The Tuck Shop

For many of us who went to boarding school, we lived for the end of term and then for the very last day. And the day we left, we put it all behind us.

Or so we thought.

But the impact of a difficult time at boarding school can last for decades. It left me with anxiety, depression, an overwhelming fear of abandonment, a need to prove that I’m right and to be in control almost all the time, and a series of broken relationships.

For other people, particularly men, the impact is often a profound emotional shutdown, an inability to express their feelings and real difficulties with intimacy.

This is what has come to be known as boarding school syndrome.

It was psychotherapist, Joy Schaverien, who first identified and named this cluster of emotional states and behaviours that she observed in clients who were ex-boarders.

She also noticed that there were four characteristics of the boarding school experience which made survivors of these schools prone to developing boarding school syndrome:

• Abandonment

• Bereavement

• Captivity

• Disassociation

The disassociation is the child’s response to the pain and hurt which arise from the experience, but it becomes so embedded in the child’s character that by the time we leave school, we don’t even notice it.

How we heal boarding school syndrome

But after many years of living from my own version of boarding school syndrome, I’ve been able to recognise and change these patterns in myself, and I know that other boarding school survivors can too.

There is a place where we can heal more easily from childhood trauma and change those dysfunctional patterns. And that place is a close, loving relationship. Intimacy enables us to heal and change. The only problem is that for many of us intimacy is really frightening.

Ex-boarders have difficulties with relationships because of this fear of intimacy. But that may not be immediately obvious. Recognising that you might be part of the problem is the first step.

This was my first step. Even though I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, I was prepared to admit the possibility that I might be doing something that was hurting my partner or contributing to the rift in our relationship.

Perhaps it was brave of me. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I wanted to make sure that if I had been contributing to our mutual unhappiness, I wouldn’t do it again in a future relationship.

The first thing I did notice was my dysfunctional independence, which made it very difficult to discuss things with him if I expected to receive a “No.” And I could see how that had arisen at boarding school!

The safety and security I have experienced with my new partner has made it possible to really dig into what else I was doing ‘wrong’. I know now that it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with me; the problem was in my survival personality. And I also knew that I am not my personality! That’s just the shell I grew to keep me safe at school (and in my family).

If you think that your boarding school experience may have led you to develop a survival personality or indeed you notice some aspects of boarding school syndrome, I want you to know that you can change! The fact that you created that survival personality means that you can adapt, declutter and reconfigure it.

If you are in a committed relationship, you can do this as you move towards greater intimacy with your partner. And if you’re single you can still do it with the loving support of friends and family.

My free e-book, coming home: Beyond Boarding School Survival, offers insights and strategies to move beyond the label of 'boarding school survivor.' Whether you've felt the weight of separation or the struggle to belong, this free download provides a roadmap to healing and empowerment.

Unpack your emotions, explore the impact of 'boarding school syndrome,' and discover pathways to reclaim your narrative.

Download your copy now and start your journey toward personal growth and greater intimacy.

Download Beyond Boarding School

This week, November 13th-19th is National Self-Care Week in the UK, and the theme this year is mind and body.

It kind of made me laugh when I saw that, because here we are in 2023 and we are still separating the mind from the body. We can think of them as separate for convenience. But let’s starting behaving as if they’re not separate.

But what does this mean in practice? Well let’s take yoga as an example. I do a 15-25 minute yoga practice most mornings. I know that when I do my yoga, my joints loosen up, my back feels better and my mental health benefits.

For me yoga is an investment in my mental wealth. Those daily yogic squats keep my lymphatics moving, as well as keeping my joints loose. I feel great because by taking the time on the mat I’ve shown myself some love. I’ve put myself ahead of my work and any other commitments I have.

Yoga might not be right for you, but whatever you do to move, stretch and nurture your body, when you do it out of self-love, then you are adding an extra dimension to the experience.

Similarly if you practise meditation or mindfulness, if you choose to eat healthily, or if you spend time in creative activities, do it because you love yourself, not just because you want to be a little bit healthier!

Self-care is also about taking responsibility for yourself. It’s not just that your GP is over-worked and you want more from healthcare than yet another prescription. When we assume responsibility – response-ability – for ourselves, we inevitably take a more holistic approach to the care of our body-mind.

The doctor will probably not have time to go through your daily habits with a fine tooth comb, trying to get to the bottom or why you keep falling ill. But you can!

You can start with the obvious self-care practices such as meditation, yoga, a daily walk, good, healthy food and 8-9 hours sleep at night. And then you can start to listen to your self-talk.

How do you speak to yourself? If you notice that you’re speaking harshly to yourself, ask yourself what’s the likely impact of that on your mental & physical health. Would you expect a child or a dog to thrive if you constantly threw insults at them, or put them down with harsh words? And yet so many of us speak this way to ourselves.

What’s your response-ability here? You can change the way you speak to yourself. You can show yourself compassion and kindness. You can be curious about why you do and say the things you you do and say. You have the ability to respond to yourself with kindness.

