When the School Becomes the Parent

Understanding Institutional Attachment in British Boarding Culture

Boarding School as an Emotional Environment

Boarding school in the UK has often been seen as a mark of privilege — a strong start in life. Yet for many who boarded, the experience was not only educational but emotional and formative in ways few people talk about. The school became, in effect, a replacement attachment figure — a system that demanded loyalty, obedience, and endurance.

Attachment to the Institution

Psychotherapists such as Joy Schaverien and Nick Duffell describe how boarders form an attachment to the institution itself. When children are separated from parents, they often redirect their need for security toward the school — its rules, its rituals, and its authority figures. The institution becomes a kind of “parental object,” both protective and punitive.

This attachment can continue long after leaving school. Many adults speak with both pride and bitterness about their boarding years — a push-pull of affection and resentment that mirrors complex attachment patterns.

The Legacy of the Boarding Code

Traditional British boarding culture values stoicism, achievement, and emotional control. These lessons become internalised - “Don’t make a fuss”, “Keep it together”, “Be strong”.

These codes can serve people well — until they don’t. In adult life they can translate into over-functioning, emotional isolation, or sudden collapses when the old strategies fail.

Loyalty and the Difficulty of Critique

Criticising the school can feel almost like betraying a parent. The institution’s voice often lives on internally — a mix of pride and self-policing that makes emotional honesty feel unsafe. Even recognising harm can be difficult when part of the self still longs for belonging in that system.

How Therapy Can Help

Therapy offers space to explore that institutional attachment safely. A humanistic approach views defensiveness not as pathology, but as an intelligent adaptation — the best the child could do under the circumstances. Through empathic connection, clients can begin to feel what was once forbidden to feel: grief, fear, tenderness, dependency.

The aim isn’t to reject the boarding self, but to integrate it — to bring compassion to the parts that survived by shutting down. Healing often means discovering that you can relate, rest, and belong without needing the institution’s approval.

Freedom Beyond the School

Many who boarded say that therapy allows them, at last, to “leave school” in a deeper sense — to live from their own values rather than the institutional code. Freedom doesn’t mean erasing the past. It means being able to carry it lightly, without it defining who you are.