24/10/2026
Day 2 | 16th Congress of Psychotherapists of Serbia | Belgrade 🇷🇸
Psychotherapy and Loneliness: Exploring Connection, Identity, and Belonging
Yesterday was another meaningful day of professional exchange, learning, and reflection, bringing together different psychotherapeutic perspectives on loneliness and the complexity of human relationships.
The workshops and lectures explored important themes, including Jungian psychodrama and the role of myths in understanding loneliness, transactional analysis and life scripts, the challenges of romantic relationships in an increasingly technological world, regret and decision-making, and the psychological dimensions of loneliness in migration.
Although approached from different theoretical and clinical perspectives, these topics share a fundamental concern: how we experience connection, how we develop a sense of belonging, and what happens when meaningful relationships become difficult to establish or maintain.
I also had the pleasure of facilitating my workshop, “Transgenerational Patterns and Loneliness: From Inherited Isolation to Belonging.”
Together, we explored how experiences of loneliness, separation, exclusion, and belonging may be transmitted across generations, influencing our relationships, identities, and ways of connecting with others. We reflected on family histories, inherited relational patterns, and the possibilities of transforming these experiences into new forms of connection and belonging.
One of the most important reflections I take from this congress is the need to give loneliness greater attention within psychotherapy, clinical practice, professional training, and research.
Loneliness is not simply the absence of people or relationships. It is a complex, subjective, and deeply human experience that can emerge even in the presence of others. It may be connected to attachment, identity, loss, migration, family histories, life transitions, and the experience of not feeling seen, understood, or emotionally connected.
As psychotherapists, we encounter loneliness in many forms, sometimes explicitly expressed, sometimes hidden behind other difficulties, symptoms, or relational patterns.
This is why talking about loneliness matters.
We need to recognize it, explore its different dimensions, and make room for it in our therapeutic work. Not only as an individual experience, but also as a relational, systemic, intergenerational, and social phenomenon.
The diversity of workshops and lectures reminded me how valuable it is to approach loneliness through different psychotherapeutic perspectives, while remaining attentive to the individual experience of each person.
Loneliness deserves a more visible place in our professional conversations, our research, and our clinical practice.
It is a subject that deserves sustained attention, and I will return to it in future reflections, particularly to discuss why understanding and addressing loneliness is increasingly important in contemporary psychotherapy.
Beyond the scientific programme, these days have also been about professional dialogue, shared curiosity, and meaningful human encounters.
Perhaps one of the most important things we can do when speaking about loneliness is to create spaces where connection and belonging can actually be experienced.