As you learn to show yourself more love and care, you will also find that you have more fulfilling relationships with others in your life. It's easier to be kind and compassionate to others when we are kind and compassionate to ourselves - perhaps simply because as we practise it on ourselves, we get better at showing it to other people. And maybe when we are harsh to ourselves, we attract harshness from others; when we are kind to ourselves, we attract kindness from others.

So you see self-love and self-care are the ultimate holistic practice, with benefits spilling over into our relationships, our families and our communities.

Self-care week is just one week. But self-care is for the whole of the year. So perhaps this is an opportunity to make one lasting change to the way you live your life. And then once that change hs become a habit, you can create another and then another...

What habit would you like to change this week, that will mean you are taking better care of yourself and showing yourself more love for the next 12 months?

I was on my customary lunchtime walk today, watching the autumn leaves blow down from the trees, with the occasional helicoptering seed wings amongst them.

It reminded me of a book we had when my girls were small, all about a girl who catches a falling leaf which turns out to have magical properties. The story follows her as she goes first to Mum, then to Dad, then her brothers and sisters, trying to get them to listen as she tells them about the magic that the leaf has brought into her day (things like turning mud pies into delicious cakes, and old curtains into velvet robes).

But they are all too busy with their own affairs to listen, and besides none of them is able to believe in what she tells them – after all she is the youngest child and therefore the least credible. And they all know that magic is not a thing.

But in the end, she finds her grandma, who is sitting by the fire knitting. Gran listens to the girl’s tale and then responds, “I had one of those once, dear.” Gran has time to listen and is open-hearted enough to consider that our heroine has something of value to tell her. And of course, most importantly perhaps, she already has experience of a magic golden leaf.

I came across a magic golden leaf back in 2017. It didn’t turn mud-pies into cakes or old curtains into velvet robes, but it totally transformed my life. What I’m talking about is the philosophy or model of the mind known as the 3 Principles.

It really is very simple: there are only two things I know to be true, and I can count on them.

1. That all our experience – thoughts, perceptions, feelings – are created from inside of us; they are never a direct result of anything outside.

2. That we are all part of something bigger – the divine, universal consciousness, the implicate order, call it what you will. As the late Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean.”

I know many people who have also got a magic leaf of their own. And it’s always good to talk about the Principles with them. But of course it’s also good to share this understanding with people who have never come across it and are maybe a bit sceptical about it!

So here’s the rub. People don’t like to be told that their impression that their feelings are caused by stuff outside of them is a false impression. Of course they don’t! This is a truth many of us hold dear. It allows us to blame someone else when we feel crap.

And it’s no good me saying “but don’t you realise? You create your feelings of anger / guilt / despair from the inside-out.” All that does is alienate people.

So I am happy to talk about my own experience. This particular magic golden leaf has given me leverage to change so much of my own experience:

• I stopped seeing myself as a victim of my circumstances and got into the driver’s seat of my life

• I began to view the trauma of my adolescence as the source of many of my strengths

• I realised that the anxiety I so often experience is not only a response to things going on ‘out there’ but also a neurological pattern which I created in the past and which I can at least modulate if not eradicate

• I have understood that I have innate healing power and innate well-being, and I have learned to trust it when I am either unwell or having a bad day with my mental health

• I am able to be in a happy and fulfilling relationship because I’ve understood that the only person I can change is myself, and that even if there are things I’m not so keen on in my partner, those things are never the cause of my unhappiness or irritation.

• If I notice that I am feeling unhappy about something, I stop to ask myself why it seems to important to me

• If I get irritated by anyone, I first ask myself “am I in an irritable mood?” The answer is usually yes, which explains why I am finding people irritating!

This is a pretty random list, but the summary is that the Principles have transformed my mental & physical health, my relationships, and my work-life balance.

If you’d like to find out more about how the Principles could form the basis for your peace and happiness download the e-book. There are 10 chapters and each one ends with a question for reflection, which will help you to move your own life forward.

We all have blind spots, things we can’t see about ourselves that may be glaringly obvious to others. For instance it might be a tendency to shut down when things get heated or to avoid difficult conversations altogether.

But even when other people see these behaviour patterns in us, they don’t always understand what lies behind them. And because they cannot understand, they very often they get angry. And what if we don't understand why we do these things either?

For many of us who went to boarding school, there is a gap in development. While we may have benefited from an excellent academic education, our emotional ‘education’ would have been neglected.

One of the foundations of a relationship is the expression of our needs and feelings and the ability to respond to the needs of our partner. This is vital to the health of the relationship and intimacy within it. But it’s often an area in which former boarders have great difficulty, since one of the places which is neglected totally within a boarding education is that of emotional literacy.

And because we leave school without even a basic level of emotional literacy, we can’t understand why things go wrong in our relationships.

One of the key things we learn as children is how to regulate our emotions. Initially this process is facilitated by the primary caregiver (usually the mother, but not always), and as we grow we get better at doing it for ourselves.

