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Trauma, Abandonment and
Privilege

A guide to therapeutic work with boarding

school survivors

Nick Duffell and Thurstine Basset

First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Nick Duffell and Thurstine Basset
The right of Nick Duffell and Thurstine Basset to be identified as authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Names: Duffell, Nick, author. | Basset, Thurstine, author.
Title: Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege: a guide to therapeutic work with
boarding school survivors / Nick Duffell & Thurstine Basset.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon: New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015039191 | ISBN 9781138788701 (hbk) |
ISBN 9781138788718 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315760582 (ebk)
Subjects: | MESH: Psychotherapy–methods. | Adult Survivors of Child
Abuse–psychology. | Anxiety, Separation. | Child, Institutionalized–psychology. |
Stress, Psychological. | Students–psychology.
Classification: LCC RC480.5 | NLM WM 420 | DDC 616.89/14–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039191
ISBN: 978-1-138-78870-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78871-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76058-2 (ebk)
Extracts from ‘A Perfect Spy’ by John Le Carré, © 1986 Authors Workshop AG, are
reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited
Illustrations/cartoons from ‘Depresso: or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Embrace
Being Bonkers by Brick, ©) 2010 John Stuart Clark (Brick), are reproduced by permission
of Knockabout Limited
Illustration ‘Survival Personality Types’ (Figure 4.1) is reproduced by permission of
Emma Basset
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Out of House Publishing
Contents

Preface vii

PART I
Recognition 1

1 Introduction 3
2 What therapists can do: an overview 16
3 Managing separation and loss 32
4 Survival 45
5 Signs, symptoms and relationships 59

PART II
Acceptance 73

6 Remembering 75
7 Adapting 90
8 Trauma 107
9 Sex: puberty, gender and abuse 123

PART III
Change 141

10 The healing process 143

vi Contents

11 Unmasking survival patterns 161

12 Homecoming 175

Postscript: boarding in the twenty-first century 191

Appendix: useful organisations 195
Index 196
Preface

Since 1990, when Nick Duffell launched Boarding School Survivors, a hand-
ful of dedicated practitioners have been pioneering specialised psychotherapy
with ex-boarders in individual and group formats. In 2000, the first account
of the psychology of boarding, The Making of Them: The British Attitude
to Children and the Boarding School System, appeared. It was always the
intention to follow up that book with an in-depth account of therapy with
boarding school survivors. The current volume attempts to share 25 years
of experience of therapeutic work with ex-boarders for the benefit of psy-
chotherapists, counsellors and other mental health workers, who may not be
aware of the complications of this little-known syndrome. Also included are
several exercises in each chapter for working with clients, both individually
and in groups.
Although the number of informed practitioners has substantially grown,
we do not – at the time of writing – have the results of any formal quantita-
tive research into this topic. Nevertheless, this book is based on many hours
of work with many hundreds of ex-boarders, and we hope it can inspire other
therapists to intervene creatively with this difficult client group.
As mental health professionals who are also ex-boarders, our learnings and
observations accompany the case material that illustrates this book. Over the
years, countless unsolicited questions, comments and letters, describing the
difficulties of boarding and the effect on later life, have come our way. We
have drawn on this rich material throughout the book, sometimes naming the
correspondent and sometimes leaving them anonymous, depending on the
wishes of the person involved.
We are indebted to a number of people who supplied material for this book
and to some who read parts of it and advised. They are Robert Arnold, Jane
Barclay, Christopher Cox, Sarah Feldman, Sally Fraser, Marcus Gottlieb,
Darrel Hunneybell, Olya Khaleelee, Zuzana Kucerova, Margaret Laughton,
Rovianne Matovu, Nicola Miller, Andrew Morrison, Simon Partridge, Emilce
Rees, Anni Townend, Jon Wallwork and Joy Warren-Adamson. Thanks are
due to them.
newgenprepdf

viii Preface

Thanks also to the anonymous contributors, and to Sue Gerhard, Joy

Schaverien, Stephen Porges and Felicity de Zuleta.
Thanks to the political cartoonist, Brick (John Stuart Clark), and to his
publishers Knockabout for letting us use his illustrations.
Thurstine would like to extend special thanks to Frances Basset for both
her thoughtful expertise and loving support; Nick would like to acknowledge
Helena Løvendal-Duffell’s pivotal role in identifying the issues and conse-
quences of the boarding culture as well as the treatment approaches described
in this book.
Part I

