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PUBLICATIONS:-

1   -  CLASS - PREJUDICE & PRIVILEGE (Self & Society, Vol 30 no 2, June 2002)

2   -  TO SMACK OR NOT TO SMACK? (Self & Society, regular column, 2002)

3   -  ROOM FOR BOTH (Self & Society, regular column, 2002)

4   -  SACRIFICE (Self & Society, regular column, 2002)

5   -  HEROES AND VILLAINS (Self & Society, regular column, 2002)

6   -  THE POWER OF REMORSE (Self & Society, regular column, 2003)

7   -  SACRIFICE (Self & Society, Vol 32 no 4, Oct 2004)

8   -  ‘I CAN’T GET NO-O....SATISFACTION’ (Self & Society, Vol 34 no 5, March 2007)

9   -  Boarding Concern: Newsletter, Feb 09:  'UNCRUSHABLE'  (www.boardingconcern.org.uk)

10 - ENDINGS – to have and to hold (Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy & Relational Analysis,
       by Karnac Books, March 2010)

11 - THE TRAUMA OF BOARDING AT SCHOOL - Boarding Concern website (www.boardingconcern.org.uk)

12 - THE TRAUMA OF BOARDING AT SCHOOL - (Self & Society, Vol 38, no 3, Spring 2011)

Copyright © Jane Barclay 2011
All rights reserved

Self & Society, A Forum for Contemporary Psychology, is published by The Association for Humanistic Psychology in Britain (AHPb): www.ahpb.org.uk
 
 

1 - CLASS - PREJUDICE & PRIVILEGE

'You don't understand', my insides screamed silently when I heard my
therapist say the word 'privileged.' I lost the rest of his sentence. All I
heard was one word that got under my skin, with its implication that I
'didn't know how lucky I was.'

After about three months of weekly sessions, I'd dared reveal a little of my
shameful admission to being 'posh', deliberately using this unposh word to
soften the blow. I'd spoken dismissively about public-schools and scathingly
referred to my father's 'old school tie' connections. Was I naive to expect
anything other than the usual chip-on-the-shoulder response about having
had a roof over my head, food and education? What had I hoped for? Sympathy
perhaps, though any attempts during my life at having a moan had never
received any. 'It wasn't that bad,' was the usual tone of family and friends.
'How dare he,' I thought. I wasn't in the mood to be fair, or to understand my
therapist's lack of understanding. Being expected to understand as a way of
making allowances had also been part of my life story. At that moment, as far
as I was concerned my therapist was as bad as all the rest.

My snarl quickly subsided. In hindsight, I think that was the moment when the
forbidden wail, 'It's not fair' finally erupted after forty years of silence
but I wasn't ready for more than a token protest. For the time being the
subject was too touchy to explore further and I tested out my anger on
less-explosive topics. Having retreated, this one lay low, until our
relationship was such that it could survive what seemed bound to turn nasty,
on my part at least.

I didn't believe a word he said about 'You're welcome here, whoever you are,'
and 'I like the way you speak.' How could he not be disgusted, let alone like
me, after I'd made my full confession, and how would I ever make him believe
the downside of being 'posh'? It took many months of tentatively exploring
projection and of learning that he did mean what he said and didn't lie,
before I included my jewelry box among the collection of momentos I regularly
brought into therapy sessions. Intending to scatter my diamond rings and a
couple of heirlooms onto the floor with nonchalance, I was tied fast by my
embarrassment, held my box close and lifted the lid slowly inch by inch. Then
all of a sudden I was enjoying myself, showing off my treasures. But when I
looked up, equally suddenly I was horrified by my daring and slammed the lid
shut again. Ok, I'd survived, and as far as I could see my therapist was
still interested in what I had to say and still seemed friendly. But you
never knew...

Over the next year the subject of class came up frequently but in a more
objective manner, since my study of middle-class had now turned into a
historical one. This was safer territory. I was fascinated to trace the
source of who I'd become back across generations of civil servants, soldiers
and crusty Victorians. I needed to place my experiences into a broader
context. I shared my discoveries as they came thick and fast; as well as
enjoying my fascination, my therapist did also admit to and apologise for his
earlier insensitivity. As I scribbled essays on suppression and pretence, on
envy and fear, and exposed myths about affluence and comfort, I was rewarded
by his surprise and at times even shock. This increasingly encouraged me to
uncover my personal history of emotional and physical deprivation.

Hearing him say that he now regarded me as his authority on the subject was
what did it! With a rush of pride and an amazing belief that there could be
some advantage to being me after all, I took a giant step into my world of
shame. Cross-legged, body scrunched and toes curling, my mouth opened one day
and out it all came - the language, the vocabulary, the manners and
mannerisms that all went towards making a person 'my sort.' Eyes glued to the
carpet I continued, squeezing out more and more confessions; when I got as
far as how to hold a knife I thought I'd reached rock-bottom. My insides
shrank and I curled up as small as possible, defending myself against the
inevitable 'beating'. It didn't come. Instead, I was encouraged to break all
the rules I'd drunk in about acceptance and being non-judgemental; I was
allowed to despise and jeer and own all my prejudice and loathing against
those who'd subjected me to such a prejudiced upbringing. I was allowed to
moan and whine and complain about the hardships of school and sneer at the
facade maintained at home for the sake of appearances. Understanding I had
a-plenty, compassion even; but when either threatened to strike me dumb, we
both reminded me there'd be time for that 'me' later....

I was still partly scared that I was condemning myself with my own words;
part of me couldn't quite believe that my therapist wouldn't 'tar me with the
same brush' forever. But I took the risk and how glad I am that I did. How
amazing to be respected for my honesty, and to be reminded that I was not
automatically a chip-off-the-old-block. How much more amazing to enjoy
being so naughty! How much more amazing still to find myself actually 'in'
the very process I'd learned so much about - feeling feelings, and it really
worked..! What relief.

It hadn't turned nasty after all; we didn't fight, as I'd anticipated, not
about this anyway. I began to trust in my own determination not to put up
with being misunderstood. I was no longer scared that I'd be identified
simply by the way I spoke. I decided that image wasn't necessarily about
sham, that I had a lot more freedom to be who I wanted to be, and that I
could enjoy choosing how to represent myself.

I'm glad to know that I'm no longer swinging between the two extremes of
desperately clinging to or disdainfully detaching from my inherited past. Now
I don't identify myself so strongly by where I came from, I can bring in my
upbringing as just one more part of myself, no more or less dominant than any
other.

I owe this state of acceptance, ironically, to indeed being privileged. Not
the kind gained from birth and placement that remains a point of conflict,
albeit matured and clearer, between my therapist and myself but I feel
privileged to believe in my free-spirit self. It's this 'me' that I've
reconnected to after a long long time, who can perform the miracle of
transforming experiences outside my choice and influence to adopt them as
mine. My innate curiosity of how people tick was never lost, but my childhood
training in critical study of every nuance of style, accent, dress and
behaviour has become one of the strongest assets I have, for myself and to
offer my clients.

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2 - TO SMACK OR NOT TO SMACK?

The word used for hitting children that isn’t slapping (face), spanking (bottom), or beating (full-blown rage). The type of lashing out that comes out of the blue, striking any bare flesh available, to release built-up frustration. Excused in terms of exhaustion, exasperation, and impossible children.

In case there’s any doubt that ‘the occasional smack never did any harm’, I have an up-to-date experience to draw on, reminding me clearly how it was being six. While the world was remembering 9/11, my memory of being struck was jogged by a vicious blow delivered by my mother, by post this time. The place she chose stung - there’s enough forethought in a smack to aim - and caught me completely off-guard. Yelp of pain and outrage. Cold dismissal of my protest a second strike. Loss of love and understanding from her of all people unbelievable, unbearable. Sense of joy gone, no point in anything, disconnected, bored and lonely. Growing rage at the waste of sunny days spent recovering from what I’d done nothing to deserve brought me back. Frustration circulated my body, shooting up and down my arm, my shoulder inflamed with surfacing rage straining to strike back

Aged six, two, or even younger, when the central supplier of nourishment suddenly turns hostile, the world stops.  There’s no-one else, compliance is vital.  Now I understand the widespread suspicion of dependencey I’ve encountered, and experienced, ever since I began training, working and being a client myself, and the tragic deep mistrust of loving relationships.

Aged 47, I can afford rebellion. After four years’ therapeutic work when I transferred emotional dependence from husband and mother (violently resisted) to my therapist, and with a more recent sense of growing independence, I reflect on the struggle, persistent defiance, to separate from a mother who experiences my difference as threatening enough to punish. The more I draw on my therapist’s interest and encouragement to discover what I feel about what, the more I realise what I missed - acceptance and appreciation.

There’s work left to do, with that rage, starting with shaking on a no-hitting deal - since smacking begets smacking - just as we shook hands on a no-sex deal four years ago. We’ve built a good foundation for having the tantrums I anticipate being the healthy non-harming way of letting off steam. Experiencing rage without fear of punishment will be as liberating as experiencing love without having to fuck.

