#thinking it takes a specific shape rather than recognising the behavioural markers is the problem

[cruelsister-moved2]

like. LOTS of people are mentally aware but remain entrenched in their cult because of what they would lose by leaving - family, livelihood, home, community. some cults blackmail or withhold documents or threaten violence or physically keep you somewhere, but usually social and financial dependence are the main motivators - which is another dangerous misconception, because people feel safe when these big scary things aren't happening. their intention is to trap you before things start getting bad, so being like oh some people recognise when it gets bad!! is so annoying because by that point they've still ruined your life, and most people escape cults to find themselves completely isolated, traumatised, and with no way to support themselves like hello

[whitestonetherapy]

Back to School...2 (1.10.17)

The next couple of months are going to be busier than normal for me with some large projects that I’m responsible for all happening at the same time.   This is not a complaint at all, because I prefer being busy to the alternative and a lot of my work through WhiteStone is deeply interesting and rewarding.  It does mean the weeks are flying by, and as I’d already started to outline Boarding School Syndrome (BSS) in my previous blog I wanted to complete the outline before more time passes.

Let’s get right to it and talk about some common things that are encountered in a clinical setting.  I mentioned emotional encapsulation in my previous post as a central feature of BSS.  This refers to a form of psychological splitting, where emotional vulnerability is eventually disowned by the young boarder as a defence against finding herself in a situation where this vulnerability might single her out from the pack.  This is the child’s adaptive attempt to survive in her changed environment, and can be either a gradual process or marked by a specific moment that might be recalled within therapy.  Being sent away from home is an event where many of the conditions that are associated with healthy psychological and physical development are suddenly disrupted – this includes the total and sudden loss of the family unit, familiarity (a home, a bedroom etc), pets, places, people and things – these are replaced instead by strange staff at a strange school with confusing customs and traditions, surrounded by other strangers.  This requires urgent adaptation, and the child has to abandon her biologically programmed need for attachment.

The web of relationships, into which we are born and on which we rely for healthy development, is traumatically disrupted by this experience in a number of ways.  Instead of secure attachment, which is fostered in children through attuned care-giving from parents (summarised mightily), the sudden loss of family increases the chances of the child developing an adaptive attachment style to deal with the traumatic event she has undergone.  This may involve emotional encapsulation, a dismissing style, where she learns that it is safer and much less painful to dismiss or minimize her own emotional experiences than to feel them, as she learns her needs will not be met and perhaps do not deserve to be met.  Alternatively the child may instead form an adaptive strategy that involves amplification of her need for caregivers and comfort - a kind of hyper-activation of the need to be close to others.  Instead of developing a secure attachment style marked by flexibility, a growing ability to experience herself as ‘good enough’ and a capacity to understand the emotional experience and intentionality of others, the child may instead develop strategies that shut her off from her emotions (dismissing) or lead her to become overwhelmed  by them (amplification).  In some cases she might switch between both of these adaptive strategies in what psychologists call a ‘disorganized’ way.

These adaptive patterns of being can remain with us throughout life and can run very deep.  What starts out as a survival strategy can quickly become a representational filter that limits the extent and nature of access to our own thoughts, feelings and desires.  And so adaptive patterns begin to influence and shape how we see the world, the predictions we make, how we see ourselves and others.  Much work in psychotherapy is to provide the type of reparative relationship where the flexibility I mention above is encouraged and adaptive strategies can be spotted and some of these ‘filters’ perhaps even changed. 

You’ve probably already guessed that a dismissing style is particularly common for ex-boarders.  Joy Schaverein has outlined various clinical markers for this.  Here are some examples:  problems with intimacy and difficulties being fully open and honest about feelings even with a loving spouse or family;  difficulties identifying such emotions in the first place, which may register as anger and yet mask other emotions which are hard to accurately name; difficulty talking about these things even in the safety of therapy; a tendency to make very dependent relationships but then to ‘cut off’ emotionally (either as part of a repeating pattern within relationships or permanently); difficulty creating or sustaining intimate friendships, or sustaining situations such as employment or education etc;  a tendency to be more comfortable time-tabling family life, and perhaps holding fixed views of what ‘should’ happen; a tendency to struggle dealing with vulnerability in others, (if your own vulnerability has been dissociated, it is tougher to acknowledge it in others).  Interestingly, as Duffell points out, ex-boarders in therapy may not at first recognise these things of themselves, even though their spouse or family may see these issues very clearly and indeed have encouraged their loved one to seek help.  Often these issues manifest as a depressive episode for ex-boarders, and this is a common trigger for entering therapy and eventually seeking help.

What is the psychological process that such people have gone through to get here?  What happened to them at school?  Duffell talks of a ‘privileged abandonment’ and Schaverein talks of the moment of abandonment itself.  The moment of being taken to boarding school and parents departing is a moment for which no young child can be prepared or give consent.  Many ex-boarders can remember this moment clearly, as for example I can.  Others report a sense of amnesia, a dissociation of feelings and a sense of numb shock.  As Schaverein says, this is the moment “the child becomes lost for words”.  Remember that young children need adults to give words to their experiences – particularly emotional ones -  as this is what allows children to metabolize their powerful emotional experiences and make sense of them.   This cannot now easily happen as reliance falls on a house-master who is looking after many children, and has limited experience or training in these respects.  In later years children may develop a sibling bond and take on some of these parental tasks and ‘parent’ each other, but this will not be possible for young children arriving at a boarding school. 

