Recovery is possible. You don't have to figure it out alone.

What concurrent-disorders work actually means

Concurrent disorders is a plain idea dressed in clinical language: the substance use and whatever sits underneath it — old trauma, anxiety, grief, long-running low mood — are worked on by the same person, in the same hour, in a deliberate order. It is the opposite of being told to get clean first and come back for the rest later, which asks you to surrender your coping strategy and go without support in the same month.

The order is the whole craft. Memory work is not something to open in a week where you have no sleep, no stability and nobody to phone at midnight. So footing comes first: a week that holds together, grounding you can actually use at two in the morning, a plan for the two or three hours a day that are genuinely the hardest. Only after that does trauma processing — EMDR, or the parts language of Internal Family Systems — get opened, and it is opened slowly.

Your use is the gauge throughout. If it climbs in the days after a session, that is information rather than a verdict. It usually means we moved faster than your footing allowed, so we stop, rebuild it, and go back. That feedback loop is the practical difference between trauma work that a person in early recovery can survive and trauma work that costs them the month.

Who does this work here

Mohamad Shabib holds a graduate diploma in addiction treatment and prevention and worked in Edgewood's concurrent trauma and addictions programme, alongside training in Advanced EMDR, Internal Family Systems Levels 1 and 2, CBT for Trauma and DBT. He is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO, MACP, CCC, works in English and Arabic, and sees clients in all six provinces. Rola Shbib, Registered Social Worker (Ontario), also works with addictions, crisis intervention and suicide prevention, and with grief.

Addiction that has no substance in it

Gambling, pornography, gaming, shopping, scrolling until three in the morning, work itself. From the inside the loop is the same shape: a cue, a stretch of relief, a cost that lands later, a promise to stop, then the whole sequence again on Thursday. The absence of a substance does not make the loop softer, and it usually makes it lonelier, because nobody around you can see it happening.

What genuinely differs is that you cannot put the object down. The phone is also your bank, your job and your children's photographs. The laptop is how you earn. So the work moves to the minutes before the reach — the boredom, the humiliation, the flat hour after everyone goes to bed — and to friction: what stands between the impulse and the act, and how many seconds that buys you.

Where money is involved, the debt becomes its own engine. Secrecy grows around the balance rather than the behaviour, and it is usually the secrecy that makes the whole thing unbearable. We can work on the secrecy, on whether and how to tell a partner, and on the shame that makes both feel impossible. The debt itself belongs with a credit counsellor, and we will say that rather than pretend otherwise.

Common questions

Do I have to want to quit before I book?

No. People often arrive genuinely split — half wanting it gone, half unwilling to give up the one thing that reliably works. Ambivalence is workable material, not a reason to wait until you feel more certain. A useful first step is naming what the use gives you as well as what it costs, out loud, with nobody arguing the other side. The first consultation is free, fifteen to twenty minutes, and needs no referral.

Can you prescribe medication or supervise a detox?

No. There is no prescribing here, no medical monitoring and no diagnosis. Medication for withdrawal or cravings, and any decision about how to safely come off alcohol or benzodiazepines, belongs to a physician or nurse practitioner. If you already have a prescriber, counselling runs alongside that care rather than replacing it, and it is worth telling us who is involved so nothing works at cross purposes.

Is this instead of residential treatment or a twelve-step programme?

It sits beside them. Outpatient counselling is often used before a residential admission, after discharge when the structure vanishes and the week is suddenly empty, or on its own where the use has not reached that point. If you attend a twelve-step programme, that stays yours and we work with it. If the steps are not for you, nothing here requires them.

Who else will know?

What you say in session stays there, with limits set by law and by our regulators: a risk of serious harm to you or someone else, a child in need of protection, a court order or subpoena, and a regulator's own reporting duties. Beyond those, disclosure is yours. You get an insurance-ready receipt after every session naming the clinician, date, service and fee. We do not bill insurers directly, so nothing reaches one unless you send it. No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice.

When can we meet, and what does it cost?

Sessions run from noon to nine in the evening Pacific, seven days a week. In practice, a six o'clock appointment in Winnipeg is four in the afternoon on the coast, and the last Pacific slot lands at midnight in Ontario and half past one in the morning in Newfoundland. Individual sessions are $150 for sixty minutes, couples $175, and the first consultation is free. Cancelling needs twenty-four hours' notice; later cancellations and missed appointments are charged in full. A small number of reduced-fee spots are held — ask at the consultation.