When Connection Feels Complicated: How Boarding School Shapes Women’s Relationships

If you went to boarding school, you may have had people tell you it was a real privilege. Women who went to boarding school may believe (or have been told) that it wasn’t so bad as it was for male ex-boarders because we weren’t beaten. However the methods of control used by girls’ schools were based in shame and humiliation.

Control was exercised through direct commands, shouting and snide remarks by teachers and other adults in authority. Our daily lives were governed by petty rules and public humiliation. But the girls shamed each other as well with derogatory comments about appearance, intellect and sporting achievements. Taken together the culture of shaming inevitably undermined the self-worth of all but the toughest of us.

So while you may seem to have everything together on the outside – career, family, friends – you may still feel that something is missing in your closest relationships.

Maybe you long for closeness, but find yourself pulling away when things start to feel challenging. You might have had a series of difficult relationships. Or perhaps you’ve given up and made the decision to remain single for the rest of your life.

For many women who went to boarding school, this push-pull in relationships isn’t random – it’s a reflection of the survival strategies we learned long ago. In that respect we’re not so different from men who went to boarding school.

This post is about understanding those old patterns, so you can understand yourself better, meet yourself with compassion, and begin to move toward deeper connection with your partner – and with your children, and your friends and family.

The early lessons of separation

Leaving home and going away to boarding school teaches all children – girls and boys alike – to manage unbearable feelings by dissociating and disconnecting.

I remember my first few months at boarding school – at the age of 11. I cried a lot and was told that I was homesick and it would get better. We were all ‘homesick’ – or in fact grieving – but some of us found it harder not to cry.

Many of the teachers and other girls treated homesickness as weakness – we learned quickly that tears are an embarrassment and they don’t change anything. So we either resorted to crying in private, or simply stopped altogether. Survival in boarding school depends on appearing fine, fitting in, and staying in control of our emotions.

This creates an early split: emotions have to be managed privately or pushed down, and this makes vulnerability feel unsafe.

The message we absorbed was: You can’t rely on anyone to comfort you – you have to cope on your own. No one is coming.

These patterns continue to play out our adult lives. Boarding school makes many of us supremely self-reliant and dissociated from our feelings. We have become so used to doing things alone, we don’t ask for help, even when it would be gladly offered. And we struggle with vulnerability and intimacy.

How those patterns show up in adult relationships

Most ex-boarders don’t realise the impact of their school experience on their adult relationships until they are into their 40s – or even later. By that time they may have burned through several relationships and be at the stage of asking whether there’s something they’re doing that’s contributing to the problem.

The patterns we develop as children at boarding school accompany us into adult life and often run the show until we become aware of them. The first stage in changing behaviour patterns is recognition. That means recognition of what I’m doing that sabotages my relationships and recognition of how it played an important role in keeping me safe at school.

Needing to be right and fear of rejection

Many of the ex-boarder women I have spoken to have recognised that they have an overwhelming need to be right. At school it was important to be right – it saved you from humiliation. I can’t imagine how many times I must have stuck to my guns at school instead of considering that the other girl might be right and I might be wrong.

The problem is that in an adult relationship insisting that you’re right and they’re wrong is counter-productive. It just breeds conflict.

Then there is the fear of judgement and rejection. You may struggle to express your needs directly, or feel invisible even when you do. The fear of rejection may be interfering with your willingness to simply ask for things, and as a result you may tend to keep quiet or complain instead. Unfortunately people are less inclined to offer what we want when we complain.

Having learned to just “get on with it,” you may be communicating a sense that you don’t need anything (even when you do). Therefore your partner may not realise you’re hurting until it spills out as anger or withdrawal.

Trying to be in control

At school, being in control was a really important safety mechanism – a way to manage uncertainty and avoid disappointment. You had so little control of how your life was conducted that the little bit of control you did have was of paramount importance.

In adult relationships, this can look like needing things to be done your way, or feeling panicky when someone else takes the lead. It feels really unsafe when someone ‘moves your cheese.’

Underneath that need to be in control is fear – that if you don’t hold it all together, everything might fall apart. That means you need to know exactly what is happening, when it’s going to happen, who’s doing it and why. I’m not just about everything from controlling things like the week’s menu, what goes in the kids’ lunchboxes and how to load the dishwasher to the weekly cost of his razor blades (yes, I did ask that) and the temperature on the thermostat.

