When booking an initial consultation, please select the service according to the age of your child on the booking form. Child psychotherapy is for children from 6 to 8 years of age, adolescent psychotherapy is for adolescents from 12 years of age. Adolescent psychotherapy is governed by our standards for therapeutic treatment of minors.

Children and adolescents generally suffer from similar psychological problems as adults, but the approach to dealing with them is different. Adults have a greater capacity for introspection and self-reflection, that is, they can identify and describe their thoughts and feelings. Adolescent clients are usually not familiar with their emotions, which are surprising and even less bearable for them. They react impulsively to unpleasant psychological states. They have a natural tendency to resolve, drown out or run away from these states immediately. At the level of observable behaviour, this strategy manifests itself in various ways. The adolescent may begin to avoid all emotional, stressors. This manifests itself, for example, in social anxiety, avoidance of the collective and excessive fear of school.

Other times, the defence mechanism is escape into the virtual world, compensation for unbearable emotions by overeating or, on the contrary, restriction in eating, repeated self-harm, incomprehensible outbursts of aggression or substance abuse.

One of the immature defences (which, however, also occur in adulthood) is denial of emotional stress and its displacement from consciousness. If emotions and thoughts can be suppressed on a conscious level, the difficulties do not go away because our body still produces a constantly recurring physiological stress response. This leads to various unexplained physical complaints, the most common of which are excessive fatigue, sleep disturbances, headaches, back pain, immune and digestive disorders.

For children and adolescents, we clearly prefer intensive psychotherapy to medication. Many problems at this age are of a transient nature and it is only appropriate to start pharmacotherapy for the most severe problems. For example, with anxiety, we are able to achieve significant improvement with adolescents through modified psychotherapy and breathing strategy training using a virtual reality breathing sensor. In the treatment of psychological difficulties in children and adolescents, we successfully apply a special form of cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy and speech therapy.