Isn’t it criminal not to legislate against the only type of hitting still permissable - anything else by anybody other than parents is called assualt, bodily harm etc - to protect kids from being live punch-bags?

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3 - ROOM FOR BOTH

Another royal event gives me another chance to explore the subject that won’t leave me alone. While I was watching the Jubilee star line-up, I was suddenly and sadly aware of how many and who were missing.  I wanted to know what had really happened. How had they become stars? How come they hadn’t survived? Had parts of themselves become lost, taken over, sacrificed? Had earlier patterns been repeated, out of attempts to rise above those very experiences? Biographers rarely spend more than a chapter at most on early days, more rarely still connect early treatment to subsequent misadventures.

I’ve always known my tendency to take up the opposite position in arguments, usually defensive, but only recently understood how that denies me the chance to know the other place. I quickly identified the source of this habit and then gradually came across the strange phenomenon of internal jealousy. When my therapist gave one part of me attention, others would butt in demanding their turn. Jealousy of others I knew well; this was new. And hugely liberating.

‘I want it all for me,’ was my wail that represented experiences of abandonment. Terrified, hurt, destructive, re-terrified, jealousy was agony.  I wanted my therapist to give up everything for me; when he wouldn’t I tried my hardest to make him feel guilty.  He wouldn’t take it on.

When I moved out of the family home, mine was the guilty position. Doing what I wanted was too much for some. Guilt was already firmly in place, given exposure by current circumstances. My well-being was assumed to be at the expense of others. Worse, was it gained regardless of their feelings, truly selfish? No suggestion, at least, that I was a sadist, enjoying the damage.

Taking on the past and present shame assigned to me, my reaction was to seesaw between hiding signs of recovery and defiance. But the treatment I received was too similar to that of my stepfather not to be recognisable as jealousy. And now I knew what jealousy was made of - fear, of loss, learned from experience of invasion, theft, dismissal. Having to deal with jealousy in one relationship and guilt in another, the montrous partnership revealed itself. How much do either or both drive the compulsion to extreme achievement at the expense of self or others? Stars who stay intact don’t go under.

Readmitting banished parts of myself continues to be a magic process. Witnessing clients test out extremes, find recognition, and realise what belongs is secondary magic. From here it’s surely a simple step to transfer this expansion to relationships with others, discovering the capacity for empathy that relies on secure boundaries.

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4 - SACRIFICE

Sunday radio never fails to stir me up - probably why I listen to it! - in particular, references to the virtues of self-sacrifice. Grrr.....

Recently, I visited an elderly friend of my father’s and quickly recognised the confused mixture of affluence and seemingly senseless economies - always made at the expense of comfort - typical to the kind of priveleged background we share. When I asked for a second cup of tea, he amiably invited me to help myself. As I reached for another teabag, I jumped, startled by his shout. In my past life (pre-therapy), I’d have blushed, fished the disposed teabag out of the bin, hated him for making me feel small and continued, unaware, my life of self-deprivation. Instead, I made teasing reference to prep-school-itis (I used to compare my therapist’s weekly hugs to my saved up sweetie-ration) and more seriously considered my leftover stingy habits still to be worked on.

I call the thrift-habit Cuddle-hunger, universal though certainly not exclusive to the nanny/boarding-school class, that only makes sense by understanding rationing, witholding and deprivation in terms of emotional rather than material availability.

Harold Shipman’s case last month and now another horror-story of abduction and murder are both tales of extreme sacrifice of the punishing-others kind - and equally senseless without historical knowledge and understanding. I despair at the experts’ consistent reluctance to explore experiential history as a matter of course in the search for answers to the relatives’ anguished question ‘Why?’

If a child is repeatedly hurt, his trying not to mind will develop into a don’t-care habit where minding is sealed in a sound-proof box.  He’s the one years later whose ‘better nature’ is deaf to appeal. To care would interrupt the moment of vengeance, deprive him of what he believes will fix his emptiness. It’s this extreme fragmentation - interesting that the ‘nice’ part earns the title ‘false self’ - that’s so terrifying to the victims, so frustrating and bewildering to the witnesses. While desperate pleas merely satisfy the need to cause misery, my fantasy is always to whisper to the hurt child who just may, secretly, be listening, craving recognition.

Who self-destructs, who destroys others, who transforms vengeful energy into determination to heal? This is the continuing mystery, beyond scientific explanation, beyond ‘how I was treated,’ to do with responsibility, free will and choice that I believe is never beyond recovery.

At last, an excuse to mention ‘The British Nanny’ by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, a rich source of understanding this important aspect of primary care. Then I discovered R. D Laing and A Esterson’s ‘Sanity, Madness and the Family,’ amazingly published as long ago as 1964.

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5 - HEROES AND VILLAINS

The Queen Mother, suicide killers - back to back in the same papers all month. That our hero, especially now she’s dead, might contain an ounce of villainy amounts to blasphemy.  As does the thought that tyrants and terrorists were once sweet toddlers. So much for the rounded picture. What is this need for goodies ‘n baddies about, in real life as much as myths and fairytales? What’s it for, why does it matter?
    ‘I don’t mind if you have a nice time on holiday,’ I told my therapist recently. By knowing and suffering my jealousy - hitherto forbidden, guilt-ridden feeling - I’d reached the amazing belief there was room for both of us. Jealousy:- terrified of not-enough to share between two, let alone go round many. Jealousy:- hatred forming an uncontainable urge to spoil, steal, torture, terrorise, destroy as viciously as possible.  No wonder sibling countries and religions fight.
    Some time ago I hit on the idea that the Devil was God’s ‘shadow,’ that the good ‘n bad divide was man-made and, being extreme and irreconcilable, underlies all destructive, reactionary behaviour. What I come up with is that the inventors of Original Sin were themselves mistreated by those exercising free-will which was God’s gift to humans. As anyone who studies the effects of punishment knows, ‘I’m bad’ is the legacy the victim does anything to dump onto others. Or turns inward as self-harm. Or does both at once. Or chooses to take responsibility and break the cycle.
    Psychopaths, terrorists, suicide killers, reflect the split projected onto them; lack of empathy, guilt, remorse seen as symptomatic of a condition confirms their irredeemable evil. Either they’re to blame (fully aware) and punishable or  excused on grounds of diminished responsibility and treated for some mental disorder or other. The born-like-it / genetic excuse is simply scientific search for corroboration of the Original Sin theory.
    That these and behavioural symptoms might be effects of mistreatment - familial, religious or otherwise - gets consideration as psychological disturbance but only in the blame-or-excuse debate. What’s missing is the criteria Emotional Damage; it conflicts with desire for retribution; heaven forbid we’re soft.
    What if sentencing decisions were more about safety, including containment when necessary, than retaliation? About apportioning responsibility for future care, from understanding rather than blaming past emotional damage?
    Ten years ago I resigned as a JP out of frustration for inappropriate sentencing. There’s been movement since, slowly but surely.  One day, the goodies will cease needing to legalise ways of accommodating their disowned violence, colluding, even conspiring to ignore the link between treatment and behaviour - by witnessing others separating the confusion between thoughts and deeds (another legacy of abuse), daring to hate thy neighbour, think sinful thoughts.
    Total peace’n harmony is an unreachable destination; sounds boring too. Perhaps it’s conflict that makes the world go around after all; not the extreme kind that destroys, more like healthy sibling rivalry where shouting at least is allowed, contained by a sense of room for all.

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6 - THE POWER OF REMORSE

Writing in S&S began with my heated reply (vol 29,6) to an article on forgiveness in the previous issue. Via the study of jealousy, guilt, splitting, self-deprivation and mistreatment the subject came up again a year later, this time prompted by a sudden urge to investigate the story of Scrooge. I needed help. If recent punishing treatment had left me anxious (threatened) and more miserly than ever, the seasonal demand to be generous to others was paralysing - literally. Fear of parting with what I wanted to hoard and guilt when I didn’t made shopping torturing experiences.

How often does ‘I can’t afford it’ translate as ‘I’m not worth it?’

It wasn’t hard to find the source of Scrooge’s meaness: his sister fetching him from the dire institution to which he’d been banished with, ‘Father is so much kinder than he used to be..,’  told me plenty. I understood my own; tried to break the habit. Understanding and intention weren’t enough.

Scrooge’s thawing process was harder to fathom. Love from a woman wasn’t enough to repair earlier cruelty; he repelled attempts at kindness with scorn; appeals to the plight of others didn’t penetrate. Awareness of time running out certainly acted as a catalyst, but I didn’t believe generosity could be driven by fear any more than guilt.

Then I had a magical experience - of being offered an apology.  Not for the recent bad treatment, nor from its source, but its effect was as if it had been.  As I filled up with a glow of well-being, I experienced this ‘sorry’ as a gift, quite different from the forced, guilt-driven kind that’s as meaningless as forced, guilt-driven forgiveness.

