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Students come to the Positive Living team with a wide range of issues
including: low mood, stress, relationship difficulties,anxieties and fears,
dealing with loss or change, homesickness, feeling lonely, personal growth
and many others beside.
>> DUNCAN: It's completely normal to feel stressed out from time to time. It
happens to us all, and particularly when we're at university.
This is somewhere where you can come and talk about anything, safe in the
knowledge that it's not going to be shared.
>> NATASHA: I felt like I was just drowning in uni work. I felt 'everybody
can do this, and I can't'. I kinda needed somebody to talk to.
>> CLAIRE: Myself and Natasha met for six sessions in total, so we had a
weekly appointment of 50 minutes.
>> NATASHA: Talking to somebody you don't know is so much easier. They're
there to listen to you. They're there to help you.
>> CLAIRE: A big part of what we do is just help students break down
something that feels like lots of big, big problems into small chunks that
feel more manageable.
>> NATASHA: There's just so many ways of dealing with what's going on in
your head that it becomes so easy.
>> CLAIRE: When Natasha left counselling she was a lot less self critical of
herself and because of that she could actually give herself credit for
things she was doing well, and that really helped her feel like she could
cope, even when things do go wrong.
>> NATASHA: I don't know how I would've got on at uni without it, to be
honest. Just having someone to talk to. It just got me through uni, I think,
to be honest.
>> CAROLINE: Once a student has made contact with the counselling service,
they're offered an assessment or an intake appointment, which isn't a
counselling session, it's really a chance for them to come in. They meet
with a therapist and it's really brief. It's always up to the student to
decide: how long I continue with this. Is it helpful?
>> DUNCAN: We offer individual counselling and we also offer counselling in
a group setting. Group work's a great way to work with people and the
benefits are: it can be really reassuring for people to understand
that they're not the only person experiencing whatever difficulty it might
be.There's something really powerful about that, when people come together
in a group and share their experiences. So it can have a normalising effect,
and a sense of feeling:'I'm not the only person in this position'.
>> DAVID: The thought of actually sort of sharing intimate things with
complete strangers seems anathema to most people, and it did to me, but I
was actually really surprised how much benefit I got from it.
A lot of people, including myself, were speaking about things that we'd
never spoken to anyone about before. There just seemed to be a sense of
shared camaraderie.
>> CAROLINE: Students have said to me that creating a safe space with others
and a space in which they feel that they can actually share. They've
commented to me frequently that that doesn't happen a lot. It can be a
unique experience for them.
>> DUNCAN: We see a big difference in students before and after they've been
through the counselling process. And it might just be making sense of things
and people feeling better prepared, and better able to fully engage with
university life, and life in general.