The boarder’s strategic survival personality

But in boarding school we have to manage the emotional impact of separation from our families, alongside the requirement to adapt to institutional living. In response to these demands, many of us will have created a very specific adaptation, which has come to be known as the Strategic Survival Personality.

For some of us this personality presents a confident exterior and the ability to cope well, whilst at the same time keeping hidden the parts that are vulnerable. For others it was about coping with our own lack of confidence and self-belief.

It was only in the last couple of months that I realised that one of the impacts of boarding school for me was that I did not feel safe for at least the first couple of years. It took me that long to learn the ropes and realise that I could actually do it. Of course ‘doing it’ meant developing my own strategic survival personality.

I know now that one of my coping strategies was dissociation (ie not feeling emotion). This worked well at school, it worked well when I went to university and had to adjust again to a new environment, it helped me cope with my shyness and social anxiety through all those years. Unfortunately dissociation let me down massively when my boyfriend took his life two days after my 20th birthday.

Now don’t get me wrong: bereavement by suicide is always a terrible experience. But if you never learned to regulate your emotions, it’s like falling into a deep pit which you simply can’t climb out of. After the initial phase of rage and despair, I entered a long period of depression.

So I entered my 20s and 30s with a tendency to depression which I didn’t get to grips with until I was in my 50s. For me that was the legacy of boarding school.

For others it will be a little different. Some boarding school survivors are over-confident; some appear to lack empathy (that seems to be a precondition for government in the UK); some are intellectual giants; and some are sensitive and gifted artists or poets. But we all have something in common: we had to develop a survival personality which was well-adapted to boarding school.

The problem is that it is not well-adapted to adult relationships.

Earlier this year I interviewed a number of women who had had a boarding school education. There were many different stories, but there were themes which kept recurring:

• an overwhelming need to be right

• being fiercely independent

• a sense that they were superior to all the men in their lives

• and a history of ‘failed’ relationships, sometimes leading to the decision to remain single

I can relate to all of these. And I would go so far as to suggest that they are the result of low self-esteem.

In my boarding school, there was no affection or physical touch, and precious little care or comfort. So we had to learn to manage without them, which meant we were learning to live without intimacy. So it is unsurprising that our relationships were so difficult given how little preparation we had received.

Fear of intimacy

Close relationships between girls were frowned upon in my school, and there were no boys. Other girls’ brothers and the boys from our brother school were regarded as mysterious objects of desire. And with no brothers of my own, I had no experience of the minds of young men.

With so little experience of boys and a degree of emotional illiteracy, I was definitely thrown in at the deep end with my first boyfriend. I had no idea that the intense emotions I experienced needed regulating! Emotional regulation was not a concept I had even been introduced to.

So it ended badly (when he took his life), and I moved from one difficult relationship to another, never understanding what I was doing wrong or what I could change to make things easier. As I said earlier, this seems to be a common pattern among female boarding school survivors.

It seems we pick partners who are a mirror to our own trauma. When we have been starved emotionally, we pick partners who are emotionally unavailable

After repeated disappointments with men who couldn’t trusted to be reliable, dependable or emotionally available, we start to believe that no men can be trusted. And ultimately we come to fear the intimacy we had so craved.

This may lead to shut down, independence and a sense that we don’t need anyone, but of course this makes for problems in relationships as the woman’s partner is likely to feel pushed away and may see her as being cold and non-empathic.

10 aspects of the survival personality which get in the way of healthy relationships

The ex-boarder’s strategic survival personality presents a huge range of difficulties which include:

• Having difficulty expressing and regulating feelings

• Hiding difficult feelings from others, particularly fears and insecurities

• Feeling mistrustful of others’ motives

• Feeling anxious in close intimate relationships

• Being reluctant to ask for help as this is seen as a sign of weakness

• Finding it difficult to relax, preferring to be engaged in work or other activity

• Needing to be right all the time

• Wanting to be in control in relationships

• A deep-seated fear of being controlled by others

• Having limited awareness of the needs of others

From surviving to thriving

There is a happy ending to this story. It is possible to change that survival personality and create something new. When my marriage ended, I realised how much I had been playing the role of Victim. I peeled it back layer by layer.

First I decided I would no longer see myself as a victim of my ex, nor any other man I might meet in the future. Then I noticed where I had seen myself as a victim of circumstances and peeled that back. Then I could see how I had regarded myself as the victim of previous lovers and peeled that back. Then onto the boyfriend who had taken his life – I was no longer the victim of that bereavement. Then boarding school, then my parents’ decision to send me to boarding school, then the reasons that led them to take the decision to send all three of us to boarding school.

It was either that or regret ever being born.

Now as the conscious creator of my life, my behaviour, my thoughts and even my emotions (actually that’s more about creating my response to my emotions), I have what you might think of as a consciously created personality.

