ABSTRACT
Ex-boarders are exiles in a way, so appreciating the value of now having a home may also constitute a homecoming. Nevertheless, with the metaphor of homecoming as a context for the therapeutic journey, therapists can help to guide their clients home by helping them outgrow the habit of drastic and strategic self-protection at any cost to become more at home in themselves. Therapists to boarding school survivor clients may sometimes feel powerless - like parents who cannot bring their child back home - in the sense that they cannot ever take away the fact of their having been sent away. Working therapeutically with ex-boarders is not easy, it takes time and a lot of patience, but the rewards are great. As in all therapeutic endeavours, and especially work with boarding school survivors, therapy has its rhythm: it swings up and down, between hope and hopelessness, between apparent success and apparent failure, between alliances and battles.
