Boarding School Therapy

Boarding School Syndrome, is a term developed by Joy Schaverien, a psychotherapist specialising in working with ex-boarders. She uses the term of describe the ongoing difficulties that adults who were sent away from home at an early age to boarding school. 

 These difficulties might include:

• Difficulty identifying and feeling emotions

• Seeing vulnerability as weakness or shameful

• Fear of being abandoned

• Fear of failure

• Difficulty relaxing and stopping

• A constant need to be doing something

• Challenges with anger

• Workaholism

• Ambition and drive for success at any cost

• Parenting difficulties

• Feeling unlovable, unworthy, and shamed

• A confident self-reliance masking extreme anxiety

• Difficulties with intimacy and intimate relationships

• Difficulties trusting and getting close to others 

• Being highly independent, with an underlying feeling of loneliness  

• Separation anxiety and irrational upset when someone leaves

• Sunday evening or September anxiety

• Addiction and substance misuse as a coping mechanism

THE BOARDING SCHOOL PREDICAMENT

In this 13 minute video, Joy Schaverien talks more about Boarding School Syndrome, what it is, and what is at the root cause:

She describes the boarding school predicament with this ABCD acronym:

• Abandonment
• Bereavement
• Captivity
• Dissociation

These are strong words and she makes no apology for this. Despite the perceived privilege in British culture, she is clear that boarding school can be a highly traumatic experience for many.

The young child experiences huge abandonment. The attachment bond with the mother and father are consciously broken, which many experience as inherently traumatic. The aim is to make them independent and self-reliant, but may be experienced as a breaking of the spirit or will.

What many may dismiss as simple homesickness, Joy describes as bereavement. The child experiences significant losses – not just of their parents, but also their siblings, their pets, their own room, family meal times and choice of food, and hugs and kisses good night.

Captivity reflects the fact that the child cannot leave and is powerless. Unlike a day school, where they can go home in the evening and have a break from school (and any difficulties there), the boarder is at school 24 hours a day. This feeling can be reinforced by the repeated return to the institution after exeat weekends and holidays.

Many ex-boarders don’t remember their first day, pointing to dissociation of an experience that was emotionally overwhelming and that they were unable to process. Natural feelings of sadness, confusion, anger are all dismissed and denied with phrases like – don’t worry it will get easier, or stop making a fuss. The child no longer trusts their feelings and suppresses any vulnerability. The environment is highly institutionalised with little privacy or free time just to play and relax. There is often a full timetable of classes and sports in order to keep the children distracted.