Personality (or character) is not something we are born with. We create it in response to our circumstances. Your circumstances have changed already. Change your behaviour, change your thoughts and your responses to things and you will change your character. I choose to keep the things I like about myself, and I choose to recognise and change the things that don’t serve me.

And of course you can do that too!

You may need support as you explore the circumstances that led you to create the character you built for yourself and to recognise that the walls you developed as part of your Strategic Survival Personality. You may need someone to remind you that you did this to protect yourself when you were a child. With someone to stand for you as you move away from survival mode, you can shift into interdependency with others. You will learn to take care of your own needs and how to live in interconnection with a partner, relying on them for the things they can offer you.

If you're looking for support on this journey, get in touch. I offer a free one-hour consultation where we can look at what you created for your strategic survival personality, how you would like to change it and what your first steps are towards creating something new for yourself.

If you prefer to start this journey alone, my e-book, coming home: Beyond Boarding School Survival will take you through a process of exploring your survival personality and how you came to create it. And it will show you how to start the process of creating a new consciously created character.

Do you speak harshly to yourself? If so listen to these words from couples therapist, Terry Real.

“There is no redeeming value in harshness. There’s nothing harshness does that loving firmness doesn’t do better.”

If you speak harshly to yourself, I understand. It’s a habit I am still in the process of changing in myself.

I know now that my harsh inner voice – my inner critic if you like – is something I created in response to what I experienced as a child. I don’t recall my parents being harsh with me, but I do remember them being harsh with each other and sometimes with my sisters. So the harsh voice was part of the background noise growing up.

I was the eldest child and I’m like many other women I know who were the eldest child. We were the responsible ones, the ones who comforted younger siblings and sometimes our parents, and we often acted as mediators or go-betweens when there was conflict.

This role which is so often adopted by the eldest child, is sometimes known as the Hero Child, and it’s not confined to women.

The hero child adapts to difficulties or disorder in their family by becoming super-competent at everything – they’re very helpful at home, they mind and care for their younger siblings; they excel academically or at sports – or both; they’re responsible and sensible. The hero child seems to have been born grown up.

But they are people-pleasers. And this is just one of the difficulties and drawbacks of having to live up to such high expectations. Many hero children will have given up their childhood, taking responsibility for younger siblings and working to high expectations academically.

I recognise that in myself – with two sisters who were four and five & half years younger than me; and being the child who went to university and then on to post-graduate studies with the expectation that I would get a PhD and become a university lecturer.

It’s only now looking back on my childhood and the boarding school experience that I have realised that I was a hero child. I have that deep feeling of loss and sadness which I could not account for in the past.

In fact I tick almost all the boxes, except that I never excelled at sports!

Teachers and parents generally view a hero child as the model pupil, but their own success traps the child in a vicious cycle of trying to be the best. The best is a lonely place to be and we end up concealing feelings of loneliness and never feeling good enough. There may be unexpressed anger about the pressure, and when feelings of depression result, work is the obvious distraction and so we work ever harder to cover it up.

Low self-esteem and feelings of not being good can become the hero child’s main driver: being a loner who seldom recognises their own skills and abilities. They can’t trust their judgment, so they rely on the opinions of others to tell them how they’re doing.

And there is often another problem for hero children: they remember only what they didn’t do, the things they couldn’t fix or control. They see their failures, but not their successes. And the things they wouldn’t try because of their fear of failure.

They end up masking their feelings of loneliness, loss, anger and resentment at not being listened to, not being heard and having to be too grown up too soon.

If you were a hero child, you may live with a deep sorrow over the loss of your childhood. You may find it easy to be serious and task-oriented, but have a hard time lightening up or being playful. You may have an intense need to be in control at all times, and feel panicky if you ever feel that you are losing control of anything.

Harshness in the hero child

As adults, hero children are exceptionally self-reliant and they judge themselves without mercy.

Hero children can be really hard on themselves. This is in part because, while we may try to conceal it, we tend to be highly judgmental people. And we don’t just judge other people, we are constantly judging ourselves.

We also often have a perfectionist streak. We have real difficulty tolerating our own imperfections. And while we can be harsh toward the imperfections of others, we may be even harsher toward the imperfections we see in ourselves.

As adults, hero children tend to be regimented in their own lives and can be controlling towards others. This can sometimes amount to coercive perfectionism. The sense of being in control seems essential simply because it was essential to their survival when they were children.

Behind that mask of calm, strength or confidence there is usually a frightened and lonely child inside that they dare not acknowledge, even to themselves. Since they’re used to feeling loved, not for who they are, but for what they can accomplish, they’re afraid that their inner vulnerability and insecurity will be seen by others and result in contempt and rejection.

So if you are a hero child, you may feel an intense need to be in control at all times, and you may get panicky when you sense that you are losing control of something. You fear the judgement of others and you probably speak harshly to yourself.

The hero child in relationships

It’s obvious that much of what I have described will be a hand grenade thrown into a relationship. Nobody likes to be controlled, micro-managed or criticised and judged harshly when they get things wrong.

