Ljubica Tasic Kennedy Interview Reveals Why Relationships Shape Who We Become

Ljubica's professional path brings together education, psychology, systemic family therapy and an ongoing exploration of emerging technologies. Ljubica holds a BA in Preschool Education from the University of Belgrade, completed additional studies in psychology and four years of specialist training in systemic family therapy, and holds the European Certificate of Psychotherapy (ECP).

Ljubica Tasic Kennedy, Systemic Family Therapist

What first drew you to systemic family therapy, and what keeps you engaged with this way of understanding people and relationships?

What first drew me to systemic family therapy was, in many ways, already present in my work in education. I have been working in education for 18 years, and throughout much of that time, I have been engaged in pedagogical counselling with families. These experiences gradually revealed to me just how deeply connected we are, not only to the people immediately around us, but also to the cultures, languages, stories, beliefs, and values within which we live.

As Lev Vygotsky observed, human beings are fundamentally relational and develop through interaction. Systemic family therapy, and systemic practice more broadly, speaks directly to this phenomenon: the reciprocal processes and dynamics between people and the contexts in which they live. No person exists or develops in isolation. Every interaction with our environment contributes to our experience and shapes the ways in which we engage in future relationships. At the same time, our actions also influence, transform, and reshape the environments and relationships around us.

Over time, through reading and exploring different bodies of literature, I encountered systemic family therapy as an approach that articulated something I had already begun to recognise through my professional experience. It therefore felt less like a departure into a new field and more like a natural evolutionary step in my professional development. It gave me a framework for understanding what I had been observing for years: that people are not simply individuals within systems, but active participants in reciprocal processes that continuously shape both themselves and the worlds they inhabit.

When someone comes to therapy with anxiety or burnout, what helps you see whether the struggle is personal or connected to the wider system around them?

I do not see personal and systemic factors as separate explanations for anxiety or burnout. Every difficulty is simultaneously personal and relational, embedded within the systems and contexts in which we live. These are not competing dimensions, but inseparable parts of the same experience.

Anxiety can be understood as a response to the circumstances and relationships through which we move. It may emerge when a person senses that the way they are currently organised, relating, or integrating within their environment is no longer sustainable and that some form of adaptation or change is required. This can happen during transitions within the family and individual life cycle, or in response to significant vertical stressors that enter a person’s or family’s life.

Individuals, families, and communities all move through recognisable developmental stages. Leaving the family of origin and entering independent life, becoming a parent, or transitioning to an empty nest are examples of life cycle transitions. At the same time, experiences such as the death of an older family member, moving to another city or country, divorce, or a significant change in employment can introduce major stressors that require a system to reorganise.

During these periods of change, both the individual and their surrounding relationships are required to adapt and renegotiate how they function together. Anxiety and burnout can therefore emerge at precisely these points of transition, when established ways of relating and coping no longer fit the circumstances.

In therapy, I explore the client’s context and, importantly, why these symptoms have emerged at this particular point in their life. We look at the relationships, expectations, beliefs, and narratives surrounding the difficulty and deconstruct those that are no longer useful to the client. At the same time, the client actively works on identifying and mobilising resources that can support adaptation to the challenges they are facing.

I see anxiety and burnout as experiences that can serve a function. Understanding what that function is and what the symptom may be communicating about the person’s relationship with themselves, others, and their wider context is often an important first step towards meaningful change.

What tends to surface in intercultural relationships that couples may initially mistake for a personality or communication problem?

Answer: In intercultural relationships, what initially appears to be a personality difference or communication problem is often a difference in meaning. Partners may use the same words, gestures, or expressions while attaching very different meanings to them.

Our ideas about independence, family loyalty, gender roles, parenting, privacy, hospitality, conflict, or financial responsibility are shaped by the cultural and family systems in which we grow up. A partner may therefore experience the other’s behaviour as controlling, distant, disrespectful, or overly dependent, while the other understands the same behaviour as caring, responsible, loyal, or appropriate.

