Why Ex-Boarders Struggle With Fear — And How to Heal It | Fear and Boarding School | Piers Cross

Okay, welcome. Today I want to offer some reflections about fear and boarding school and the sense that I was terrified at school, and just talking a little bit about some teachings. I'll begin with just introduction, some teachings from people like Suzanne Zedijk, from, um, who else have I got? Talking Nick Duffell, talk a little bit about Emma Sepala and her work around fear, and then also some of the stories really. What are some of the stories of people who've been like Bear Grylls and some of the the women who've shared their stories in this amazing book here, which is Exploring Boarding School Challenges for Women and Third Culture Kids by Nikki Moxie. And Linda Devra. So enjoy. So I'll begin with a few stories, to be honest. I was reading this amazing book yesterday, Nikki Moxie and Linda Devra's new book, and I just, as I was reading it, I look, I often look in the back of books. So one of the ways I prepare for talks is I have all of these books, and I will look through 20, 30 different books, and I will look at the index. And I have a look at the index, and I just see, for example, fear. And it's really interesting. I look through, like I said, 20 books. I only found a few references to fear. Yes, I could find them in books, you know, maybe it's so prevalent That it's not put in the index. But in this book here, there's only 3 pages of index. You've got fear, which is, you know, it's 3 lines long. It's one of, not the longest, you know. You've got food, you've got distress, which is less, dormitories. But it's one of the, the ones which has the the, you know, the most accounts. So just reading through some of the stories, and again, it's like just always shocked. You know, I have read many of these before, but just going through it again, it's like, wow. So I'm going to read a story out here. So this is from a personal story, page 49. So basically the story is this girl, she's 6, She couldn't sleep and she's freezing in her bed and so she wants to warm up. She's 6, she jumps up and down on the bed and essentially the matron comes in, turns the light on and starts hitting her and she's like totally shocked and so she says she felt humiliated and confused. I started to sob but also instinctively knew I mustn't make a sound for fear of further Recrimination. My 6-year-old self realized in that moment that it wasn't safe to cry in this hostile environment, so instead I gulped down my tears, the first of countless occasions when I would swallow my sorrow, burying my despair deep inside myself to avoid punishment or the mockery of my peers. I lay there in a state of shock all night, barely daring to breathe. If I allowed myself to breathe, someone might hear it. If I allowed myself to move, someone might hear it. So I lay there stock still all night long, not daring to make a sound, unable to sleep for fear of incurring Matron's wrath again. I felt like a hunted animal lying frozen in anticipation of the next potential attack. That was the beginning of my attempt to not exist. I figured that if I didn't draw attention to myself, then I wouldn't be hit again. If I could train myself to suppress any form of personal expression, then I might have a chance of survival in this perilous place. I felt like a hunted animal lying frozen in anticipation of the next potential attack. It's like, it's just unbelievable. So The reason fear— the reason I wanted to talk about fear today is I see that as ex-boarders, both working with clients but also interacting, reading biographies, I see that fear is one of the things that is most prevalent as an emotion for ex-boarders, both while we're at school but then afterwards. But what I see is that we've disassociated from that fear And as Nick Duffell talks about in Wounded Leaders, he talks about these 3 levels of dissociation. First one is we disconnect from the feeling within ourselves. Second level dissociation is we project that fear onto someone else. And then third level is that other person then feels that fear, feels that emotion, that anger. It's like They become the one who's fearful. And I noticed that a lot, that for me growing up in boarding school, although I was good at sports and I, you know, basically didn't get in trouble because I learned, as that lady said, just, you know, keep my head under the parapet all the time. I realized that actually I was in fear nearly all the time. Because I was frightened of making a mistake. I was frightened of, you know, making a mistake playing football. And we used to have this teacher at my school, my boarding school, the football instructor. And people who went to my school and remember him, he was called Mugger. I mean, there you go, that's kind of a name. And he just used to shout at you all the time, like this really angry man. And I'd go into freeze. I'd be in fear. On the pitch, and I'd make mistakes all the time because, you know, what happens when we're in fear? We freeze. I wasn't relaxed and it was okay to make mistakes. It wasn't okay to make mistakes, and I think that's something that's really come to me is that I was just terrified all the time, and I just see that our nervous systems are, as ex-boarders, they're still on. It's that amygdala part of the brain, the fight, flight, freeze, it's still on. And so I'll share towards the end just some different ideas we can use for just calming that nervous system down. I think the first step, as Pete Walker talks about in Complex PTSD, is just the cognitive, to know that it's happening. And I see this really common, is, ah, actually, what am I feeling? When we send an email to someone and we get in touch, or We communicate with someone, what am I giving off here? Is that fear? Do I need just to take a breath and read it back again? I've done that many times. I'm like, oh, that's going to cause a lot of chaos, that. And I've ripped up notes I've written to people because I'm like, oh, that's going to come off really, really badly. So I'm going to share Bear Grylls, Mud, Sweat and Tears. It's page 58, and I've read this one out before, but this is the big quote. When I hit boarding school, so he was age 8, suddenly all I felt was fear. Fear forces you to look tough on the outside but makes you weak on the inside. This was the opposite of all I'd ever known as a kid growing up. I had been shown by my dad that it was good to be fun, cozy, homely, but then as tough as boots when needed. At prep school, I was unlearning this lesson and adopting new ways to survive. And then another example from this book by Nikki Moxey and Linda Devereaux, and please do go and buy a copy because it's just incredible. And one of the passages I was reading last night, I'll come back to, is Suzanne Z. Dykes' piece. It's like, wow, really