About
Chriss Lalande | Therapist | Village Witch
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I came up through a mental health system strained by waitlists, resource scarcity, and institutional limitations — and what I saw there changed me. The gap between what people need and what institutions can provide is not an accident. It is a design flaw, and it costs people dearly.
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That dissonance led me back to something older and connected me with Indigenous elders and knowledge keepers. I met strong women who not only taught me how to be a good ally but also how to see below the structures of colonization.
My work is an act of political resistance—reclaiming the healing practices that existed long before modern mental health systems and institutions, honoring the wisdom held closely, particularly by women, queer and trans seers who were silenced. My vision is to facilitate a remembering, return and restoration to a healthcare model that too often extracts rather than nourishes. My background includes a Bachelor's degree in Indigenous Social Work, clinical practice, but most affectionately I am a lifelong learner of the environment
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What drives me is not a credential — it is a commitment to reclaiming healing spaces that belong to all of us, and honoring the wisdom that institutions never managed to contain.
You do not have to fit yourself into a system here. This work fits itself around you.
Services
Individual Therapy
This is the space where therapy meets spirituality. The most inclusive definition I have found of spirituality is to be part of something that is bigger than ourselves. For some, this means organized religion, others it mean community, moving with the seasons, energy systems and pulses as defined by physics or just being a human on a spinning rock in the universe. For so many of us, this is the part we're good at, but no one really taught us how to be good at being a human; being spirit feels much more organic.
Therapy is applied psychoeducation and processing the experiences that prevent these lessons from landing. Together we work on building life skills, understanding your emotional landscape, recognizing the thought patterns that keep you stuck, setting goals that actually align with who you are, and learning when to hold on versus when to let go and how.
This isn't clinical therapy stripped of soul, nor is it spiritual bypassing that ignores the real work of healing. It is inclusively both—grounded in techniques that we know work (evidence based) and applied in an environment that permits spirituality; a sense of belonging to something grander than ourselves.
Induced After Death Communication
Along with generalized therapy, I also facilitate Induced After Death Communication (IADC), a grief based intervention derived from EMDR. As distress diminishes during our work together, you may enter a state of calm receptivity where spontaneous connection with your loved one can occur—experienced through sensory means (sight, sound, touch, smell) or as a felt sense of presence.This is not mediumship, you become the receiver of your own experience.
This deep work requires a 6 month to 1 year waiting period after loss. 79% of participants connect to their loved ones, but results are dependent on willingness, openness and capacity to do this work. Results are not guaranteed but therapeutic even without a sensory connection.
See our IADC tab to learn more.
Group Therapy
There is a particular kind of relief that comes from being in a room — even a virtual one — where you don't have to explain yourself from the beginning. Where someone else nods before you've finished the sentence. Where the thing you thought made you strange turns out to be the most human thing in the room.
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Group therapy works because healing is not a solo project. We learn relational patterns inside of relationships, and we heal them the same way. The group becomes a living practice space — for honesty, for boundaries, for showing up imperfectly and discovering that you are still welcome.
Sessions draw on a range of approaches depending on what the group needs. Some weeks that looks like structured skill-building. Others it looks like sitting with something hard together and finding out that's enough. What stays consistent is the container — safe, facilitated, and built on the understanding that you are not too much, and you are not alone.
Professional Consulting
Most workplaces have policies around mental health. Far fewer have cultures that actually support it. The difference lives in the relational fabric of the day-to-day — how people are spoken to, whether difference is genuinely welcomed, how conflict is navigated, and whether staff feel like whole people or just functions.
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This consulting work is for organizations and practitioners who are ready to move past the policy and into the practice. Sessions focus on cultural sensitivity, relational skill-building, and the kind of self-awareness that makes someone genuinely good to work with and good to work for. Not performative professional development — the real work of understanding how we show up for each other.
Because the mental health of the people you serve starts with the mental health of the people doing the serving.