Boarding School - The Long Term Impact

Description

Life after boarding school - the long term impact.

Following the glowing feedback from previous participants, this event will now run for four hours (not three). This one will take place on the outskirts of Oxford and is restricted to those who are ex-boarders and therapists/mental health professionals.

To the ex-boarder: Please come along no matter what your assumptions are. Perhaps you loved your time at boarding school, but you might be baffled by some aspects of everyday life and accept it’s “just how you are”.

Of course, many of us have no wish to revisit something so painful. After all, sleeping dogs are best left snuggled up in their beds. Strangely, in the course of their lives, most family pets have fewer ‘assigned beds’ than the average ex-boarder sleeps in during the course of their childhood**. Many “Third Country Kids” need to use both their hands and their feet to count up how many bunks they called ‘theirs’ during their formative years.

Then there’s the third group of ex-boarders: those who believe they sound spoilt and ungrateful should they dare criticise or complain about how it was for them. They know their parents wanted the best for them and that it itself leaves them with contradictory feelings which are difficult to articulate.

Former boarders are very good at keeping secrets and those who wish to exclaim publicly how wonderful they found it can be quick to silence any dissent. It’s a classic survival mechanism in action: the belief that you’re either with us or you’re against us! Oddly, I am not subjected to a plethora of indignant emails and private messages from vegetarians if I declare that, “Tomatoes are not okay”.

I didn’t realise just how many people secretly found boarding school quite tough. It is breaching the invisible code just talking about it. So if any of what I have written resonates, then come along and simply listen. You might be quite astonished by what this talk reveals, and there’s no obligation for you to contribute your life story. This isn’t a sigh and cry event.

I never once talked about my experiences at two boarding schools until I wrote my second book. Indeed, I would have told you my second boarding school was ‘okay’. Then, after a little bit of research, so many of my life decisions and calamities made sense. More than that, the academic in me became acutely aware of the commonalities amongst former boarders in their behaviours, their reasoning skills and their emotions. Some are amusing, but many are not.

• Do you inhale your food, snatch at buffets or find sitting down for a leisurely dinner excruciatingly difficult?
• How about packing up your suitcases when going on holiday. Crush it all in as fast as possible or dilly-dally indecisively for days?
• Then there’s the holidays themselves. Do you morosely count away each day as if at the end of it, doom awaits. Perhaps holidays, like birthdays, are something to not bother with.
• Do you get a gentle sadness every September as the summer wafts away. Does the smell of autumn pique your anxiety? Perhaps you have a sudden jolt of dread every Sunday as if you were still weekly boarding?
• Do you struggle to stay in one place for too long? Do you get cabin fever quickly, but when out yearn to be ‘back home’.
• Do people find you ‘overly serious’ yet you would rather stick your head in a bucket of sewage than have an emotional heart-to-heart about your vulnerabilities?
• How do you feel about spontaneity? Do you get a kick out of being ‘naughty’ and ‘sneaky’ even with the people you love most?
• Do you confuse observation with criticism; inwardly cringing if anyone innocently remarks on something obscure that you do?
• Are you inclined to perfectionism? Do you become furious when things don’t quite go to plan or are you a silent seether hoping that someone will eventually read your mind and help you?

For years, I thought I was the only one.

**It is recommended that a dog gets a new bed every two years. Boarders, of course, will have at least two beds per year, and will relinquish one of them every September, with the other left unused for up to forty weeks a year. Their assigned beds may have been in operation for more than two decades.

For therapists:

A lot of ex-boarders bury the harsher memories - and yet drink to excess or dabble with drugs, gamble, have dysfunctioning and sporadic relationships, eating disorders, low but perennial levels of anxiety and inexplicable bouts of depression. We frequently turn up in therapy (and rehabs) where the connection may not easily be made between our adverse childhood experiences and one’s present day realities. Of course, the “ACEs'' ask a series of questions as if the child was brought up in their own home. Answering them literally makes most ex-boarders’ childhoods seemingly quite benign.

Did a family member go to prison? No.

Client doesn’t say “But I was sent away for stints up to twelve weeks long, three times a year with no ability to phone home when I was seven/thirteen.”

Did you witness one parent being violent to your other parent? No.

Client doesn’t say “The initiation ceremony involved us new boys being given a good thrashing by the prefects to see who would cry first.” “I witnessed physical violence most weeks for five years but I was a girl so it didn’t affect me.” “No, the cane had been banned a few years before, but the fagging was something else.”