Returning to Scrooge, I immediately made the connection I’d missed: the moment he was shown his young mistreated self was the ‘sorry’ he needed to unlock self-pity, forgive/cease punishing himself, and exchange meaness for generosity.

Could I do the same? The day I soaked up my apology, a friend spoke of commitment that transformed four years’ therapeutic work.  Time to take the larger share of responsibility for care, that up till then I’d depended on others - mostly my therapist - to provide. Only long-term, day-by-day commitment to me would be enough to change fear of not-enough into trust in plenty, with belief in more to come.

Does forgiveness depend on remorse?  (I prefer to thank for apology, far less yukky!) All I know is that damage to self-worth needs enough sorrow, love and commitment - wherever the source - to restore the natural flow of receiving and giving.

A satisfying place from which to say ‘bye’ and get on with that book....

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7 - SACRIFICE

Since wondering about lack of reference to the crucifixion in Chris Scott’s ‘Christ as Archetype’ (vol 31 no 4), the subject of sacrifice has been clamouring for my attention as much as the issue of forgiveness did previously (see reg col vol 31 no 2.) In fact, I sense a close connection between the two, and not only by their strong religious associations; both are to do with giving and both are frequently bound by ‘got to’s and driven by guilt.

The purpose of my enquiry is to understand better what I’ve identified as a mutation of the practice, namely the addiction (one I’ve been working on myself) I call Self-deprivation. I suspect this is far more common than realised. With a bit of encouragement, friends have divulged ingenious variations on thrift, many recognised as habits inherited from parents rather than driven by current necessity. I wouldn’t presume to call any of them addicts, but when a tendency is normalised it can more easily escape attention.

Particularly as going-without is the inverse of using or doing addictions. I only woke up to the extremes I’d reached when I hesitated outside the loo, debating my need to go in terms of cost (water, loo-paper), which was way outside the requirements of financial circumstances. Once admitted, I recognised numerous areas where I was cutting back, making do, all in the name of saving.

Like any other addiction, this behaviour is driven by the fear ‘I’ll die without having/doing it,’ the truth being that the ‘it’ is the potential killer. Like any other addiction, the purpose is to feel better, via the fix that repeatedly tries and fails to deal with emptiness experienced as intolerable. ‘Better’ in this case means feeling virtuous, but predictably the immediate glow is quickly replaced by the original fearfilled emptiness that comes from not enough nurturing. And feeling safe. My brief satisfaction had nothing to do with giving away what I saved, because I didn’t. I was sensibly and selflessly saving for my future. Needless to say, the time would never come when I’d spend the stash hoarded in the name of safety.

Sacrifice - a ritual that’s been recorded since records began, its form depending on culture, religion and historical setting, seemingly an integral piece of human behaviour.What’s it all about?

My earliest history lessons introduced me to myths and legends; in scripture we dotted round the old testament. Both fed me exciting gory stories, though the latter were more scary since they were about ‘proper’ God. Lasting images of stone slabs, slit throats, deliverance of babies - whatever was most precious to mortals given up to all-powerful and usually raging gods, to appease and placate - to ensure survival.

Original sin I find an outrageous suggestion. Born bad - bah... Original fear, however - aren’t we all naturally afraid to die, and isn’t that fear part of our instinctive drive to survive? The kind of sacrifice I’ve just described feels like part of mankind’s survival story, unlike the kind used to fix a different sort of personal terror.

Trying to reconcile God the ogre with God the loving father was confusing. The memory of sitting between my grandparents beneath the vicar’s voice booming from the pulpit ‘I, I, cross out the I,’ won. God’d be angry if I wasn’t gooder, which meant less for me and more for others, whether I knew those others or not. As for Jesus - sharing, giving, being nice all the time. How could he do that? I knew I wasn’t, couldn’t. Guilt galore.

Forty years later and I’m wondering about sacrifice - giving away something precious - in terms of being able to afford it. If I give from too empty a pot, using the very act of giving to feel virtuous, my self quickly erodes. The receiver also pays. I recently had the experience of being on the receiving end of unhealthy giving. Driven by the need to feel appreciated, this friend’s insistence on helping and supplying material goodies was overwhelming. I took on his erosion, becoming increasingly incompetent and helplessly dependent; what a relief when the effort and guilt it took to say ‘no thanks’ told me it was time to heave him out of my life, get my self back, and leave him to deal with (or not) what was his.

The stronger the sense of self, which depends on enough needs being met enough of the time, the more giving is affordable. Nobody loses; neither giver, nor receiver. No demand for thanks, no guilt at receiving what the owner can’t do without. This is the link to ‘real’ forgiveness, which is fuelled by the same generosity. The motive isn’t to feel virtuous; the effect, though, is satisfaction. Gain to both parties.

I realise I’m describing the essence of the therapeutic relationship. Early on in training, a session on rescuing activated strong resistance: ‘What’s the matter with wanting to help?’ I argued, having no idea of my own neediness, and thankfully a long way from working with clients. Now I just hope there are not too many therapists out there giving of themselves at the expense of their clients. (Hey - a moment of realisation re my ‘addiction’ to tv soaps: they fill a need for emotional drama harmlessly.)

Time to bring sex into the picture, without which talk of God ‘n religion wouldn’t be complete. My mother, directly descended from the straight-laced variety of Victorianism, taught me I had ‘to suffer to be beautiful.’ Hers was the era of pantigirdles and stilettos. Lots of squeezing. The packaging of bottoms, bellies and bosoms I grew up with said ‘Look but don’t touch, get off, keep out.’ To be comfortable, relaxed and natural was too sexy by far. As for nipples, to be disguised at all costs. Heaven forbid. So how come God didn’t approve of comfort, let alone sex? Correction, sexual pleasure. And how come Jesus didn’t do it, so far as we know? Or his mother...

Was it jealousy that made God eliminate competition? Did his anger come from feeling threatened, was his demand for sacrifice a bid for reassurance? Aged fourteen, I decided after about ten minutes’ consideration, not to become a nun; if all that discomfort went unnoticed, what was the point? Heroism needed witness. It was then I began wondering how much God’s demand for ‘all’, sexual love included, was responsible for guilt - for not supplying. Jealousy/Guilt are quite a pair.

I continue to wonder how much I’ve constructed this version of God from how I experienced my stepfather - the epitome of ‘dog-in-the-manger’ - and from my religious instructors’ projections of their instructors. In the quest for a less cluttered image, I can now sense that another kind does exist - if and when I want one. More tolerant, encouraging and most importantly unconditionally loving.

How to feel secure enough to shed the clutter? And how to break the spell of this particular addiction, arising I believe from maladaptive religious practice - without swinging to the other extreme (gluttony) also well-documented in the history books from my school days.

From as young as I can remember I knew ‘it’s not so much what happens, but how it’s dealt with.’ Having just been training with Babette Rothschild in Somatic Trauma Therapy, in terms of post traumatic stress I’m delighted to have this child-wisdom affirmed and supported by research and practice. During my own therapy, it wasn’t long before I insisted ‘It (attention, care, love) has to come from outside first,’ by which I meant that to re-stimulate the instinctive drive to self-care, I needed lots. That enough good treatment can heal both spirit and brain to reinstate self-care as an automatic response fills me with awe.

I call the second stage of the process The Hot Chocolate Challenge, since this was where my battle with me commenced once I took on more self-responsibility - after I’d settled essential needs such as peeing. The battle-ground, though, kept shifting. Once I cracked warm drinks, there was hot water, heating, new socks, anyplace where the issue was pleasure and comfort.

Then came learning to differentiate between needs and wants. I’d been so good at talking myself out of hot chocolate, for two weeks I insisted on a daily dose. Only then could I consider whether I actually wanted one or not, and choose. If I chose not, I’d spend the £1.40 on another treat, so I couldn’t get away with having nothing. Building trust - to know what’s ok to spend and what’s genuinely too much - is ongoing.

The last challenge is giving. Here comes Christmas again, and I want to feel generous.  Well, I know from experience now what I only knew intellectually last year - that generosity depends on treating myself to plenty. I’m working on it....

The recovery process sounds straightforward. Well, it is; and the experience is unlikely to be a smooth ride. Boulders of resistance and periods of relapse can repeatedly interrupt the flow. Via thinking ‘what’s the point of living if I don’t enjoy?’ I regularly faced the choice between giving up and persevering. The challenge of hot chocolate was a good one. There was simply no excuse (too expensive, don’t have time, too far to go etc) that wasn’t me saying ‘I’m afraid.’ Sip by sip I learned that having a good time came from everyday things, and the more I had the safer and better I felt.

I turn to the difference between martyrs and suicide-killers to get a clear picture of ‘true’ sacrifice and its maladaptation. The former choose to die from a secure enough sense of self to survive (transcend) even death. That the motive is selfless is seen in the after-effect of such deaths. The latter use extreme acts they perceive as heroic; heroism is the motive rather than the result. That such misplaced attempts to fix existential terror are supremely selfish is evident in the destruction left in their wake.

