Dialectical Behaviour Therapy · Virtual · Six provinces
DBT Therapy (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy)
Some people do not need to understand their feelings better. They need something to do at the moment the feeling arrives.
Online DBT-informed individual therapy with a DBT-trained clinician. Available across British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador. Free 15–20 minute consultation, evenings and weekends, no referral needed.
At a glance
Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) is a structured, skills-based talk therapy built around four sets of practical skills — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness — for people whose emotions arrive fast and hard and whose reactions to them cause damage. At TEO Counselling it is offered as DBT-informed individual therapy, not as a full four-component DBT programme, and that distinction is explained in full further down this page. Alison Shaji (MA Clinical Psychology, Registered Clinical Counsellor in British Columbia) is DBT-trained; Mohamad Shabib (MACP, CCC, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO in Ontario) works with DBT-informed skills and sees clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador. Individual sessions are $150 per 60-minute session, couples sessions are $175, and the first step is a free 15–20 minute consultation.
What is DBT therapy?
DBT therapy is a structured form of talk therapy that teaches specific, practised skills for surviving intense emotion without making the situation worse, and for changing the patterns that keep producing it. It is taught rather than discovered: there are named skills, they are rehearsed, and you use them between sessions.
It was developed by the psychologist Marsha Linehan in the late 1980s, originally for people living with chronic suicidal thinking and repeated self-harm — a group that standard cognitive therapy of the era was not reaching. Linehan’s observation was that relentless focus on changing behaviour felt, to those clients, like being told the problem was them. So she built acceptance into the model as an equal partner to change. The approach has since been adapted for emotion dysregulation much more broadly.
You will see it written both ways: dialectical behaviour therapy in Canadian and British sources, dialectical behavior therapy in American ones. Same model, same four skills modules, different dictionary.
Nothing on this page is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation for you specifically. It is a description of an approach, so you can decide whether it sounds like the right direction before you speak to anyone.
What does “dialectical” mean?
Dialectical means holding two apparently opposing truths at the same time instead of picking one. In DBT the central pair is this: you are doing as much as you can with what you currently have, and some of what you are doing has to change.
That sounds like a philosophical footnote until you notice how much of the exhaustion in this territory comes from being handed only one half of it. Told only that you are doing your utmost, nothing changes and the pattern continues costing you. Told only that you need to change, you hear that your struggle does not count, and something in you digs in. DBT refuses to choose — the acceptance is not a softener before the real message, and the change is not a betrayal of the acceptance. Both are the message.
Practically, it shows up in how a session sounds: the reaction is validated as making sense given the history, and in the same conversation you are asked what you will do differently on Thursday. If only one of those two ever happens, it is not DBT.
How is DBT different from CBT?
DBT grew out of CBT and kept its structure. The difference is what each one aims at: CBT works on the accuracy of a thought, DBT works on the intensity of an emotion and what you do while it is happening.
CBT
Works with the content of thoughts
- Is this thought accurate? What is the evidence for and against it?
- Change the behaviour, watch what actually follows, update the belief
- Structured and often time-limited, with practice between sessions
- Tends to be efficient for clearly bounded problems — panic, insomnia, a specific phobia, a defined behavioural loop
- Assumes you can step back from the thought far enough to examine it
DBT
Works with the intensity of emotion
- Less interested in whether the thought is accurate; more interested in what you do in the ninety seconds after the feeling lands
- Teaches named skills explicitly, then has you rehearse them and report back
- Adds acceptance and validation as an equal half of the work, not a warm-up to it
- Works to an order of priority — anything life-threatening first, then anything derailing the therapy itself, then quality of life
- Built for the situation where stepping back is exactly what you cannot do yet
They are not rivals, and the two are frequently used together. Alison Shaji holds both CBT and DBT training, and Mohamad Shabib holds CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2 alongside his DBT-informed skills work, so a session can move between the two depending on what the week has actually thrown at you. If the thought is the problem, examine the thought. If the thought is fine and the reaction still flattens you, that is DBT territory.
What are the four DBT skills modules?
DBT organises its skills into four modules. The first is the foundation the other three stand on; the remaining three each answer a different question.
