Stephen Fitzpatrick
Living in transitional times
Living an ordinary human life is challenging enough at the best of times, but ours is exceptional, marked by economic instability and geopolitical conflicts, pandemics, the escalating cost of living, wealth inequality, and of course, climate change, so that the everyday challenges of living, loving and finding meaningful work, can feel insurmountable and overwhelming.
Psychotherapy for our time
I have experience of working work therapeutically in the NHS and private practice with individuals, groups and organisations with complex emotional and relational needs. I work with the transformational methods of Role Analytical Psychodrama to help clients rediscover their capacity for living creatively and spontaneously in the moment, even in such extraordinary and uncertain times as these.
Self-Leadership Lab Group Program
In addition to offering psychotherapy at the Practice, I lead and facilitate the Self-Leadership Lab, an experiential self-development group using insights, tools and techniques from role-analytical psychodrama, cognitive neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology. The group convenes weekly in North London and is intended for those wishing to develop their full potential, and thereby transform their personal and professional lives. Click here for more information.
My therapeutic training and professional background
I am a UKCP registered honorary psychotherapist at Lambeth’s Secondary Care Psychological Therapies unit (part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) working with patients diagnosed as ‘personality disordered’. I am a board member of British Psychodrama Association and a Senior Trainee in the Individual and Group Psychotherapy Training program at the London Centre for Psychodrama.
In addition, I draw on three decades of training in non-western psychospiritual healing modalities including seven years of intensive mind and intuition training with a Naqshbandi Sufi order and two decades of working with teachers in the Taoist and Zen traditions.
Until recently I was Head of Culture and Wellbeing at Urgentem, an award-winning climate-risk firm in the City of London and have a background in climate and social justice campaigning with Greenpeace, WWF and Oxfam as well as working on social innovation and climate-related projects with banks and asset management firms such as HSBC, Schroders, Blackrock, M ‘n’ G and Eden Tree.
My approach
I practice a trauma-informed approach which facilitates deep and lasting change by safely releasing and resolving past traumas of hurt and betrayal. Role Analytical Psychodrama doesn’t just focus on the past though – it’s an approach that comes with a powerful and flexible toolkit for responding to present challenges and experimenting with future possibilities as well.
This means that I will not simply nod along and passively repeat back what you have said to me. Time is precious and so I’ll try, in each session, to be proactive and “get in there,” providing you with both support and challenge as well as guidance and concrete ideas to help you to change, so that leave with fresh perspectives and new ways of being that can be put into practice outside the consulting room.
A science-aligned way of working
This creative and experiential way of working is congruent with the findings of contemporary neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology about the way that experience changes the brain and nervous system, closing the gap between thinking and doing, so that your natural spontaneity and strengths can (re)emerge.
The eminent psychiatrist, bestselling author and trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk has championed psychodramatic methods for healing of early attachment injuries by providing corrective emotional experiences that lay down new memories of safety, belonging and being cherished.
Whether our focus is past, present or future experience, change is achieved by ‘externalising’ or ‘out-picturing’ your internal world and relationships with others into three-dimensional space in order to activate your innate somatic intelligence through action and role-play.
This way of working renders what can often be elusive, frightening or chaotic thoughts, feelings and experiences tangible and thus more readily available for understanding, exploration, and transformation.
Learning from experience
In common with Gestalt, Schema and Internal Family Systems Therapy, working in this experiential way is more immediate and direct than therapy that facilitates change solely by talking, so I provide a safe, accepting and nurturing space in which you can take calculated risks to rediscover your embodied intuition and natural gift for playing with your own experience.
Working with ‘ecoanxiety’
Our mental wellbeing is intimately connected with the health of the planet, so I regard climate-related distress or ecoanxiety as an understandable, healthy and adaptive response to what is happening to our world.
If you are experiencing climate-related anxiety, I can accompany you to acknowledge and explore your emotional responses as a first step toward developing emotionally informed and sustainable actions that strengthen your sense of agency, efficacy and connectedness to like-minded others.
Working with Dreams
Until recently, dreams were relegated to the periphery of clinical practice, however contemporary dream researchers have discovered that dreams and dreaming have adaptive value for learning, emotional adjustment, regulating mood and updating both personal and collective knowledge
Although there are individual differences in the degree to which people are aware of sleep thoughts and dreams, the mental activity we call ‘dreaming’ is continuous throughout the waking, sleeping, and dreaming cycles.
I work with night dreams as well as staging dream-like emotional recalls of significant past moments, using psychodramatic techniques such as dream-sensing, dream re-entry, dream rescripting and dream re-enactment.
Organisational work and coaching
In addition to my therapeutic work with individuals and groups I am an organisational clinician and coach working with purpose-driven organisations wishing to create mindful and relational cultures and innovative learning and development programs for Gen Z and Millennial employees who are increasingly refusing professional environments that are not aligned with their values.
I specialise in working with climate tech, finance and sustainability-focused companies whose staff are demanding more fulfilling and creative ways of being at work as well as meaningful and authentic interactions with colleagues and managers and the opportunity to develop and grow both professionally and personally as members of a community with a shared identity and purpose.
Writing and publications
I have contributed chapters to W.G. Lawrence’s “Experiences in Social Dreaming” and Philosopher Jules Evans and Transpersonal Psychiatrist Tim Read’s book on Spiritual Emergency, “Breaking Open’ (described as ‘required reading for all mental health professionals’ by the Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review) as well as co-authoring, along with former Chief Dramaturg of Ballet Frankfurt Steve Valk, ‘The Mindful Media Manifesto’, described by Professor Daniel White, as ‘a vision for a renewed communicative order building on concepts that might serve as a contemporary description of the Buddhist path.”