MACP, CCC · Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), CRPO (Ontario) · Published
If you are reading this, the drinking or the pills or the gambling has probably stopped being a private question and started costing you something you can name: a relationship, a job you are quietly scared of losing, mornings you do not remember clearly. Addiction counselling online in Ontario means working on that with a registered clinician online, from your own home, without a referral, a waiting room, or a commute across the city at the end of a long day.
This article covers what addiction counselling involves, the approaches used, how harm reduction and abstinence both fit, what online sessions cannot do, who provides this work in Ontario, what it costs and what OHIP and benefits cover, and the free public services worth knowing about.
At TEO, in brief: TEO Counselling Services provides addiction counselling online anywhere in Ontario through two clinicians registered in the province, Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, who holds Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) status with the CRPO, and Rola Shbib, RSW (Ontario). An individual session costs $150 for 60 minutes, and there is no intake or assessment fee. It starts with a free 15-minute consultation, and because sessions run seven days a week, evening and weekend times are available. The full service page is addictions and recovery counselling.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) describes addiction with four features it calls the four Cs: cravings, loss of control over use, a compulsion to use, and continued use despite the harm it causes. Its page on addiction is also plain that there is no one-size-fits-all treatment. The right route depends on how severe the use is, what kind it is, what support you have around you, and how ready you are to change.
Counselling is one of those routes, and it starts somewhere people do not expect: not with the substance, but with the job the substance is doing. By the time someone books, the drinking or the pills are rarely about pleasure. They put a floor under the dread that arrives at four in the afternoon. They shut off a memory that turns up when the house goes quiet. They make a family dinner survivable.
So the early sessions are mostly mapping. What time of day the reach happens. What was going on in the twenty minutes before it. What changed in your body twenty minutes after. The aim is to write the job description accurately, and then to build other ways of doing that job, some of them things you can use tonight, before anything is taken away. If the substance comes out and nothing takes over the work it was doing, the pressure tends to surface somewhere else: sleep first, then temper, then a harder week.
Online, this looks like a scheduled 60-minute session with the same clinician each time. You need a private room, a stable connection, and headphones if the walls are thin. Everything else works the way it would across a desk, and the plan for a dropped connection is agreed before it is ever needed.
No single method suits everyone, and a good addictions counsellor draws on several. The ones used at TEO are:
That last one deserves its own explanation. CAMH's page on concurrent disorders uses the term for any combination of a mental health problem and a substance use problem occurring together, and notes that people usually do better with integrated treatment, where both are addressed at the same time in a coordinated way, than with being told to deal with one and come back for the other.
In practice, the order is the whole craft. Memory work is not something to open in a week with no sleep, no stability and nobody to phone at midnight. Footing comes first: a week that holds together, grounding you can use at two in the morning, a plan for the two or three hours a day that are hardest. Only then is trauma processing opened, slowly, with your use as the gauge throughout. If it climbs in the days after a session, that is information, not a verdict: it usually means the pace was faster than your footing allowed, so the work stops, rebuilds, and goes back.
Some people want the substance gone entirely and want help holding that line. Others want their weeknights back, or intend to keep drinking but never again drive, or want to stop using alone. Each of those is a goal worth working toward on its own terms, and none is treated as a lesser version of the real one.
There is no private scoreboard. If the goal is four dry days a week, they are counted honestly, the good weeks are examined for what they contained, and the work is to build more of that. Nobody is lectured for reporting a number that went the wrong way.
Harm reduction is not the same as pretending nothing is dangerous. If you use alone, mix alcohol with benzodiazepines or opioids, or depend on an unregulated supply, your counsellor will say plainly what that carries and work on it with you. Being direct about risk is not moralizing. Goals also move in both directions: people who wanted moderation sometimes decide abstinence is simply less work, and people abstinent for years sometimes have a bad night. Coming back afterwards and saying so is part of the work, not a failure of it.
It is worth being clear about the limits before you book, because they matter more here than in most areas of therapy.
If you already have a prescriber, a family doctor or a treatment program involved, it helps to say so at the consultation so nothing works at cross purposes.
Two TEO clinicians are registered in Ontario and both take on addictions work, so you have a choice.
Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, is registered with the CRPO, the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, as a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), number 14298, and is a Canadian Certified Counsellor through the CCPA. Addictions are a specific part of his training rather than a sideline: a graduate diploma in addiction treatment and prevention, Motivational Interviewing, CBT for Addictions, and time as a counsellor in Edgewood's concurrent trauma and addictions program in Nanaimo. On the trauma side he has advanced EMDR training, IFS Level 1 through the IFS Institute (Level 2 in progress) and CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2. He works in English or Arabic. The Qualifying category means he practises under clinical supervision, as the CRPO requires of every registrant in that category.