1. Mindfulness
Noticing what is happening while it is happening, without immediately grading it. Not meditation for its own sake — the point is to widen the gap between a feeling arriving and you acting on it. DBT frames this as finding the middle between “emotion mind”, which is certain and fast, and “reasonable mind”, which is logical and often cold. The workable state sits between them, and it is a skill rather than a mood.
2. Distress tolerance
What to do in the hour you cannot fix anything, so that the hour does not end in something you have to repair for a month. Changing body temperature, paced breathing, intense exercise, deliberate distraction, self-soothing through the senses. It also includes radical acceptance — not approval of what happened, but stopping the exhausting internal argument that it should not have.
3. Emotion regulation
Reducing how often the crises happen at all. Naming the emotion precisely, checking whether it fits the facts of the situation, and where it does not, acting opposite to the urge on purpose. It also covers the unglamorous groundwork — sleep, eating, illness, substances, movement — because emotional intensity is far harder to manage on four hours of sleep, and no skill compensates for that.
4. Interpersonal effectiveness
Asking for something, or saying no, without either capitulating or detonating. The module separates three goals people usually mash together: getting the outcome, keeping the relationship intact, and keeping your own self-respect. Which one matters most in a given conversation is a decision you can make deliberately rather than discovering afterwards which one you sacrificed.
In a full DBT programme these modules are taught in sequence in a weekly group and practised in individual therapy. In the DBT-informed individual work offered here, the same skills are introduced in session as the material calls for them — usually starting with distress tolerance, because that is the one that stops next week being a repeat of this one.
Who is DBT therapy for?
DBT was built for emotion dysregulation — emotions that come on faster, hit harder and last longer than the situation would suggest, and the behaviour that follows them.
DBT skills often land well for people who:
- feel emotions arrive faster and harder than the situation seems to warrant, and take much longer to come down
- have urges to self-harm, and want somewhere to say that out loud without the conversation immediately becoming about hospitals
- watch the same relationship pattern repeat — very close, then a rupture, then distance, then very close again
- act on impulse in ways that cost money, jobs or relationships, and cannot explain it afterwards
- have been told they have borderline personality disorder traits, or have wondered about it themselves
- already understand their reactions perfectly well and want something to actually do at the moment one starts
It may not be the right starting point right now if:
- you need the full four-component DBT programme with a weekly skills group and phone coaching — that is a different service and this page says plainly further down that we do not run it
- you are in immediate danger, or the risk is at a level that needs a crisis service or a hospital assessment rather than a scheduled appointment
- substance use is at a point that needs medical detox or a higher level of care than outpatient sessions can provide
- what you want is open-ended exploration of your history rather than structured skills practice — in which case a different approach may suit you better
These are tendencies, not rules, and none of them is a judgment about you. Related material on this site sits at personality disorders and BPD traits, mood disorders, anxiety and stress and self-esteem and identity. If two or three of the points above landed, the next step is a free 15–20 minute conversation rather than more reading.
Book a Free ConsultationIs DBT the same as therapy for emotional regulation?
Not quite. Therapy for emotional regulation is the goal; DBT is one of the routes to it, and the one with the most explicitly taught skills attached. Searching for one and finding the other is not a mistake, but they are not interchangeable words.
Other routes to the same goal are used here too, and which one fits depends on what is driving the dysregulation. Where it traces back to unprocessed traumatic memory, EMDR may be the more direct road. Where the reaction is a protective pattern with a long history behind it, Internal Family Systems asks a different and often more useful question. Where the trigger is a specific, bounded fear, CBT-based work tends to move faster.
DBT earns its place when the problem is less about meaning and more about speed — when the reaction is already underway before any insight can be brought to bear on it. In that situation, a skill you have rehearsed is worth more than an explanation you agree with.
What does a DBT session look like?
More structured than most people expect, and less like a lecture than the word “skills” suggests.
Sessions tend to open by setting an agenda rather than with an open question, because fifty minutes disappears quickly if the first twenty go on catching up. Many people track the week in some simple form between sessions — which emotions ran high, what they did, which skill they reached for or did not. That record is not homework marking. It exists so the session works from what actually happened rather than from what is easiest to remember on the day.
Then one incident usually gets taken apart in detail: what was happening beforehand, the exact moment it turned, the thought, the body sensation, the urge, what you did, and what it cost afterwards. Walked through slowly, most episodes that felt like they came out of nowhere turn out to have several points where a different move was available. Those points are where a skill gets attached.
