The Un-Making of Them: Clinical Reflections on Boarding School Syndrome

Ex-boarders can be among the most challenging clients for therapists, with many clinicians struggling to address their unique needs. This book presents a groundbreaking collection of chapters sharing insights and reflections on clinical work with ex-boarders in different settings and circumstances with the aim of expanding the body of knowledge for therapeutic work with such clients.

The contributors reveal that the fall-out from boarding is much wider than previously thought and also report on innovative treatment methods that may help therapists address these consequences with ex-boarders in treatment.

Featuring the experience and insights of some 16 different clinicians, many of whom are ex-boarders themselves, this new collection offers contributions from a wide range of theoretical backgrounds, including psychodynamic, Jungian, transactional analysis and ’energy psychology’. It tells how the understanding of the ’boarding school syndrome’ has been enlarged by recent advances in attachment therapy, trauma studies, neuroscience, including pastoral, and safeguarding awareness within education. Topics covered include the effects of boarding on girls, on both intimate and sibling relationships, on military family boarders and on ex-boarder therapists, as well as how both careful, patient attention and dynamic EMDR may be used to alleviate boarding school trauma.

The reader will gain a wider understanding about how individuals and society are impacted by this way of raising children and what evidence-based pathways to recovery are being evolved.

This book is written in an accessible jargon-free style and will appeal to psychotherapists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and counsellors, as well as ex-boarders and parents interested in the impact of boarding schools from a professional or personal perspective.

Nick Duffell, MA, Dip Psych IP, was trained in Systemic Family Therapy and Psychosynthesis before perusing extensive studies in psychoanalysis and post-Jungian theory and training in developmental somatic therapy. He pioneered the understanding of Boarding School Syndrome and his work has been featured on TV and radio since the early 1990s. A psycho-historian and trainer, he is the author of several books on boarding as well as on couple-relations and political psychology.