Zuzana Antalikova

Zuzana Antalikova is a qualified, BACP – registered Integrative Counsellor. She works in private practice at The Awareness Centre in Tooting.

Zuzana has experience working with a range of mental health difficulties, including depression, anxiety, panic attacks, guilt & shame, low self-esteem, and issues related to work, career and relationships. She has also volunteered for a crisis-intervention service, where she regularly engaged in conversations about trauma, suicide, self-harm, risk and abuse. Her special interest lies in cross-cultural issues and concepts of identity.

Zuzana`s career background in health & food safety has always revolved around her passion for supporting the wellbeing of others. Throughout her 17 years in management positions within the dynamic and multicultural hospitality industry, she has encountered a vast number of people with diverse identities, backgrounds and life stories. This experience, along with her personal journey as a multicultural therapy client, only deepened her growing interest and fascination with the complexities of our shared human experience. This eventually led her to train as a therapist and pursue a career in mental health.

As for her approach, Zuzana`s primary hope in therapy is to create and maintain a safe, confidential space for her clients to bring anything that is on their mind. She believe that building a trusting relationship where clients feel truly seen, heard and accepted is the key to any desired change, regardless of the duration of therapy. Her main therapeutic stance is rooted in person-centered model, which views each client as the expert on their own life, as nobody else really knows what it is like to be ‘You’. With this in mind, compassion, empathy and genuine curiosity in each client as an individual are fundamental to her practice.

Being an integratively-trained therapist, Zuzana also blends various therapeutic modalities to suit everyone’s specific needs, particularly drawing from the psychodynamic, existential and solution-focused approaches. She believes that our early life experiences, significant relationships, and unconscious processes continuously shape our current sense of self and how we navigate the world. Exploring the past and making sense this way of what is going on ‘here and now’ is something she always encourages with her clients.