Sara Bicknell BA(Hons), MA, Dip Psych, UKCP
Counselling & Psychotherapy in the Bath area

About Myself

I live on the edge of Bath with my husband and family. I am the mother of 3 and have been a mother for 30 years. I grew up in Australia and have lived in Italy for several years and am a fluent Italian speaker. I have been a psychotherapist for the last 23 years and after a recent 18 month sabbatical, during which I walked the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, I undertook further training in Family Constellations and returned to practice in September 2016. Prior to becoming a psychotherapist I was, amongst other things, an English language teacher. I came to psychotherapy through my own difficult journey of relationship break-up with the ending of my first marriage. Therapy made such a profound difference to how I approached my situation and the way I saw myself and my life that I knew I had found my vocation and began training in 1995 to become a psychotherapist. Subsequent training in couples therapy kindled a passion in me for working with couples and this has been my main focus since 2007.
I am committed to enabling people to find greater peace within themselves and to make choices that enable them to lead rich, fulfilling and meaningful lives creating satisfying relationships for themselves.

"Ultimately we have just one moral duty to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us the more peace there will be in our troubled world."
Etty Hillesum

Qualifications
I trained at the Institute of Psychosynthesis in London and am an accredited member of UKCP and a member of BACP.(The 2 principal organisations representing counsellors and psychotherapists in the UK)
I hold an MA in Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy and a BA 1st Class Joint Honours in History of Art and Italian.
In 2007 I completed a further years training specialising in working with couples at The Centre for Relational Couples Therapy..
During my sabbatical break I have done further training in Family Constellations and begun a 3 year training in Astrology from a psychological perspective which I am pursuing.
I am an accredited Feeding Your Demons practitioner as taught by Lama Tsultrim Allione, based on an ancient Tibetan Buddhist shamanic practice for resolving inner conflict.
I subscribe to the BACP (British Assosciation for counselling and Psychotherapy) ethical framework for good practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy and am bound by the ethical code of my training organisation (IPS)
I am in regular supervision for both my individual work and my work with couples.


What is the therapy?
I am trained in Psychosynthesis, a school of psychotherapy that recognises that just as our childhood is affecting our present living so too is our vast human potential for healing and change. We are not just products of our conditioning and slaves to our histories but also aspire to qualities of generosity, beauty and compassion for others. Indeed repression of this higher potential and longing for something greater (what Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis in Italy, called Repression of the Sublime) can lead to psychological disturbances, just as debilitating as repression of childhood trauma. Psychosynthesis emphasises both the depths and heights of human experience.
"There is a crack, a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in"
Leonard Cohen