My belief is that behind any addiction, including the drive to kill as a misguided route to satisfaction, lies an unresolved episode when the self was overwhelmed to the point of wipe-out. Hence the emptiness, the terror, the ‘I, I, all for me’ call for attention.

Next on my agenda is to take a closer look at the Buddhist way. I begin this adventure mistrusting what I’ve gleaned so far, resistant and suspicious; but nevertheless curious.......

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8 - ‘I CAN’T GET NO-O....SATISFACTION’

 I settle down to write this piece with a strong cup of black coffee at my side - wondering with wry humour how much this simple action is about choice, habit, addiction...
    I’m extremely satisfied to find a link between the two topics I’m passionate about - forgiveness, and my latest fascination in addictions. Opposites, one the other’s shadow, the relationship is clear: addictive behaviour is about inflicting pain, punishing self and/or others; part of forgiving is realising there’s no longer need to.
     ‘Today we’re going to look at habits and addictions,’ my tutor’s voice announced, during year one of my counselling training. ‘I’ve always been an addictive person,’ I laughed flippantly, and slightly proudly, to whoever was sitting on my left.
    What a truth that was; how little I understood by it. Some years later, I baulked at the use of any labels with the words ‘am’ or ‘have’ in front:  she is an alcoholic; he has OCD, she has PTSD. Diagnoses implied stuck for ever, defining identity. Now I concede that labels are useful so long as they allow the possibility for change. Just as I use tenses to bring awareness to a client’s process, so the subtle shift in distinguishing ‘who I am’ from ‘how I behave’ can indicate massive movement towards liberation and well-being.

I can own addictive tendencies, recognise I’m drawn to using certain substances and behaviours in times of stress, and can tolerate a certain amount of not-having and not-having-yet, which means facing and feeling the emptiness I believe underlies all addictive behaviour. Food has usually been my own filler, from starving (‘gotta be thin by Friday,’ as if that’d solve all my self-esteem issues by making me instantly desirable,) to stuffing as a way of disposing unwanted goods (choc, cheese etc.)

Addiction: (I ended a recent piece on Forgiveness with the words ‘quick fix’.) 1:- the pull of attention to a substance and/or behaviour that I pin my hopes on to make it all better, to fix it. 2:- the purpose being avoid the ‘it’ (often not identified as pain, let alone what pain) that demands to be made better, too painful to acknowledge, far too painful to experience. 3:- this avoidance is experienced as craving the substance and/or behaviour (gambling, drink, fags, uppers, downers, sex, starving, bingeing, hoarding, spending, smacking, rage, misery, excitement, exercise, love - the list is infinite, since it’s anything at all, including what we think of as healthy, done to excess, including not-doing.) The empty hole screams ‘fill me.’ 4:- sometimes, which is an addiction in itself, a torturous revisiting that hole over and over again without resolution: the binge-starve cycle that solves nothing, simply affirming the learned belief ‘I deserve this hell, I did something so bad......’ 5: - confusion between being and doing: ‘was it something I said/did?’ sinking into the deep shame of ‘it’s who I am; being me is so bad I shouldn’t exist, but as I do I must suffer.’ 6: - an ‘I can’t survive without it’ focus on the fix-it, which represents the original life-death struggle, and questions the right to exist, of self and/or others; confusion between being and doing represented by lack of distinction between feeling and acting.
    Addiction - a cry from the heart covered up by layers of symptomatic behaviour.

Time for another cup of coffee, my third and last today.... and come back empty-handed from the kitchen realising the healthy alternative to address the ‘I want’ that seeps in as I write about emptiness is to take a break and physically move to shift energy and become more present.

So much for the behaviour and the drive that energises such behaviour. How to work with myself and clients? To address the behaviour without exploring the driving energy is just another attempt to fix. It (CBT included) simply won’t work long-term, any more than willpower alone. The very nature of addiction resists attempts to be fixed: any amount of anything, help included, will never be enough. Appetite is insatiable, for the simple reason that the original hole cannot be filled, the original missing care cannot be had. What can be had, though, is care now. The risk is in digesting rather than rejecting it, for care is what activates, desuppresses the original hurt. How to manage the craving becomes possible only by gently redirecting the longing to its source, registering the grief and anger that accompanies such lack of what was needed; and gradually relearning to trust that the therapist’s care doesn’t have strings.

Time to take a look at the genetic content of addiction. Can addictive tendencies be inherited? Why not, whether by gene transference and/or from being on the receiving end of addictive behaviour? The latter is another form of the cycle of abuse whereby the abused takes in feelings of the abuser and goes on to dump them onto another - the classic bully dynamic. I wonder whether repeated behaviour, including addictive, can be genetically encoded, and while I’m speaking from scientific ignorance that would make sense to me. However, if experience can be encoded, surely it can be decoded; surely what I’m born with genetically doesn’t exclusively have to rule my life any more than what I’ve experienced.

Freud’s Oedipus theory clamours for mention. I understand it as a story of jealousy, regardless of who’s related to whom, and who knows. Of course children want to play sex with their parents; children like to experiment, need to explore. So long as boundaries around behaviour are held, and the jealousy / possessiveness understood, no harm is done. This is the adults’ responsibility, always. If the central role of parents is to encourage their babies and growing children to separate, to learn to distinguish between their selves and others, then forcing them to get ahead of themselves in any aspect and/or holding them back amounts to using the child to ‘fix’ residual child-needs of the parent - and passes on the emptiness (absence of self is the result of such take-over) that addictive behaviour is desperate to avoid/fix. Narcissistic tendencies (been swotting up my myths!) surely stem from this kind of early upbringing.
    The child needs to be allowed to hate as a vital part of the separating process, supported by the parents’ consistent loving - not confusing how to manage difficult-to-deal-with behaviour with ‘s/he’s a difficult child and should be punished.’
    The parent who punishes ie turns child and hates back, hits the very core of the child’s being. Rather than feeling guilty-bad about behaviour, the child feels ashamed of who s/he is. Hating is a wretched state for a child, angry and isolated; how important it is to being welcomed back rather than punished. No doubt the parent wasn’t privileged to experience being allowed to hate safely either. This parent is likely to both push away, then cling - anything to avoid re-feeling his/her own painful separation experiences. The beliefs being acted on are both ‘if I attach, I’ll have to feel the pain of separation, so better to remain detached,‘ and ‘if my baby grows up, a part of me is lost...I don’t/can’t exist without.....’ The terrifying belief ‘I’m not complete’ is evident in everyday life, represented by compulsive shopping, eating, smothering relationships.

The jealous/terrified parent clings on, absorbs the child’s self to complete her own; the child may turn adult before daring to risk leaving, for fear of losing
him/herself because that’s what s/he’s learned will happen. S/he may settle for partial autonomy or not separate at all.
    My work with clients is often about the struggle to separate from a fearful mother, frequently including use of food, fags, sex and alcohol to plug the pain, the behaviour a distraction as well as a signpost to the pain that needs attention.
    And then I wonder about the ones I don’t work with, who get little empathy or understanding - the ones who are addicted to violence, even to killing in an attempt to feed the monster their pain turned into. It seems obvious to me that serial killers are killing their mothers over and over again; or children who seem to have what they had stolen, or never had - innocence, love. (More closely related than many dare think to the pouring of a third cup of coffee, or the purchase of another handbag.)

I believe therapy is essentially about replacing punishing ‘no’s with the compassionate setting of boundaries, all the while making sure the behaviour signposts rather than distracts from the central pain. This process itself is what allows the longing of what was missing to be increasingly tolerated, doing whatever it takes to maintain contact with present time, and thus the adult gradually takes charge of the screaming child, who in turn feels safer for being contained.
    To be able to do this, a big part of my work is to acknowledge, with the support of my supervisor, the child-fears in me that can get activated by cancelled appointments and endings, and to contain the urges to cling to or punish clients who prepare to leave. Which in turn allows me to forgiving/lovingly manage whichever part, however ‘difficult,’ the client brings, and to rejoice in and encourage their development towards autonomy.

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9 - Boarding Concern Newsletter, Feb 09: 'UNCRUSHABLE'

It’s ten years since I stamped my foot and shouted at my psychotherapist of just three months, ‘Privilege? You call being sent away to school a privilege?’
    I’d slipped in the information as a by-the-by fact to clarify what I was saying about relationships at home. Echoes of being told how lucky I was, and to think of the starving millions, lit the fuse which set free thirty years of forgetting. I now had the task of weaving this split-off part of me back into the rest of my existence. Fortunately, I had chosen a man to work with who welcomed my rage and then listened to the stories I unearthed from a heap of myths and brain-washing.
    Eight years ago, I qualified as a Therapeutic Counsellor and have since built a thriving practice in Exeter. Each time I work with a client who’s been a boarder, the part of me who longs to compare notes has to keep quiet – again. My internal supervisor reminds me I need access to space of my own.
    Comparing notes - unthinkable, at school, to complain, either to the adults in charge or to fellow-inmates. Unthinkable, on a day out or back home for holidays, to spoil one precious moment thinking about school. Let alone whine about the cold or missing home when my mother had been even colder and had had no outings at all. Result: whichever place I was in, the other me disappeared, along with my feelings. Long-term work: to join myself up again, and keep gathering in any part that starts to wander off.
    As well a residue mistrust about complaining, the little girl in me has wanted not only to be special but the ‘special-est,’ the only way she knows to make up for utter wretchedness of being treated for years as a non-person. Her scream ‘Never mind you, I want it all for me’ has ricocheted around my therapist’s room in many contexts and this competition can still threaten friendships, especially with fellow ex-inmates.

