been to boarding school. There was very little written about women’s experience.

Nonetheless both Nick's book and a later book by Joy Schaverien, Boarding School Syndrome, talked about the lasting emotional impact of boarding school, which casts a long shadow into adulthood. It became obvious how much the pain of that experience was still with me when I went to a reunion 35 years after I left school and suffered a sort of mini breakdown.

I was in counselling at the time and we often came back to the trauma of the years I spent in boarding school. My counsellor offered me a course of 12 EMDR sessions (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing). They were very successful in that after those 12 sessions, I could talk about my memories of school without crying.

But it wasn’t enough.

Because although the emotions I felt about school had receded, nothing had changed in the way I related to myself and other people.

• I was still shy.

• I was still a perfectionist.

• I still felt deeply unconfident and unsure of myself.

• I still shouted at my husband when I was angry with him.

• I still felt compelled to get my point across when I ‘knew’ I was right.

And I had no idea that any of this had anything to do with school.

Nothing much changed until after I left my husband. Our relationship had deteriorated to a point that the marriage seemed irretrievable. And I still didn’t see that I was doing anything wrong.

Starting the process of reinvention

Being alone again, after the breakdown of a relationship, gives all of us a chance to review and take stock, and it really helps if we’re willing to concede that we might have been part of the problem.

For me the first big step was to realise that I had cast myself in the role of victim and that I had been blaming my failures on my husband and on the traumas of my childhood & adolescence.

In that moment I decided that I would not play the victim and that I was going to take responsibility for my life. That was the first step towards self-reinvention. Not that I thought of it as reinvention, but that’s what it was.

It was the type of reinvention which we do in response to a crisis – in this case the dissolution of my marriage.

In the year that followed, as I was engaged in coach training, I reinvented myself in other ways. I recognised my own defensiveness and how I was allowing it to sabotage my relationship with my daughter, so I backed off from it and opened myself up to criticism and to allowing her to have her own reality even if I didn't share it.

Then in 2018, I was introduced to a new understanding of human experience. This understanding can be summed up in these two tenets:

1. That all of our experience is actively created moment-to-moment inside our minds. Our experience is never passively received; it is always created. This, my friend, is neuroscience.

2. That we are all part of something much bigger – the divine, the deity, universal consciousness, whatever you want to call it. This concept is something I grew up with as a Quaker, so it wasn’t new, but what was new was my willingness to accept that it was true of me!

This new understanding (the 3 Principles if you want to know) became the engine for my own conscious reinvention; that is reinvention that I decided to undertake without being spurred into action by circumstances.

The conscious self-reinvention of a boarding school survivor

Of course there was a moment when I decided I wanted to be different, root and branch. I’d been tinkering at the edges, which yielded small if significant results. But I wanted something much more than that.

In 2020 I met Mark and we fell in love. It was a little confusing, but then being in love is confusing sometimes. But it made sense in a different way when we discovered that we had both been to boarding school – that explained the way we ‘got’ each other.

We agreed from the outset that we wouldn’t argue. That turned out to be surprisingly easy, in spite of my long history of arguing.

But there have been other things which could have got in the way of our relationship. In terms of relationship dynamics we were well-matched – I tended towards being boundaryless and he tended towards being walled-off. It’s a classic pairing. And it’s not healthy, unless both partners are willing to address it and move towards balance.

Moving towards balance turns out to be way easier if you recognise that deep inside you is that spark of the divine, and that spark is who you are. Let’s call that divine spark the True Self.

Knowing that my True Self is who I really am and not just a separate little piece of the divine lodged inside me was immense. I no longer identified with my conditioned self, my boarding-school-survivor self. Recognising that gave me access to a space from which I could move into being more myself than that small survivor self had been.

What helped this to work really well was the recognition that all those traits I had taken on as part of my ‘survival personality’ (for instance the overwhelming need to be right all the time), were in fact the wise creation of my True Self, because it was those traits that kept me psychologically safe when I was at school.

I’m sorry if that’s a bit confusing, but it’s important. The reality is that there are no intrinsically bad people, there are no bad parts. There are only good people doing ‘bad’ things.

We all have parts which do things which are bad for us and bad for others. Those ‘bad things’ are usually beliefs and behaviours which kept us safe during our childhood and adolescence. And as adults we can shed them just as a snake sheds its skin when it outgrows it.

All it took was the realisation that they had been the creation of a wise part of me, but that I no longer needed those traits & behaviours and I could let go of them.

Your True Self as the engine of conscious self-reinvention

Conscious self-reinvention isn’t just about letting go of the ‘bad’ behaviours or the self-limiting beliefs. It’s about creating yourself in closer alignment with who you truly are – your True Self.

For the boarding school survivor, or ex-boarder, the process looks like this:

1. Notice what you’re doing which is sabotaging your relationships and/or your own mental health. That’s your survival personality.

2. Acknowledge that your survival personality was the creation of your own inner wisdom (your True Self) and was designed to keep you safe when you were at school.

3. Realise that you no longer need that boarding school survival personality and that it no longer serves you.

4. Commit to conscious self-reinvention.

5. Trust that you have all you need within you to reinvent yourself in closer alignment with your True Self, your own inner wisdom, which of course is your True Self. And ask!

The question you ask is simply this: “What do I need to do or be in order to move into closer alignment?” And then listen for the small voice which is like a quiet flute at the back of the orchestra. Your survival personality may be shouting at you, but when you tune into that small, still voice, you can hear it.

You’ll know when it’s the voice of your inner wisdom, because it feels good in your body. When you listen the messages of your True Self you’ll feel open and expansive. When you’re listening to the voice of your survival personality (which you might think of as your ego), your body will feel tight and contracted, and fear comes in the door. If you’re feeling like that, retune. The voice of your True Self is just a little way down the dial!

Next Tuesday I’m hosting a workshop on self-reinvention and relationships. One of the biggest rewards of conscious self-reinvention is in our relationships, and it can transform what may have looked like a hopeless case into something thriving and very loving.

To find out more about self-reinvention for relationships, sign up for the workshop here.