Paul Smith-Pickard & Dr. Bernice Sorensen

Psychotherapy & Counselling in West Dorset

Paul Smith-Pickard MEd.,MA.dist.,UKCP.reg.

Paul is a Registered Existential Psychotherapist specialising in sexuality and relationship difficulties, drug and alcohol problems, trauma, bereavement, depression and stress, and general life crises. He also offers Therapeutic Life Coaching see TLC page.

To contact Paul in West Dorset ring: 01297 489216

or email click here


Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Paul offers individual and couple counselling and psychotherapy from an Existential perspective. He was recently Chair of the Society for Existential Analysis. click here to see their website.

Supervision.
Paul provides both individual and group existentially informed supervision, for practising therapists and students coming from a variety of therapeutic orientations. In-house supervision and group facilitation available for agencies and companies at commercial rates.

Training & Consultancy
I offer consultancy in course design, implementation and accreditation.

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Who I Am

Training and qualifications
An initial degree in Fine Art was followed by a post-graduate teaching certificate, before working as an art teacher in secondary education in Dorset. During this time I gained an M.Ed. in Art & Design Education from Sussex University. By the end of my ten-year career in art education I had become Head of Department in a large comprehensive school in my home county of Dorset. Divorce prompted me to come to London and I spent the next ten years as a designer before deciding to train as a counsellor.

I commenced training and working as a counsellor in 1992. In 1995 I received training in addiction and codependency counselling at the Meadows treatment center in Arizona.Two years later I began a master’s degree in existential psychotherapy and counselling at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling under professor Emmy van Deurzen graduating in 2000.I am currently enrolled on the doctoral program at the Metanoia Institute.

My first six years as a therapist were spent almost exclusively working in the addiction field gaining considerable experience of one to one counselling as well as group work and workshop facilitation. During the last two years of my MA at the New School I had a voluntary placement at the London Lighthouse working with clients with HIV and AIDS.I have worked as a counsellor and supervisor in Primary Care and as a psychotherapist in acute healthcare at King’s College Hospital in South London. I recently left this post in order to devote more time to my doctoral studies. I have been involved in teaching counselling and psychotherapy since 1994.

Existential Psychotherapy

Existential psychotherapy is about helping you to understand and make sense of your life and what is happening to you now. It’s about finding some sort of meaning for what is taking place in your life and making sense of your experience. It's also about realizing that you have choices about how you would like your life to be in the future and how you chose to remember your past.
I have found existential thought helpful for people coming to me with a wide range of issues including problems of sexuality and relationship, drug and alcohol problems, workplace difficulties and redundancy, trauma, depression and stress, and general life crises. People do not need to have a serious problem or difficulty to come to me for therapy. Some people come to assess where they are in their lives or to help them make a decision about the future. Others come in order to know themselves better.
Therapy is a joint venture between my client and myself. I am not here to advise or analyze or diagnose. I am here to create a safe environment or space where my clients can hear themselves and hopefully meet themselves, sometimes for the first time. A space where my clients can realise that they can choose to effect change in their life and their relationships.

Existential therapy is informed by existential philosophy. There are a wide range of existential philosophers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and there is no definitive therapy that can claim to be ‘the’ existential therapy. There are a number of internationally regarded practitioners such as Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinneli, Hans Cohn, Emmy van Deurzen, Alvin Mahrer and Eugene Gendlin, who have quite conflicting views of what existential therapy looks like. However there are some points of common ground such as: There is no fixed or essential self and that we are constantly in flux and create ourselves out of our own choices. That we live in a world that we share with others where we have to negotiate shared meanings as well as finding our own. We are responsible for our own lives and our choices. Life is a series of losses as well as gains. Bodily felt experience and emotion are just as valid as intellectual thought as they are always connected and cannot be separated.

If you are interested in any of the above please contact me by telephone, email, or write to me at the address below.

Transference as Existential Sexuality.
Society for Existential Analysis Talk from the Chair. 11 November 2005

'A series of recollections and images from a personal journey of actual events and Philosophical musings on both existential thought and various phenomenological attitudes....'If you would like a full copy of this talk please email me at psmithpickard@ukonline.co.uk

The Phenomenology of Encounter

My subject of interest is concerned with intersubjectivity and experiences that might be described as embodied inter-experience.

My question is whether it is possible to identify, in a meaningful way, a felt sense of the other’s, and our own, embodied presence within an encounter, an embodied narrative that links us to the other through our bodies, and runs alongside or independently of any spoken narrative. If such a phenomenon can be described, how could it be purposefully integrated into psychotherapeutic practice?

Publications

Smith-Pickard,P.(2001) Unravelling a Ball of String: relationships in the world of objects. in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis.12.2.

Smith-Pickard, P. Challenging Therapy - An existential perspective on the frame. In Luca,M. ed. (2004) The Therapeutic Frame in Context. Brunner-Routledge.

Smith-Pickard, P. & Swynnerton, R. The Body and Sexuality. in Van Deurzen, E. & Arnold-Baker, C. eds. (2005) Existential Perspectives on Human Issues. Palgrave.

Smith-Pickard, P. (2004) The Locus of Addiction in The Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis. 15.1

Smith-Pickard,P.(2006) ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Husserlian Heresy’ in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis.17.1. Jan 2006.

Smith-Pickard,P.(2006) ‘Transference as Existential Sexuality’ in Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis.17.2. July 2006.