Competition – utterly alien in the boarding-school system (as well as at home) was the concept of ‘enough to go round,’ making every activity competitive, from bagging the thickest piece of bread by nicking the crust with my finger-nail before grace (prep school,) to the weekly aural arithmetic test. But, and it’s a big but, to succeed meant being modest to the point of apology. One prize-giving, I felt guilty enough to whisper to my music rival – and mean it – ‘you should have won, really.’ Result: when I play tennis (symbolic of any relationship,) my body remembers despite huge mental effort to persuade it otherwise, that it’s simply ‘not done’ to win; I disengage and in effect walk away. Long-term work: nurturing the belief that not every interaction is a life-death annihilation-of-self struggle, that there’s room for more than one – in conversation, in relationship, as well as on the tennis court.
    Absence of physical comfort underpinned the mantra central to every rule and every form of contact with staff (especially Matrons, the surrogate mothers): ‘Your feelings, wants and needs do not matter.’ Result: since unanswered needs turn into longing, and long-term unanswered longing is torture, existence becomes a question of making-do, beneath which a deep shame grows to quash needing anything; asking then becomes a paralysing experience. Long-term work: to coax the shamed person back out in much the same way you’d treat a cowering distrustful dog.
    And then there’s food. Despite my stomach being filled like clockwork my heart and soul remained hungry. Result: cram in as much as possible at any opportunity, trying to satisfy what felt like tummy-hunger which I now call cuddle-starvation. Long-term work: to feed this little girl little-and-often (a balance between ‘demand feeding’ and ‘feed-by-the-clock’) and gently enquire of each twinge whether it’s actually food or something else that’s needed. This confusion lasts a l-o-n-g time since boarding-school often compounds confusion around nourishment from babyhood.
    My therapist was on the receiving end of my cuddle-starvation, and hatred for not providing the ones that had been missing. Gradually I was able, within the cuddles he could offer, to feel the agonising yearning that has to be gone through as part of the healing. ‘I want looking after’ was my persistent wail. I’d done enough ‘taking care of myself.’ It was a while before I grew enough adult self to join him in taking responsibility for my well-being and another while before taking over enough to leave.
    This insatiable longing makes every friendship, let alone an intimate relationship, a minefield of challenges. Every goodbye, even goodnights, carries the potential of activating fear. How to wreck a good friendship, partnership, marriage? With jealousy, insecurity, hunger for reassurance, blame and resentment for all that’s missing. What makes intimacy possible? Recognising and owning these feelings, to safe-guard against acting them out; and pledging life-long commitment to taking responsibility for my own needs.
    Joining up my boarding-school self with the rest of me has meant looking both at cultural and family context, particularly the latter, inevitably leading me to examine my parents’ choice to send me there and the pain of blaming and raging, and the wishing for a different history. Adult reasoning and understanding didn’t make a dent on these feelings and I believe there’s no circumventing this stage; the young person needs to let any festering hatred out (in the therapy space) – for his/her own well-being and to prevent damage to others.
    Although the issues I’ve raised are well-documented, each individual’s healing process, as well as circumstances, is of course unique to them. For me, it’s been essential to find someone to work with, through the cloying, disempowering darkness of hating to a place beyond - not those noble states of acceptance and forgiveness our culture aspires to, but essentially of self-forgiveness. By this I mean exchanging self-punishment, in whatever form, which perpetuates earlier misery, for quite a different regime.

I love to watch clients as they slowly respond to care that seems to permeate all resistance - after all, some measure of self-care has brought them through the door in the first place; and I love to nurture the belief that they’re worth caring for, and that they always were, that the treatment they endured was not about them (deserving it) but about the adults-in-charge’s own split-off misery. It’s magical work, and this is where I do indeed feel privileged – both to have been received and responded to by my own therapist and to pass on what I absorbed.

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10 - ENDINGS – to have and to hold (to be published in Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy & Relational Analysis,
by Karnac Books, March 2010)

I’m writing this in August. Ever since I can remember, I’ve spent my end-of- summer month wishing it away, jumping ahead to September, the start of autumn, a time of beginnings. Until this year. For between last August and this I’ve made a discovery. And as discoveries tend to, this one has been leading to more and more.
I love how the big lessons come, the sense that what I’m learning has been there all the time waiting until I’m ready to know it. It was in this way I reached the core message of how I ended therapy - four years before but still haunting me, not quite finished. I had taken myself to a presentation entitled ‘Trauma of the Privileged Child’ and recognised, as I’d hoped to, much of my own boarding school experience. The questions that came afterwards were interesting but I had nothing to say. Until, suddenly it was there, my new realisation. Then came the announcement, ‘That’s all we have time for.’ No, I had to say this. I blurted my sentence out across the hall, heart pumping: ‘I was in therapy six years and gave two weeks’ notice to finish; I got the goodbye over with as quickly as possible, just how it was at school.’ I subsided, grateful that instead of the ticking off I expected, for speaking out of turn, I received a thank you.

How else could I have borne saying goodbye to the man I’d come to love as my ‘third-time-lucky dad’ and who’d come to love me as his daughter? The less time I wasted anticipating our parting, the less painful, surely.
    The more I thought about it, after this lecture, the more I realised I’d been replaying not just the repeated partings on station platforms and school driveways: ‘you’ll be fine, you won’t even think about home once you’ve settled in.’ I had also re-enacted earlier separations, from my nanny and from my father. The way I’d been taught to manage was by forgetting. Out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, no longing. I’ve been healing this splitting-off of feelings ever since.
    In the early days of therapy, each moment between sessions was a matter of counting down the hours, waiting and dreading something would stop me getting there. I functioned as wife and mother but my heart was elsewhere. Then, having got through the heavy oak door for the precious hour I’d been waiting for, I missed being ‘home’ too, spending the time dreading the end (strong memories of school outings, as well as visits from my estranged father.) ‘Come back,’ he’d say, over and over again, ‘Be here.’ I didn’t understand what he meant. I was here, feeling all those feelings.
    How I longed for contact and strained to get closer, then closer still; I didn’t realise my resistance to being connected was equally strong, pushing away the agony of inevitable separation.
    The work - which I’ve recorded at length in a self-case-study called Second Childhood - became a matter of unlearning and relearning: that goodbyes were part of relationship; that following a goodbye, far from forgetting and desolation, connection was maintained by lots of remembering with lots of warm feelings. Very different from a life chopped into chunks of longing for togetherness and dreading separation. Which sums up life at boarding school, with the addition of refusing to feel either since there was no comfort available.

By means of letters, telephone calls and recording sessions so I had his voice to soothe me to sleep, over the years I learned to retain a sense of my therapist between visits, in effect to ‘internalise’ him. Connecting with him during sessions grew from this. Gradually, we formed the secure base from which I could start growing some life of my own and add heart to my functioning.
But saying goodbye forever was another matter. How could I keep connected to him without any contact at all? I resorted to the only way I knew, to push him away as fast as possible, then get on with managing without him.
I saw the clock reach eleven. I didn’t want to speak. Or cry. I had to squeeze every drop out of our last cuddle. I peeled myself away, took my last gaze around the room. This final ration was going to have to eke out a long, long time. I paused at the door for my last-last look then turned to walk down the passage. ‘It’s alright, he’s still there,’ I murmured to myself as I trundled down the stairs and out to the car.
Even if I’d wanted to forget, I couldn’t; our work together had stuck. And I didn’t want to, anyway; that would mean wiping out the last six years, pretending we hadn’t loved each other. But remembering left me pining and the one person I wanted to comfort me was out of bounds. Since there was no reunion to look forward to, all I could do now was record time in terms of survival without contact and live on a diet of pride in this achievement. A week, a month went by. In the old days, I’d have turned to food to plug the misery, but now I had no appetite. My craving to meet again so we could at least say goodbye properly, fully, with feelings, ate away at me, literally; I lost two stone. Missing and longing sat like a boulder in my stomach that I feared would turn into a cancerous lump and kill me.
    For four months, I watched my flesh disappearing, a part of me pleased to have achieved a life-long ambition to be thin. But I also knew this amount of suffering, alone, wasn’t right. Although it felt like ‘giving in,’ I picked up the phone and rang my therapist-dad. Not to book an appointment, just to hear his voice. We talked a while, he was sorry I’d been having such a hard time and I felt comforted. This contact wasn’t enough in itself but it was enough to remind me he was him, not the angry stepfather who didn’t want to be bothered; and to rejoin hands with my adult self without whom I was nothing more than helpless and abandoned child. It was enough to ‘bring me back… be here.’
    By the way I disconnected from him, skipping our goodbye, I’d disconnected within myself all over again. No wonder I’d been desolate afterwards; five years later I revisit this ending to do some reconnecting work - with the support from another therapist, a woman this time.
    I won’t pick up the phone to him, that’s not the way; or devise a ceremony, or gaze at photographs. The work now is ongoing practice of ‘being here’ that I learned with him over and over again both during and between sessions; by keeping in touch with me, I’m bound to keep in touch with him since he was my teacher.
    Even though this is the way to living more fully and relating more fully with others, it’s a practice that requires commitment. Being in close relationship with all parts of myself means regularly meeting the edge of my core fear of abandonment. I find the needy child in me present in every relationship of value, her feelings easily activated. She/I can feel threatened when a client talks of holiday plans; when my daughter drops in for a rare and precious visit, when my husband turns over to sleep.
    Alone, I’m not threatened; there’s no-one there about to leave. Fully engaged in relationship with either a task or a person, I’m not threatened. Now is all there is. The unsafe feelings come during what I call ‘together-and-apart’ times, when I’m close enough to someone else to register their separateness. ‘Stay with me,’ I want to wail when my husband wanders out to the garage. Very young, totally dependent on his presence for my own; if he disappears, so do I. My child-impulses to withdraw and cling whirl in frantic circles.
    The more I practice, the sooner I remember that it’s me who needs to ‘stay with me’ and then do what I need to come back and join up; and the more often I use these resources, the more securely I stay put in the first place.

