About

I am 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 recognised 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 develop and mature.

I am an Accredited Member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy registered with the United Kingdom Register of Counsellors. It is an essential component of my membership 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.

Upon gaining my initial qualification as a Person-Centred Therapist, I decided to allocate part of my work to providing counselling therapy for children and young people. I undertook further training in child psychotherapy and play therapy to complete the Diploma in Practice-based Play Therapy (2007).

February 2013 saw my first book Person-Centred Therapy with Children and Young People published by Sage Publications, London. Read some reviews HERE. I am now looking at a shortlist of ideas for a further book I plan to start in early 2020.