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sophia_sol) wrote2016-11-02 10:19 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2016-11-02 10:19 pm
Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the "privileged" child, by Joy Schaverien
I read this book because of family reasons - I have a grandparent who was put into a boarding school overseas by her missionary parents for much of her childhood, and this was clearly a formative influence on a number of the ways in which she grew up to be a difficult person.
This book spends too much time focusing on the methods of therapy for the author's various case studies, which is unhelpful and uninteresting to me. But it also did a good job of outlining both the systemic abuses within the imperial British boarding school system and the ways in which boarding school can be traumatic even without any overt abuses, and how these things can affect the child subjected to them.
It's a helpful reminder that Grandma was once a traumatized child -- and although as an adult she emphatically did not deal with her trauma well, that original trauma she experienced was not her fault.
(note: this is a different grandmother than the one who died this summer.)
This book spends too much time focusing on the methods of therapy for the author's various case studies, which is unhelpful and uninteresting to me. But it also did a good job of outlining both the systemic abuses within the imperial British boarding school system and the ways in which boarding school can be traumatic even without any overt abuses, and how these things can affect the child subjected to them.
It's a helpful reminder that Grandma was once a traumatized child -- and although as an adult she emphatically did not deal with her trauma well, that original trauma she experienced was not her fault.
(note: this is a different grandmother than the one who died this summer.)