Specialist Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist
Dr Juraj Kralik
I am a Highly Specialist Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist with extensive experience of working with children, young people and their families, offering safe therapeutic space to process complex feelings and experiences. I had worked in various educational settings, including early years centres and a secondary EBD school, for over 10 years before qualifying as a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist. In my clinical training I had spent another six years observing and later offering treatments to very small children, even infants, but also to school-aged children and older adolescents in crisis. I have worked extensively with their parents and families.
To this day I work as part of a busy multidisciplinary team in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health service in south London.
All of this work experience and in-depth training have given me a real sense of developmental journey through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, which I now use to inform my way of working therapeutically with children and young people, understanding and addressing issues relevant to their age and stage of development.
I specialise in emotional development, for example separation anxiety and anger management. I work with children and young people who struggle to control and express their negative emotions in safe ways, helping them to identify various sources and triggers for their anxiety and emotional dysregulation, that way extending their range of emotional expressions beyond bodily ways, such as self-harm and violent risk-taking behaviour. This way of working therapeutically also deepens their emotional knowledge of themselves, allowing for further insight and growth in their ways of relating to others.
I offer treatments tailored to individual needs of children and young people as well as their families. I focus on helping all to sustain and benefit from mutual relationships. These treatments vary in length and depth of exploration depending on most present needs and difficulties.
My approach is exploratory but holding, imaginative but focused on the most pressing issues, always building on areas of strength already present. The aim is to create a stronger sense of the child or young person, within themselves but also for their family and wider community.
Qualifications and Professional Membership
Clinical doctorate in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy with IPCAPA/bpf and Anna Freud Centre/UCL.
Postgraduate Diploma in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies with Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust and University of East London.
I am a full member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP), British Psychotherapy Foundation (bpf), British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).