The rest of a session is teaching and rehearsal — trying the skill in the room, out loud, badly the first time, which is the normal way of it. Then you use it during the week and report what happened, including when it did not work.
Sessions are online by secure video, seven days a week between noon and 9pm Pacific — that is 3pm to midnight in Ontario, and 4:30pm to 1:30am in Newfoundland and Labrador. What you say in session is kept confidential within the limits every Canadian therapist works under: a risk of serious harm to you or someone else, a child in need of protection, a court order or subpoena for records, and the reporting obligations a regulator can impose. Those limits are explained in the first session, before anything sensitive is discussed. Talking about self-harm urges is not, by itself, one of them — describing an urge is not the same as being in danger, and where that is unclear you get asked directly rather than have decisions made around you.
Does TEO offer a full DBT programme?
No. We offer DBT-informed individual therapy. That is a genuinely different thing from a full adherent DBT programme, and the difference is worth being exact about, because “we do DBT” is written by a great many practices that mean what we mean and by some that mean rather more.
Standard, adherent DBT as Linehan specified it has four components running at once:
- weekly individual therapy;
- a weekly skills training group, typically running through the four modules over about six months;
- between-session phone coaching, so a skill can be applied in the moment it is needed rather than described afterwards;
- a consultation team supporting the therapists delivering it.
TEO provides the first of those four. There is no skills group, no between-session phone coaching and no consultation team, and research findings about the full programme cannot be assumed to carry over intact to one component of it delivered on its own.
What individual DBT-informed therapy does offer is the skills themselves, taught and rehearsed one to one, inside a therapy relationship that can also work with whatever is underneath them. For a lot of people that is the right amount of structure. For some it is not enough, and where that is the case the honest answer is a hospital outpatient service or a dedicated DBT clinic, usually reached through a family doctor, a nurse practitioner or a psychiatrist. If that is what you need, we will say so at the consultation rather than book you in and hope.
Where can I see a DBT therapist online in Canada?
Everything here is virtual, so the constraint is not distance — it is which clinician may work in your province.
British Columbia. Alison Shaji is a Registered Clinical Counsellor registered with the BCACC, which is a provincial registration, so BC enquiries are routed to her and she is the DBT-trained clinician on the team. If you have been searching for a DBT therapist in Vancouver, Victoria, Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond, Kelowna or Nanaimo, the practical answer is that the sessions happen by video and where in the province you live makes no difference to availability. Sessions with Alison run in English, Hindi or Malayalam.
Ontario. Mohamad Shabib is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO and works with DBT-informed skills alongside EMDR, Internal Family Systems, the Gottman Method and CBT for Trauma. Someone looking for a DBT therapist in London, Ontario, or in Toronto, Ottawa, Windsor or Sudbury, would work with him, in English or Arabic.
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland & Labrador. Mohamad sees clients in all four, so DBT-informed sessions are available in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, St. John’s and anywhere else in those provinces with a reliable connection and a door that closes.
Rola Shbib, BSW (Hons), is a Registered Social Worker registered with the Ontario College. Her depth is in crisis intervention, grief and loss, and she does not offer DBT. The free consultation is where the routing is sorted out, before anything is booked.
Alison Shaji & Mohamad Shabib
Alison Shaji holds an MA in Clinical Psychology and is a Registered Clinical Counsellor in British Columbia. She is DBT-trained, alongside CBT, EMDR, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, psychoanalytic work, inner child work and the empty chair technique. She does not hold DBT certification — that is a separate credential issued by the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification, and it is a different thing from completed training. Of everything she works with, the DBT skills are the part aimed most directly at the gap between knowing what you want to do and doing it.
Read Alison’s full bio →Mohamad Shabib, founder of TEO Counselling Services Inc., holds an MACP, is a Canadian Certified Counsellor and is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the CRPO in Ontario. He works with DBT-informed skills alongside Advanced EMDR training (EMDRIA), Internal Family Systems Levels 1 and 2, Gottman Method Levels 1 and 2, and CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2, with hands-on experience in concurrent trauma and addictions. Sessions in English or Arabic.
