Find Your More: The Blog - More Love, More Resilience

It takes a degree of humility for anyone to recognise that their behaviour has been unkind or that they could be more emotionally available. So if you have already seen that in yourself, you’ve taken the first step – and it was a brave one. In this blog post I take you through six stages in the journey to discovering who you are and reconnecting with your inner life and those you love.

Talking with ex-boarder clients and their partners I notice a pattern where the partner feels dismissed, shut out, and even lied to. The relationship suffers because the ex-boarder is unable to show up fully with their partner – and often with their children as well. There are very real reasons why partners feel this way. Their experience is a mirror to the survival personality or mask which children create at boarding school to keep them safe. After wearing that mask for 5, 10 or even 13 years it becomes very difficult to take it off – the mask feels like safety, without it there is only vulnerability and fear. But to have a healthy relationship, we have to put the mask aside and let our partners in. Let’s take a look at the mask and how it impacts relationships.

If you really want to understand how the trauma of boarding school affects adult relationships you need to ask the ex-boarder’s partner. The wives and daughters of men who went to boarding school complain about them... * being defensive * avoiding conflict * being afraid to face their fears and other painful emotions * dissociating or disappearing when things get difficult * being dismissive of family members and their needs * being evasive or telling outright lies But there is a reason behind this behaviour - part of the ex-boarder's mask.

I don’t know how many times I have heard this complaint from clients: “I’ve tried everything. Nothing I say makes any difference. I don’t want to keep nagging, but if I don’t nag nothing happens.” It can be about mundane household tasks like putting things away or it can be about big things like honesty and integrity. So when you realise that your partner is being evasive and hiding something from you, what do you do? Or when yet again the milk has been left out and gone sour, what do you do?

Many women who went to boarding school carry invisible wounds that only surface years later - in loneliness, self-doubt, or struggles to connect deeply with others. Real healing begins when we see how we adapted to survive, and start gently laying down the armour we built back then. As we learn self-compassion, reparent the little girl inside, and reconnect with our true selves, love and belonging become possible again. It’s a beautiful journey of coming home - to ourselves, and to the warmth of genuine connection. Join me on Tuesday 18 November at 5pm UK time for a free online workshop, Finding More Warmth in Relationships: For Women Ex-Boarders, and take your next step on this path of healing and rediscovery.

In last week’s post, I wrote about what happens to girls at boarding school: how the culture of separation and shame shapes a survival personality that prizes self-reliance and control. This week, I want to look at how those same traits show up years later, in the places that matter most: our relationships with partners and children. Once upon a time, independence was our armour. It helped us cope, compete, and carry on. But in adulthood, that same independence can quietly block the intimacy we long for.

Many women who went to boarding school grew up learning to cope alone - to be self-reliant, capable, composed, and untouchable. Those strengths helped us survive in an environment where feelings had to be tucked away. But decades later, the very traits that once protected us can make love and intimacy feel confusing, even unsafe. This is the first post in a three-part series which will explore how boarding school shaped our “survival personality” - and how that legacy shows up in our adult relationships. We begin with Part 1: The Creation of the Feminine Survival Self.

Many women who went to boarding school learned to be independent, capable, and endlessly resourceful. But those same strengths can make adult relationships unexpectedly hard. You might find it difficult to feel truly heard, stay calm in conflict, or believe you’re good enough just as you are. This post explores how early separation and self-reliance shape the ways we connect – and why love can sometimes feel like hard work. It’s not about blame or fixing yourself, but about understanding the protective patterns that once kept you safe. When you begin to meet them with warmth and compassion, new possibilities for closeness start to emerge. If this resonates with you, join me on November 18th for a live online workshop exploring how boarding school experiences shape women’s relationships – and how healing begins when we start to listen to ourselves with kindness.

Whether we’re trying to rebuild trust with a partner or simply feel more at ease in our own decisions, the starting point is always the same: self-trust. It’s built through small, consistent actions - doing what we said we’d do, showing up even when it’s inconvenient, and being kind to ourselves when we don’t quite manage it. When we live in alignment with our own promises, we create a deep sense of safety and reliability, and that safety naturally extends into our relationships. Others begin to feel what we already know: that we’re steady, dependable and honest in our intentions. In this post I explore practical ways to rebuild self-trust, one small action at a time, and how those changes ripple outwards to strengthen the bonds we most care about.

Do you sometimes feel like you just need to get done with all this emotional stuff so that you can get on with the important things in your day. Enough already! Stop crying! We have things to do, places to go, people to see. But hang on a minute. Emotions aren’t just a nuisance. They’re an important guide to how you’re doing moment-to-moment. If you were a civil engineer and someone offered you a really sensitive instrument that would provide you with moment-to-moment data about the state of repair of a bridge and send you an alert every time the bridge got too close to failing, you wouldn’t say “No thanks, I have more important things to worry about.” But that’s what emotions are – a very sensitive instrument which feeds us data about the state of our system – mind, body and soul.

It seems like it’s a common complaint at the moment – from women whose male partners are emotionally unavailable and unwilling to share their feelings. “I’m not that kind of man.” “I’ve never talked about my feelings. I’m not about to change that.” “That’s who I am. I can’t change who I am.” This blog post is inspired by some of my women clients and their obvious frustration. If you're struggling to get through to your man or he refuses to open up about his feelings, there are some perspectives and skills that will make a difference.

Nick and Sally met when they were still at school. It was great to start with, but as time went by the cracks started to show. Sally was away at boarding school most of the year so they couldn’t see each other for weeks on end. Then the holidays arrived and cramming so much into those few weeks meant that things could get very intense. Sally’s Mum pointed out that Nick was very ‘needy’ and ‘emotionally dependent.’ But no one noticed Sally’s tendency to be a bit walled off – or if they did they didn’t say anything. This was the 1970s and no one talked about emotional regulation, boundaries or attachment styles.