Systemic/Family Psychotherapy

Systemic therapy is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on how an individual’s personal relationships, behavior patterns, and life choices are interconnected with the difficulties they face in their life. The concept stems from systems theory, which looks at how different parts of a system affect one another to maintain the stability and equilibrium of the whole system.

Miss Vicky Balomenou is a systemic psychotherapist, family and couple therapist. She is a member of the Resilient lives multidisciplinary team, where she provides family and couples therapy and family therapy groups. She is also the director of the Family Institute of Cyprus.

Miss Balomenou studied at the Democritus University of Thrace majoring in Social Work. She trained in Systemic Psychotherapy, Systemic Couples Therapy, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy, Group Therapy, Parental Counseling and Drug Addiction Counseling organized by ΚΕΘΕΑ in collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of San Diego. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Ioannina, researching the development of children’s mental resilience, through intervention in couples.

She worked at the Ark Therapeutic Program of ΚΕΘΕΑ in Greece and at the Agia Skepi therapeutic program as a therapeutic staff, as manager of the Family and Social Reintegration Program, and as manager of the Counseling Station which she created. She was also an external associate at the Family Guidance Center of the Welfare Office, and is a partner of the interdisciplinary team of the Rheumatology department of Areteio Hospital. She founded the Systemic Institute of Cyprus where she served as director and Scientific Officer. She developed educational programs for mental health professionals and therapeutic and preventive programs for children and adults. She founded the Center for Research and Systemic Applications of Cyprus. She was the scientific manager of the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Program “No one slips through the net of Cyprus”, implemented in collaboration with the Heidelberg University Clinic and the “Early intervention for young offenders and their families” program. She founded the Fairy Tale Museum and the Skill4kidz program, aiming at developing children’s mental resilience. She published two books.

Miss Balomenou is a member of the European Family Therapy Association, the National Psychotherapy Society of Greece and the Pancypriot Association of Psychotherapists, where she was vice president. She holds the European Certificate in Psychotherapy.

Speech Therapy

Speech therapy can help people who have difficulty speaking to communicate better and to break down the barriers that result from speech impediments. The goals of speech therapy include improving pronunciation, strengthening the muscles used in speech, and learning to speak correctly.

Dr. Kakia Peteinou is Professor and Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Cyprus University of Technology. She is also coordinator of the postgraduate program “Developmental Communication Disorders” at TEPAK. Dr. Peteinou holds a Bachelor (CUM LAUDE) and a Master (M.Ed) degree in Speech Therapy/Speech Pathology from the University of Georgia in the USA as well as a Doctorate (PhD) in Speech and Hearing Sciences from the City University of New York Graduate Center in the USA with specialization in developmental psycholinguistics. Her research interests focus on the language development of children with slow speech development and its relationship with chronic language delay (developmental language disorder, childhood verbal apraxia, phonological disorder, autism spectrum disorders). She is also involved in the study of early patterns of early typical and pathological language development as well as the development of language assessment tools for preschool and school age children. Since 2020 she is the president of the scientific committee of the Autism Spectrum of the International Association of Communication Disorders IALP. She is the director of the research laboratory http://theralab.cut.ac.cy/.

Training Facility

The Resilient Lives Centre also serves as a training facility for Phd Clinical Psychology Students. Our centre provides supervision and collaboration with the University of Cyprus and University of Utrecht in the Netherlands as part of the students’ clinical practice.