For many ex-boarders, the memory of that first day sits somewhere just beneath the surface. The car journey. The moment your parents left. What you did with what you felt next. This module begins there, with your own personal experience of arriving at school and what it took to get through it. We look at how young children adapt to that transition, what they learn to do with their feelings in order to survive it, and how those early adaptations often become the patterns that follow you into adult life.

Were you homesick? And if you were, what did you do with it? What happened to the children around you who showed their sadness? This module contacts the grief of going away to school, whether you felt it at the time or learned very quickly not to. We explore what it meant to pack and unpack that trunk term after term, moving between two worlds that never quite connected, and how living between a home self and a school self can create a feeling of homelessness that has nothing to do with where you live. For many ex-boarders, that feeling of not quite belonging anywhere is one of the most enduring things boarding school left behind.

 When you are sent away to school as a child, you find a way to cope. This module explores the particular strategies you developed to manage life in an institution, often with little pastoral care, no regular parental support, and no safe place to fall apart. Drawing on Nick Duffell's Survival Personality typologies as well as additional types developed through my own clinical work, including The Good Girl and The Caretaker, we look at the character you built to get through it. Not to criticise it, as it kept you safe, but to understand how those same adaptations may now be getting in the way of the life and relationships you want.

Going through puberty in an institution, without your parents and often without any real guidance, shapes you in ways that follow you into adulthood. This module explores what that time was like for you: how you learned about your body, sex, and relationships, and what that has meant for your sexuality and intimacy ever since. We also look at adolescent friendships, the intensity of them and the cruelty that was sometimes part of them, and how those early experiences still show up in how you relate to people now.

Because the experience of puberty in boarding school differs for men and women, this content is divided into two separate modules. You are welcome to work through both.

For many ex-boarders, this is the module where everything in the present really starts to make sense.

When you were sent away to school, your nervous system adapted to cope. Those adaptations were intelligent and necessary at the time. But trauma does not stay in the past. It lives in the body and drives patterns in your relationships, your work and your sense of self that can feel impossible to change without understanding where they began.

This is the largest module in the programme. We cover Trauma, Complex PTSD, the impact of early abandonment, dissociation and shame.  Not just as concepts but with practical tools to support yourself as the work deepens. This is where understanding becomes something you can actually feel.

When you grew up largely alone, learning to rely only on yourself, self-care was never modelled in the way it should have been. For many ex-boarders, they may have experienced neglect and this remains invisible because of the "Privileg." Sometimes just the quiet absence of someone noticing, attending, caring for the small things. This module explores what you learned to do with your own needs as a result, and how that shows up now. Do you push through illness? Take pride in not needing anyone? Find it easier to care for others than for yourself? We look at where those patterns began, why they made sense, and how to begin doing something genuinely different. Not as another item on your to do list, but as an act of repair toward the child who had to manage alone

Being sent to boarding school did not just affect you. It moved through your entire family system, shaping your relationships with your parents, your siblings and, if you have children of your own, your current family. 

This module looks at all of that. The distance that may have grown between you and your parents, whether spoken about or not. The sibling relationships that were interrupted or never quite recovered. The moments in your own parenting where something unexpected gets triggered and you do not quite know why.

We explore transgenerational trauma, how patterns of disconnection pass quietly from one generation to the next without anyone intending them to, and what it looks like to begin interrupting that. For many people this is one of the most quietly powerful modules in the programme. It is where the personal becomes the generational, and where real repair becomes possible, not just for you but for the people who come after you

We look at how your present-day relationships may have been impacted by your school upbringing. We will look at attachment theory, how you identify and how this shows up for you in relationships. We look at the impact of hiding your emotions and vulnerability, why you may find criticism incredibly hard, and how you may carry an abandonment wound that can cause you to act out in relationships that cause you difficulties. You will learn ways to express yourself and improve your relationships.

Using the framework of Internal Family Systems Therapy, I will show you how to recognise the different parts that show up for you at different times and how you can support yourselves as an adult and turn compassionately to the parts of you that you have shut out, disconnected from, and split off when you went to school.

Children growing up in boarding schools have little privacy and boundaries are often crossed. Here you will learn what boundaries are important to you, why they matter and how to assert them in relationships to support yourself. We will look at influences on Self-Esteem and what you can action in order to boost your own.  

Boarding School inflicts certain values on children and pushes them into certain careers or belief systems about who they should be and how they should live their life. Many ex-boarders report feelings of anxiety in the workplace, and in this module we get to examine what lies behind this and how to manage it. This is your opportunity to look within and work out your own personal values and what matters to you. Are you in the career you want to be in? Do you feel you have autonomy to make your own choices or do you still feel captive by the constraints imposed on you from elsewhere?

In this final module we will reflect on all your learning and connect with who you are now at the age you are now. Your likes, loves, dislikes, passions. What brings you joy and nourishment. You will recognise your integrated self. We will reflect on your ending at your school, how you do endings today and find ways to do it differently if you wish to.

Many ex-boarders find themselves wondering whether they might have ADHD or be on the autistic spectrum sometimes because a partner, friend, or professional has suggested it, and sometimes simply because something has always felt like it doesn't quite fit. What makes this genuinely difficult to untangle is that the patterns which develop in response to early separation, emotional suppression, and the need to adapt at boarding school can look remarkably similar to neurodivergence. In this module, will look at the overlap between ADHD, Autism, Complex PTSD, and Boarding School Syndrome and understand the similarities and the differences.