And yet the hero child finds it so hard to let go of that need to be right and to control their other half.

Furthermore, hero children also have difficulty having fun (after all, there is always something that needs to be done).

We take ourselves very seriously and it’s hard to have fun when you’re so busy being responsible and right. So the fun that others have, the easy laughter and the ability to relax is usually missing in hero children, and may be an object of their jealousy or judgment when they see it in others.

If your relationship is suffering, look to yourself first.

• Are you being harsh with yourself?

• Are you taking so much responsibility you have no time for fun or pleasure?

• Have you been giving your inner critic, your inner perfectionist full rein?

• Do you feel panicky or just uncomfortable when you’re not in control?

• Do you fear the judgment of others?

If you’ve answered yes to two or more of these questions then it is time to start being sweet to yourself.

Self-esteem simply means holding yourself with love and kindness even when you have screwed up or let yourself or someone else down.

When you catch yourself speaking harshly to yourself, take a breath and speak from a different voice – the voice of the part of you which loves you. And believe me that part is in there too, alongside your hero child, your inner critic, and your inner control freak.

It may not feel natural to be kind to yourself. And you may have to keep repeating the exercise over and over again. But with enough practice it will get easier.

This is part of the process of self-care which makes it easier to step up in your relationships – with your other half, with your children, your family and your friends.

If you would like to find out more about the self-care piece, you can download my guide to relationship renewal, Three Steps to a Magical Relationship.

Or for 1-2-1 support in the process, get in touch. You can book a Clarity Call, and I will spend an hour with you as you explore how you would like your relationship to be, what’s holding you back and what your next steps could be.

What fears or behaviour patterns have you brought with you from childhood?

Like tiny rodents, small things from childhood can create quite a lot of havoc in adulthood.

I’ve been noticing recently that I have a fear of being found out – or perhaps more accurately a fear of being accused of something I didn’t do.

I was talking about it with my supervisor and she asked me “when do you think you first experienced this?”

When I thought about it, it seemed like it started when I was about 11 or 12. It was during the first two to three years at boarding school. It might have happened before then, but it wouldn’t have had such an impact then, because I felt relatively safe.

At school though, we didn’t feel safe.

Looking back I can see how it took me about two years to really learn the ropes and figure out how to avoid getting into trouble when I was at school. And perhaps more importantly, how to survive psychologically.

In those first two years, any child would be emotionally vulnerable. If you get into trouble or if you get on the wrong side of another pupil, you can’t go home to your parents at the end of the day.

You don’t really know what’s possible and what isn’t. That comes later. In the end you learn to work the system (unless you’re an even bigger goody two-shoes than I was). And you learn how to keep yourself out of trouble.

But the fear of being found out or wrongly accused stays in there as one of many neural pathways left over from childhood.

And like those little rodents it eats away at your sense of who you are, what you’re worth and who you can trust. It also provides the foundation for a habit of concealment. I can see now why I have concealed so much in my relationships, and why it was difficult to break that habit.

Of course this pattern isn’t confined to people who went to boarding school. All children experience the fear of being found out or being wrongly accused. As a parent, I was aware that I couldn’t always know who had done what. Small children are quite happy to shift the responsibility to their siblings.

Hopefully most of us leave this fear behind when we reach adulthood. But for some of us it persists, and it gets in the way of living life to the full. We find it hard to commit to things when that fear of being found out transforms into fear of getting things wrong.

But I find it’s helpful to remember that those fears and behaviours are patterns I created to keep me safe in those early years at school. And that I can create new ways of responding to difficult situations now.

I can remind myself that the fear of being found out or getting things wrong is something I have created in my mind, that I am capable of handling most situations and that the adult Sorrel is much more powerful and skilful than little Sorrel was. And I will be ok no matter what happens.

Perhaps it was fear of getting things wrong which stopped me sharing my guide to going beyond boarding school survival. So I am being the adult now and telling you about it. If you want to read it, you can download it here: https://www.sorrelpindar.co.uk/beyond-boarding-school

We can all talk about the things we don’t like in relationships: being shouted at, ignored, taken for granted, talked down to, being bossed about, and that’s just scratching the surface.

But what do we actually want? And how can we create a relationship in which we do get what we want?

How do we create the conditions for love, respect, acceptance, tenderness, intimacy and great sex?

I was away last week and I took my copy of Bell Hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. She devotes the first 100 pages or so to an analysis of how patriarchy fails men as well as women. She talks about how masculinity is distorted by patriarchy and the hidden injuries suffered by men in a world in which domination is the only game in town.

Then in chapter 7 she goes on to talk about feminist masculinity. To quote her directly, Hooks says:

“ending patriarchy is necessary for men to have collective liberation. It is the only resolution to the masculinity crisis that most men are experiencing.

“To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings. In the partnership model selfhood, whether one is female or male, is always at the core of one’s identity.”

What struck me reading this was that Hooks talks about partnership, rather than the oft-touted teamwork model of relationships.

Should couples operate as a team?

