BLOG: From cooties to classes, cute couselor cures the Girl in the Glasses

Since I crossed the border from “Boys Have Cooties-ville” to “Hey He’s Kind of Cute Town,” I have fulfilled just about every young adult romantic comedy cliché I can think of.

Some of these instances resulted in relationships of varying duration, while others were nothing more than periods of wistful admiration from afar. I’ve fallen for the best friend, the hot guy that has no reason to acknowledge my existence, the neurotic intellectual and the close friend’s ex. Last semester, I added one more trope to the list: I developed a bit of a crush on my therapist.

After an unfortunate late-night incident this past January, which I now mentally refer to as “Baby’s First Panic Attack,” it was evident that I needed more immediate help with managing the huge life transition called college than frequent calls to my parents and then-boyfriend back home. I’d spent the first week after winter break depressed about leaving the comforts of home, terrified by my new semester schedule and lonely. After discussing the situation with an academic adviser, I found myself warily checking the hallway for witnesses before entering a small office on the second floor of the Delzell Education building where the student counseling center used to be located.

My skepticism was all-consuming; I had all but determined to dishonorably discharge myself from the whole university experience and return home to live forever as a pitiful invalid. Surely I was beyond the help of a psychology grad student. Just as I was considering the likelihood of an unnoticed escape from the small waiting room, the door opened and, to my great horror, a rather attractive man entered and introduced himself as my counselor.

As I’m sure is the case with a sizeable amount of decidedly introverted post-adolescent heterosexual females, I am much more comfortable with appreciating visually appealing, but otherwise unfamiliar, men from a distance. It is not my standard practice to entrust them with the details of my every flaw. Yet, in this particular case, it seemed my options were to either talk to this guy or try self-medicating with various illegal substances. I figured the former yielded the least negative side effects.

I won’t deny that the stigma of “going to therapy” played a part in my trepidation as well. However, the student counseling services available on campus are varied and, at least in my case, effective. As you can see on the student counseling services website, you can seek help with anything from substance abuse to self-esteem (or lack thereof). It’s both judgment and cost free, totally confidential and hugely helpful to both the grad students and their patients.

For instance, I learned to recognize some methods of coping with anxiety that I already used in daily life.  Believe it or not, one of my coping methods is finding humor in the situation. It was empowering to realize I was already able to deal with what I was feeling. I even made a little game out of trying to get my counselor to crack a smile at my snarky complaints about group projects. Truth be told, I was even a bit sad on our last meeting that last week of the spring semester — not because I felt unprepared to face the real world, but because it was strange to think that I wouldn’t see someone again after they’d helped me so much.

According to what my current roommate learned in her psych class, it’s not uncommon for patients to feel a certain amount of affection for their therapist and in a way, it makes sense.  Sharing such personal information with someone else feels a lot like bonding (and it doesn’t hurt when he looks like Cillian Murphy). But if I happened to run into my counselor today or, horror of horrors, if he happens to be reading this now, the one thing I’d want to say to him wouldn’t be “Call me, maybe.”  I’d want to say, “I’m doing a lot better this year.  I have a great group of new friends and I deal much better with stress. So thanks for all of your help. You’re going to make a great doctor someday.”