Workshop Details
Jane Barclay offers the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be sent to Boarding School in terms of trauma and why the allowance and promotion of Boarding Schools in the UK can be described as Child Abuse sanctioned by the ruling classes.
In this workshop Jane will examine both the wrench of separation and the impact of being plunged into institutional life with all its rules and customs, necessitates replacing true Self (feelings and needs) with a Persona that serves survival in this particular form of institution. This is existential trauma. After giving attention to initial Shock, to forming Survival Persona in face of deprivation of both goodnight cuddles and the right to age-appropriate individuation, and the Double-Bind of ‘being loved yet sent away’, Jane outlines the process of recovering this banished (for safety) Self, of healing this wound to the soul. She considers how clients might arrive in therapy, how they might resist, how they might attach. She considers the part of the therapist, the importance of being alert to projection, counter-transference, of understanding the ‘purpose’ of shame, the need for supervision support.
Jane will articulate why she describes these experiences as child abuse that is sanctioned by the elite (mostly former boarders themselves) who have been in power for centuries and have a cast-iron agenda for keeping it. How Boarding Schools are key to preserving power and privilege in the British ruling classes. Using a combination of arrogance and charm, that in itself is misogynistic, hypnotising their voters into believing they are indeed their ‘betters’ and know best.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Raised awareness that the experience of being sent to Boarding School does ‘qualify’ as trauma, that the necessity to split-off unwanted parts of self, as a means to surviving both wrench of separation and instant adaptation to institutional life, is existential ‘threat to life’.
- Understanding the double-bind that this traumatic experience is rated as privileged.
- Raised awareness that the allowance and promotion of Boarding Schools in UK is sanctioned child abuse.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Therapists, including those who work within boarding schools, and those in ‘helping professions’
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- This workshop may evoke relief of having beliefs already in place or emerging validated; may evoke surprise; make evoke shock; may evoke deep pain; may evoke resistance.
Course Content
Presenter
Jane qualified as a Therapeutic Counsellor in 2000, and accredited with UKAHPP in 2010 as a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor. In addition she has trained in Somatic Trauma Therapy with Babette Rothschild, and in the Boarding School Experience with Nick Duffell and Joy Shaverien.
Since 2010, working with adults who went to boarding school, partners of boarder, and children of boarders has been her specialised client group. Passionate to raise awareness and bring to light the abuse inherent in the continued practice of sending children away to elitist establishments under the guise of ‘privilege’, she was a director of Boarding Concern from 2012-2015, and has published a number of articles, including ‘Class, Prejudice and Privilege’ in Self & Society, the journal for Humanistic Psychology Practitioners.
