Trauma Abandonment and Privilege

1
Trauma Abandonment and Privilege

• Thurstine Basset (thurstine_at_bassetconsultancy.co.u
  k)
• 28th November 2014 SRF Conference

2
Introduction

• Boarding School Survivors workshop
• Boarding Concern Involvement
• Links with SRF
• Boarding school abuse or privilege or both?
• Privilege makes it hard to raise the issue
• Parents make the decision young children mostly
  have no say

3
The book in progress

• Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege a guide to
  therapeutic work with boarding school survivors
• Authors Thurstine Basset (survivor) and Nick
  Duffell (survivor and therapist)
• Practice-based text book, illustrated by case
  studies, diagrams, cartoons and exercises.

4
The book published by Routledge in 2015

• Describe the effect on adults of being sent away
  to board in childhood
• Locate this within the context of the British
  attitude to boarding
• Offer interventions and strategies for
  therapists, counsellors, psychologists and other
  mental health workers to work with ex-boarder
  clients.
•  

5
My experience

• When I was pushed through the doors for the first
  time, my sense of bewilderment and loss was
  almost overpowering. The first and most natural
  thing I wanted to do was to cry, but I soon
  discovered that this was frowned upon and
  discouraged. I learned to bite my lip and joined
  centuries of British-educated and privileged
  children who develop a stiff upper lip. (Basset
  2006)

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My experience (cont)

• My mother cried all the way home as she held my
  teddy bear that she was advised not to leave with
  me. Some weeks later on their first visit, my mum
  and dad found me in a cheerful mood. I had made a
  friend and my mum recalls that I almost
  completely ignored her, as I was so intent on
  playing with my friend. I ran straight past her.
• In truth, of course, we both suffered.
• (Basset 2006)

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My experience (cont)

• I have said I wasnt prepared for going away at
  8, but equally the same could be said for leaving
  school at 18. The feeling of finally leaving
  after all those years was as high in an almost
  ecstatic way as the original feeling had been low
  in a deeply miserable way. Both experiences, ten
  years apart, had an other-worldliness about them.
  (Basset 2006)

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Emotional Courage

• Emotional courage seems to me to be a means for
  the expression of emotional intelligence. Half a
  century is a long time to wait to acquire enough
  emotional courage to get in touch with some of
  your innermost feelings still better late than
  never as they say. (Basset 2006)

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Childhood curtailed

• My headmasters report
• My one complaint concerns foolish behaviour
  nothing serious, merely pestilent and much of
  his tiresomeness concerns Matron's department. In
  a third term he must put away these childish
  ways. (1956 I was aged 8)

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Good and bad experiences

• More people are currently seeking
  psychological help for issues connected with
  early boarding.
• Many people feel the experience did them no
  harm and that it was a very good one.
• Not all are damaged by the experience but each
  child has to survive and that has a cost.

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Abuse?

• Britains most overt form of child abuse is
  mysteriously ignored. (George Monbiot in the
  Guardian, 26th March 1998)
• Tribe of people, mostly in deepest Britain, still
  adhering to a mid-Victorian doctrine of drastic
  change to family attachments which are
  deliberately broken

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Numbers involved

• 67,000 currently in boarding schools (2014)
• 14,000 aged 7-13 (2011)
• Drop in 1990s but currently increasing
• Annual fees 29,000 (2014)
• Telegraph (2011) credit crunch/longer working
  hours BS cheaper than a nanny
• Poll - How do you juggle work and looking after
  your children?

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Telegraph Poll (2011)

• Childminder
• Nanny (paid)
• Grandparents
• Boarding School
• Stay at home Mum/Dad
• After-school clubs

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Telegraph Poll (2011)

• Stay at home Mum/Dad 35
• Boarding School 23
• After-school clubs 14
• Nanny (paid) 13
• Grandparents 8
• Childminder 7

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Theories of child development that support
boarding school at an early age
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Theories of child development that support a
gradual transition from child to adult

• All theories developmental, maturational,
  behavioural, educational, psychological,
  psychodynamic, attachment theory..........

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1990 to 2014

• Boarding School Survivor Workshops 1990
• The Making of Them book published by Nick
  Duffell 2000
• Boarding School Syndrome Joy Schaverien 2011
• Wounded Leaders and abuse enquiries 2014 and
  beyond

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Other writings

• Marcus Gottlieb (2005) profoundly homophobic
  environments
• Rovianne Matovu (2010) a double homesickness
  a deep longing for my country, home and family
  and especially my mother...................
• Jane Palmer (2006) finds healing through
  therapy

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General literature

• Anthony Worrall-Thompson, Peter Cook, John Peel,
  Frederic Raphael
• Angela Lambert and Drusilla Modjeska
• The gain is a discipline of mind that should
  not be undervalued. The loss, it seemed to us
  that afternoon, was represented by the figures of
  sirens and sphinxes that filled Freuds room the
  repressed feminine that our culture denies. Our
  un-English, feminine waywardness. (Modjeska 1995
  page 235)

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Media

• Films The Making Of Them (BBC 1994) Leaving Home
  at 8 (Channel 4 2010)
• Supertramp Logical Song (Hodgson and Davies
  1979) young man with a magical life is sent to
  board so his school can
• Teach me how to be sensible,Logical,
  responsible, practical.And they showed me a
  world where I could be so dependable, clinical,
  intellectual, cynical.

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Brick (Depresso -2010)
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Brick (cont)
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What therapists can do

• Help client journey from survival to living
• Use RAC (Recognition-Acceptance-Change) model
• Understand and work with survival personalities
  rebel, conformist, crushed.
• Draw on wide range of theory

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Survival Personalities
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Theory that underpins the work

• Attachment
• Trauma
• Survival
• Other sources of knowledge

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Boarding school an attachment-deficit environment

• Being sent away to boarding school at a young age
  effectively breaks the strong attachments that
  have nurtured a child.
• Children find themselves in an institutional
  world, usually run on masculine and patriarchal
  lines, with little feminine or maternal
  influence.

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Boarding school an attachment-deficit environment
(cont)

• This is an entirely unnatural rupture no
  psychological or developmental theory of any kind
  supports such practice.
• Instead of growing through a process of gradual
  maturation over a number of years children are
  forced to grow up too quickly, to put away
  childish ways and become adults before their
  time.

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Boarding school an attachment-deficit environment
(cont)

• Instead of having a secure base of good
  attachments, boarding children tend to grow up
  emotionally and relationally detached.
• Children compensate by developing an internal
  refuge the Strategic Survival Personality, to
  which they transfer their attachment and
  reliance.

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Boarding school an attachment-deficit environment
(cont)

• In consequence, ex-boarder adults often seem to
  show signs of a child inside of them who has
  never organically grown up and who tends to
  dominate some of their behaviours, especially in
  intimate relationships.

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Conclusion

• The last word a mother
• The last word a child
• Thank you for listening