Living in transitional times
Life is challenging enough at the best of times, but the times we live in are exceptionally chaotic and overwhelming and the everyday challenges of living, loving and finding meaningful work, can sometimes feel insurmountable and overwhelming.
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 methods of Role Analytical Psychodrama, a playful yet powerful, embodied and relational way of working, which help clients rediscover their capacity for living creatively and spontaneously in the moment, even in such extraordinary and uncertain times as these
The Courageous Pause Mini-Retreat Program
Because London is such a uniquely challenging place to live, love and work I also lead and facilitate the ‘Courageous Pause Mini-Retreat Program to offer Londoners a different and highly effective way to slow down, ground themselves and connect to what really matters in their lives.
Courageous Pause offers an intensive group experience of transpersonal psychodrama designed to bring about positive, deep and lasting change, closing the gap between your dream life and real life by aligning your thoughts, your feelings and their expression in purposeful action.
Courageous Pause offers a deep ‘retreat style’ learning and growth experience in bite size pieces, unfolding over 6 Sunday mornings spread out across three months, to enable participants to integrate their retreat experiences and learnings into their everyday lives.
(Click here to download the retreat flyer or email for dates, costs and more information)
My therapeutic training and professional background
I’m 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.
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 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 both night and day dreams, using psychodramatic techniques such as dream-sensing, dream re-entry, dream re-scripting and dream re-enactment.
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.”
Contact Me:
stephenfitzp@gmail.com