Rola Shbib, BSW (Hons), RSW (Ontario), holds registration number 866715 with the OCSWSSW, the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers, and is based in London, Ontario. Her work has centred on addictions, crisis intervention and suicide prevention, and grief, and she sees individual clients in English.
You can confirm both registrations yourself on the CRPO public register and the OCSWSSW online register, and it is a sensible habit with anyone who calls themselves an addictions counsellor. Ontario regulates the titles psychotherapist and social worker but not the word counsellor, so a college listing, rather than the wording on a website, is what shows that a clinician answers to a regulator.
The consultation call is where the choice between them gets made, based on what you want to work on and whose calendar has space. Confidentiality works the same way with either: what you tell your clinician stays between you, apart from the exceptions Ontario law places on every regulated clinician, which include a serious risk of harm to you or another person, a child who may need protection, a court order, and mandatory reports to a regulatory college. You will hear those exceptions spelled out at the start of the first session, before you share anything you would rather keep private.
OHIP does not cover counselling or psychotherapy in private practice, whether the clinician is a psychotherapist, a social worker or a psychologist. The province's summary of what OHIP covers says it pays for medically necessary care from physicians, and that services delivered outside a hospital by providers who are not physicians are not insured. CAMH's page on psychotherapy draws the same line: when a psychiatrist or another medical doctor provides psychotherapy the provincial plan pays, while a psychotherapist in private practice charges a fee. Our guide to whether OHIP covers therapy goes through the detail, including the publicly funded programs that are free.
TEO's fees are $150 for an individual session and $175 for a couples session, each 60 minutes, and there is no intake or assessment charge on top. The 15-minute consultation costs nothing. You pay per session, by Interac e-Transfer or by credit card through Jane, the booking platform the practice runs on, and after each session you receive an insurance-ready receipt that names the clinician, the date, the service and the fee.
Most people pay through an extended health plan from work. What the plan reimburses follows the designation written in your booklet, so look for "Registered Psychotherapist" (and check whether the Qualifying category is included) or "Registered Social Worker". With Mohamad, Pacific Blue Cross plans and plans on the TELUS eClaims network, Canada Life and Manulife among them, can be billed directly where the plan permits, leaving you to pay only what the plan does not. Rola is not set up for direct billing, so her sessions are paid in full and you claim the receipt back yourself. The mechanics are on our direct billing page and the numbers on the fees page.
A few reduced-fee places exist. If the fee is what is stopping you, raise it on the consultation call rather than ruling yourself out.
If private counselling is out of reach right now, or you need something tonight, Ontario has public routes. Health Canada's page on getting help with substance use lists them by province. For Ontario:
A family doctor or nurse practitioner can also connect you with publicly funded community addiction services, and our guide to free and low-cost counselling in Ontario sets out the main ones, who qualifies and how to get in.
You do not have to want to quit before you book. Most people arrive divided: part of them wants the substance gone, and part of them is not ready to lose the one thing that has reliably taken the edge off. Saying both of those things to someone who will not argue either side is a reasonable way to spend a first hour.
If you are in Ontario, or in British Columbia or any of the other provinces TEO serves, the first step is a free 15-minute consultation, on a video call or a scheduled phone call, with no referral needed and no pressure to commit. Book a free consultation through the Jane booking platform, or text (519) 760-5211 with a question first. Evening and weekend appointments are available.
You don't have to carry it alone.
No. Plenty of people book while still divided, wanting the substance gone and not ready to let go of it in the same breath. That ambivalence is something counselling can work with; it is no reason to hold off until you feel certain. The consultation is free, takes 15 minutes and needs no referral.
Not in private practice. OHIP covers care from physicians and publicly funded programs, not counselling from a psychotherapist or social worker in private practice. Most people pay through an extended health plan that names Registered Psychotherapist or Registered Social Worker; at TEO, direct billing is available with Mohamad Shabib for Pacific Blue Cross and TELUS eClaims plans, and every session comes with an insurance-ready receipt. For free public services, ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 lists addiction programs near you around the clock.
Yes. Mohamad Shabib works in English or Arabic, and a session can switch between the two whenever that is easier for you. Rola Shbib works in English.
CAMH describes addiction by four features: cravings, loss of control over use, a compulsion to use, and continued use despite harm. You do not need to meet all four, or to have decided what to call it, before talking to someone. The free consultation is a reasonable place to describe what is actually happening and get a straight answer about whether counselling is the right kind of help.
There is currently no waitlist at TEO. Evening and weekend appointments are available seven days a week, sessions are online only so your location in Ontario changes nothing about access, and the first 15-minute consultation is free.
Book a free, no-pressure consultation. We'll talk about what you're going through and figure out together if we're the right fit.
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