My understanding is that teams usually have a captain or a manager. There may not be an I in the word ‘team’, but there sure is an I in the word ‘captain’.

Perhaps the majority of relationships under patriarchy are founded on an inequality – one person assumes the role of captain, and their partner is at best the first mate. Sometimes the two people swap places, as each vies for the place of top dog.

So why we call them partners I can’t imagine.

Reading Bell Hooks’ words it seemed to me that partnership is the foundation on which we can build the loving equality that we actually need. And that means the same for both men and women: letting go of the privileges and protections afforded – or at least promised – to us by patriarchy. Because even if the woman is the one with the power in a relationship she is still enacting the patriarchal structure; just in reverse.

Giving up the privileges of power is something few of us will relish. No longer able to call the shots, no more excuse to sit with your feet up while someone else sorts out the mess in the kitchen. Or no longer shirking responsibility for decisions we once deferred to the ‘captain’.

So why would men give up the privileges of patriarchy?

Even more important for men is the willingness to redefine your identity outside of the traditional patriarchal notions of masculinity.

To quote Bell Hooks again:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

I would add here that it is sometimes also women who assault the self-esteem of men as they attempt to break out of the emotional self-mutilation that Hooks describes. For men to be able to change and connect with their inner life, women must also let go of being tied into traditional notions of femininity and masculinity.

As women we can no longer assume that we will always be the ones with the greatest emotional intelligence. If we want our menfolk to be involved in traditional female domains such as child-rearing and providing us with emotional support, we have to permit men to do these things, make mistakes, learn from them and get better at it! And we have to do this without mocking our men when they get things wrong or show vulnerability.

The old patriarchal model of marriage gives rise to a whole host of behaviours which are, quite frankly, counter-productive. You may get what you want in the short-term if you shout at your partner or if you withdraw because you’re angry. But as a long-term strategy it just doesn’t work.

The likely outcome in the long term is, at best, a marriage or relationship which is dead inside, where you just rub along like housemates who know each other too well.

Or when the behaviour is more extreme, it will likely end in the divorce courts.

The long-term gain of transforming your marriage or relationship into a partnership where both of you are respected, loved and cherished is obvious. It may require a degree of courage, a willingness to trust and a preparedness to let go of things we have always taken for granted as a right. But the reward is so much greater than those little privileges that it's well worth the investment.

In the coming weeks I’ll be talking more about what we get wrong and what we can do to get things right. And I’ll keep coming back to the idea that a relationship works best for both parties when it’s conducted as a loving partnership.

If you would like to look at the possibilities for creating something new and wonderful in your relationship, get in touch. You can book a free one-hour Relationship Renewal Clarity Call, where you'll be able to explore what's not working for you in your relationship, a vision for how you would like it to be, and your next steps towards that vision.

Hopefully you're not a workaholic, but if you do work really long hours, read on!

Sometimes work can seem like a welcome escape from home.

Or it may just be that we work such long hours because of the perfectionist imp perched on a shoulder telling us that it’s not finished yet, or it’s not good enough yet.

No-one is born a workaholic; it’s a pattern we learn, or create to keep us safe.

What's important is to understand what drives that urge to work really long hours. Is it because you're really engrossed in what you're doing? Is it because you're afraid of turning out sub-standard work? Or is it a form of escape.

I remember a story about a brilliant mathematician. He was a professor at a very respected university and he worked long hours during the week. But at his wife's insistence the weekends were work-free. And every weekend he had a migraine which confined him to bed most of Saturday and Sunday.

On Monday he was fine again and he could return to his calculations.

The doctors could find no cause for the migraines, and besides they only plagued him on weekends. There is no way of knowing the truth. It may be that work and migraines represented an escape from his family. Or it may be that the migraines were a direct result of long hours at his desk.

The point is that for this man there was a driver (love of maths or a wish to escape), and there was a cost to his working hours.

I would say I have a tendency to workaholism in certain situations, such as when I’m really excited about a project, but also when I’ve wanted an escape from something uncomfortable. I would like to say that it is just a behaviour pattern that I can pick up and put down. But that wouldn't be entirely honest!

What's the problem with working long hours?

The trouble with indulging in workaholism is that it has a cost. It can be damaging to our relationships and to our health. I have worked with 100s of people with chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) and long covid and many of them had got ill after a period of working excessively long hours.

Work can be a 'misery stabiliser' - a place we go when we're feeling down, but not something we are unable to stop doing.

Or it can be an addiction - a way of avoiding thoughts or situations which we find painful or challenging. In other words a form of escape much like alcohol, food and gambling. That's when we call it workaholism.

But unlike drugs and alcholism, work is acceptable and it can feel really compelling (just like any other addiction).

So it really helps to have some steps you can take to curb your enthusiasm for work.

1. Make a judgement: do my long working hours amount to an addiction, is it a misery stabiliser, or is it just something I love and no more than that. If you think you are looking at an addiction, you'll probably want to get professional support, just as you would if you were an alcoholic.

