ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the methodology designed to assist the change process that employed in working with boarding school survivors. The Strategic Survival Personality was designed by a child and may not last for life. The most critical therapeutic work is the weakening of the ex-boarder's reliance on the Strategic Survival Personality. Therapists may be very clear with their clients that stepping out of habitual short-term survival, to avoid the shame of admitting they are wrong or out of order, is a necessary way to bring about the demise of the strategic survival personality's command over the ex-boarder's psyche. The ex-boarder's mask can prove tricky for the therapist to see behind, due to the complex defence mechanisms the survivor can employ. Joy Schaverien, who is a psychoanalyst and also an art psychotherapist, describes powerful work with an ex-boarder client who used drawing to come into relationship with parts of his psyche that had been driving him.