great how she unpacks boarding school syndrome. So, so this is page 117. So she just says here, they say here, many of us recall the fear, shame, and humiliation which was used to control our bodies and our behaviours. For several of us, this punishment happened very soon after we arrived at school. So it's that fear again, and I'm sure there was another example in here as well, but I can't find that off the top of my head. Oh, there it is, yeah, and so this is the girl who basically wees herself because the teacher, you know, it's almost the first day and she has to stand against the wall, you know, I think she's age 8 something. Last night we passed the new girl who has missed her tea and been told to stand all this time in a dark corridor, her face to the wall in disgrace for all to see. The sound of some 80 pairs of shoes scuffing the lino tells her that the whole school is filing past her now and seeing her for what she is, nothing better than a baby. I'm relieved I'm not her. I don't want to be her. I'm a big girl now and soon I'll have new friends. But in my bed a while later, huddled under the sheet, blanket and counterpane, I must have done all I could to stifle my sobs. The me looking back on this as an observer sees it all happen and knows that it did, yet I have no real memory of how I felt. I can only imagine I must have felt afraid and very alone, and learnt from that very first day that I must not show my feelings of distress, fear, or bewilderment. I must behave as expected and wear the mask of a busy, chatty boarder In order to survive. So I think that's it. The fear thing is, it's like, you know, I was saying this to someone today, this idea, oh, I'm fine. And that's often what we say as ex-boarders. I'm fine. I remember as a child, my parents say, how are you? I'm like, I'm fine. Because actually, I'm feeling quite a lot of fear. I'm scared. And when we can somatically feel that, and I think that's the first one of the first practices is just to draw into the body and just acknowledge, oh, what am I feeling? Maybe it's really tense shoulders, maybe it's belly butterflies. It's just to acknowledge. That's the first stage. This is how I feel. Fear. Another thing I find— practice I find really useful, and I've drawn this from Bessel van der Kolk and The Body Keeps the Score and some of his lectures I've attended. And he says often when we go into freeze, the brain has no neural activity. And what I find I need to do, and what he says, just moving your eyes left and right So if we've gone into freeze or we've gone into fear, just looking left and right, and I've added in a piece which just says, are there any lions and tigers to my left or right? Are the bullies still there? And I'm like, oh no, no, I'm safe, and that just tells my nervous system I'm okay. And that links into Ant Middleton's book, um, The Fear Bubble, which I found really useful actually because I Obviously, I felt a lot of fear throughout my life, and when I began doing podcasts, I'd get really nervous, really frightened. And he says this idea of the fear bubble is that he used to be in fear a lot of the time, but he was just— his nervous system was just burnt out. And what he found was he could isolate the the time when he was going to step into a fear bubble. So for him, it was the military, and he could isolate it to just pockets of a few minutes. Okay, right, I'm about to step into that room where it's danger, right? Am I ready to do it? And he said, if you say, yes, I'm ready, then you step over that threshold and you go in, and it's like, right, you can do it. So I've done that with, say, my podcast, so I'm interviewing someone I'll feel that fear, but I'll think, wait, it's not for another hour, so I'm not stepping into that bubble. So I'll just say, oh, it's not now. And that's been really useful. This is something that Ant Middleton talks about. So it's just to notice, ah, okay, first thing is notice, oh yeah, fear. Second one is, am I about to step into a fear moment? Rather than us being in fear all the time, seeing, oh, it's useful. We can use it to perform at a high level, but just noticing when I'm stepping into the bubble, and he says an important aspect of this is then to step out of the bubble at the end. So after you've done your talk or you've done it, it's then to settle your nervous system and again just going, oh yeah. And one of the ways I find of settling my nervous system is to go for a run. I've just been for a run now. That just regulates. Or going for a walk, or just looking left and right. Oh, oh, I'm outside of the bubble now. Nervous system can relax. So that's something I found really useful. I realize this could be a longer video today, but— so this is Emma Sepala, The Happiness Track. She talks about fear. She says Anxious emotions such as fear are physiologically contagious through pheromones, chemicals released in our sweat. When someone emits fear pheromones, the people who come into contact with that person show greater activation in brain areas corresponding to anxiety and fear, particularly the amygdala. So this is important for us to know that Unconsciously, maybe I'm in fear and therefore I need to just regulate my nervous system or I'm going to take it into my family, I'm going to take it into my work. And talking to different experts through making the documentary, they would often say the people who've been to boarding school often run their companies, CEOs, like boarding schools. So that fear, they imbue their company. And it's not a very nice place to work, from what they've said, you know, quite bullying. So I think that is, you know, there's lots of other things I could talk about here, but I just think, just notice there might be trigger points for you. So it might be, it might manifest fear as control, might be trying to control people. It might be anxiety, going away, holidays, flights. It might be things like mealtimes, Sunday evenings for many exporters. It's like just to notice, oh, that's when I go into fear, and that's where you need the, ah, first one, mindfulness, come back in. Second one is the fear bubble exercise. Oh yeah, and I find the third one, I use this all the time with my clients, And just because there's so much clinical research, and I've been using this 25 years myself, the research shows it calms the amygdala, what Emma Seppala PhD is talking about, that alarm center. It just calms the center down. So those are the 3 things I would recommend. So yeah, any questions, please do let me know. And yeah, it's, it's, I just find it fascinating drawing upon this and I could go into a lot more depth. Like I said, I didn't talk about Suzanne Zedijk here, but just really recommend getting a copy. I'll put a link to, to it in the description. So any questions, please do let me know. And yeah, take care.