2. If you're confident that you are not addicted to work, there are some long-term questions and some short-term questions.

3. In the short-term: Really get to grips with your priorities by asking yourself questions like “is this really more important than my partner or my children?" "Am I willing to let this damage my health?” and “Does this really have to be done today or can it wait until tomorrow?”

4. Remember what happened the last time you worked this late, and the time before that, and the time before that. Are you ok with a repeating pattern of illness or arguments with your partner?

5. Challenge yourself: will anyone die or will the roof fall in if I stop work a couple of hours earlier? For most of us work is not a life-or-death situation.

6. For the longer-term: If you think work has become a misery stabiliser, begin to explore what it is you are escaping from. What is that is it you find so frightening? For instance is it feelings of pain, sadness or anger?

7. If you are finding it difficult to say "No" to your boss, then you may want to do some work around boundaries. Often saying "No" turns out to be less dangerous than we had imagined. But we can't see that while our self-esteem is so low and we lack confidence.

If after answering these questions, you have realised that work has become an escape from a difficult situation at home, part of the solution will be to work on your relationship. All the things you find difficult in a work setting will be easier if your relationship is solid.

To help you with your boundaries, you can download the Boundaries Workbook. It will take you through a process which will help you to get clear on why your boundaries are not working for you and what will help you to establish firmer, more flexible boundaries.

And as ever, if you want to talk this through with me, let me know – you can book a Clarity Call.

I remember those days when my children were small and they would knock a drink off the edge of the table, and I had to struggle not to shout at them. Or worse still, I’d yell at them “how many times do I have to tell you?”

It seemed like every day something small happened and I over-reacted. Flying off the handle had become my normal.

I knew that part of the reason was that I was stressed and tired. But I didn’t realise just how anxious I was (that came later!).

And the biggest thing was that I was blaming my husband for a lot of the things which weren’t working for me. And if I wasn’t blaming him, I was putting it down to work stress or worries about the family.

I knew that I was a bit lacking in self-esteem and self-confidence, but I never guessed just how much I had put myself into the position of victim…

I constantly felt like I was at my wit’s end, wondering what I had to do to make him change. Because nothing I did made any difference.

I wanted to stay and make it work, but I felt utterly helpless and trapped. No wonder I had such a short fuse.

What is it we want from our partners?

More than anything I wanted peace. I wanted support with the housework, but more than that I wanted a quiet life. With more love and affection.

And that was impossible because we were constantly fighting.

The stress we experience when we add conflict with a partner into the mix of raising children, working and dealing with everyday life is enough to put anyone on a short fuse. But the other ingredient in the mix is all the thinking we do.

Women generally do about twice as much housework as their men do, even though both partners are working. And added to that is the fact that the woman is the one doing the managing – remembering the jobs for him so that she can remind him to do them. This can tip the balance from 2:1 towards 3:1.

If he recognised how much she was doing, it might be easier. But a recent YouGov poll* found that men believe they are doing more than they actually are. You can see how this would breed resentment, can’t you?

So we are thinking about the things he forgets so that we can remind him. And we are thinking about what this all means. Like it must mean he doesn’t respect me or care about me or he’d remember to put the bins out. So the stress equation is:

stress = housework + thinking about his chores + thinking about what it all means + resentment

That’s quite a burden.

Is this all we want? For our menfolk to shoulder more of the burden of housework and childcare? No, we want more. We want a deeper level of understanding, a greater sense of oneness, more intimacy, better sex. We want to feel delight and excitement in our man’s company and we want to feel safe and relaxed.

At least that maybe what we think we want.

The truth is that while the thinking mind is wanting all this lovely closeness, there’s a part of us which wants something much more fundamental – we want him to give us what our parents did not.

And he wants the same thing. But we can’t give our partners what our parents didn’t give us. That’s not the role of a spouse or a lover. The only person who can do that re-parenting thing for you is yourself.

And when you start to give yourself what your parents were unable to, you are a big step closer to the peace and contentment which means you won’t keep flying off the handle.

You’ll probably still want him to do more of the housework, but at least there will be less on the right hand side of that stress equation. And you won’t fly off the handle nearly as often!

The first step towards giving yourself the loving care you’ve been missing is to let go of self-judgement and move towards self-acceptance.

If you’d like to find out more about how to move into that space of self-acceptance and to a place where you can ask your partner for the things you need, download my e-book, The Three Steps to a Magical Relationship.

* You can see the YouGov poll on housework here: The YouGov poll

We all have those days. The days when we seem to lose touch with our own adultness and behave like children.

It might be flying into a rage about something, or it might be bursting into tears. Or anything in between. And of course this kind of behaviour is not constructive when it happens in response to a conflict or problem within a relationship. However it is a kind of survival strategy.

It is completely understandable. For we are all capable of inner child behaviour when we are triggered. We come to our relationships with the same patterns we created as children when we felt unsafe. Those behaviours come to form a sort of survival kit, and we can all change our survival kit to make it more appropriate to adult life.

