I was both moved and engaged by last month’s articles by Nick Duffell and Joy Schaverien on the impact of boarding school on the long-term emotional health of the pupils.

I am a boarding school survivor, sent off to prep school at the age of eight and expected not to spend anything longer than a summer holiday at home again. Much of the content of these articles rang true for me and the clients with whom I have worked who also experienced this abusive English tradition. I do not agree that understanding the effect of boarding school is critical to working with such clients because the impulse to send a child away from the family at the age of eight does not exist in isolation, rather it forms a consistent part of a family’s style of relationship. To work successfully with a client who experienced boarding school, a therapist needs to understand the context in which he was brought up, of which this is only a part.

The reason that these clients were sent away at such a young age is that, as so often in these cases, it was done to the parents. For these children, going to boarding school runs in families; it is a product of the shame, abandonment and consequent rage that is inherited by each generation. My parents sent me away when I was eight because they had been sent away at the same age. Each generation keeps in place the circumstances that damaged the one that came before; the abusive behaviour was passed down from parent to child. In my own, and many other English families, this type of abuse was normalised because it was the accepted way to bring up children. Boarding school is one symptom, all be it an important one, of a family life in which emotional ties are discouraged.

As a therapist it is also important to consider what sense the child makes of this parenting style: where the infant wound is preverbal. The style provides these families with protection from the pain of their own children’s emotional needs, which if felt, could awaken the pain in the parents’ own wounds. In these families, from the beginning, children’s needs are not met, so, consequently, at a young age they stop expressing them. The infant wordlessly makes sense of this behaviour by understanding that there is something wrong with him, so the seeds of shame are sown. The lack of interest shown in him by his parents consistently reinforces a message of shame and abandonment to which he unknowingly responds with rage.

Clients from a background that features boarding school lack congruence because their concept of self has been constructed to meet the rigid and relentless demands of their parents to hide their feelings. Their conditions of worth are that to be loved and valued they must make no demands, which requires them to hide their emotions from their parents and consequently from themselves. For this reason, what boarding school survivors need from therapy is a consistent, nurturing, long-term, caring relationship. This can give them the confidence to visit those places within themselves where they most fear to tread and by doing so to make sense of their past. This relationship can best be developed within the Rogerian, person-centred approach.

Matthew Byng
MBACP (Accred)