Recognition
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1

Introduction

I fell into conversation with a Frenchman I sat next to last night at dinner, and
I just couldn’t resist getting onto education, because the French have such dif-
ferent views on education – they cannot understand how we can possibly
do what we do – how we can bear to send our children away: they should be
coming in to us every night and talking to us every night, how we mustn’t lose
touch with them, and how vital it is to see them every day. I totally disagree –
I think it’s the making of them, this sending them away. And, you know, I can
see what happens, I can see them every three weeks – it’s not a drama, really.
(A mother of one of the 8-year-old new boarders talking to
camera in Colin Luke’s 1994 film The Making of Them)

Key points of chapter

• Psychology professionals have been slow to acknowledge that the British

culture of sending young children to boarding school has an impact on
psychological wellbeing.
•• Although unsupported by any theory of child development, the practice
is still seen in some quarters as a desirable way to educate children.
• A body of literature on this important topic has been built up over the
last 20 years.

Setting the scene

This book aims to help psychotherapists, counsellors and other mental health
workers to develop a therapeutic approach to adult clients who were sent to
boarding school as young children. This first chapter gives background infor-
mation to set the scene for these therapeutic interventions.
We are writing early on in the twenty-first century. Over the previous cen-
tury enormous strides were made in the field of children’s rights; psychology
grew from small beginnings to become a major influence in society. Many
4 Recognition

theories of child development evolved from a number of perspectives – edu-

cational, cognitive, humanistic, maturational, behavioural, psychodynamic
and so on. But nowhere can we find a single theory of child development that
underpins or backs up the British practice of sending young children – aged
8 or sometimes younger – away from their families to reside in educational
institutions for approximately 75 percent of each year.
Most people would accept that the fundamental role of parents is to love
and protect their children while gradually nurturing their independence, so
that by the time they reach adulthood, they can begin to make their own way
in the world. This normally involves a step-by-step and very gradual process
towards increasing maturity and appropriate autonomy.
And yet there is – in a manner of speaking – a tribe of people, living mostly
in deepest Britain, who see things differently and have strange customs.
They adhere to a socialisation doctrine perfected in mid-Victorian England,
whereby the normal process of child development is interrupted by a dra-
matic and drastic change in which family attachments are deliberately broken.
The practice appears cruel to those outside this tribe, as it does at the time to
the children of the tribe, and it can leave deep emotional scars. Unlike such
abhorrent practices as female genital mutilation, its scars are not obvious to
the human eye and do not normally involve – anymore – bodily harm. But
they are real scars nevertheless which can have a profoundly negative effect
in adult life.
The tragedy is compounded because this wounding has been overlooked,
denied and powerfully normalised. Huge financial lobbies support the busi-
ness of boarding schools, to which the UK government grants special charity
status. Moreover, the tribe that supports the practice is influential and vocal,
consisting of those who can afford the fees – at the time of writing some
£30,000 per annum per child. It includes the traditional upper classes, the
wealthy middle classes as well as the less well off but aspirant socially mobile,
supplemented by rich foreign families investing in the social status such an
education affords.
Their children, typically 8 year olds, discover that from day one (and for
the next 10 years) they will spend 9 out of every 12 months living in a board-
ing school and only 3 months at home with their family. They have neither
the choice, nor the right to object, and soon an internal self-monitoring pro-
cess kicks in to assist the child in surviving and adapting to the inevitable.
The habit of sending the children away, the process of survival and accom-
panying trauma are disguised and compensated by the privilege afforded by
the social elitism that accompanies this form of education. Hence the title
of this book.
To most modern European observers and to psychologically minded
people, this antiquated practice seems like a form of child neglect – even abuse.
For example, the journalist George Monbiot suggested that ‘Britain’s most
overt form of child abuse is mysteriously ignored’ (Monbiot, 1998). But the
 Introduction 5

educational system that lies at the heart of it is a well-trodden path to privilege,

