During my junior year in college, I found myself in group therapy. Each Monday, my group met with two staff members from the on-campus counseling center. They would guide us through breathing exercises before we dove into conversation. Surprisingly, Mondays became my favorite day. But it wasn’t so easy to get to this point. Neither was taking care of my own well-being.
Prior to participating in group therapy, no one knew that I frequented the counseling center, except for one professor and a handful of close friends. A huge stigma existed on my college campus, and frankly most campuses around the country, that there is weakness in asking for help.
At my university, there was an assumption that my peers and I were high achieving, exemplary students. During my freshman year, I was in a study group with students from my introductory economics course when I realized I just wasn’t going to understand core concepts, no matter how hard I tried or how long I studied. Everyone else in my group expressed that the material was easy to them. It was then that I jokingly asked if they were all valedictorians in high school with perfect SAT scores. No one laughed – their silence confirmed it all. I felt ashamed that I had neither attached to my name. I felt like a fraud for getting into such a challenging school.
