Psychotherapy is a controlled act, enforced by the Regulated Health Professionals Act under the Ontario goverenment. This means that only people who holds a certificate of registration of authorization and are members of a governing college can use the term “psychotherapist” and perform psychotherapy.

The controlled act of psychotherapy is defined as treating, by means of psychotherapy technique, delivered through a therapeutic relationship, an individual’s serious disorder of thought, cognition, mood, emotional regulation, perception or memory that may seriously impair the individual’s judgement, insight, behaviour, communication or social functioning.

Here at The Witch’s Therapist, we do our best to ensure our work is non-demonizing, non-pathologizing, and non-bypassing while also honoring the regulations and bylaws and guidelines set out by governing colleges. We do this by employing the non-pathologing, evidence-based, psychotherapeutic technique Internal Family Systems Therapy. Internal Family Systems teaches us to compassionately understand our thoughts, emotions, behaviors and feelings as a response to systemic wounding and protection rather than the result of pathology. In this way, we work within your inner world by honoring and collaborating with your body’s protective system (parts) rather than fighting or overriding them. IFS is a beautifully healing lineage that invites the practices of deep witnessing, trust-building, nurturing and self-attunement (the relational practices of safety and love) to help us feel whole and free. Internal Family Systems also honors spirituality and makes space for rituals while encouraging critical thinking, healthy skepticism, reality checking, social justice conscious ethics, and good boundaries. It also helps us finding the middle path between spiritual bypassing and cynical skepticism.

While The Witch’s Therapists specializes in working with alternative religious practioners, IFS can be used with any spiritual belief system and has been explored in other theapeutic modalities. In the Buddhist tradition, the states that IFS refers to are called mental formations or habit patterns. Piaget and the cognitive behaviourist refer to them as schemas. Psychosynthesis refers to them as sub personalities and psychodynamic psychologists refer to them as ego states. We call them ‘parts.’

For more information on Internal Family Systems please check out our resource page.