I am David Smyth and this is me above. 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 suppose 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 recognised that I now had an oppotunity 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.
I am an Accredited Member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy and registered with the United Kingdom Register of Counsellors. It is an essential component of my Accreditation that I complete a programme of continuing professional development each year. I am also required to have firmly in place, arrangements for the supervision of my clinical practice.
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. I therefore began a programme of further training in child psychotherapy and play therapy. I am now a Certified Play Therapist following the successful completion of the Diploma in Practice-based Play Therapy.
Since 2000 I have had an interest in working with people who have been affected by adoption. In 2005, as a result of legislative changes in the provision of adoption services, I successfully applied for Registration as an Independent Adoption Support Agency. I am now registered through Barnardos. This involves working with people who have been adopted (whether children or adults) and others whose lives have been affected by adoption, perhaps through giving up a child for adoption. I am also asked periodically to help locate and establish contact with, an adoptee and his or her birth parent(s).
