ROOT to Present Professional Community Model at Belgrade Psychotherapy Congress
Belgrade, Serbia – October 2026 – ROOT, a regional systemic psychotherapy community founded by four therapists working across Serbia and Croatia, will present its work at the Belgrade Psychotherapy Congress, held from October 22 to 25, 2026. The presentation, ROOT: Creating Community as an Intervention Against Professional Loneliness, explores whether the deliberate creation and maintenance of professional relationships can itself become a systemic response to professional isolation.
“A therapist can have colleagues, professional contacts, clients, supervision, and an active social life, and still experience a lack of meaningful professional connection. Professional connection does not necessarily have to take the form of formal support or intervention. This recognition was one of the starting points from which ROOT developed.” – Ljubica T. Kennedy
ROOT began not as an organizational project, but as a relationship. Its four members first met during their systemic psychotherapy training, continued their professional connection and eventually established ROOT as a professional community. Today, the members live and work across different regions of Serbia and Croatia. There is one detail central to ROOT’s story: we physically meet perhaps once or twice a year. Everything else has been built and sustained online. For years, we have developed consistent professional relationships without sharing an office, a city, or a daily physical environment. We did not become a community because geographical proximity made connection inevitable. We became one because we deliberately maintained the relationship.
This experience led ROOT to consider professional loneliness from a systemic perspective. Loneliness is not simply being alone, nor is it synonymous with depression or objective social isolation. For therapists, this distinction is particularly relevant. Psychotherapy is fundamentally relational, yet the therapist’s own professional environment can be surprisingly solitary. The relational intensity of working with clients does not necessarily translate into a relationally rich professional environment for the therapist.
ROOT’s geographical distance has made this question particularly visible. Its members do not work in the same city or share an office, yet technology has played an important role in sustaining their ongoing professional relationship without relying on conferences, training, supervision meetings, or travel. Technology became a powerful facilitator of professional connection. It made relationships more accessible and therefore more sustainable, but it also created an unexpected strength: distance became a powerful resource. Each member works within different professional, social, and cultural contexts, bringing perspectives that can challenge assumptions that might otherwise remain unnoticed. From a systemic perspective, difference is not noise to be eliminated. It is information. ROOT therefore serves not only as a space for support, but also as a space for questioning assumptions, introducing alternative meanings, and broadening the context in which professional experiences are understood.
The model is also grounded in the realities of professional life. Time, geography, money, and everyday responsibilities shape the relationships that can actually be maintained. For ROOT, accessibility is therefore part of relational quality.
“We are not trying to treat the lonely therapist,” says Ljubica T. Kennedy, systemic family therapist and ROOT member. “We are interested in creating a professional system in which meaningful connection is easier to access and sustain.”
At the Belgrade Psychotherapy Congress, ROOT will present this model as an ongoing professional and systemic experiment: what becomes possible when a professional relationship is deliberately sustained across geographical distance and gradually develops into a community? For ROOT, the answer begins with a simple systemic premise: relationships do not merely exist within systems. Relationships help create the systems in which we subsequently live and work.
ROOT began with four therapists creating a relationship. Its ongoing question is what becomes possible when that relationship becomes a community.
About ROOT
ROOT, or rootherapy, is a regional systemic psychotherapy community founded by four therapists who first met during their professional training. The community connects practitioners working across Serbia and Croatia through ongoing professional exchange, collaboration, supervision, and shared systemic practice. ROOT develops its work around the belief that professional relationships and communities can be intentionally created and sustained across geographical and organizational boundaries.
Media contact
Ljubica T. Kennedy
Systemic Family Therapist
