Personal Counselling

A confidential meeting between yourself and a professional counsellor. Often the purpose is to solve one or more problems or to give you information. You may discuss any issue you like.

The sessions are:

• Confidential: This means that the information revealed by you stays between you and the counsellor. Your professors and your family will not know about the sessions unless you choose to tell them.
• Free of charge to all students.
• Without obligation to continue: You do not have to come more than once but can come back if you feel it was helpful.
• Self-directed: The counsellor does not require you to talk about any particular issue but will help you try to decide what is most important.
• Label-free: You will not be labeled as the purpose of your visit is to solve a problem and not to burden you.

First Session Intake: After we take a bit of information about you the session begins with you telling the counsellor why you have come. Sometimes you'll give us some background to the issue or problem. The counsellor listens and clarifies. By the end some ideas on what you can do about the matter are discussed. If you feel the session was useful, you might make another appointment for the following week.

Subsequent Sessions: Counsellors like to know how the past week has been, what setbacks you encountered and progress you may have made. If further sessions are needed, trust usually deepens and the student often finds they are more able to speak frankly about themselves and their life circumstances. When this happens, there is often the opportunity for great positive change, though it does take time. The cornerstone of personal counselling is the feeling the student is experiencing and whether or not favourable change in their studies is being achieved.

• We encourage healthy independence, being yourself, self-confidence, honesty about who you are and how you feel;
• Courage to face the world and to take appropriate risks in order to grow and change;
• Expressing emotion (feelings) is preferable to repressing them;
• Choosing your own way in life instead of living by the standards of others;
• Self-discovery through self-disclosure.