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Therapy helped my daughter adjust to college—and to being a grown-up!
My daughter went away to college in Sept. ‘99. Her phone calls home during those first couple of months led my husband and me to think that everything was going great for her and that she was adjusting well to school and to being 3,000 miles away from home. She told us she was making friends, how much she liked her classes, and that she was really glad she’d chosen that school to go to.
We were totally unprepared for what happened when she came home for winter break. She’d lost so much weight that she was practically just skin and bones (she’d never been one of those girls who went on crazy diets), and it seemed like the whole time she was home she just stayed in her room, sleeping sometimes until 1:00 in the afternoon, crying at the least little thing, and not really even talking to her old friends when they called or dropped by. My husband and I didn’t know what to do. When either of us tried talking to her about what was going on, she’d just say she was fine, that she was not a kid anymore, and that she was “perfectly capable of taking care of herself.” As scared as we were to see her in such a bad way at home, we were even more scared about what could happen when she was far away at school and we weren’t there to help her.
That January, about 2 weeks after she left and went back to school, she called to tell us she’d talked to a therapist recommended by one of her school advisors and that she wanted to keep having appointments with her. I couldn’t have been more relieved—or more proud of my daughter for being smart enough to ask for help! And really, from that time on she just got better and better. When she came home last summer she was her old self again—actually better than her old self. I guess she was right, she really isn’t a little kid anymore and she really is perfectly capable of taking care of herself (with a little help)!
--Kay
Bethesda, Maryland
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