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.