Therapy for College & Graduate Students in Durham, NC
I offer therapy to college and graduate students in Durham and online throughout North Carolina.
Academic life promises a life of the mind. It also involves deadlines, evaluations, uncertain futures, difficult hierarchies, and the unnerving discovery that intellectual ability does not confer immunity from being human.
A person can spend the day thinking seriously about complexity and still feel ashamed of not knowing what to do next. An unanswered email can alter the week. A disappointing grade, stalled experiment, or difficult conversation with an adviser can seem to expose something larger than the event itself.
Therapy offers a place where these experiences do not have to be made either more intellectual or less important than they are.
Therapy for College Students
College is often described as a time of freedom. Freedom, however, can be disorienting.
The structures of home loosen before new ones have fully formed. You may be deciding how to use your time, whom to trust, what you believe, how you want to be known, and which parts of yourself can enter the life you are making.
There are classes and requirements, but also roommates, friendships, sex, family expectations, money, loneliness, and the complicated experience of becoming more separate from people on whom you may still depend.
You may have arrived accustomed to excelling and encountered work that no longer yields to effort in the familiar way. Or you may be doing well while privately anxious that everyone else possesses some ease, confidence, or instruction manual that you missed.
For students whose identities have been marginalized, college can offer new forms of recognition while also making questions of race, culture, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or belonging newly vivid. Being welcomed in principle is not always the same as feeling at home.
Therapy can help with anxiety, depression, relationships, grief, family conflict, identity, and academic pressure. It can also be somewhere to gather the week, hear yourself think, and become more curious about the person taking shape amid all this education.
Therapy for Graduate Students
Graduate school has a peculiar way of making work both limitless and personal. There is always another article to read, paragraph to revise, experiment to run, language to master, or qualification not yet acquired.
A dissertation can occupy years of life while remaining, on any given afternoon, stubbornly unwilling to become a paragraph.
The pressures extend beyond the work itself. Funding may be uncertain. Advisers hold considerable influence over opportunities and futures. Departmental politics can be consequential while remaining difficult to name openly. Friends outside the university may not understand why you cannot simply finish, while colleagues appear to be advancing with suspicious composure.
Graduate students often live in two times at once: the immediate demands of teaching, research, clinical work, or writing, and the deferred life that is supposed to begin after the degree. Relationships, family plans, money, health, and ordinary pleasure are asked to wait patiently. They are not always patient.
Therapy can make room for the anxiety, isolation, perfectionism, stalled work, ambivalence, and questions of meaning that graduate education can intensify. It can also help separate the actual problem before you from the much harsher story about what that problem supposedly reveals about you.
When Academic Pressure Becomes Personal
Academic environments make evaluation ordinary. Grades, admissions, fellowships, comprehensive exams, publications, teaching evaluations, and job searches all translate complex work into judgments. It can become difficult not to experience those judgments as verdicts on the self.
Achievement may carry older meanings. It may have secured approval, belonging, safety, mobility, or a place in the family story. The wish to succeed may be deeply your own while also carrying expectations that took up residence inside you long before college or graduate school.
Therapy gives us room to examine these meanings without reducing ambition to pathology or treating every difficulty as an efficiency problem.
For a fuller discussion of perfectionism, evaluation, and the meanings achievement can carry, you can read about my work with academics and researchers.
How I Work
Before entering private practice, I worked in university counseling centers at Harvard University, Lesley University, and Elon University, and I continue to see students from Duke, UNC–Chapel Hill, NC State, and other colleges and universities across the Triangle and throughout North Carolina.
My approach is depth-oriented and practical. We may look closely at procrastination, sleep, panic before an exam or presentation, a difficult exchange with an adviser, or the habits that make it impossible to stop working.
Cognitive behavioral and mindfulness approaches can offer useful ways to interrupt spirals, work with attention, and distinguish urgency from thought. We may also follow what runs underneath: the private meaning of competence, the relationship between achievement and belonging, or the question of who you might be if the next accomplishment did not provide the answer.
Therapy need not become another performance review. You are allowed to arrive unfinished, contradictory, discouraged, curious, or unsure what the important question is.
Begin Therapy
You do not need to wait until you are failing, leaving, or unable to continue.
We can begin with the assignment you cannot start, the email you keep rereading, the future that has become difficult to imagine, or the part of your life no syllabus or program has made room for.
Serving Durham · Chapel Hill · Raleigh · Hillsborough · Online across North Carolina