This is why I work from a dialogical and collaborative perspective. I am interested in exploring the meanings partners give not only to words, but also to gestures, rituals, facial expressions, silences, and everyday interactions. Importantly, this process is not limited to intercultural couples. Even partners who share the same cultural background can inhabit very different relational worlds and attach different meanings to the same experience.

In intercultural relationships, however, these differences can become particularly visible. Migration, language, family traditions, religious or cultural narratives, and different expectations about relationships can all become part of the relational context.

Rather than deciding whose interpretation is correct, therapy creates space to become curious about how these meanings were constructed, what they represent for each partner, and how they influence their relationship. This can transform “Why don’t you understand me?” into “Help me understand what this means to you.” That shift can create space for negotiation, flexibility, and connection.

From your work in schools, what do adults often overlook about the relationship between student wellbeing, family dynamics, and the school environment?

One thing adults can easily overlook is that the challenges students face are not fundamentally different from those we, as adults, encounter throughout our own lives. We all move between multiple roles and relational contexts: as partners, parents, colleagues, friends, family members, and members of wider communities. Maintaining clear, healthy, yet sufficiently flexible boundaries between these contexts is not always easy.

For young people, however, this process is intensified by development itself. Adolescence involves ongoing developmental tasks and the gradual integration of a sense of self, while young people are simultaneously learning how to occupy increasingly complex social roles. They are moving between family, school, friendships, online spaces, and wider communities, each with its own expectations, rules, and meanings.

When a student becomes anxious, withdrawn, aggressive, or disengaged, adults can easily locate the difficulty within the young person: their motivation, personality, or emotional resilience. From a systemic perspective, I am interested in what is happening across the relational contexts around them. How are expectations communicated? Where do boundaries become unclear or rigid? Are the messages from family, school, and peers compatible, or is the young person navigating conflicting demands?

This is a question I am particularly engaged with through my work in education, youth and community settings, and my wider work with families. I believe wellbeing is supported when the systems around a young person can provide both connection and space for differentiation.

As artificial intelligence becomes part of everyday learning, what changes in young people’s relationships or development concern you most?

Change is an inherent part of human development, and every generation introduces changes that are not always immediately welcomed or understood by those who came before it. I am therefore cautious about viewing artificial intelligence simply as a threat. Young people have always developed within changing social and cultural contexts, and adaptation to change is part of how societies evolve.

What concerns me more is something potentially different about the context in which this generation is developing. Historically, when children and adolescents encountered new social, emotional, or developmental challenges, they could turn to adults who, even if they did not have all the answers, had some lived experience of the world they were navigating. Adults could provide an attachment relationship from which young people could explore, test ideas, regulate emotions, make mistakes, and gradually develop autonomy.

Today, an increasing part of that developmental environment is digital. Young people form attitudes, experiment with identities, enter relationships, and construct their understanding of themselves and others within a digital reality. Adults are now raising a generation in a rapidly evolving digital realm in which they themselves may have little developmental experience.

This creates a new form of cultural distance between generations. The concern is not simply what artificial intelligence might do to young people, but what happens to relationships when adults struggle to understand a significant part of the world in which young people are growing.

From a systemic perspective, the challenge is therefore to preserve the relationship between adults and young people as a space for dialogue, curiosity, and collaborative exploration, rather than allowing technological change to become another source of generational disconnection.

When someone feels chronically exhausted, what should they examine beyond their own habits and ability to cope?

I think it is important not to reduce chronic exhaustion to an individual’s habits, resilience, or ability to cope. Not every symptom should be given a psychological explanation. In therapy, I therefore always explore the wider context, including sleep, changes in circadian rhythm, physical symptoms, illness, caring responsibilities, financial difficulties, major life circumstances, and other factors that may be contributing to someone’s exhaustion.

We are whole beings. Our psychological experience cannot be separated from our bodies, relationships, responsibilities, and material circumstances. Chronic stress and burnout can also become pervasive and embodied, which makes it particularly important to recognise when someone may need medical assessment or another form of care alongside, or instead of, psychological support.

There is also a systemic dimension that I find important to explore. Sometimes people remain in patterns of chronic dysregulation or difficult relational dynamics because those patterns have become familiar. What is familiar is not necessarily healthy, but it can feel predictable and therefore difficult to change. A person may understand intellectually that something is not working while still finding it very difficult to reorganise their relationships, boundaries, responsibilities, or expectations.

