Why Boarding School Students Feel Lonely Even When They’re Surrounded by People
Boarding school students are almost never alone.
They live with other students, eat meals together, attend classes together, and spend their afternoons at practices or activities. In the evening, they return to dorms filled with their peers. From the outside, it seems like an environment where loneliness would be difficult.
And yet, boarding school students can feel profoundly lonely.
The loneliness I hear about in therapy usually isn’t about a lack of friends or spending time alone. Students are surrounded by people they like and often have active social lives. The disconnection is deeper. They don’t feel genuinely known by the people around them, and sometimes they aren’t entirely sure who they would be showing someone if they tried.
To understand why that happens, it helps to look at what adolescence already asks teenagers to do and what happens when that developmental process takes place inside an intense achievement culture.
Adolescence Is Already About Figuring Out Who You Are
Teenagers are in the middle of developing an identity that is increasingly separate from their families. They’re figuring out which values feel like their own and beginning to make more independent choices about how they want to spend their time. Much of adolescence involves trying things, changing your mind, and gradually discovering what fits.
That process is supposed to be messy. You’re supposed to develop interests that disappear six months later. You’re supposed to discover that something you thought would matter to you doesn’t. Parts of your personality might even seem contradictory while you’re figuring out how they fit together.
The achievement culture at highly competitive boarding schools makes that exploration more complicated.
From the time students arrive, there is already an awareness of what comes next. Classes, athletics, and extracurriculars all become part of preparing for college. By ninth grade, students are beginning to think about the story they’ll eventually tell in an application.
That creates pressure to figure out who you are before you’ve really had enough time to explore it.
When Everything Starts to Feel Like It Counts
At a college-preparatory boarding school, doing something purely because you enjoy it starts to feel difficult to justify.
An interest becomes more valuable when it develops into a passion. A passion becomes more valuable when you become accomplished at it. Eventually, that accomplishment becomes another piece of the narrative you’re building about yourself.
This makes it harder to spend time doing something you’re bad at simply because it’s fun. There’s pressure to invest your limited time in the activities where you have the greatest potential to excel.
Over time, students get very good at developing a coherent version of themselves. They become the serious musician or the standout athlete. Their academic interests develop a clear direction that makes sense alongside everything else they’ve accomplished.
That coherence is useful when you’re applying to selective colleges. It’s less useful when you’re trying to figure out who you actually are.
The Constant Comparison of Boarding School
Comparison is part of adolescence, but boarding school intensifies it because the people you’re comparing yourself to are always nearby.
Your classmates are also your teammates, dormmates, and friends. You’re competing for opportunities within the school while knowing that eventually many of you will apply to the same selective colleges.
Some of that competition is explicit. Much of it never needs to be said.
You know who was selected for the varsity team and who received the lead in the musical. You know who is taking the most demanding courses. Eventually, you know which friends are hoping to attend the same colleges you are.
At the same time, these are the people you live with. You want friendships with them. You want dinner to be enjoyable and your dorm to feel comfortable. There’s an understandable pressure to remain friendly even when comparison or competition is sitting underneath the relationship.
That creates a difficult social environment. Students are trying to belong to a group while simultaneously evaluating where they stand within it.
When Your Identity Starts to Feel Like a Character You’re Playing
I sometimes think about boarding school students as authors who have been asked to write their own character very early.
Before college applications, there was an application to boarding school. Students have already had experience presenting a version of themselves that explains who they are, what they care about, and why they belong in a particular environment.
Then they spend the next several years refining that character.
The problem comes when it becomes difficult to distinguish between the person and the story.
You’ve spent years figuring out how to describe yourself to admissions officers, teachers, coaches, and other people whose evaluations matter. There’s much less incentive to explore the parts of yourself that don’t fit neatly into that description.
Being a person is much messier. You have interests that go nowhere. You change your mind. You have qualities that seem inconsistent with each other, and parts of you exist without contributing anything to a résumé or application.
Those parts matter when it comes to connection.
Why You Can Have Friends and Still Feel Lonely
Authentic relationships require some ability to let another person know you. That becomes difficult when you’re still trying to distinguish who you are from the version of yourself you’ve learned to present.
This is why loneliness at boarding school doesn’t necessarily look like social isolation. A student can have close friends, spend almost every waking hour around other people, and still feel disconnected.
They’re participating in relationships while continuing to manage how they’re perceived. There’s competition underneath some friendships, and there’s pressure to maintain the version of themselves that everyone already recognizes.
You can be surrounded by people who know what classes you’re taking and what you accomplished last semester without feeling like anyone knows what it’s actually like to be you.
That is a particularly painful kind of loneliness because there’s no obvious absence to point to. You have friends. You’re included. Your days are full of people. It can be difficult to understand why you still feel alone.
Loneliness Isn’t Always What Brings Students to Therapy
Boarding school students don’t always begin therapy by telling me they feel lonely.
They’re more likely to talk about a conflict with a friend or anxiety about grades. They talk about how difficult it is to keep up with their schedule or how much pressure they’re feeling.
As we get to know each other, something else frequently begins to emerge. Underneath the stress is a sense of disconnection from other people and sometimes from themselves.
Even in therapy, students sometimes initially give me the polished version of the story. They’re used to explaining themselves in ways that make sense and presenting a coherent narrative about who they are.
Part of my job is to gently nudge against that. I want the version that hasn’t been edited into a clean plotline.
Therapy Gives You Somewhere You Don’t Have to Build Your Résumé
I want the boarding school students I work with to pursue the things that matter to them. If getting into a particular college is important, we can talk about the pressure that comes with that goal and how to manage it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being ambitious or wanting to excel.
Therapy also gives students a place where none of those accomplishments are required.
You can explore an interest without deciding whether it belongs on an application. You can admit that something you’ve spent years pursuing doesn’t feel the way you expected. You can have conflicting feelings without having to resolve them into a better story.
Over time, students become more familiar with the unedited version of themselves. That makes it easier to recognize their own values and understand which goals genuinely matter to them.
It also changes their relationships. When you know yourself more fully, you have more of yourself available to share with another person. Connection becomes less dependent on maintaining the right version of yourself and starts to feel more genuine.
Boarding school students are already surrounded by people. What many of them are looking for is the experience of being known by them.
If you’re a boarding school student who recognizes this experience, or a parent whose teenager is struggling with loneliness, pressure, or feeling disconnected while away at school, you can learn more about therapy for boarding school students or schedule a consultation.
Dr. Erin Hopkins is a Clinical Psychologist and Therapist serving clients in Connecticut, and virtually in New York and PsyPact States. Prior to private practice, she worked in the counseling department at Choate Rosemary Hall.