I have a sense that my practice will hold good for the very biggest endings of all and with that thought in mind, it’s time to leave this piece - it’s August: time to pick blackberries.
 

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11 - THE TRAUMA OF BOARDING AT SCHOOL

My attempt to address a collective misunderstanding about boarding, grown from the cultural normalisation of this privileged form of education, is based both on my work as therapist and personal experiences of boarding.

Being transported from home to a place utterly strange, and left there, is a traumatic experience - of being rendered unsafe in an instant.  The initial startle, unless activated into Fight or Flight (the instinctive physiological response to any situation that threatens safety,) turns into prolonged shock; this position of tension will last as long as it’s needed, until deemed safe to release. Children away at school are forced to fend for themselves; whatever the help from peers and encouraging supervision from staff, the very process of adaptation that is so highly-regarded as character-building - having to be independent, reliable, tough, on the outside at least - carries a psychological price that can lead to life-long problems in adulthood, if not sooner.

Since the mid-twentieth century, research has led to a greater appreciation of children’s need for secure attachment to their central caretakers, more recently validated by neuro-scientific findings. Children who feel safe will naturally venture forth into the world with curiosity towards healthy independence, as and when they are ready; not, as some fear, remain ‘tied to apron strings.’ It is the children who are forced to become self-reliant ahead of their natural development who meet the world warily, and form a mistrustful, defended way of being in the world that sets up patterns which later on can severely undermine intimate relationships.

The traumatic moment is the realisation that return home isn’t possible. This may happen on the front steps, unpacking the trunk, at the first meal, at bedtime. The protesting energy that surges forth has no outlet and can only collapse into submission. This process (better known in terms of trauma as the Freeze response) is, indeed, the third survival course that animals, human ones included, rely on when trapped. As such, surrender does serve its purpose, bringing relief as the life-protecting energetic arousal that has no outlet lowers, allowing for day-to-day functioning. But, whilst adapting to enforced conditions comes naturally, readapting when it’s all over doesn’t seem to. Ex-boarders have just as much difficultly rejoining the wider world as combat veterans and released prisoners and prisoners-of-war, conditioned to continue living by the same means that for years served ‘getting through.’ To continue living as if still there, condemned, once back home, to a sense of strangeness, of not quite belonging – hence instant recognition of and sticking to one’s own kind: no wonder the public-school network is so strong.

For the first three weeks at prep school contact with home is firmly discouraged, on the grounds this would upset both children and parents (see ‘Leaving Home at 8,’ ITV Spring ’10.) which must be avoided, or the brutality would be exposed and the highly lucrative business cave in. In terms of grooming, this is on a par with any version of ‘it’s for you own good.’ I invite you to imagine, if you haven’t experienced this hiatus, or remember if you have: after parting – whether the brisk kind or distraught clinging - the measures the young child must resort to, to bear the vanishing of all s/he knows as safe and familiar, replaced by all that is scary and new. Fear and distress is automatically stifled and, discouraged by all concerned, must remain so. And there’s so much to learn, so quickly, without respite; staff promote occupation as the antidote to homesickness. The adults in charge know that three weeks is the length of time it takes to break a young child’s hope of rescue. By the first outing, each one will have learned to put on a brave face, to withhold complaints, to count blessings.

At boarding school, just as in any ‘care home’ or institution, inmates are not loved by their caretakers. Children are taught, fed, housed but not day-to-day parented, let alone cuddled. No amount of contact by letter, phone and email; of outings, speech-day visits and weekends home; of teddy at bedtime, treacle stodge and tuckbox makes up for the certain knowledge that another goodbye looms. Nor do glossy brochures of well-furnished commonrooms and extra-cirricula activities.

Life is a matter of survival, of ‘getting by,’ dependent upon suppressing longing (too torturing to maintain;) upon living one day at a time, eking out rations of both food and affection; making the most of things; refusing to think about home and then when holidays come blotting out ‘the other place.’ Some learn to be canny, others to thrive on competition or play the fool. Hungry for attention, the boarder will strive for recognition in terms of achievement, whether in class, at sport, at music; sadly, the child’s sense of self and confidence becomes totally dependent upon ‘success’ or ‘failure’ in these terms. The true self, in terms of feelings and needs, must be hidden and thus become split off.

Defence of the boarding system is cast-iron amongst protagonists, livelihoods depend upon its survival, and not only in financial terms. ‘Everyone’s doing their best… you’ll be grateful one day for the opportunities… you’ll build life-long friendships’ are among the many mantras locked in place to protect all concerned from the bleak reality of painful, and totally unnecessary, traumatic separation. The old-boy/girl network does indeed endure, serving to preserve collective denial of little-boy/girl misery.

What lies beneath such denial? Need for safety is universal and tends to be found in familiar territory. To step outside the centuries-old beliefs that to have less leads to needing less, and that to not-need is a ‘good thing,’ can appear dangerously, terrifyingly unfamiliar. Hence the sneering at need for affection (‘soft’) and scorn for need of others (‘dependent.’) But need for contact is primitive and instinctive, uncrushable by scorn or by will-power; unsatisfied, it will continue to present in varying guises for as long as it remains ignored rather than recognised as such: no wonder boarders, deprived of goodnight kisses, turn to sweets and certificates and crushes as substitutes, and later become workaholics, alcoholics, and mistake sex for intimacy.

The boy or girl, grown adult, may be struggling in a relationship or with an addiction or dark depression (the ‘cry for help’ can present in numerous ways,) want help but be loathe to seek it, mistrustful and self-critical of being needy: the idea of therapy is deeply shameful. I work with the clients who have both listened to this cry and found the courage to reach out; together, we join back up the pieces that years earlier had to be split-off, protest disallowed, Fight/Flight energy suppressed. As both therapist and ex-boarder, I recognise missed appointments, criticism, self-criticism, superiority and all judgement and prejudice as defences against connecting more fully; what I hear is a small child saying ‘managing on my own is what I had to do to survive.’ As much as this child, tucked within the adult, longs for contact and craves affection, safety still relies on going solo. The pack is the enemy, authority and peers alike; best to stick to the edge, easier to scuttle away. (No wonder that my own therapist’s holidays - parting with the words, ‘See you in three weeks’ - was a time to endure by ticking off calendars and scribbling him notes. Over time, goodbyes gradually became less painful; the final ending, however, turned into years of work made of longing, raging, longing again, as I re-felt - and healed through a process of grieving - my young experiences.)

The work for the ex-boader, with sensitive and respectful support, understanding and encouragement from the therapist, is to escape the trauma ‘Freeze’ position held in place by behaviour patterns that are only an illusion of reactivated Fight/Flight energy (eg control over eating, power-seeking at work/at home) whilst still driven by long-forgotten helpless rage and distress. This work is made of three stages: identifying (cognitively) these patterns, recognising and honouring both how they served and the price they exacted; accepting (emotionally) what really happened – the stage that evokes much fighting resistance to feeling so much loss; and reconnection both internally and hence with the wider world that is a step-by-step process of regrowing trust. In practice, stages overlap, each releasing emotions that have been closely guarded, sometimes for decades; so the process cannot be rushed: the risk of overwhelm, even retraumatising, is ever-present.

I conclude with emphasis on what defines this particular form of trauma that renders the child within the adult so reluctant to speak out: recognition of the core pain of abandonment still has to be fought for, on the outside as well as within. Sexual abuse, rape, torture, imprisonment, corporal punishment – all these and more are by now widely recognised, readily evoking shock, anger and a collective desire to protect. Boarding school continues to be promoted in our predominantly each-man-for-himself culture.
 