power and what can appear to be a successful life. It leads from prep school
(from the age of 7) to public school (from 13) and then usually to Oxbridge.
This path has been travelled by countless public luminaries, including, at the
time of writing, the current UK Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Layard, the champion of successive gov-
ernments’ strategies to ‘improve access to psychological therapies’.
Herein lies one key reason why this practice is overlooked: private board-
ing has an almost unassailable position in the world and parents invest huge
sums for their children to be part of it. It brings money into the UK, is looked
up to and aspired to; insiders think it the envy of the world. A secondary
vicious cycle enhances its position: the influential parents who support private
boarding simultaneously opt out of the state system, which suffers in com-
parison and cannot compete in terms of resources. A Cinderella state system
then helps further rationalise the parents’ choice for the private system, which
instead of seeming outdated, presents itself as the only option for parents
who ‘want to do the best for their children’.
And it does turn out many people who are ‘success stories’ – at least in the
world of outer achievements. Yet, since 1990, in workshops run by the organ-
isation Boarding School Survivors for both men and women ex-boarders
seeking psychological help as adults, the overall boarding school experience
has been frequently described in the following terms:

neglect – betrayal – abandonment – grief – rage – abuse – confusion –

sadness – helplessness – loneliness – motherless – missing daddy – sent
away – neediness – anger – suppression – denial – tears – survival.
(Selection of participants’ initial impressions on the first morning
of a four-day Boarding School Survivors workshop)

It is this gap between outer and inner reality with which ex-boarders and
practitioners have to engage.

The early years

How has the boarding habit escaped serious attention for so long? The
first traceable mention of any problems associated with boarding edu-
cation comes from the renowned Scottish economist and philosopher
Adam Smith:

The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant

colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding schools, seems
in the higher ranks of society to have done crucial harm to domestic mor-
als and thus to domestic happiness, both in France and in England …
6 Recognition

From their parents’ house they may, with propriety and advantage, go out
every day to attend public schools: but let them continue to live at home.
(Smith, 1759, V1.11.13)

It was not until the First World War that the first serious psychological hypoth-
esis about ex-boarders was made. William Halse Rivers, the ‘shell-shock’
psychiatrist, noted that many wounded officers expressed their sickness dif-
ferently to the enlisted men because they were already trained to withhold
their personal responses through their public school education: ‘The public
schoolboy enters the army with a long course of training behind him which
enables him successfully to repress, not only the expression of fear, but also
the emotion itself’ (Rivers, 1918).
The next serious attempt to examine the effects of boarding from a sci-
entific viewpoint came from post-Second World War sociology. Royston
Lambert and his colleagues collected data from 12,000 boys and girls in
over 60 different boarding schools – public, prep, ‘progressive’, independent
and state run. Their extraordinary piece of research has more a feel of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays than Harry Potter and has been widely read (Lambert
and Millham, 1968). Amongst his data, Lambert reported anonymous com-
ments from a huge number of pupils about teachers who were sexually abus-
ing pupils, for example:

Mr Tomkins is a house master and I think he is a vulgar man … he does

rude things to people … please publish this to show everybody that a
schoolmaster is not good at all.
He has had a warning from the headmaster about being sexy. Nobody
likes him.
Keep your legs crossed if you go to coffee with Oscar, he is as bent as a
clockwork orange and a right queer.
When I was trying on a uniform, this bum bandit pressed his tool right
up against me.
(Lambert and Millham, 1968, pp. 272–3)

Lambert makes it clear that there were numerous similar statements and that
many more disturbing comments were not published but were kept in the
research files. He mentions that these revelations put pressure on research
workers and made their task difficult. But there is no sense of any crime being
committed or any outrage at the behaviour of the teachers for the damage
that they were doing to the children in their care. The sexual abuse (not named
as such) is glossed over, which probably accurately represents the prevailing
attitude of the times.
 Introduction 7

