Why September used to bring the cough back...

Every time September came round, I noticed how my mood dipped and it used to bring a particular kind of dread. Something that arrived and was felt before I had the words for it. There is no doubt I am a sunshine lover and like many of us, can get an element of S.A.D but the contrast that happened in September often felt extreme.

I began to also notice a pattern which began with a cough that I noticed started to emerge towards the end of September. I had an annual reunion with friends from University at the end of the month and several years in a row I had to cancel because I became unwell with the same symptoms. For someone who is rarely ill, this made me curious. Only once I had done my own deep dive on my experience at Boarding School, and connected the coughing and projectile vomiting that occurred for me in the first term that I was away to being a symptom of my own homesickness, was I able to consider that maybe this was a repeated pattern that was occurring 30 years later.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the lungs are the organ system linked to grief and sorrow. The Lungs govern the Metal element, which is also associated with autumn, the season of letting go, endings, and release. The theory holds that unprocessed or unexpressed grief can settle in the lungs specifically, showing up as a tight chest, a cough that lingers, shallow breathing, or a vulnerability to chest infections and respiratory illness more generally. Grief that has nowhere to go is thought to weaken the body's defensive energy, making a person more prone to catching colds or infections that settle in the chest.

Understanding this enabled me to recognise that I had some unprocessed grief that needed to be felt and let go of. That the reason the young girl at school had to have a bucket by her bed for when she coughed and was sick, was a sign of her grief and fear that she was unable to express in any other way.

If you are an ex-boarder, you may also know this feeling in your body more than in your mind. Maybe you feel a hollow, sick feeling that shows up before you have consciously registered why. It might arrive with the first cool morning, or the sight of stationery in a shop window, or a child somewhere nearby getting ready for a new term. Even though you are now an adult and your school days may be decades ago, still it comes.

Our nervous systems don't track September as a date, but notice a shift in the light, a change in the air, and then the specific, anticipatory dread of a separation you knew was coming and could not stop. When any piece of that sequence returns, even something as small as the temperature dropping, your body treats it as the whole pattern arriving again. This is implicit memory, and your mind is left to catch up and explain it afterwards.

A child does not have the words for “I am about to lose my parents for weeks.” What a child has is a body, so the distress goes straight there, to the gut and the vagus nerve. That is why nausea, appetite loss and that hollowed out feeling were so common before you were sent back and those early days at school. If that experience never had the chance to be processed properly, and for most children sent away again and again, there was rarely time or safety for that, so your body kept its own shorthand for it.

If you relate to this and have this familiar feeling each September, maybe it is time to really notice it, allow it to be felt, and acknowledge the sadness you may have felt as a child rather than push on through.  Most importantly do not tell yourself to get over it, because until it is properly felt and processed it will keep repeating.

I am pleased to say that my own pattern of chest infections and coughs is no longer present.

Below is an exercise to support this.

Find five quiet minutes.

Notice the part that feels it.

When the nausea or the tightness shows up, pause and ask silently, where do I feel this in my body. Place a hand there if that helps. This is your exiled Child part, still carrying the original feeling from being sent away. It has been holding this for a long time.

Find the part that wants to push through.

Alongside the feeling there is usually another voice, the one that says get on with it, don't make a fuss, head down. This is your Survival Personality, the part that learned endurance was the only way through term time. It is not the enemy but it kept you going when you had no other option. Ask it gently, what are you afraid will happen if I don't push through right now, and let the answer come without judging it.

Let the Wise Adult step in.

Now bring in the part of you that is genuinely an adult today, with choices the child never had. From that place, speak to the younger child part directly. Something like, I know this feeling. I remember it too. You are not being sent away this time. I am here, and I am not going anywhere.

Ask what it needs.

Rather than trying to make the feeling disappear, ask the younger child part what it needs right now. It might be rest, warmth, a slower pace for the day, or simply to be acknowledged rather than overridden. Offer whatever small version of that is actually possible today.

Thank the Survival Personality.

Before you finish, turn back to that part and thank it for what it did all those years. Let it know the Wise Adult is available to carry things now, so it does not have to do this alone.

This will not make the feeling vanish but what it can start to do is change what happens when it arrives, so that instead of being swept along by it or fighting to override it, there is a Wise Adult in the room who can meet it and choose what happens next.

The term Survival Personality was coined by Nick Duffell in The Making of Them (Lone Arrow Press, 2000).

www.boardingschoolsurvivors.co.uk/books/the-making-of-them