girls school

Discussion of the children's schools in the UK.
TB
Posts: 35
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2004 11:51 pm

Postby TB » Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:02 am

emmalu9,



TB, what is your actual SES experience? Why don?t you tell us? You were lucky enough to have the choice of whether to join and when to leave the SES. You will never understand the loss of a childhood to its poisonous rubbish.


I have posted details of this a few times, shall I repeat them in my thread? You are right to say I am lucky not to have attended St James and I am unable to comprehend the impact on its students.

On the other hand, your detachment from your experience of sexual abuse as a child could mean that it actually affected you more than you realise. Often children deal with traumatic events by shutting down, leaving them with little or no memory of it at all. You could have more feelings about those sexual abusers than you remember.


What are you talking about? Do you genuinely read this into my posts or are you trying to stir me up?

emmalu9
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:07 pm
Location: London

Postby emmalu9 » Fri Mar 04, 2005 12:17 pm

TB,

I mean no offence and I'm not making any criticism or comment on you personally. In a previous post you spoke of the sexually abusive priests at your school in such a detached way that it made me wonder if there was any forgotten feelings about the incidents you mentioned. There is plenty of literature on how the abuse of a child, and witnessing another child being abused can affect people in childhood, and later in life.

I'm sorry if my last post sounded antagonistic, but if you did feel 'stirred up' perhaps looking into some of these theories, even if only to put your mind at rest would be a good thing to do... I could personally recommend 'Facing Codependence' by Pia Mellody, which helped me to understand what abuse is, how it affected me when I was little, and how it was still limiting me as an adult.

As I have said before, this forum for me is about helping to heal from past events, not causing further damage.

TB
Posts: 35
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2004 11:51 pm

Postby TB » Fri Mar 04, 2005 1:55 pm

Hi emmalu9,

Thankyou for clarifying your approach and I appreciate the suggestion. I have no doubt you are right when you talk about the mechanism of repressed memories, but for me there seems no indications. I would imagine that the first requirement to dig deeper is either an intention or at least a sense that something needs to done. I do not feel anything like this, so it means one of two things. Either I was abused but have no readiness to face it, or I was not abused at all.

My ability to separate myself from the incidents mentioned is not limited to just this. On most topics, whether intensely emotional or trivial I seem to be able to separate the feeling from the concept. When I was in early school, probably 8 or 9, I would make comments or ask questions that the other kids could not even imagine. It was nothing to do with intelligence, it was more to with perspective. The examples I recall were in astronomy or human behaviour. It was only as a teenager when I actively studied the subjects, that I realised I had registered some fundamentals without any obvious references. They were not difficult or controversial things, just things that had no apparent requirement for questioning. I grew up among a variety of cultures that had some very different standards of behaviours and habits, quite a few of which my peers or relatives found distasteful or wrong. I never seemed to have an issue with them, rather finding them interesting and different.

I mention these to show that for me an ability to examine something without somehow getting personal or disturbed is normal, and does make me think that I have no 'forgotten' memories.

I have read your posts about your own experiences, and as with so many of the past pupils I am appalled at how much people have been hurt. I have no place on a board like this, and no right to make comments that add to the pain.

You are quite correct when you state I am a critical observer and do not talk about my feelings. I have no issue with doing this but I cannot imagine what value it would add to anyone if I did.

On the other hand, most of my posts get me beaten up by people, and thats hardly value. People have asked to leave this board in the past, however with my time in the SES, I felt qualified, and was damned if I would. Perhaps as a non past-student of St James/Vedast I should be disqualified. Kindly don't all cheer at once and set up a voting panel for this.

Good luck with the inquiry, do not give up on it, I will be reading the progress. Daffy recently opened a thread looking to restore some harmony. I do not think this board is best served by the likes of me who disrupt it. It's been an education for me, I now look at the SES through different eyes, courtesy of the people on this board. My apologies to anyone who was hurt by anything I said.

emmalu9
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:07 pm
Location: London

Postby emmalu9 » Fri Mar 04, 2005 6:01 pm

TB,

You have as much right as anyone else to write on this forum. Your experience of the SES is as valid as that of anyone who ever went to the adult classes.

I now look at the SES through different eyes, courtesy of the people on this board


Thankyou for this statement, it demonstrates the potential power of this forum, and may serve as a warning to those responsible to take notice of our noise.

Thanks for your empathy with those writing here, it means a great deal to all of us to just be heard. Sorry I can't write more now - I only have internet at work, but keep watching, and writing if you want to.

Emmalu9

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Keir
Posts: 177
Joined: Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:04 am
Location: London

Postby Keir » Thu Jun 30, 2005 10:35 pm

I have to say after reading this thread from beginning to end I became increasingly angry at T.B.'s posts.

I think what was winding me up was that he was being so intellectual about the whole thing. So when I read that he considered that he could seperate thinking and feeling about incidents, his years in the SES suddenly made sense.

After all, in the SES the man's Budhi (intellect/mind) was seen as strong and lovely and the women's Chitta (emotion/intuition) was all wobbly and unreliable. Quite apart from this ridiculously bald sexist misinterpretation of a teaching that was peddled to us in such a sombre way as truth, the chance to talk in an uncluttered intellectual environment (no touchy feely people to ask you how you felt being the odd one out as a child for instance) probably for once made him feel quite at home. IMHO it is precisely this denial of the emotional and intuitive elements of both men and women that is one of the reasons posts on this site have described the innability of SES family members to deal with the emotional outpourings from the authors on this Board.

Fortunately for T.B. he seems to have got bored with the intellectual claptrap that is peddled at the SES, and not unexpectedly so. As a RELIGIOUS CULT it is not about making sense intellectually. Faith is about what you are prepared to believe in the absense of logical fact. Besides which, if you stifle debate you dont have to be logical - you just take the ball away if they dont agree with the party line (thereby neatly employing 'the threat of being cast out of a new social situation' that time honoured cult (and playground) tactic).

Maybe I am being unfair about T.B.'s posts. Or maybe its just that I had a gutfull of intellectual justification of emotional suppression and abuse whilst I was attending SES, at the same time as receiving a lesson in the practical application of it from overzealous teachers who were practising intellectual detatchment whilst throwing cricket balls at pupils' heads!

You can only grasp the danger of the SES' mangled truth when you are on the receiving end of what it leads to. T.B. was able to leave when he realised that he was being told what to think and do. (T.B. for us it was a daily reality that our parents thought was good for us, so we couldn't leave when we felt like it, we hadn't joined it out of choice, and we risked parental dissaproval and disbelief if we told them the truth about it).

No amount of intellectualising will ever begin to address what it is like to feel suppressed, powerless, threatened, beaten, kicked, humiliated, dismissed etc. The fact that it happens in other places too is not an excuse to attempt to turn it in to an intellectual crapshoot. If you can't feel what I feel, fair enough, but don't try and tell me that I am wrong for feeling it.

Been there, got the T-shirt.


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