Why is safety the hardest thing for a boarding school survivor?

Some ex-boarders find a lot of things hard. There’s a long list of things we boarding school survivors complain of, including:

• anxiety

• hypervigilance

• dissociation

• addiction

• depression

• difficulties with vulnerability and intimacy

• emotional dysregulation

• difficulties with relationships.

But there is one thing which seems to be foundational to all of these – simply not feeling safe. When I asked the members of The Tuck Shop (my online community for ex-boarders) what they would like to focus on first, the majority of them identified safety. So that’s where we started.

It’s as if we came away from school – which let’s face it wasn’t a very safe place – into adult life, and were unable to connect with a sense of safety in the world around us.

OK, I admit, the world isn’t such a safe place – especially if you live in such places as the middle east. But for most boarding school survivors the fact is that our immediate world is relatively safe, but this seems not to count for anything. Besides we’re talking here about psychological safety, not physical safety.

We have a deep sense of being unsafe which is decoupled from the reality of our day-to-day lives. For years I used to wake up with a feeling of dread, and I know I’m not the only one.

But what is it that underlies this lack of safety?

There are some obvious good reasons for not having felt safe at boarding school. In some schools there was a systemic problem of physical or sexual abuse. Then there was the bullying. And then there was a culture of shaming. No matter what you were dealing with, you didn’t know when or where it would come from next. So you were always on-guard.

In this environment it made sense to become hypervigilant and that became part of the boarding school child’s survival personality. The hypervigilance is the flipside of the sense of never being safe.

Hypervigilance means we are anxious most of the time. We’re on the lookout, waiting for something to go wrong. It’s stressful and exhausting. The human body isn’t designed for this. We aren’t designed to be on hyper-alert all the time.

So it makes sense that we all long to feel safe.

The costs of hypervigilance and not feeling safe

The lack of safety seems to be at the root of most of the things we complain of. Take depression for example. As psychiatrist, Dr Bill Pettit points out, in the end as anxiety overwhelms us, we move into depression – a state in which we move from hyper-aroused to hypo-aroused. It makes sense to abandon anxiety because of its high costs, but depression isn’t really the answer! I can attest to that after almost four decades of it.

The lack of safety is like a multi-headed hydra. It gets into everything. We don’t feel safe being vulnerable, we don’t feel safe with our feelings, we don’t feel safe with people we don’t know, we don’t feel entirely safe with people who are our friends.

The tendency to dissociate from our feelings – which seem so frightening – makes it difficult to have meaningful relationships. Without the direct experience of our own feelings it’s hard to empathise with others. But the vulnerability we fear is only a little bit below the surface and very often we don’t feel safe with a partner – the slightest trigger and we experience insecurity, abandonment and feeling unlovable.

How can I start to feel more safety in myself?

Psychological safety is so foundational it makes sense to do whatever you can in order to increase your sense of being safe.

Let’s start with the basics: There is only one way you can feel safe or unsafe and that is from inside of you. That means nothing outside of you is 100% in control of your feelings of safety. As long as you know that physically you are not in danger (no building is collapsing around you, no one has a gun to your head, etc), you are in a good position to create your own sense of safety.

• Yoga

• Meditation

• Engaging in an activity that helps you calm your nervous system such as drawing or crochet

• Sitting with a pet – the purring of a cat is very calming to the nervous system

• Listening to birdsong

• Taking a walk in the local woods or a park

All of these engage your body or the senses which helps to calm your whole system. But you can also work more directly with the part of the brain which governs your body’s stress response (the amygdala and hypothalamus), by using reassurance.

For instance you can reassure yourself repeatedly through the day ‘You are safe’ or ‘We are safe’ or ‘I am safe’ (whichever works best for you). And when you notice yourself caught up in anxious thinking, you simply notice the thoughts and then acknowledge that it’s your survival personality thinking those things and that they most likely aren’t true!

You might find that safety comes more easily than you expected. But for most of us it takes practice. In fact you could say it is a practice.

It helps when we do this in connection with others. This is what we do in The Tuck Shop – we come together once a week to share experiences and discover that we’re not alone in feeling the way we do. That connection is immensely healing.

If you’d like to join this community of boarding school survivors (and some of our partners), you can find out more here.