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Dear Editor
I applaud much of Elizabeth Standish's review (BJP 27(4): 417-19), but since she mentions me frequently I appreciate the chance to clarify my position. Her account of ex-boarders in her practice supports my observation made in April's Therapy Today (Duffell, 2011), that therapists and patients generally belong to the same social class that may normalize boarding. But with ‘It is easy to fall into a sense of blaming the therapists who did not draw out the trauma of early boarding’, she minimizes the issue. I cannot support this stance.
Since I began my work with ex-boarders in 1989 I have received thousands of letters from members of the public, responding to newspaper articles and eventually my book, The Making of Them (Duffell, 2000). Many correspondents told me their therapist missed boarding issues. By this I do not mean the trauma of what happened at school, regularly trivialized in our media, but how the experience of 24/7 boarding affects the adults these children become.
Standish recalls advice from her training: ‘If you go after the badger he's likely to retreat even further. But what if the badger never emerges?’ Badgers tend not to emerge because they are afraid. Ex-boarders are too - even if they don't show it. If they present for therapy, like all patients, they present symptoms rather than causes; it's our job to help them see the links. Additionally, boarding-school survivors harbour vicious internal double-binds from the shame of their privilege, so they tend not to come out from hiding - unless they find themselves in real crisis or in really safe hands.
Standish ends: ‘The world we live in is changing, British society is less repressive than it was - and we have mobile phones’. I find this argument naïve and dangerous. It is one frequently used by the Boarding Schools Association, with whom I have had much media debate. Boarders grow up without families, phones or not. Go to any boarding school and you'll rarely see unhappy children. Colin L