When I was 13, my parents were living in Tonga. They decided the best school for me was in Wellington, New Zealand. So I was going to boarding school.

It wasn’t a discussion. There was no choice. You are going.

I remember the question that sat underneath everything for a long time afterwards: What did I do wrong?

My story: from third culture kid to boarder

I’ve written before about growing up as a third culture kid, a diplomat’s son who lived in seven countries by the age of fourteen. By 13 I was already an expert at arriving somewhere new, reading the room and trying to fit in. Boarding school should have been just another move. It wasn’t.

This time my family wasn’t coming with me. For two years I saw them only in the school holidays. The rest of the time I was on my own in a very traditional boarding school, with its hierarchies, its rules and its unspoken codes, trying to work out how to survive it.

What I remember most is isolation, bullying and loneliness. The kind of loneliness that sits in your chest at night and that you learn very quickly not to show, because showing it makes things worse.

The decision was made with good intentions. My parents wanted the best education for me, and I understand that now. But a 13-year-old doesn’t experience good intentions. He experiences being sent away. And children, almost without exception, make sense of that by concluding it must be about them.

What is boarding school syndrome?

“Boarding school syndrome” is a term introduced by the Jungian psychotherapist Joy Schaverien. It describes a cluster of lasting emotional and relational patterns in adults who were sent to boarding school as children. It isn’t a formal diagnosis, but it’s a recognisable pattern that many therapists now work with.

At its heart is the abrupt breaking of attachment. A child is separated from their family and has to find a way to feel safe in an environment where there is no one whose job is to love them. Schaverien has described homesickness not as a phase to get over, but as a form of bereavement.

The psychotherapist Nick Duffell, himself an ex-boarder, described how boarders build what he calls a strategic survival personality. The child learns to be independent, grown up and self-sufficient, fast. The vulnerable, needy parts go into hiding. On the surface, the child looks competent and fine. Underneath, the need for closeness gets packed away so thoroughly that he may stop noticing it at all.

Much of the research focuses on children sent away at seven or eight. I was older. But 13 is not grown up. It’s the start of adolescence, the very age when you’re working out who you are and when you need a secure base to push against. Losing that base, especially as a child who had already been uprooted many times, landed hard.

The quiet rules you learn

Nobody hands you a rulebook, but every boarder learns the rules:

Don’t cry. Or if you do, don’t let anyone see.
Don’t show you miss home.
Don’t be different. Different gets you picked on.
Watch everyone. Know who’s dangerous and who’s safe.
Keep your real feelings to yourself, including in letters and phone calls home. Your parents are far away and there’s nothing they can do.
Be fine.

These rules work. They get you through. The problem is that they don’t expire when you leave school. Many ex-boarders are still living by them decades later, often without realising.

“What did I do wrong?”

This question is worth pausing on, because I’ve come to believe it sits at the centre of so much boarding school pain.

When children are sent away, they rarely think my parents are making a practical decision about education. They think I must not be wanted, or I must have done something. Duffell has written about how, as an ex-boarder himself, he blamed himself and feared there was something so wrong with him it couldn’t even be spoken about.

That self-blame doesn’t disappear. It goes quiet. Later it can show up as a relentless drive to be good, to perform, to earn your place, and to never be a burden. When I look at my own Nice Guy patterns, the need to be pleasant, impressive and no trouble to anyone, I can see the boy at boarding school who decided that if he was good enough, he might not be sent away again.

Signs you might be carrying boarding school experiences

You might recognise some of these:

You’re highly capable and independent, but find it hard to ask for help or let others care for you
You keep feelings to yourself and only realise later how much something affected you
Closeness feels good in theory, but in practice you pull back, shut down or keep one foot out the door
Goodbyes, departures or Sunday evenings bring an unexplained heaviness or dread
A partner’s need for you can feel like pressure, or their absence can feel unbearable
You feel a pull to be good, successful or impressive in order to be acceptable
Anger sometimes surfaces far more strongly than the situation warrants
You tell yourself it wasn’t that bad, other people had it worse, and you were privileged to go

That last one matters. Many ex-boarders downplay their experience because boarding school is seen as a privilege. Schaverien and Duffell both point out that this sense of privilege creates shame, which keeps people from admitting it hurt.

How it shows up in relationships

Often boarding school pain doesn’t really surface until adulthood, and very often it surfaces in a marriage. Schaverien observed that the losses of boarding, and the anger that comes with them, are often buried and only emerge later, in a close relationship or in therapy.

This makes sense. An intimate relationship asks for exactly what the strategic survival personality learned to shut down: dependence, vulnerability, needing someone. The partner of an ex-boarder may experience them as distant, self-contained, hard to reach, or suddenly and puzzlingly angry. The ex-boarder may feel criticised for being the way they had to be to survive.

In couples work I often see this: one partner reaching, the other retreating, both hurting, neither quite understanding why.

How IFS therapy helps boarding school survivors

I work primarily with Internal Family Systems (IFS), and I find it especially well suited to boarding school experiences.

IFS understands the mind as made up of parts, each trying to protect us, and a core Self that is calm, curious and compassionate. In boarding school terms, the strategic survival personality isn’t one thing. It’s a team of protective parts, each with a job:

The competent one who looks fine, copes with everything and needs nobody
The feelings locker who keeps sadness and longing sealed away
The watchful strategist who scans for danger and reads every social situation
The good boy or good girl who complies, performs and tries to earn a place
The inner critic who decided the problem must be you
The one who holds back in relationships, so being left can never hurt that much again
The sudden anger that erupts when the old hurt is touched

Underneath these protectors there are usually younger parts still carrying what happened. The 13-year-old standing at the school gate as his parents leave. The boy lying awake in the dormitory, homesick and afraid to show it. The one who still believes he was sent away because he wasn’t wanted.

IFS doesn’t try to get rid of the protectors. They did remarkable work, and they kept you going. Instead, we get to know them, thank them, and ask their permission to reach the young parts they’ve been protecting. Those parts can then finally be seen, have their experience witnessed, and let go of beliefs like I did something wrong, I have to cope alone, or if I need people, I’ll be sent away.

When that happens, the protectors can step back. People often find that closeness becomes less threatening, feelings become more available, and the drive to perform and prove themselves softens.

How we might work together

If this resonates, here are some of the areas I work on with ex-boarders:

Grief and homesickness: giving the losses of being sent away the recognition they never got
Self-blame and shame: untangling the belief that it was your fault, or that it wasn’t bad enough to matter
Intimacy and relationships: understanding how survival strategies show up with a partner, individually or as a couple
Nice Guy and people-pleasing patterns: loosening the need to be good, impressive and no trouble to anyone
Anger and emotional shutdown: making room for feelings that had to be locked away
Leadership: many ex-boarders become highly capable leaders, and often find the same survival strategies that made them successful are now limiting them
Parenting decisions: if you’re weighing up boarding school for your own children, exploring your own experience first

I work online with individuals and couples internationally. If you were sent away to school and you’re starting to see how it shaped you, I’d be glad to hear from you.

[Get in touch]

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Sent Away at 13: Boarding School Syndrome and the Boy Who Learned to Cope