Like insisting that you’re right, trying to keep control of everything is a losing strategy in a relationship. But when you realise you’re doing it and make the decision to change it, you’ve taken that first step of recognition.

Feeling not good enough

With all that shaming at school, it’s not surprising that our self-esteem is often rock-bottom. Added to the shaming we experienced at school, there may be the lingering question ‘What did I do so wrong that my parents had to send me away?’

The pattern that emerges here is of never feeling like we deserve the love of our partners or even our children. You may have a sense that you have to earn their love. You may feel you’re constantly falling short, no matter what your partner says.

That deep belief that you must earn love or approval, which makes others responsible for your self-esteem, may be masked by perfectionism. Perfectionism is simply fear – fear of judgement and disapproval.

A life driven by perfectionism leads to exhaustion, resentment, and difficulty receiving care. When I say difficulty receiving care I mean self-care as well as the care your partner might offer you.

Conflict with your partner

When old wounds are triggered, the nervous system reacts as if you’re back at school – unsafe, powerless, unseen. We often see the people close to us through the lens of those who hurt us in the past. Usually that would be a parent – perhaps an abusive or a neglectful parent.

But in a boarding school survivor the situation is more complex. Our parents were not there. We were abandoned, not once, but repeatedly, term-after-term. So the core wound for the boarding school survivor is most often that of abandonment.

This shows up in two ways:

• You may feel that pain of abandonment every time your partner goes away (say on a work trip or to visit a friend). It feels out of proportion, but it really hurts. You may end up arguing about why he has to go, how long for, and find it really hard to trust.

• A fear of abandonment may underlie a tendency to people-please. Some female ex-boarders find themselves in co-dependent relationships where they enable an abusive partner. But it may simply be that you fight to be heard because of that fear or withdraw in order to stay safe.

Whichever way that abandonment wound shows up, it is likely that your partner gets confused by it, not realising the intensity comes from pain of boarding school, not just the moment at hand.

The hidden grief

Many ex-boarder women carry unacknowledged grief – not just for what happened, but for what didn’t happen. We grieve our lost childhood: the lost years of ordinary childhood affection, the lack of consistent care, the absence of parents during adolescence as well as early years. We grieve the friends from home who we lost touch with, the childhood activities which we couldn’t continue at school, and of course toys we stopped playing with. Perhaps most of all we grieve the fact that we had to grow up too soon and stop being children in the fullest sense. We had to be “fine” and not worry our parents with our pain and hurt.

Later in life this grief can surface in relationships as longing, anger or emptiness. But very often we don’t realise what it is. We don’t see the thread that runs back through our lives to the years at school, and so we can’t understand or explain it.

When we can name it, we stop turning it against ourselves and the people we love.

Beginning to heal - Acceptance

Healing begins with understanding that these patterns were once brilliant survival strategies. If you are to heal the wounds of your boarding school experience it is essential to honour the part of you which created these patterns to keep you safe. You may have created a seemingly impenetrable shell – your survival personality – which keeps everyone out.

This is your ‘armoured self.’ It kept you safe in a world that didn’t meet your needs and was frankly unpredictable and dangerous. So it was very wise, that part of you.

The task now isn’t to blame yourself – it’s to bring warmth and curiosity to the parts of you that still feel small, scared, or unseen, and to the parts which are angry or defensive.

The challenges you have in your closest relationships become opportunities to notice the defences of your survival personality and to experiment with letting go of them and trying new, gentler ways of being that help you get closer to your partner.

The connection between you can grow slowly and safely as you learn that vulnerability no longer means danger. It actually means more closeness and intimacy.

If this resonates with you, remember you’re not alone. There are many 1000s of women who went to boarding school and sometimes it can help to share experiences.

On November 18th, I’m hosting a live online webinar especially for women who went to boarding school. We’ll explore how early separation shapes our adult relationships, why it can be so hard to feel close, and what we can begin to do about it.

It’ll be a chance to connect with other women who understand, to feel seen, and to take your next step toward healing.

You deserve relationships that feel safe, nourishing, and real. I’d love to see you there.

Sign up here: Finding More Warmth in Relationships: For Women Ex-Boarders

If any of this post feels familiar, take a moment to notice how hard you’ve worked just to survive. That strength is still in you, and it can also become the foundation for something softer, kinder and more connected.