 

12 - THE TRAUMA OF BOARDING AT SCHOOL

My intent is to provide experiential evidence that boarding at school is indeed a trauma and needs wider recognition in these terms. Sexual abuse, corporal punishment, rape, torture, imprisonment – all these readily evoke shock, anger and a collective desire to protect as well as a mass of literature and training in therapeutic response. Boarding school continues as a highly lucrative business  to be regarded and promoted as a privileged choice of education, the core suffering from enforced and prolonged separation avoided or at best excused on grounds that it’s ‘for your own good’.
I write as an ex-boarder, a therapist, a client in therapy and as a (recently become) director of Boarding Concern.

Ten years ago, I had only a fleeting idea that living two-thirds of each year at school from the age of nine and a half was in any way connected to how I related both to myself and others in adulthood. Since then, my awareness has been surfacing in fits and starts until I am now in no doubt, especially after working on the chapter in Does Therapy Work? (Barclay, 2011) that describes how I ended long-term therapy, that  this experience left me with debilitating ‘separation anxiety’ and a host of life-constricting coping strategies and ‘somatic memories’ (Rothschild, 2000, p37).

I put all awakening down to inherent inner wisdom that strives above all for truth and integration. I put the hesitance of this particular awakening down to cultural normalisation (hard-wired during Empire days) of boarding school as being ‘a good thing’ for building character, fostering independence, turning ‘little soldiers’ into big ones (girls as well as boys), producing leadership qualities – all highly-desired attributes. Pupils readily adopt the mantras, ‘It’s for the best in the long run’ and ‘Think of others less fortunate’; these, and more, are cemented in place to defend the system from challenge and aid suppression of homesickness.

When my therapist included the word ‘privileged’ in his response to my apologetic sketch of ‘Poshland’ upbringing, including tentative mention of boarding-school, despite knowing he was referring to enough food and a roof over my head, what I heard was accusation. My spurt of rage (Barclay, 2002) quickly subsided; I wasn’t sure enough of my own ground to fight for understanding or risk being challenged. I continued to link my anguished mix of clinginess and mistrust to other young-child experiences (my need to make sense of flooding emotions intense), and many years passed before I found a space to work more directly towards integrating my neglected, split-off boarding-school-self.

I attended a talk entitled Trauma of the Privileged Child (presented by Prof. Joy Shaverien) that spoke directly to my nine year-old heart. Wow. I enrolled in the therapeutic workshops offered by Boarding Concern (see below) and had an immediate sense of coming home. What relief to be among people who didn’t need convincing but already knew the loneliness, the need for recognition and struggle to be best at something, the unspeakable and therefore unfeelable homesickness, the universal lack of privacy, the comforts of sagging mattress, teddy and of treacle stodge.

After a year and a half more in therapy, with a woman this time, I know that eight years’ incarceration offered no chance of recovery from the initial shock of being transported from home and left somewhere I was led to believe as jolly that instantly turned out to be otherwise. Being severed from all that was familiar and comforting shattered my core assumption (Janoff-Bulman, 1992), along with trust, that ‘my’ adults wouldn’t leave me, that I could rely on them to keep me safe (Gerhardt, 2004).
 Enforced adapting, becoming independent, reliable and emotionally stoic - this is the very process, ironically, that is so revered. Whilst adoption, fostering, evacuation and deportation are accepted as destabilising, and children of separated parents are encouraged to make home with one rather than split themselves between the two, the form of child-rearing that entails moving between home and school six times each year (not counting weekends and half-terms) is even now barely acknowledged as a disturbance to a sense of ‘secure base’ (Bowlby, 1979).
 

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The moment of trauma is the realisation that return home isn’t possible. This may impact on the front steps, unpacking the trunk, at bedtime. (Being sent out of the dining-room for crying was ‘it’ for me: first breakfast, a puddle of black treacle spreading across the plate – too much.) The slicing separation of child from primary attachment figures is mirrored by internal splitting. Since the protesting energy that surges forth cannot be mobilised (Levine, 1997), it must be contained. Therein lies the split: the one who feels hurt, abandoned and betrayed gets locked away; expression of feelings are not welcome in this place and to feel with such intensity all alone is unbearable. What remains is a child whose thinking is on overdrive, searching for reasons for being left (commonly leading to the question ‘what did I do?’ since it offers the possibility of correction,) and at the same time faced with a host of new instructions to assimilate.
 Crucially, at boarding school, just as in any ‘care home’ or institution, children not loved by their caretakers. They are taught, fed, housed but not parented. Bowlby writes extensively of ‘secure attachment’ and ‘separation and loss within the family’ in Making & Breaking Affectional Bonds; in Why Love Matters, Gerhardt adds neuro-scientific findings to support visible evidence of insecure-attachment-induced stress (p 25-31).

Contact by letter (nowadays by phone and email), periodic day’s out (nowadays frequent weekends home) and even an extra visit for a match or concert cannot erase the certain knowledge that another goodbye looms; living in anticipatory dread becomes normal. Nor do ever more glossy brochures of comfortable common-rooms, extensive grounds and the lure of attractive extra-curricula activities compensate for missing pets, home bedroom and even irritating siblings. Or for lack of goodnight hugs.

The first hour, first bedtime, first breakfast: the first week is a series of after-shocks before the bizarre becomes familiar. One new and bewildering experience follows another relentlessly (Duffell, 2000) without ‘down-time’, a private place to recover even temporarily or cuddles. No amount of being shown the ropes by peers, bracing encouragement from staff or even momentary comfort from an under-matron provides reassurance since the reality doesn’t change.

The process of acclimatising and desensitising can be compared to that of prisoners-of-war (Herman, 1992) who, if guarding and terrain combine to make escape impossible, can only sit it out hoping one day for release. Survival of treatment intended to depersonalise and make keeping order easier – use of surnames, uniform bed-covers, strip-washes, lack of privacy –  is dependent upon being canny and competitive. Upon suppressing longing; upon living one day at a time, eking out supply of rations of both food and affection; upon refusing to think about home and then when finally there blotting out ‘the other place’. The legacy, that all forms of abuse and neglect have in common, is a sense, back home, of strangeness, of not belonging – until or unless a process of re-joining the splitting brings about integration.

‘Abuse? That’s going too far.’ Both schools and parents ‘sell’ the benefits of boarding school to their children as they have had it sold to them. Together with persuasive enticements and reassurances, in terms of grooming this is on a par with any other version of ‘it’s for you own good’. Defences in the form of mantras, quickly learned by rote by new boys and girls, are necessary to protect all concerned (shown in Colin Luke’s documentary The Making of Them, 1993) from the bleak reality, all in the name of top-class education which in turn leads to top jobs. Individual distress is contagious; if an epidemic broke out, the emotional brutality of the regime would be exposed. To challenge centuries-old beliefs that to have less leads to needing less and that to not-need promotes independence would mean, as well as the demise of a highly lucrative business, stepping out of ‘all that is familiar’ (p2). No wonder the investment to keep the status quo.
 ‘What about service families?’ ‘And what about escape from abuse at home?’ Surely being fostered is a more nurturing option if rescue is needed. And reliability of home and family more important than constancy of schooling, at least up to the age of thirteen (Gerhardt, 2004).

I emphasise, it is the power of collective defensive arguments, by those whom the system has served in terms of high-achievement and those who envy the academic advantages, that compounds the particular trauma of being sent to boarding-school: a child who steps out of line and plucks up courage to complain (about continual separations, about missing home – tho more likely about conditions since his feelings have been locked out of awareness) is most likely to be told hear that he or she is lucky – shamed into silence that can extend long after breaking-up for the final time.

For the first three weeks at prep school contact with home is firmly discouraged, on the grounds this would upset both children and parents (shown on Channel 4, Cutting Edge, Leaving Home at 8, Spring 2010). Imagine, if you haven’t experienced this hiatus, or remember if you have: after a brisk and hearty, stiff-upper-lip parting, the measures a child must resort to, to bear watching all s/he knows as safe and familiar, including the source of hugs and cuddles, driving away. (It is quite common, I’ve discovered, not to remember the first ‘goodbye’, not consciously anyway.) The brain strains to make sense out of utter confusion. So much to learn, so quickly. Fear must not be seen by peers, distress quickly stifled; protest to staff is unthinkable. Activity without respite – ‘timetable-ing’ (Duffell, 2000) – is the well-known antidote to homesicknes. The adults in charge know that three weeks is the length of time that breaks a child’s hope of rescue; the children themselves make the decision to stop looking ahead, to put needs on hold (the crucial moment of necessary self-betrayal) and turn to the immediate business of surviving.