At that point, I become interested not only in what is exhausting the person, but also in what is preventing change. What keeps the current pattern in place? What would changing it mean for their relationships and wider system? These questions can become an important part of the therapeutic work, while remaining attentive to the possibility that psychological, relational, physical, and contextual factors may all require consideration.

How can couples from different cultural backgrounds distinguish a genuine relationship conflict from expectations they have inherited from family or culture?

I do not think there is always a clear boundary between a “genuine” relationship conflict and a cultural difference. Cultural and family expectations can genuinely contribute to conflict because they shape what each partner believes a relationship should look like. The important question is what happens when those expectations meet the needs and values of the two people who are actually in the relationship.

In therapy, I would therefore explore what each partner understands the conflict to mean. Is this something that genuinely matters to both of them in their present relationship, or are they responding to an expectation they have inherited from their families, communities, or cultural narratives? Sometimes a partner is defending not only a personal preference, but an idea of what a “good daughter,” “good husband,” or “proper family” should be.

At the same time, cultural differences should not automatically be explained away. Couples may genuinely have different values or needs around parenting, family involvement, finances, autonomy, or belonging. These differences may require negotiation and sometimes difficult decisions about how they want to organise their life together.

The therapist’s role is not to decide whose cultural framework is correct. It is to create a space where both partners can examine the meanings they bring into the relationship and decide what they want to carry forward, what they want to adapt, and what they want to create together.

Every couple has a unique story, and that story deserves its own time to be told before we decide what the conflict is really about.

What does treating the client as the expert in their own life change about the therapeutic conversation?

Treating the client as the expert in their own life changes the therapeutic conversation from one in which the therapist provides answers to one in which knowledge is developed collaboratively. I may bring professional knowledge, therapeutic frameworks, and experience, but the client remains the person who knows their own history, relationships, meanings, and lived experience most intimately.

For me, an important part of this approach is returning ownership and competence to the client. Therapy should support people in making their own decisions and recognising their capacity to act, while also acknowledging the responsibility that comes with that agency. This can be deeply empowering because the client is no longer positioned primarily as someone who has a problem that an expert needs to solve.

There is also an important power dimension to this. Therapy inevitably contains an asymmetry: one person is often arriving in pain, uncertainty, or crisis and sharing deeply vulnerable parts of their life, while the other is listening from a position of professional expertise. If we are not attentive to this, the therapeutic relationship can unintentionally reinforce the idea that the therapist knows what is best for the client.

Giving competence back to the client helps rebalance that relationship. It also reminds us that therapists are not omnipotent and that therapy is not a panacea. We have knowledge, but we do not have access to the client’s truth outside the dialogue we create together.

For me, maintaining a grounded therapeutic position means knowing what I can offer, recognising what I cannot, and making enough space for the client to reclaim authorship of their own life.

What is one idea about relationships or wellbeing you hope people carry with them after reading this interview?

Perhaps the one idea I would most like people to carry with them is that we are fundamentally creatures of interaction. We shape the people and relationships around us, just as they shape us. This process is mutual and circular, and understanding it can help us move away from the simple causal and often blaming logic of “Who did this to whom?”

A systemic perspective offers a different way of understanding relationships. It allows us to look at patterns rather than assigning a single cause or a single person to blame. This does not mean giving up responsibility. Quite the opposite: it can help us see more clearly what is within our sphere of influence and responsibility and what belongs to other people or to circumstances beyond our control.

When we begin to recognise these relational processes, we can develop more meaningful relationships, understand ourselves with greater compassion, and perhaps heal from relationships that did not last without reducing them to failure or blame. We can also begin to reclaim our own experience and our capacity to decide how we want to participate in the relationships that shape our lives.

Ultimately, I find this way of thinking deeply humanistic. It allows us to see people not as isolated individuals with fixed characteristics or problems, but as complex human beings continuously developing through their relationships and contexts. For me, that creates more room for responsibility, compassion, curiosity, and change.

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