Boarding on the couch

The topic was not properly discussed in a psychological perspective until 1990,
when psychotherapist Nick Duffell aired the issue in an article in the Independent
newspaper (Duffell, 1990) and received hundreds of confirmative letters from
readers. In 1995, Duffell introduced the term ‘boarding school survivor’ to
the therapy world in an article in Self and Society (Duffell, 1995). Drawing on
his experience of his first decade of psychotherapy and group workshops for
ex-boarders, Duffell published the first psychological exploration of the phe-
nomenon of boarding with The Making of Them (Duffell, 2000).
As the first examination of boarding through a psychological lens, The
Making of Them summarised the processes that boarding children go through
and the subsequent problems encountered as adults, while proposing some
avenues for therapeutic help. It was widely acclaimed, including an endorse-
ment from the BMJ (BMJ, 2001), and enabled many ex-boarders to feel a
sense of recognition. Indeed, reading the book has often been the first stage
in an ongoing healing pathway for many ex-boarders.
Himself an ex-boarder and former boarding school teacher, Duffell enu-
merates the psychological tensions that are in force when children first leave
their families to board and how they learn to survive at boarding school.
He shows how this involves constructing what he calls a ‘Strategic Survival
Personality (SSP)’. Once in place, this may not be so helpful when, as adults,
ex-boarders attempt to navigate the waters of sexual relationships, family and
particularly parenthood. The survival personality, constructed by a child, is
very durable; crucially, it is very difficult for the bearer to recognise or shed,
because it is so close to the identity of the self.
The book’s follow-up, Wounded Leaders (Duffell, 2014a), takes a broader
societal view of the boarding school system by questioning the ability of the
British ex-boarding elite to govern. He argues that:

Ex-boarders hide their emotional and relational dysfunction behind a

facade that usually projects confident functioning and resembles a clas-
sic national character ideal. The character ideal is one that is well known
and regularly celebrated in our letters, theatre and film. Mostly, it appears
as the self-effacing, conflict-avoiding, intimacy-shy, gentlemanly type so
classically represented in the late 20th century by the actor Hugh Grant.
(2014a, p. 71)

This is only one facet of an SSP, however, for there is also another side to it,
writes Duffell, ‘the hostile, sarcastic bullying type’ akin to Flashman and not
the sort of character that anybody wants to identify with.
8 Recognition

Duffell (2014b) believes that British politics is awash with privileged

men who hide their lack of emotional maturity behind a facade of confi-
dence that is inevitably very brittle: ‘There is, I believe, a direct link between
the problems caused by boarding school experience and our domination
by men who do not provide good leadership because of unacknowledged
psychodynamics.’
Coming at the issue independently, Joy Schaverien, Jungian analyst and
professor of art psychotherapy, building on an article in the Journal of
Analytical Psychology (Schaverien, 2004), coined the term ‘Boarding School
Syndrome’ (Schaverien, 2011a). Schaverien observed that in the disbelief
that people want to hear about their institutionalised childhoods (2011b),
ex-boarders may be ‘lost for words’, and that many famous names in the psy-
chotherapy profession found that their boarding experiences did not interest
their own analysts. In her latest book on the psychological trauma of the
‘privileged’ child (Schaverien 2015), she uses her experience as an analyst with
ex-boarders to illustrate how ex-boarders can make extremely difficult clients.
In particular, they tend to terminate therapy at the very point when they are
starting to recognise how their boarding experience is still shaping how they
make decisions and run their lives.
Increasingly, ex-boarders are beginning to write about their experiences.
Some of these have been inspired by participating in Boarding School
Survivor workshops, others from going to conferences organised by the sur-
vivor organisation, Boarding Concern, founded in 2001. Bob Arnold and
Thurstine Basset (2005) attest to the healing nature of the group workshops
in sharing often very emotional experiences with people in the same boat.
They talk of escaping from the restrictions of the ‘stiff upper lip’ and intro-
duce the term ‘emotional courage’ as being important for facing up to and
exploring feelings rather than just burying them. Basset (2006) elaborates on
this through recounting his plan to revisit his prep school 50 years on from
his first arrival there.
Simon Partridge (2007) reflects that issues relating to his time at boarding
school had not been dealt with in his individual psychoanalysis sessions but
he has found the workshop a safe place to express his anger at his mother for
abandoning him, followed by his empathy for her feeling of powerlessness in
believing that she had to do it: ‘It’s something our sort of people just have to
do – it happened to me.’ Indeed, one can only wonder where all those feelings
from mothers over many years go as they make what must be the hardest deci-
sion of their lives.
Ex-boarders who are themselves therapists have published articles in recent
times. Jane Barclay considers the work that an ex-boarder needs to do, facili-
tated by their therapist, is: ‘to escape the trauma “Freeze” position held in
place by behaviour patterns that are only an illusion of reactivated Fight/
Flight energy (e.g. control over eating, power-seeking at work/at home) whilst
driven by long-forgotten helpless rage and distress’ (Barclay, 2011).