About Integrative Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents
A psychotherapist working with children and adolescents must have specific additional education in order to apply appropriate therapeutic techniques tailored to the child’s bio-psycho-social stages of development, their difficulties, and their relationships with parents and the environment.
Therapeutic skills and expressive techniques are adapted to the child's developmental stages and individual needs, which also includes the careful selection of projective media. The therapist’s role in this process is highly complex. The therapist is responsible for creating a safe environment, setting boundaries, and maintaining the ethical integrity of the therapeutic process, while simultaneously bringing the child’s internal psychological processes and relationships with parents into the therapeutic relationship. The new relationships formed through therapy often become crucial for the child’s future relational patterns.
Specific challenges in child and adolescent psychotherapy arise from the child’s difficulties with motivation, limited capacity for retrospection, and challenges in understanding temporal perspective. In adolescents, an additional difficulty is their preoccupation with ego defenses against the therapist, which can make it harder to establish a therapeutic relationship.
Child and adolescent psychotherapy differs significantly from adult psychotherapy, particularly in terms of the therapist’s role, the relationship with parents, and collaboration with them. The success of therapy with children and adolescents largely depends on the quality of cooperation with parents, which directly influences the acceptance of the therapy itself.
The child and adolescent psychotherapy program is based on a developmental approach that integrates humanistic and integrative modalities, including psychoanalysis, systemic family therapy, gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, self-psychology, developmental theories, relational theories, and neuroscience.
The developmental perspective of the program is inspired by the works of prominent experts such as John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott, Daniel Stern, Allan Schore, Margaret Mahler, Melanie Klein, and others.
The program equips candidates with professional and academic competencies, with a particular focus on clinical skills, professional competence, personal development, supervision, and the capacity for multidisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. The program fully meets the criteria of good clinical practice, ensuring a high standard of education and research.
Core Philosophy of the Program
temelji se na:
The child-parent relationship, which is fundamental in shaping the internal psychological structure of the child and adolescent
The internal child structure, which influences relationships with the environment, often tending to repeat past experiences and contribute to the creation of life scripts and shame
The self, which is not an entity but a continuous process, socially, affectively, and relationally structured through relationships with parents and other significant figures, and shaped by social, economic, and cultural characteristics
Defenses through which children protect themselves from change, partly out of a sense of safety, attempting to maintain the current state
Resistance to emotions that originate from the past and emerge in the present context of the child's life, while also indicating potential therapeutic interventions
The basic rules of psychotherapeutic treatment, regardless of the foundational approaches, include:
A solid understanding of developmental stages
An understanding of family dynamics, which is essential as it shapes how the child perceives the world and themselves within it, with early experiences being carried over into all future relationships
Knowledge of other significant individuals in the child’s life
Understanding of protective and risk factors
Understanding of neuroscientific findings
Legal frameworks concerning the protection and well-being of children
