The fears we bring with us from a childhood spent in boarding school

What fears or behaviour patterns have you brought with you from childhood?

Like tiny rodents, small things from childhood can create quite a lot of havoc in adulthood.

I’ve been noticing recently that I have a fear of being found out – or perhaps more accurately a fear of being accused of something I didn’t do.

I was talking about it with my supervisor and she asked me “when do you think you first experienced this?”

When I thought about it, it seemed like it started when I was about 11 or 12. It was during the first two to three years at boarding school. It might have happened before then, but it wouldn’t have had such an impact then, because I felt relatively safe.

At school though, we didn’t feel safe.

Looking back I can see how it took me about two years to really learn the ropes and figure out how to avoid getting into trouble when I was at school. And perhaps more importantly, how to survive psychologically.

In those first two years, any child would be emotionally vulnerable. If you get into trouble or if you get on the wrong side of another pupil, you can’t go home to your parents at the end of the day.

You don’t really know what’s possible and what isn’t. That comes later. In the end you learn to work the system (unless you’re an even bigger goody two-shoes than I was). And you learn how to keep yourself out of trouble.

But the fear of being found out or wrongly accused stays in there as one of many neural pathways left over from childhood.

And like those little rodents it eats away at your sense of who you are, what you’re worth and who you can trust. It also provides the foundation for a habit of concealment. I can see now why I have concealed so much in my relationships, and why it was difficult to break that habit.

Of course this pattern isn’t confined to people who went to boarding school. All children experience the fear of being found out or being wrongly accused. As a parent, I was aware that I couldn’t always know who had done what. Small children are quite happy to shift the responsibility to their siblings.

Hopefully most of us leave this fear behind when we reach adulthood. But for some of us it persists, and it gets in the way of living life to the full. We find it hard to commit to things when that fear of being found out transforms into fear of getting things wrong.

But I find it’s helpful to remember that those fears and behaviours are patterns I created to keep me safe in those early years at school. And that I can create new ways of responding to difficult situations now.

I can remind myself that the fear of being found out or getting things wrong is something I have created in my mind, that I am capable of handling most situations and that the adult Sorrel is much more powerful and skilful than little Sorrel was. And I will be ok no matter what happens.

Perhaps it was fear of getting things wrong which stopped me sharing my guide to going beyond boarding school survival. So I am being the adult now and telling you about it. If you want to read it, you can download it here: https://www.sorrelpindar.co.uk/beyond-boarding-school