Virtual Trauma Therapist & Couples Counselling for Burnaby, BC

Fitting a session around the SkyTrain

For most people in Burnaby the question is not whether therapy is worth doing. It is whether it is worth ninety minutes of travel on top of the hour. A half past five appointment downtown means leaving Brentwood at twenty past four and getting home near seven, and that arithmetic is what makes a course of therapy hard to keep up. Online, sixty minutes costs sixty minutes.

Sessions run noon to nine in the evening, Pacific time, seven days a week, which is the clock Burnaby already lives on. A session that begins at eight ends at ten to nine. If your shift at Metrotown finishes at half four, six o'clock is an ordinary request here rather than a favour someone has to squeeze in.

The thing worth planning before you book is where you will sit. A door that closes and a pair of headphones is enough, and people manage it from a Highgate bedroom with flatmates next door, or a parked car in an office parkade. If a private sixty minutes is genuinely not available to you, say so at the consultation, because it changes what is sensible to begin. Reprocessing a difficult memory is not work to open in a room where the door might swing open.

What the term does to a student on Burnaby Mountain

SFU runs three terms a year, so the pressure never gets a fallow season, and BCIT's compressed intakes do something similar. Plenty of Burnaby households have somebody in them permanently four days from a deadline. The word people arrive with is procrastination. What they describe once they slow down is usually something else.

This is the kind of thing Internal Family Systems is built around. IFS treats the mind as made up of parts, and treats the voice that has you rewriting an assignment at three in the morning as a protector doing a job, usually staying ahead of an anticipated humiliation. The work is not to argue it down or shout over it.

It starts with noticing the difference between being blended with that part, which sounds like "I am useless", and being separate from it, which sounds like "a part of me is telling me I am useless". From there you can ask the part what it is afraid would happen if it eased off. Often something younger sits behind it, holding the belief the protector has been managing for years. Mohamad has IFS Levels 1 and 2 training.

What therapy is not is an academic accommodation. It will not lower your course load, and because counsellors do not diagnose, sessions here do not produce documentation for an accessibility office. Your campus health service handles that side of things, and using both at once is normal.

Common questions

I am at SFU for the term but my family home is in another province. Where do I have to be sitting?

Where you physically are during the session governs it, not where your permanent address is. We can work with you in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador, so a session from your place in Burnaby during term is straightforward. If you go home over the break to a province not on that list, sessions pause until you are back. Tell us the dates early so we can plan around the gap.

Does MSP or my student plan pay for this?

No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice, and MSP is no exception. Extended and student plans vary, so read yours for the designations it actually names: some list Registered Clinical Counsellors, some Registered Psychotherapists or Social Workers, some only psychologists. Ask specifically whether the Qualifying category of Registered Psychotherapist is included, because the plan's wording is what decides it. We can direct-bill a number of plans, including Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and plans on the TELUS eClaims network. You pay at the time of the session and get an insurance-ready receipt afterwards, every time, which you submit yourself.

What happens if a midterm or a shift change means I have to cancel?

Twenty-four hours notice and there is no charge. Less than that, or a no-show, is charged in full: $150 for an individual session, $175 for couples. The hour was held for you and cannot be filled at short notice. If cost rather than timing is the thing in the way, ask about the reduced-fee spots at the consultation. A small number are kept aside.

Could my family, my employer or my school ever see any of this?

Outside a short list of limits, no. We do not confirm to anyone that you attend, and nothing goes to a school or an employer. The limits are real and you should hear them plainly: 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 reporting duties. Your therapist goes through those in the first session, before you decide what to talk about.

What actually happens in the free consultation?

Fifteen to twenty minutes, by video or phone, with no referral needed and nothing to pay. You describe what is going on in whatever order it comes out. We ask what you have already tried, which times of day you can realistically protect, and whether you are looking for individual or couples work. Then we say which of us fits and what the first few sessions would involve. It is also a legitimate outcome for us to say we are not the right fit and point you elsewhere.