Seeping Within: A Journey from Trauma to Healing Through Performance
Oct 11, 2025
This is an article written by Lucy Windridge-Floris and Sadie Maddocks
Aesthetic distancing is at the heart of arts therapies. This article explores how theatrical performance can facilitate healing and redress the trauma of childhood bullying. As people with trauma are invalidated time and time again, the authors ask you to suspend judgement that Boarding School is always a privilege and request that the specific nuances of boarding issues be incorporated into the training of arts therapists.
In 2024 a pupil, at a prestigious English Boarding School, was convicted and given a life sentence at Exeter Crown Court for battering two fellow pupils with hammers as they slept. According to reports, he ‘fell out with one of his victims when he thought he had laughed at him as he worked on a school project and began treating him ‘horribly’. The prosecution said the teenager carried out the attacks in a ‘killing rage’.
Bullying can have devastating consequences, and the resulting trauma can be ‘at the limit of what is sayable and hearable’ (2020, p.330). There is a particular kind of insidious colonial bullying that takes place within the walls of institutions such as the traditional British public school system where, oftentimes, there is nowhere for pupils to run, nowhere to hide and no one to talk to.
Sometimes fictions resonate with real life events. You may remember the famous ‘bucket of blood’ scene in the iconic movie Carrie (1976) adapted from Steven Spielberg’s novel of the same name. The sounds of dripping blood, the clanging bucket and the expression on Sissy Spacek’s face will remain forever in collective consciousness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJWev1npwc
Perhaps the scene is powerful because it exploits one of our biggest fears – betrayal and public humiliation. The scene has remarkable verisimilitude, making use of the abject and cultural taboos about menstruation to evoke the greatest shame and indignity possible.
After attending Amelia White’s course https://www.theboardingschooltherapist.com/ we became aware of how boarding school experiences had profoundly changed the direction of our lives (Conti, 2021, p.15). Sadie began working on an edifying performance project to enlighten and blow taboos apart in ‘an aesthetic mapping of relationships rather than a staging of suffering and survival’ (Sajani, 2012, p.18). She chose stand-up comedy to represent a real-life incident where blood-stained underwear was fished out of a bin in a girl’s bathroom, dressed on a blow-up sex doll and hung from the ceiling of the main co-educational school dining hall at a large end of term event. Sadie stayed close to the original narrative and yet, at the same time, used language, gesture, symbol, metaphor, fictional characters and humour to subvert the ‘staging’ of the primary event.
Up until this point, Lucy had found the incident so shameful that she had only spoken about it in private therapy and with a few she trusted. The memories were solitary ‘imprints … organised not as coherent logical narrative but as fragmented sensory and emotional traces’ (Van de Kolk, 2014, p.176).
Sadie’s use of theatrical devices felt appropriate and affirming. Although feelings of anger and grief arose, Lucy, the ex-boarder, was able to maintain observational distance. Recognition of events through laughter and the clear discomfort of the audience was proportionate making it possible ‘to move between feeling and thinking, … to fully … express, and tolerate emotions …[and] expand perspective’ (Frydman et al, 2022, p.8).
Buckley describes aesthetic distancing as the relationship between the drama and the use of distancing as a ‘therapeutic process’. Here language, embodied experience and a reflective process played a large part in trauma resolution (2023, p.136).
What was interesting is how the narrative and the performance combined. There was an opportunity to work with story in action (performance through theatrical language) using ‘thought, meaning and form’ to bring the trauma or human experience ‘back into relationship’ (2023, p.134).
Hodermarska et al. say ‘in the therapy context, intentional aesthetic intervention is made in the service of the witnesses’ personal need, which they argue creates a potential for transformation in both performer and witness through an opening up, rather than a perfecting, of the audience response to a performance’ (2015, cited in Buckley 2023, p.137). Sadie’s first recorded performance was ephemeral. This quality is an important part of the context for therapeutic process because the collaboration, writing and telling took place ‘in a particular moment-temporarily and spatially’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p.89). A ‘form of living’ where emotions and sense-making will change with each new performance and each new audience.
Of course, in an arts therapy context one should consider the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Trauma is overwhelming and often buried psychologically for many years. It can resist containment and description and thus be hard to resolve. It was vital that we were cautious, gently gauging and assessing intuitively the level of trauma and the participant’s ability to process the performance to avoid re-traumatisation. We spent time situating ourselves and our stance on the subject. This process took place during the course, via email as well as face to face conversation prior to performance.
Buckley writes that ‘silence, speechlessness and immobility may be the legacy of trauma. Finding a means into movement and words is one pathway towards reconnection and healing’ (2023 p. 135). To bring the scene to the stage between women who had coped with the boarding system in different ways was reconciling. We are wounded storytellers and together have found, what Frank calls, ‘an ethic of solidarity and commitment’ (2013, p.132).
The Boarders (written and performed by Sadie Maddocks and Tricia Nguyen) is a powerful and darkly tender play that traces the entangled lives of two women - one British, one Vietnamese - bound by the shared trauma of growing up in the British boarding school system. Though worlds apart in culture, language, and history, their stories collide in the shadow of a male-dominated institution that promised opportunity but delivered abandonment, silence, and captivity.
Debut performance at Lang Spot in Saigon 6-9th and 13-16 November 2025 https://www.langspotvn.com/the-boarders. The aim is to take the play to The Edinburgh Festival 2026.
If you would like to support this production highlighting girls’ experiences growing up in boarding schools in the UK please contact Sadie Maddocks at [email protected]
Do you want to find your voice? Lucy Windridge-Floris has over 30 years of experience as a creative arts practitioner and therapist. If you are interested in exploring your life experiences through creative writing in a safe space, or if you're keen to collaborate through academic writing and research within this field, please connect! Find her here
Bibliography
Buckley, M. (2023) The aesthetics of language, body and distancing in dramatherapeutic work. Dramatherapy vol. 44 (2-3) 132-144
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De Palma, B. (Director). (1976). Carrie [Film]. United Artists
Frank, A. (2013) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness & Ethics (2nd ed), The Chicago University Press: Chicago
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Morris, S. ‘Boy guilty of attempted murders in Devon private school hammer attack’ The Guardian. Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/21/boy-guilty-attempted-murders-devon-blundells-private-school-hammer-attack Accessed: 21.07.2025
Van de Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking
White, A. The Boarding School Therapist. https://www.theboardingschooltherapist.com/
