Gord Alton

Gord’s major passion throughout his life has been integrating Christian spirituality/mysticism with psychology as well as finding ways to bring spirituality and healing into the difficult painful experiences of life. This passion grew out of his own faith experiences as well as discovering God’s presence in the midst of losing his two younger hemophiliac brothers to HIV/AIDS in the 1990’s. For most of his professional life, he has been bi-vocational, both a church pastor within the Mennonite Christian tradition, but also a spiritual director and psychospiritual therapist to people living with palliative and mental health conditions. He has been a trained spiritual director since 2000 and a certified psychospiritual therapist with Canadian Association ofSpiritual Care (CASC) since 2006, and became a member of the College of Registered Psychotherapists in 2016. He became a certified CASC Supervisor-Educator in 2020.

In his search for how psychology could enrich and deepen spirituality, he discovered the

Diamond Approach in 2006, a spiritual psychology that integrates the insights of depth

psychology with the insights of religious mysticism. He has been a student of the Diamond Approach for seventeen years now and participates in 2 weeks of retreat work each year plus group meetings throughout the year. In 2020, he discovered Internal Family Systems (IFS), an evidence-based psychological model that resonates quite strongly with the Diamond Approach framework. He has found that many of his clients also find the IFS framework as a helpful model to make sense of their mental health struggles but also work toward personal healing. These insights from the Diamond Approach and IFS flow into his professional practice as a psychospiritual therapist and supervisor-educator as well as other counseling modalities like Self Psychology, Solution-Focused Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Family Systems and Narrative Therapy.

In May, 2023, Gord became a CASC and CRPO supervisor within Alida van Dijk’s CASC PTE training centre.  Gord is a avid kayaker and enjoys nature, hiking, biking, and walking the beach at his cottage at Sauble Beach.