Student Counselling
For most people, being a student is one of the best stretches of life. The freedom, the campus, the ideas, new friends, a social life that is finally your own — very nearly everything you looked forward to while you were still at school.
What nobody quite anticipates is the rest of it. It is also the first time living away from home, the first time nobody is checking, the first serious relationships and the first real struggles, possibly even failures — all of it at once, in public, among people who seem to be managing perfectly well.
I have worked with university and college students in Stellenbosch for over fifteen years.
What students come to me with
In no particular order, and often several at once:
- Procrastination — and the shame and avoidance that grow around it
- Exam anxiety, everything that comes with the weeks before, and the distress after a failed paper
- Study methods that worked at school and do not work now
- Weed, alcohol and other substances
- Online gambling — increasingly common, and rarely mentioned until late
- Relationship struggles, and romantic breakups
- Self-esteem, appearance insecurities, and the fear of rejection
- Social media — the pressure, and the comparisons
- Feeling that you don't fit in, that everyone else arrived knowing how to do this
- The high-achieving environment — surrounded by success and still feeling inadequate
- Difficulty with parental relationships
- Money — running out of it, and making an allowance last
There are more, and if your reason isn't on that list, it makes it no less valid. The list is only there so you can see that none of it is unusual.
A place to check in, for as long as you are studying
Not everyone who comes needs a course of therapy. A good many students use me as a fixed point: somewhere to check in when it is needed, over the whole three or four years.
Some come weekly for the length of a degree. Others come twice in a semester, or once when something happens, and then not again for months. Both are normal, and neither requires a decision in advance.
Parents often want this in place for their children — a familiar person their student can go to if things get difficult, without an emergency having to happen first.
What it usually becomes
The relationship changes over time. It starts as counselling, and as the years go by it often becomes something harder to name — part therapist, part mentor, part coach, depending on what is needed that term.
Many of these last the whole of a degree. Some carry on well beyond it: people who come back at the next crossroads, or who simply want to tell me what happened next.
That is something I value very much. Being trusted with the harder parts of someone's twenties, and then getting to see what they do with their life, is among the best things about this work.
Every February, twenty minutes
At the start of each academic year I keep time open for students to come and meet me for about twenty minutes, at my practice. No charge, no obligation, and no need to have a problem.
The reason is simple: it is far easier to ask for help from someone you have already met. If a hard week arrives in May, you are not starting from scratch with a stranger.
What you say here stays here
Someone else may well be paying. What you bring is still yours.
I don't report back on sessions, and I don't discuss what is said with anyone without your agreement. In my experience parents are entirely comfortable with this — most of them want their children to have their own space, with their own person, precisely because it is private.
In the end we all want the same thing — you, your parents and I — which is for you to grow intellectually and socially, to be healthy, and to feel equipped for a full life ahead.
The limits are the usual ones, and they are set out on the FAQ page.
The practical two: money and time
Most of what students bring is emotional. Two things are not, and they come up constantly.
Money. Running out halfway through the month, an allowance that never quite stretches, debt that started quietly. These are seldom only about arithmetic — but they are also genuinely about arithmetic, and that part can be sorted out. I am not a financial adviser, but my first degree is a B Comm, and where it helps we sit down with the actual numbers: what is coming in, what is going out, and what to do about the gap. People are often surprised how much lighter it feels on paper rather than circling at two in the morning.
Time. Either there is never enough of it, or there is plenty and it disappears anyway. We can build a structure that fits the way you actually work — a weekly schedule, a plan for the term, a way of breaking work into pieces small enough to start. Procrastination is usually somewhere in it, and it is almost never about laziness.
Where gambling is part of the money side, there is more on the online gambling page.
Related
Much of what students bring has its own page: anxiety and stress, self-worth and self-esteem, loneliness, alcohol and substances, and online gambling. School-age scholars are covered under help for youth at risk.
Practical details
Sessions are fifty minutes, in person at my practice in Stellenbosch or online by Zoom, in English or Afrikaans. Online works well when you are home for the holidays, or writing from somewhere else.
Fees and other practical questions are answered on the FAQ page.
Getting in touch
Send me a message by email, WhatsApp or the contact form. Students usually write themselves; parents sometimes write first. Either is fine.
You don't need to find the right words, and it doesn't have to feel serious enough first.
If it is urgent, please say so in your message. I want to know, and I will reply as promptly as I can. The helplines below are only for an immediate crisis, until I can get back to you, if another therapist isn't available:
- Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0800 567 567 — toll-free, 24 hours
- Emergency services: 112 from a mobile phone, or 10177 for an ambulance