ABSTRACT
Boarding children cope with their feelings of loss and abandonment by adopting a strategic survival personality in order to keep themselves safe. Boarding school places demands on children to grow up very quickly and become premature adults. All children are pre-programmed to rely on their parents for protection, support and guidance, but boarding children have to discover on their own how to survive. At the most basic level, boarding children have to split their identity into a home child and a boarding child and keep both sides of their identity going. In short, the split-off vulnerability and childishness may begin to land fair and square within the person of the therapist. Retaliation usually occurs first in the threat to quit therapy, which is itself an ambivalent, self-negating action, of the kind which, unfortunately, the boarding school survivor is all too used to from childhood.