It’s useful to think of these inner child behaviours as parts. Think about the way people tend to talk about different parts. For instance someone might say “A part of me really just wants to give up on this and divorce him, but another part of me wants to do everything in my power to get the marriage to work again.”

You may be familiar with other parts, such as your Inner Critic, your Perfectionist or your People-Pleaser. These are like inner voices telling you things like “don’t upset her” or “that could do with a bit more work.” These parts look like adult voices, but they are driven by the childhood fear of judgement or abandonment.

What exactly are these parts?

To me it looks like each part is a collection of neural pathways which get triggered by specific circumstances. And those pathways developed in response to your need to protect yourself when you were small.

I like to think of them as neural pathways because I know that we have considerable neural plasticity, which simply means you can teach an old dog a new trick.

We all start with the neural pathways we create as small children.

These pathways are generally formed before the age of seven. They correspond to a time in our lives when we do not have much in the way of resources at our disposal.

The young child’s first response to fear or pain is to tend and befriend, but this doesn’t work if the parents are either abusive or emotionally unavailable. And believe me food on the table and clean clothes are not enough on their own. Children need love and attention as well!

When we’ve been abused or neglected, these early pathways wire together to form the wounded child, the collection of behaviours which look like those of a very young child.

Later, from about the age of seven, the adaptive child emerges. The neural pathways which constitute the adaptive child have access to different strategies, including fight or flight and freeze. So in adulthood, if the person’s adaptive child get triggered they may fly into a rage. This is simply the fight pathway that’s being triggered.

Which strategy we develop as children depends on our circumstances. If we grow up in a violent household where we are encouraged to use violence, then the fight pathway will be the obvious ‘choice’. But this is not actually a choice – at least not yet.

In a family where there is absolutely no safety, flight or even freeze may be the best option, and so we grow up with a strategy of withdrawing or running away when things get difficult. In adults, withdrawal can literally mean leaving the house or it can look like retreating to the shed or into depression.

In an adult relationship, however, it’s really important to engage with your Wise Adult. That’s the part of you which places boundaries on your own behaviour and is more interested in deepening connection with your partner than with attacking or scoring points.

If your partner is aggressive or neglectful, and you respond from your adaptive child, you will simply get caught up in a repeating cycle, which ultimately will lead into the death spiral, and then potentially into divorce.

When you respond from your Wise Adult, you stand a chance of getting back into love and connection.

This brings me to the 3 Principles

One of the basic tenets of the 3 Principles is that our thoughts and feelings, are all created in the moment, from the inside-out. In other words they can never be ‘caused’ by people or circumstances.

This is not a big leap from the idea that a particular type of behaviour (violence, withdrawal, verbal retaliation, etc) is the product of a neural pathway that we developed as a child.

To me it looks like this:

My wounded child (a collection of neural pathways) holds the pain of abandonment and the fear of being in the wrong which I experienced as a child.

My adaptive child (another collection of neural pathways) responded to this experience by getting really good at sarcasm, and having an overwhelming need to be right which transmutes into shouty arguments, or worse.

When my wounded child is triggered by a feeling of being attacked or put in the wrong, my adaptive child gets sarcastic and dismissive. Or simply shouts her frustration. Of course this behaviour is not very well received by my partner.

Those behaviours are entirely created in the moment from the inside-out, in response to my perception that I have done something wrong.

What or who is my Wise Adult?

I’ve not mentioned this yet, but many of the parts models talk about a true self or core self. And so does the 3 Principles. This true self is the essence of who you are and can never be damaged.

The true self is the source of your innate well-being, wisdom, empathy, compassion and so on. All of these are part of our true nature.

And the Wise Adult? This is the ‘part’ of you which in Terry Real’s words “can stop, think, observe and choose.” Your Wise Adult chooses empathy, compassion and curiosity over judgement and retaliation.

To me that looks like my true self. And the great thing about the true self is that not only is it careful of the health of our relationships and our partner’s well-being, but it is part of the divine, something so much bigger than either the wounded child or the adaptive child.

Within the 3 Principles understanding, change is often only a thought away.

1. You realise or remember that you ‘have’ a true self/wise adult – in fact that is who you are.

2. Then when those old pathways get triggered, you choose to take a step back and notice what you’ve done

3. You accept that while you regret your behaviour that was triggered, you are simply human and you can forgive yourself

4. You apologise and try again speaking from your Wise Adult instead of your adaptive child

5. And remember to get good at anything you have to practise. You’ve gotten very good at all those adaptive child behaviours. Now you have a new way of being. A bit like giving up the guitar and learning the piano (or vice versa!)

Moving from your old adaptive child survival kit to a new survival kit fashioned by your Wise Adult isn’t always easy. But it is well-worth the investment. You can make it easier by working through the Survival Kit Workbook, which will help you to understand why you created those childhood behaviour patterns and guide you through a process of creating new adult behaviours.