At an early age, we had every significant relationship abruptly,
unnecessarily cut off: mothers, fathers, siblings, cousins,
grandparents, friends, pets, home, neighbourhood, community were
suddenly lost. (I use the word 'unnecessarily' advisedly: of course
there are rare exceptions where family life is so dysfunctional that
boarding comes as a relief.)
A vital part of the healing work is making efforts to imagine - or
remember if we are ex-boarders - the shock felt on first arrival at
school.
This breach of relationships has
implications, for example, when a gay ex-boarder comes out to his
family; the healthy connection, which might support a person in this
process, has already been radically broken. Not surprisingly,
'nesting' and the security of a home can feel extremely important
and healing, and many of us have found new communities and
'families of choice' which have gone some way to filling the gap
left by the rupture in our childhood.
A vital part of the healing work is making efforts to imagine - or
remember if we are ex-boarders - the shock felt on first arrival at
school. That is to make contact with the child before he adapted to
his new environment and shut down his authentic, feeling part. "I
didn't complain to my parents," is the message I hear from ex-boarders
when asked to recall their first hours at school, " because that would
have let them down." This is a very wrong thing for a child to have
been taught. To be vulnerable or powerless should not invite contempt,
and to need love and reassurance is human and natural.
The child who arrives at boarding school is well aware that his parents,
having invested a great deal in the success of this project, expect him
to be calm and courageous. Resourcefully, he may come up with a piece of
double-bind reasoning which runs something like this: "I am privileged
to have been sent away from home, I'm lonely and dying to be touched and
comforted but
... I'm lonely and dying to be touched and comforted but I'm not going to ask for that.
I'm not going to ask for that. My parents have sacrificed
themselves and sent me away because they love me, and I know that they
love me because they tell me so. Therefore the experience I am having is
not real, or not to be trusted, or there is something wrong with me. It
is not possible to imagine that
my parents have been selfish, cruel or
ambitious for themselves. I must be ungrateful, undeserving, rotten to
the core."
At the same time the child puts an immense, instinctive effort into not
crying, disciplining and deadening himself, strangling his throat,
tightening his chest and restricting his breathing so as to hold back
tears and shut off the waves of grief and homesickness. This way of
using himself becomes habituated, and is evident both when I work with
adult ex-boarders and when I reflect on my somatic self-organization.
It becomes what the child, then the adult, recognizes as his identity.
It corresponds to what Nick Duffell has termed the 'strategic survival
personality'.
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