Boarders, of course, spend up to forty weeks a year not in a family. Pets and grandparents died, parents divorced, homes were moved, and nanny was no longer needed. These events usually took place when the child wasn’t present, they’d simply come home to confront a new normal.

Instead boarders have “houseparents” and “matrons”. They are paid employees who have little time for affection and interest. With up to sixty attention-deprived children to corral about the place, what human wouldn’t resort to shouting and threatening to punish a lot? In truth, outside of the classrooms, adults were most frequently tasked with making sure the dormitories remained out of bounds when the rules said so, or switching lights off when the rules dedicated the beds were in-bounds. Some were nice. Some were paedophiles. Some were nice paedophiles. Some friends were nice, other were bullies. Irrespective they were people you had to rub along with twenty-four hours a day, like it or not. “This is your family now” the newcomer is informed whilst being confronted by a large group of strangers.

Day-schoolers reckon they can spot an ex-boarder at sixty paces. Yet ex-boarders are blind to their own quirks and views of the world.

This talk really brings to life the realities of what boarding school is like behind the brochures, the literature and other representations in popular culture. As much as boarding school advocates rely on the defence of “It’s not like that anymore”, they are typically relating their contemporary provisions to the much-documented absence of carpets, curtains, and central heating as suffered by ex-boarders in the post-war years. Even less attention is paid to the impact of children being brought up in a matriarchy or absolute patriarchy.

In subsequent decades, child psychology has also evolved and not one jot of it has ever concluded that banishing children from family life is in the best interests of the child. Just under 6,500 English children are currently confined to residential care units across the country. Family law judges and social workers endeavour to place the other 60,000 “looked after children” in private family houses rather than children’s homes. Moreover, they aim to keep siblings together. Typically their parents fight like hell to stop them being removed.

There are 65,000 boarders going to bed tonight in a residential care environment having been placed there by their parents. Removed from their homes, estranged from their communities and their cultures, only permitted to revisit it one night a week, one weekend every three weeks or for a few weeks every three months. This pattern is repeated for up to eleven consecutive years.

Being sent to boarding school is seen as a privilege, but it comes at an emotional cost. Many, many ex-boarders found their twenties a difficult period of time as they adjusted from closeted, highly-structured existences to true adulthood and self-determination. Self-care can be an anathema. As adults, many are plagued by a belief that life would be better if only they could find more time, manage more efficiently, or fire most of their bosses and co-workers - assuming they can actually excel at working in formal teams in the first instance. Most will experience divorce.

Many ex-boarders decide against having children - partly because they find intimate relationships difficult to sustain. Those who do become parents go on to have a crisis of confidence when their children turn the age they were when they were sent away. With no imprinting, good or bad, to draw on, these parents must guess at what good parenting might look like.

Many parents who are also ex-boarders exclaim, “Boarding School was fine for me, but I wouldn’t send my children…” Why is that? What conclusions have they formed about their lovability or their parents’ capacity to love? Even now fully grown adults, most adult ex-boarders will not admit they didn’t enjoy boarding school to their parents to avoid invoking guilt or shame.

For some, the fractured bonds with siblings, parents and their wider families/communities and cultures are never re-woven and remain loose and fragile. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but the ex-boarders’ villages were overpopulated by children trying their best to be adult-like, with too few adults to model their behaviour upon.

It is my belief that understanding the nuances of a boarding school existence will only enhance one’s professional ability to help the ex-boarder face their current challenges.

This talk makes the invisible visible.

Topics presented:

Common conceptions of Boarding School.

- What's good about boarding school?

- What role has it played in history and the cultural psyche?

"They are nothing like Tom Brown's School Days"

- How boarding has school changed in subsequent decades

- Challenging the deflective "It's not like that anymore" that negates the now-adult ex-boarder's experience.

- What the modern day boarding school looks like.

Growing up in residential care/institutions

- What are some of the typical challenges faced by ex-boarders living in "the real world"?

- Tackling the belief "I thought I was the only one".

- The psychological impact of an abrupt "growing up" / deculturalisation from the family system.”

- Command and Control authoritarianism / Friends as parents.

- Regression and suppression in the child.

- Rationalisation / psychological bindings of parents and children.

- Tackling the euphemism "Homesickness". The trauma of abandonment, repeated rejection, imprisonment, neglect and false hope.

Elitism and abuse

- Navigating the teenage years in a closed community with little privacy.

- Love and affection, homophobia, sex and paedophilia.

Esteem, Confidence and the Brittle Ex-boarder

- From Surviving to Thriving. Why is it so difficult to find peace/rest?

- Where to get further help and support.

Tea, coffee, snacks and tissues will be provided. Car parking is free.