In 2016, the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario came into existence, and I joined the College.
In 2022, the College received a complaint about my behaviour. As the College investigated this complaint, I was asked to undertake supervision for two years and to take a course, both of which I did. I passed both of these.
Then came a stage in the process in 2025 where the College wanted to suspend my registration for a period of a year as a ‘penalty’ for my alleged errors. This would mean that I was barred from working as a psychotherapist for a year, barred from seeing my regular ongoing clients, and even barred from responding to anyone I had ever worked with who was in crisis, whatever the circumstances.
I said, but what about my clients? I work with many vulnerable people with whom I have years long therapeutic relationships, and working with me is an important part of them doing okay.
The response I got was that these clients could and should just get new therapists, and that I could have a couple of months to help them transition. They’d be fine, working with their new therapists.
I was horrified.
The College is not wrong that many people change therapists along the way, and they often do well. When a client initiates that process, it can be the best thing that ever happened in their therapy. But it can also be a painful and difficult transition. Especially for clients who are coming from a good therapeutic relationship and who have the kind of trauma where they are slow to trust for some valid reasons, the transition can be very very slow. The disruption to the healing process can be significant, and at times severe.
Every conversation that I have ever had with a teacher or a supervisor or a colleague or a client about a client about perhaps working with a new therapist has looked at the potential benefits of a new therapist and whether or not those are a good trade off for the costs of losing even a therapist who isn’t a great fit for the client. I have had clients who thought that a friend or partner should get a new and better therapist, and assumed that was an easy process that would certainly bring about a significant improvement. With my clients, mostly I have gotten them to understand that it’s not that simple, and why that is, and other ways that they might help their friend or partner and/or improve their relationships. With my College, I failed to make any headway in this conversation whatsoever.
I would have had more respect for the College’s position if they felt that I was a danger to my other clients, but I had no sense that they had any concerns other than this one complaint. If a therapist is a danger to many clients, suspension while the issues are being resolved makes a lot of sense to me. But to take a serious risk with the well-being of my other clients to penalize for my behaviour in one instance did not make sense to me -- and it wasn't hard for me to imagine a variety of other penalties that would have penalized me, but not the people who were working with me. This one was going to be worse for many of my clients than it was for me, which deeply offended me.
Nor was the College interested in hearing which of my clients I was particularly concerned about and why. There was no way for any of my clients to have any input in this process, even though it could have a big impact on their mental health.
I did come to understand more about the College’s position when I finally realized that their model is the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and that they were thinking about suspending me like that College might suspend a gynecologist. So, sure, I’d rather have my regular gyno give me my pap smear, but I can get a pap smear from many doctors, and it doesn’t compromise my health care to do so.
But I think that’s a terrible analogy. In my experience, therapy is more like a person going to a doctor and saying “I’m in a lot of pain”. And if you and I have worked well together for a good chunk of time, I have some pretty good hypotheses about where that pain is in your body, and what it might mean, and what might help. But if I send you to someone who doesn’t know you, they start where I did when I was first working with you -- suggesting the things that usually hurt in most people in the situation you are describing, and suggesting the interventions that work for most people. It takes quite a lot of learning about you before the new guy can be as effective as I can be. And you may suffer a lot of unnecessary pain during that transition.
And the conversations with representatives of the College did really show to me how differently the College understood therapy, from what I believed. My version of psychotherapy is profoundly relationship based, whereas apparently theirs is not. I believe that there is a significant difference between long term therapy and short term work, which is not a distinction that the College seems to make. I believe that a transition takes a lot longer with some clients as opposed to others, whereas the College felt that one size should fit all, and in my opinion, theirs was a very short time period.
I believed that my clients should get to decide whether they wanted a new therapist or wanted to continue with me, but the College disagreed. It would be very reasonable to me that the College might want to know more about the clients who would choose to stay, whether they were making a decision with full informed consent, and whether they were being unduly influenced by me in ways that were not good for them. All of those are real issues that deserve consideration, but that was not what was happening here.
During this time, I was also thinking a lot about how I was practicing, and thinking a lot about how much in other ways my practice was pretty far from standard psychotherapy.
Over the years, I have worked more and more with the idea that some kids are born into families where they get to learn some really important life skills, and others are not. So for decades now, I’ve worked with clients around learning skills that they are missing, about understanding aspects of the world or perspectives that they had not been exposed to. Educating people about how feelings work, and why their efforts to help themself feel better were not working, and what would work. I work hard to use language with clients that was a better fit for how they think about themselves, other people, their lives, and the world, rather than using standard psychotherapy language. In fact, some clients would come in with psychotherapy language or perspective, and I would try to replace it with something more immediately useful to them.
I talked to a lot of people about what was happening with the College, including many of my clients. The more I talked to people the more clear I was that my initial feeling was correct. I believe it was my ethical obligation to give my clients the choice as to whether they wished to continue working with me or they would prefer to make a switch, and the only way to give them that choice was to leave the College.