For a large portion of my life I managed to satirize my experiences in boarding school in India. In social situations with my “Indiakid” peers, I can keep up with the laughing and mockery and the absurd story-telling… which is usually how most social situations wound up. But then a silence will fill the room when I blurt out something like “… and then I was ankle-deep in shit!” (There was one incidence in which I was truly ankle deep in raw sewage)
By and large it has not been socially acceptable to talk about the difficult aspects of boarding school, and by and large it is avoided. In our early adult lives I had a difficult time expressing my individual feelings, so as a way of coping, I would find something absurd in a shared experience to laugh about.
We are individuals. It’s not realistic to expect that we go navigating the world and our lives as if they are common and shared.
In more recent years I have had to get more real about the harmful aspects of 3HO and India boarding school. Understanding the breadth of my experience allows me to examine my own life, my own actions, my own purpose, and my place in the world. Part of examining it is to acknowledge the traumatic aspects. As a young adult, I was under an assumption that trauma, or even post traumatic stress, was the result of one isolated incident that imprints in one’s mind and haunts the individual forever. But the more I looked at my own life I came to realize that the situation as children in India wasn’t one, singular or isolated traumatic incident. It was the multiplicity of chaotic situations that acted on us as the main stressors. Take the poor conditions of our environment, add the randomness in the kinds of punishments enforced on us, plus the minor but random violence imposed upon by teachers, and you have a institutionally hostile environment that day after day continues to compound the stress.
If this basic outline of our situation isn’t traumatic, I don’t know what is.
9 Replies to “Trauma at boarding school and before”
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interesting and informative post
Poor kid, didn't get as sheltered as you think you should have been. What about the rest of the world? What about the millions of kids who would love nothing more than the chance to go to the school you did? I have news for you, school in America is not always a bed of roses either. Everyone everywhere experiences difficulty and "trauma." How you cope with it determines the kind of person you are.
@Anonymous: I published your comment because it is a classic type of dismissal toward people who have experienced hostile environments as children. This kind of attitude should be noted by readers of my blog, as it helps inform them as to the kinds of resistance those of us, who speak out about 3HO and GNFC, face continually.
And my response to you is this: You are right. Schools in the US are not "a bed of roses". We are severely lacking in our educational system. But the kinds of things that we experienced on a day to day basis at GNFC–the beatings, the corporal punishment, feces covered bathroom walls, no running water, sporadic electricity–are ILLEGAL in this country. It is AGAINST THE LAW to corporally punish a child and to physically abuse a child in ANY school in the United States of America. Period.
you say: "Everyone everywhere experiences difficulty and "trauma." How you cope with it determines the kind of person you are."
Well, it's possible you have developed techniques to cope with your own traumatic experiences. If those techniques including, oh say, meditation (like people in 3HO are trained to do), you are simply blotting it out, shelving it for later. So, by shelving it, it manifests in other ways, perhaps behavioral things like saying mean and snarky things on people's blogs.
But what's worse is that it perpetuates in the cycle of abuse. And it's a pernicious and closeted reality that far far too many families, women and children have to suffer through.
Kelly, Thanks for your post.
As one of the first parents to send my children to school in India (following the example of Yogi Bhajan, whose own children, Ranbir and Kulbir, I transported there in the mid-1970's) I was completely blind to the abuse that was meted out by teachers and aya's (house mothers) alike. Sat Hari, my younger daughter was slapped and had the back of her hand ruler-whipped daily. This went on for years. Some of the American teachers were much more abusive on the boys' side. I think there should be a support group and peer-counseling for the victims, many of whom I believe to be suffering still. –Peter Alexander (aka Sat Peter Singh)
I just gotta say, Anonymous, that your statements show a tremendous amount of ignorance about about trauma and youth development, and what is considered normal, much less legal, even in the worst inner-city schools in the United States. I'm going to assume that you were either not there with us, or if you were you were, it was as an "older kid" who, because of your developmental stage, experienced and internalized what was happening in a vastly different way than the smaller children who were sometimes 6,7 and 8 years old. Or maybe you were one of the poor children whose parent was actually perpetrating the abuse on us, and you feel protective of that parent. I don't know what world you live in that you think that the experience and threat of daily and intermittent physical violence -beatings, canings, slapping, etc., would not profoundly affect children who were as young as 6, 7, and 8 years old. I am a professional IN THE US (which I'm assuming is where you live) who works with at-risk youth, and youth who have been removed from their parents care because of EXACTLY that kind of abuse and neglect. Believe me, if that school (GNFC) were in the U.S., not only would that school have been completely shut down by Child Protective Services, but the adult perpetrator/s who participated in the violence, OR stood by and let it happen, would have been prosecuted and imprisoned, as they should have been. Not to mention the years of lawsuits Sikh Dharma Foreign Education would have been facing. I wonder what world you live in that the kind of "care" that we received was in any way normal, acceptable, or legal. For 10 years I have worked with at-risk American youth and youth in foster care who are in TYPICAL public high/ inner-city high schools, believe me, what we went through is NOT normal, acceptable or legal, at least in the US. I certainly hope that you realize that if you witness anything like what we went through in your own children's lives, you intervene instead of telling them life isn't a "bed of roses."
I am so grateful for each one of you that have spoke out about your abuse….I lived in a girls home in New Orleans, La. It was not very nice, but at least we were not physically by adults, only each other.
I do have a support group as I am also a recovering drug addict…go figure…years of trying to block out my life…. May you heal & be blessed, no child deserve abuse~I use my pains to help others as I see you do as well.
Namaste' Love & Light & Thank You! I wish America would wake up about the truth about this man!