It can be common from this point for children to feel homesick, which is really a proxy for feelings of bereavement.  This is often a gradual process of realisation, from initial alarm, to searching behaviour (anger and guilt), then hope of rescue, then mourning, grief and feelings of internal loss.  As well as grieving, children may experience their new school as a form of captivity.  They are taken to a place they cannot leave and where all activities are regulated and time-tabled - food, clothes, work, play, censored letters, lessons, and so on.  As Schaverein says, ‘private reverie‘ is discouraged, and unsanctioned spontaneity may be frowned on.  Whether this is just an enduring extension of the Victorian idea that boarding schools are a place to ‘unmake the child and make the man’, I cannot say, but I think it’s a fair bet.  Here is a quote from a Mr Woodard, founder of my own public school, who in 1858 said the aim of the place was to, “remove the child from the noxious influence of home and home comforts”.  Hmm.

Younger children often experience a powerful and troubling internal incongruence too.  Perhaps they have been told school will be fun, possibly (these days) a little like Harry Potter, and that they will be enjoying lots of activities, and that the whole experience will be good for them – as Duffell says “the making of them”.  So the child is placed in an internal double bind.  She ‘knows’ that this is ‘good for her’, but it does not feel good.  She may also have a sense that financial sacrifices have been made so she can go to boarding school and that she is expected to be grateful… yet it does not feel good at all.  The child’s experience inwardly is at odds with what her caregivers have told her it should be… and thus she may come to experience herself as unworthy or a failure, and to doubt her own perceptions.  She may have a sense that to share these things will be deeply upsetting and that caregivers will be angry, and so she may come to feel responsible for maintaining the emotional equilibrium of her parents at a very young age .  These are things for which small children have no words and only a limited understanding, and so cannot verbalise.  The child increasingly becomes separated from a coherent narrative of her own life. 

As an adult a further double-bind is that such an upbringing is considered a ‘privilege’ and so discussion of any of these serious things can feel like a dangerous flirtation with being considered an ingrate,  fair game for ridicule rather than compassion from a society that considers them to have been born lucky.  This is common. The same process works internally too; ex-boarders may hide from themselves (and their therapist) the traumatic nature of their boarding school experience, such is their sense of shame at admitting such a ‘lucky start’ might actually have caused some problems – there can be a feeling it would be deeply ungracious, a bout of navel-gazing and quite unmanly to ‘whine’ about such things.  So as adults, ex-boarders may trivialise the tough experiences they had as young children, especially if they came to associate closely with (and attach closely to) the school in which they spent many formative years, and where some good friendships and good times were also had.  It can be hard to consider the cost at which these things have come, even when facing troubling issues later in later life.

For the young child at boarding school there follows, in time, a choice point.  Either the boarder must adapt and find a way to navigate her new environment and begin to dissociate from her need for her (now unavailable) family and home, or continue to suffer and take the chance of being singled out as a target onto which other students can project their own fears.  Eventually the child dissociates from the pain and protects a nucleated self from experiencing further trauma.   In short, she must adapt or find herself alone and singled out.  Here is emotional encapsulation. “He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it” (Orwell).  I will link to a documentary at the end of this post, where this process is shown in some detail.

Finally, the sense of loss young boarders experience is repeated many times with return trips to school over many years, and so loss is re-experienced routinely in a way that reinforces adaptive strategies.  This further crystallizes a split between the ‘survival personality’ of the boarding school self and the ‘home self’ which is fundamentally changed too.  Those suffering with BSS often report a sense of ‘no longer being known’ at home when they returned for school holidays, and so having a sense of not belonging anywhere, they had changed in ways not recognised by their parents and so were now alone here too.  Many ex-boarders remain with a sense of exile throughout their lives, a sense of non-belonging as if they are not really participating in their own life.

Nick Duffell spends a lot of time at the moment lobbying for the abolishment of boarding schools for the under-16’s.  I am not sure I would go that far.  I can think of plenty of examples where home-life may be far more troublesome than an upbringing in a good institution.  For children in their teens it is important to also begin to individuate and this seems a more natural and much less damaging time to consider this type of education.  I also think that technology such as mobile phones, and much greater emphasis on pastoral services in schools should not be ignored – it is obviously much easier to maintain a meaningful contact with children at school in recent years with phones and email, and schools have become much more sophisticated in terms of considering the wellbeing of children in their care.  That said, I want to be careful not to diminish the suffering that many will be experiencing right now who are at boarding school – an institution is absolutely no replacement for a good family - but general trends in a better direction must also be recognised. 

I’ll be coming back to this topic, no doubt, and I hope this blog is at least a useful general overview and a start point for readers who are interested to know more. 

As promised, here is the Cutting Edge documentary “Leaving Home at 8”.  It tells the story of four boarders who we meet just a few days before their departure to boarding school.

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