Taylor’s Counseling Center is winding down three of its therapy groups after low turnout.
Four groups were originally planned: Navigating Love and Conflict, Passport to Wellness, Gather and Grow and Building Better Balance, Chad Hofstetter, a Taylor counselor, said.
Navigating Love and Conflict, for instance, only had two attendees, while Passport to Wellness had none.
Building Better Balance will remain, with three or four attendees. It meets Mondays at 2 p.m.
The goal of the group is to help college students adjust to adulthood, Hofstetter said.
“Especially for freshmen coming in, life’s very different, right?” Hofstetter said. “You’re asked to do a lot more adulting type things than most people are, and so we like to try to think about things that are helpful to students where they are in their stage of life.”
The Counseling Center is also launching an impromptu group focused on coping with anxiety.
The group’s objective is to teach students what anxiety is — a fear of the unknown — and to diminish its severity, Hofstetter said.They meet on Wednesdays at 3 p.m.
Therapy groups differ from traditional counseling in many ways, Hofstetter said.
“The way that a group is set up is more psychoeducation than processing,” Hofstetter said. “In group counseling, oftentimes people find it even more difficult, but what they do get out of it is a sense of not being alone, a recognition of their own normalcy.”
Students often find it easier to open up about their own experiences after they realize other students are going through the same thing, Hofstetter said.
Students may then transition into individual counseling if they feel they need it, he said.
The idea of group therapy arose from seeing the success of other campus-wide groups, such as PAX, and the influx of new counselors.
“We try to implement new ideas as new counselors come in,” Hofstetter said, “and they oftentimes have new ideas, new experiences compared to what we’ve been doing, and we try to implement those as well.”
One of those new ideas was the Passport to Wellness group, intended for international students. The group was started after discussions with the Office for Intercultural Programming (OIP). It is aimed at giving students the skills necessary to live in another country.
The group was put on pause due to low turnout, Charisse Salade, Taylor counselor and group leader, said.
The students who participated in these groups enjoyed and benefited from them, Bree Brunn, a sophomore biology major and member of the Counseling Center’s first therapy group, said.
“It was focused on anxiety, like clinical anxiety and emotions of anxiety,” Brunn said. “We would talk about our days, our highs, lows, then we would discuss new exercises and just kind of talk about what we were going through.”
Other students led the discussion, she said. One student was getting their bachelor’s degree. Another was studying for their doctorate in neuroscience.
She appreciated the group’s community, remaining friends with participants after the group ended.
“It was really nice to be able to sit there and realize, you know, you’re not alone,” Brunn said. “It sounds cheesy, but it’s a very real struggle in this and just in general.”
Brunn continues to use many of the skills she learned in the class, such as breathing and grounding techniques. While she felt they were of little use at the beginning, the act of doing them in community helped her become more comfortable with the techniques.
Both Brunn and Hofstetter acknowledged the importance of mental health for Gen Z, and praised the Counseling Center’s efforts in the field.
“I think Taylor does an overall pretty good job of trying to provide resources to help with that,” Brunn said. “I mean we have PAX here. It’s not just the running group. They also host other events too, but it’s by and large running.”
Hofstetter agreed. The societal change Gen Z has faced, especially the COVID pandemic, has caused unique problems for Gen Z, he said.
Despite the stigma around receiving counseling, the Counseling Center hopes to be a welcoming place on campus, Hofstetter said.
“We go out of our way to make the Counseling Center as safe a place as possible,” Hofstetter said. “You know, a place where students can feel safe, where they can heal, where they can better understand whatever it is that they’re struggling with. Our goal is to help them achieve what they came to Taylor for, which is to be a functional student and to meet their own goals and expectations. And we want to do what we can to help them with that.”
