Still Haunted by School?
You’re Not Alone
Did you like school?
I didn’t. I hated it. It was a tough environment where bullying was just normal. I left with no formal qualifications. This wasn’t due to lack of ability (I have a doctorate and I’ve written 5 books), it was caused by being overwhelmed by anxiety or emotionally shut down for most of the school day. The place was grim. Violent. Miserable. I was either bored or scared most of the time.
Years later, I met a senior colleague who’d gone to a very posh and famous boarding schools. On paper, it couldn’t have been more different to mine, nice buildings, Latin, top grades. But you know what? He was traumatised too. Not in the same way, but the scars were there all the same. Essentially we’d had a very similar emotional experience, only the context was different.
Now I work as a leadership coach. I meet many outwardly successful people: business owners, c-suite people. When I ask them about school, they usually say something like: "It was great. Good education. Lifelong friends. My parents sacrificed a lot to send me." And, that’s all true. But, for many, that positive experience is only one side of the coin.
When I ask what it was like being eight years old, away from your parents for weeks on end... there's a pause. Then: "Well, you just got on with it. I actually felt pretty miserable when I think about it…I try not to dwell on it to be honest.”
That line – you just got on with it is usually where the trouble starts.
British boarding schools (and plenty of state schools too) teach kids to survive by shutting down. You learn early not to cry, not to miss home, not to feel too much. You learn to cope. And, eventually, you become brilliant at coping. So brilliant you barely realise you’re still doing it decades later.
That stiff upper lip cliche? Sometimes isn’t courage. It’s dissociation.
By the time you’re in your forties, you’re successful. Calm. Competent. You know how to behave in a meeting, how to write a report, how to lead a team. But inside, there's often a small part of you that never really made it out of school. That part is still frozen at eight, or eleven, or thirteen. Still quietly trying to stay safe.
Many boarding school kids are like trained actors. They smile, perform, and say they're fine. Even when they’re furious, upset or desperately missing someone. You won't hear them talk about what's wrong. But their traumatised part finds comfort through an affair, heavy drinking, or just a sense of numbness and isolation or disconnection from others.
That level of emotional shutdown doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from spending years surrounded by hundreds of other children who were also wounded in their own way. Vulnerability was an invitation to be mocked or ostracised. So you got good, really good, at hiding it. You learn not only to mask your feelings, but to disconnect from them entirely.
Trust doesn’t come easily to boarding school kids. These environments don’t just fail to teach emotional trust, they actively discourage it. You know, in theory, that human relationships require vulnerability. But nothing in your upbringing makes you want to take that kind of risk.
A lot of my coaching clients who went to these schools are extremely bright and capable. Many were top of their class in something. The schools can produce fantastic academic results.
What they don’t tend to teach well is how to live an emotionally healthy adult life. Things like:
How to grieve and mourn properly
How to be open and honest about anger and needing other people
How to be kind to people who seem weak or just vulnerable
How to trust anyone, genuinely
It’s one of the great ironies: this type of schooling is still sold as a privilege. And, in many ways it is. Yet the emotional damage it can cause is huge. And no one talks about it until midlife, usually when something breaks. Often it takes a crisis: a divorce, a panic attack, heavy drinking, a depressive episode; before someone starts to realise that something is terribly wrong.
Small-t trauma
When people hear the word trauma, they think of big stuff: abuse, violence, serious accidents, war. That’s what psychologists call "Big T" trauma.
But there’s also "small t" trauma. It’s not particularly dramatic, but it still hurts. Things like being sent away from home too young. Being mocked by a teacher. Being the quiet kid who was always left out.
You don’t need to be beaten up to be traumatised. You just need to feel unsafe, unseen, or unloved.
For long enough that you adapt.
And adapt you did. Most of the people I coach are very good at their jobs. But under pressure, something weird happens. They overreact. Shut down. Lash out. Get anxious over nothing. Get drunk. Or just suddenly go cold/detached/distant.
That’s not them being difficult. That’s an old wounded part of them being triggered.
We all have different "parts" inside us. We have lots of mini-personalities competing for attention (like the film ‘Inside Out’) You might have a confident part, a funny part, and a perfectionist part; and you might also have a part that’s still scared, sad, or angry about what happened when you were a sensitive, vulnerable little kid.
That scared wounded part often stays hidden. But when something reminds it of the past, being told off in public, feeling left out of a meeting, someone challenging your authority, it kicks off.
One client I worked with was a senior partner at a law firm. Calm, in control, smart. But if anyone questioned him in a meeting, he'd get defensive and sarcastic. It turned out that as a child, he’d been frequently humiliated by a teacher in front of the class. That part of him still hated being put on the spot.
Once he could see that, and deal with it with a bit of compassion, things changed. He stopped being reactive. He stayed present. He still led his team well; actually better, but now he wasn’t operating from a place of fear.
I see versions of this all the time.
A successful entrepreneur who panics when they feel ignored.
An entrepreneur who always needs to be the smartest person in the room.
A CEO who struggles with staff who show emotion.
Scratch the surface, and it goes back to childhood. Not always in dramatic ways, but often in ways that shaped how they function, how they protect themselves, how they relate.
This isn’t about blaming anyone. Not your parents, not your school.
It’s about insight or in other words, self understanding. A lot of the emotional habits we learned at school weren’t healthy. They helped us survive back then. But they don’t help us thrive now.
We learn to perform, not feel. We learn to cope, not connect. We learn to survive, not trust.
So, back to that question: What was your school like?
If your answer is "It was fine," maybe give that a second look. Maybe it wasn’t. And maybe some part of you is still waiting for someone to ask the right question and actually listen to the answer.
Because until we can face what school really did to us, we risk carrying those old patterns into every boardroom, bedroom, and breakdown we find ourselves in as adults.