As I watched my parents driving away into a dark, cold October night, the helplessness and anguish that I felt in the pit of my stomach is beyond words. Anyone with boarding school experience will recognise that feeling and wonder today if it was a curse or a privilege. I remember the whole school was eerily quiet and dark because everyone was in chapel. I’d had to have some teeth pulled out for braces and so I was allowed an extra day at home after the weekend and it was a Monday night.

I don’t remember how I got from the window at the top of stairs to the matron’s room. Looking back, she must have heard me sobbing and half carried me away from the window to her rooms. It was beyond anything I’d ever felt or will ever feel again I believe. I was inconsolable. Even now, as I write these words, I can feel the sadness and pain and the tears welling up. The saddest part is that I now know that my mother cried all the way home. And yet, I wanted to go boarding school. It was an incredible privilege for which I also feel very lucky. But was it also a curse? 

I brushed away that phase of my life

Having spent so many years working on my issues with my parents, I was completely blind-sided to the issues I developed from my school experience. I’ve gone through so much coaching and other forms of group work and it’s only now that I realise how much I brushed away my school experience. When I talked about my life, the school phase was simply “and then I went to boarding school which taught me a lot and then uni, etc, etc”. That phase of my life has been safely locked away in a little box with the key melted in hell… until now.

The Nightmares

In my late 20s, I learnt that it wasn’t normal to have horrific nightmares every night. Interestingly enough, they always revolved around the same theme: being in prison for something I haven’t done. We used to refer to school as The Prison. 

Sometimes the nightmare comes back. They come back when something is threatening me in the same way that I used to feel threatened at school – fear of being abandoned, not being good enough, losing my independence, someone is getting close to me emotionally, someone is alienating me from a group … 

The Questions of boarding school and whether it’s a curse or a privilege?

Research on boarding school trauma is still relatively new and admittedly, I’m also only recently uncovering it for myself. There is so much to unpick and so many topics to work out, which I’ll go through over several blogs, but the one that stands out to me right now is ‘identity’. What identity or mask do we wear as part of the survival tools we learn at school? And that doesn’t just apply to boarding school. Many people suffer during their school years for one reason or another.  But then again, what positives did we take away?

The Beginnings of Research

Nick Duffel in his book Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege summarises the key identities we develop at school into Rebel, Complier and Crushed, i.e. the victims of bullies. I actually feel that we incorporate a little bit of all 3. Although I’ll confess that I relate more to the rebel … the one who fears and mistrusts authority. Duffel describes us so well: “superior, over-friendly or seductive, with a delightful child inside”.

How do you know if you’ve suffered a boarding school curse or privilege? Or perhaps both …

1- Do you have fierce independence? A resistance to authority … after all, what do they know?? 

2- Do you seem to flit between extremes – you want love / you don’t want love, you want to be home/ you want to be out … it’s the struggle between the inner child and the survivor adult

3- Do feel it’s weak to show vulnerability? Do you wear masks depending on the situation you’re in?

4- Do you lock away your emotions? Do you keep people at a distance with a wall around you? A friend of mine once called it “my great wall of china” 

5- Do you feel like the world is a hostile place where you need to fight to survive? How do you get people to do what you want them to do? Let’s be honest…

What behaviours have you developed to survive? I needed to feel safe so I cultivated the perfectionist traits I’d already half learnt from the first phase of my childhood. Everything revolved around: “I take care of myself and no one else does”. I learnt to change my behaviour according to what others expected. I didn’t know how to be true to myself. There were so many masks, so many identities, that it was almost like being in my own theatre production. Whilst many of these have now gone over the years, I’m still left with the fear of abandonment and the struggle to let people in.

So what can we do? What are the first steps to understanding whether boarding school was a curse or a privilege? 

1- Acceptance

I always assumed I was resilient because of my boarding school experience but if you look at the proper definition then being resilient involves connecting with our emotions. And on the contrary, I would get overwhelmed by them. Mindfulness has made a huge impact to my life and helped me to accept. We need to accept pain and to stop resisting it in order for it to lessen . Otherwise, we are constantly fighting the world and that just causes us suffering because we can’t change things out of our control. 

2- Emotions

I didn’t have the right vocabulary for describing my emotions, let alone feeling them. It’s simple but it works – I love the wheel of emotions. The trick is to learn the words but also use them when journaling about the experiences, either from school or simply from your day. It’s an exercise that can also help you find the patterns of triggers and unhealthy behaviours you use today.  

3- Talking

I know it’s hard but just saying out loud that yes, I suffered, is important. It’s part of accepting. For years, I would brush it away as something inconsequential. I felt guilty though because surely my experience was nothing compared to what some people have to live through. I was very lucky to be so privileged so how can I possibly be in pain?

However, we were children and our needs were not met. We did not feel safe. In terms of developmental psychology, that is very damaging with regards how we approach life and relationships as adults. Coaching can help and sometimes therapy is also needed. Again, remember that to ask for help is a sign of strength. It’s a sign that we understand that we are human and that by facing our pain can we hope to grow. And of course, start to ease the pain. 

And what’s next? I’ll keep sharing the tools I discover but as a start, I need to reconnect with my inner child through journaling. I need to help her grow up beyond those school years. Therefore, I can help myself move into truly believing that I am safe and that the pain is over. I have to remember. I have to go back, reform the key and open the box.