David Smyth

After a career spanning the National Health Service, King's College, Cambridge, and the Historic Royal Palaces Agency, I decided, at the age of 40 something, to change direction. This was facilitated by my very first experience of being made redundant. In the deeper recesses of my mind, I harboured a feeling that I wanted to become a psychotherapist. My inclinations in this direction had surfaced periodically in my earlier jobs but, suddenly without a job for the first time in my life, I recognized that I now had an opportunity to do something tangible about it.

In 1999, I qualified with the Diploma in Counselling from the University of East Anglia with a training firmly established in the Person-Centred Therapy tradition. Soon after completing my initial training, I set up my own practice and this has continued to grow from year to year.

Soon after obtaining my initial qualifications as a Person-Centred Therapist, I decided that I would like an opportunity to allocate part of my work to providing counselling therapy for children and young people I, therefore, began a programme of further training in child psychotherapy and play therapy. I am a Certified Play Therapist following the successful completion of the Diploma in Practice-based Play Therapy.