The younger the child, the greater the emotional wrench when separated from primary sources of love and nurturing physical contact, and the greater the threat to physical safety when separated from primary sources of protection. The longing (I call this ‘cuddle-hunger’) that arises from unmet needs demands a focus and so deflects towards sweets and puddings, towards gold stars and top-of-form status, to shows of courage on stage or playing-field: to winning. Oh yes, and to being naughty. Enough to win admiration from peers. Imagine a school full of children with such determination: every aspect of living becomes a competition, from ‘bagging’ the thickest slice of bread (Dickensian measures to ease emotional starvation), to whose brother is the grooviest at sports-day. Pretending, ‘telling stories’, cheating when necessary – anything to get a sense of identity, of special-ness. Yet to be the best means being envied, a lonely state: public schools historically turn out officers, not ‘men’.

No wonder ex-boarders (the ones who haven’t sunk into a mire of self-destructive behaviours) continue to fill places of leadership, public roles and the top positions in elite professions: being best is what they learned to value, to compensate for inner emptiness. (When I watch Blackadder or Monty Python I don’t laugh; my inner schoolgirl squirms at public-school humour, recognising and re-feeling the pain underneath.)
 

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So to post-trauma. In the first weeks, fight/flight energy must, if not mobilised, collapse into submission (Barclay, 2010). The third survival-serving response, to freeze or ‘play dead’ (Rothschild, 2000), cannot be sustained over an indeterminate period. ‘Freeze’ takes the form of switching off needs that cannot be fulfilled (extended longing is self-torturing) and turning to what or whoever is available as substitute to ‘make do’. Survival means living as two sides of a coin, back to back, one side permanently hidden (Laing, 1960), the other the face that is seen. It is the latter that people respond to, the one that its owner comes to believe is all s/he is.

The Strategic Survival Personality (Duffell, 2000) develops as a shell to present to the world. This way of being does serve its purpose in terms of locking away feelings; it also carries a high price. The hidden, silent ‘face’ must find alternative ways of making its presence felt, for example via an eating disorder, self-harming, cheating, aggression. The on-going splitting can manifest in depression and bi-polar mood-extremes as well as in powerful control of self (needs in particular) and others, including addictions – to behaviours such as gambling, sex and high-risk activities, and to drugs, alcohol and food. To quote my therapist, ‘How can you relate to other people if you cannot relate to yourself?’

Ex-boarders can have just as much difficultly rejoining within themselves and hence to the wider world as do combat veterans and released prisoners, conditioned to continue surviving by the same means that served ‘getting through’, including making light (‘fine, really’) or joking about hardships (‘put hairs on my chest’.)

‘The syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma needs its own name. I propose to call it ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder.’’ (Herman, Trauma & Recovery, p 119). Out of hard-wired coping strategies grows the ‘drama triangle’ (Karpman, 1968) of victim, persecutor/aggressor, rescuer – each behavioural position a maladaptive bid to gain at least an illusion of power and of ability to self-protect, and to get needs for safety met without intimate engagement. Anything to avoid re-feeling helpless.
 The most visible survival technique or ‘face’ particular to the ex-boarder is social confidence, the ability to ‘get on’ with everyone, often admired as ‘charming’: bubbly small talk and wit both serve to avoid being known, very exposing for someone who has long denied the existence of his/her inner self. Also common as a defence against social contact is arrogance. Next is competence: striving for excellence and competition in all things again serves to promote hierarchy and hence avoid intimacy with others. One of the hallmark legacies of boarding school is the double-bind of aiming to be ‘top’ but not getting ‘above yourself’ – hence ladles of self-deprecation.
 

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The cost of my own survival strategies all come under the heading ‘fear of intimacy’.
‘I see the problems of sexuality in boarding schools expressed in later life as difficulties in loving, or more specifically in combining sex, love and intimacy in relationships.’ (Duffell, The Making of Them, p 169.) I began to make sense of all my relationships together with my irritation and frustration at girlfriends who gushed greetings but remained elusive, somehow ‘not there’ even when we were chatting over coffee. Instinctively, I’d homed into people of my own kind: no wonder my hunger for meaningful contact remained unsatisfied. Boarders, including myself until recently, can become expert at ‘doing’ effusiveness, at ‘doing’ relationships, all the while ‘being’ absent. Now I understand my indefinable sense of ‘something’s missing’ and dismal lack of belonging.

The first taste of attention from my therapist was like a grain of sugar given to a starving man, unleashing a craving for someone to love and be loved by (equally risky) that demanded to be satisfied – and was over time (Barclay, 2011), gradually enabling me to take these primary needs beyond the therapy room.

No wonder, in retrospect, how my early years of therapy were all about having more and more: time and attention. I dared not let in nourishment and so remained hungry. No wonder, too, that my therapist’s holidays that started with the words, ‘See you in three weeks’, were breaks to endure by ticking off calendars and drawing him pictures. Anything to stop him, and thereby stop me, from disappearing. Over years of work, separations became less threatening as I became more substantial, more connected to myself in his absence; however, the final goodbye (Barclay, 2010) left me pining with homesickness and drawing on my habitual, survival mode of ‘having to go without’. After struggling alone for months, I sought help from another therapist, a woman this time, to complete this ending.

True freedom – from the prison of the ‘drama triangle’ – means reconnecting to and remobilising fight/flight survival energy (Levine, 1997). I’ve discovered just how different this feels from prickly defensiveness, muscles warmed up and primed rather than cold and tight, body expansive rather than hunched (Keleman, The Human Ground).
 

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Ex-boarders are likely to come to therapy without any idea of schooldays as a source of distress. Fiercely self-critical of being needy and suspicious of attachment, let alone dependency, they automatically deflect care by means of criticism and comparison and fiercely stick to subject-matter that appears safe: the ‘problem’ they’ve come about and what to do to beat it.

An unaware therapist who misses a passing reference to boarding-school may inadvertently give the client a chance to assert his/her case; more likely, the omission will pass unnoticed since the client won’t be aware of its significance either. A therapist who colludes with collective assumptions about the privilege of boarding-school is potentially lethal. The first time I described my moment of abandonment and subsequent survival measures to a local group of therapists, I was received with a mix of surprise and curiosity. Only one in the group stayed silent; afterwards she came over and said, ‘I’m sorry you had such a bad time; for me it wasn’t so at all.’ Perhaps I’d overused my personal experience and needed to present more clinical evidence to get my point across; perhaps she didn’t dare, wasn’t ready to get the point.

As therapist, to maintain awareness of my ‘self’ as separate from an other’s depends on inhabiting me as ‘home’. Attention to ‘monitoring arousal and anxiety’,  ‘use of brakes’, and ‘becoming familiar with the theory of the Autonomic Nervous System’ (Rothschild, 2006) is invaluable. The unshakeable belief that I suffered trauma from enforced separation from home and parents enables me to let my experiences, and responses to a client, inform me. This includes remembering at all times that behind missed appointments, forgetting to pay and all the other defences against connecting with me more fully is a small child saying ‘keeping my distance is what I had to do’. As much as s/he may long for love, safety meant self-reliance for all things, peers and adults alike not to be trusted – however high the cost in isolation. A client I’ve worked with for three and a half years handed me a Christmas card just before leaving for our break – of three weeks. ‘I tore up the first one,’ he said, ‘Of course, I gave myself a hard time for such waste. But I’d written ‘with love’. This one, well, I hope you like the picture, it’s a favourite of mine; and I’ve just signed my name.’ I thanked him for the card, and thanked him for the extra gift of telling me what he’d torn up.

My endeavour is to raise awareness rather than fight against denial, to remain respectful of defences and continue to proffer my own experience to inform and promote understanding – in conjunction with Boarding Concern which provides a place to call for anyone who is ready.

References:
Barclay, J. (2002) Class – Prejudice and Privilege, Self & Society, Vol 30 no 4, p33-35.
Barclay, J. (2010) Endings, to have and to hold, Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, Karnac Press,
Barclay, J. (2010) The Trauma of Boarding at School, www.boardingconcern.org.uk
Barclay, J. (2011) Does Therapy Work? Exeter: Troutbeck Press.
Bowlby. J (1979) The Making & Breaking of Affectional Bonds, London: Tavistock Publications
Duffell, N. (2000) The Making of Them, London: Lone Arrow Press.
Gerhardt, S. (2004) Why Love Matters, London: New York, Routledge.
Herman, J. (1992) Trauma & Recovery, London: HarperCollins.
Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992) Shattered Assumptions, New York: Free Press.
Karpman, S. (1968) Fairy Tales & Script Analysis: Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7 (26), 39-43.
Keleman, S. (1975) The Human Ground: Sexuality, Self and Survival, California: Centre Press.
Laing, R. (1960) The Divided Self, London: Tavistock Publications.
Levine, P. (1997) Waking the Tiger, California: North Atlantic Books.
Rothschild, B. (2000) The Body Remembers, London: New York, W.W.Norton.
Rothschild, B. (2006) Help for the Helper,  p113-114, London: New York, W. W. Norton.
Documentaries: The Making of Them, BBC, 1993 (Colin Luke)
                        Leaving Home at 8, Cutting Edge, Channel 4, Spring 2010
 
 

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