Read Mohamad’s full bio →Session details
Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and plans on the TELUS eClaims network, which includes insurers such as Canada Life and Manulife; Rola is not on the direct-bill line. Otherwise you pay at the session and claim afterwards with an insurance-ready receipt. Full detail is on the fees and insurance page.
Book a Free ConsultationHow much does DBT therapy cost?
Individual sessions are $150 CAD for 60 minutes and couples sessions are $175 CAD. The first conversation is free — fifteen to twenty minutes, no referral required, and no obligation to book anything afterwards.
No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice, so extended health benefits are the usual route, and which practitioner designation your plan names is what decides it. Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and plans on the TELUS eClaims network; otherwise you pay at the session and claim afterwards with an insurance-ready receipt. The fees and insurance page sets out the detail, and the FAQ below covers the one question worth putting to your insurer before you book.
Cancellations need 24 hours notice; later cancellations and missed sessions are charged in full. A small number of reduced-fee spots are held — asking about one is a normal request, not an awkward one.
If things are unsafe right now
Therapy sessions are scheduled appointments, not a crisis service, and no page can assess your situation. This matters more here than on most pages, because a good deal of what DBT addresses is exactly the territory where waiting for an appointment is not the right plan.
- If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call 911
- In Canada, the Suicide Crisis Helpline can be reached by calling or texting 988 — that is 9-8-8 — at any hour, in English or French
If you are having urges to hurt yourself but are not in immediate danger, that is still a legitimate reason to reach out to 9-8-8, and it is a legitimate thing to bring to a consultation. You will not be shamed for saying it, and saying it does not automatically set anything in motion.
Common questions about DBT therapy
Does DBT work online?
The skills side adapts well, because most of what DBT teaches is meant to be used in your own life rather than in the session — practising a distress tolerance skill in the room where you usually lose the argument with yourself is arguably an advantage. Sessions run by secure video. What online delivery does not replace is the group and phone-coaching components of a full DBT programme, which we do not run in any format.
Do I need a diagnosis before starting DBT therapy?
No, and no referral either. We do not diagnose, and a session here produces no diagnostic finding — a formal diagnosis comes from a psychologist or a psychiatrist. Plenty of people book because emotions are running the show and they want skills, without any label attached to it.
Is DBT only for borderline personality disorder?
No. It was originally developed for people with chronic suicidal thinking and repeated self-harm, many of whom met criteria for borderline personality disorder, and it has since been adapted for emotion dysregulation more broadly — impulsivity, anger, unstable relationships, some eating difficulties and some substance use. You do not need any diagnosis to find the four skills modules useful.
Does TEO run a DBT skills group?
No. We provide individual therapy that draws on DBT skills. A full adherent programme adds a weekly skills group, between-session phone coaching and a therapist consultation team, and we run none of those three. If the structured programme is what you need, say so at the consultation and we will tell you straight that we do not have it.
Who is DBT-trained at TEO?
Alison Shaji, MA Clinical Psychology and a Registered Clinical Counsellor in British Columbia, holds DBT training alongside CBT, EMDR and Emotionally Focused Family Therapy. Mohamad Shabib works with DBT-informed skills alongside EMDR, Internal Family Systems, the Gottman Method and CBT for Trauma. Neither holds DBT certification, which is a separate credential issued by the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification and is not the same as completed training.
How long does DBT therapy take?
There is no fixed number of sessions, and anyone quoting you one in advance is guessing. A structured skills programme elsewhere typically runs six months to a year by design. Individual DBT-informed work here is reviewed with you as you go — some people come for a defined stretch to build a set of skills and stop there, others stay longer because the relational material underneath turns out to be the work.
Is DBT therapy covered by insurance in Canada?
No provincial health plan covers counselling in private practice. Extended health plans often do, and what matters is which practitioner designation your plan names — Registered Clinical Counsellor, Registered Psychotherapist or Registered Social Worker. If your plan names Registered Psychotherapist, ask specifically whether the Qualifying category is included, because the plan wording is what decides it. Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and plans on the TELUS eClaims network.
Can I do DBT-informed therapy while taking medication or seeing another therapist?
Medication is a question for your prescriber and this work sits alongside it without conflict. Seeing two therapists at once is worth raising at the consultation rather than midway through — the issue is usually sequencing rather than the combination itself, since two structured approaches running at the same time can pull in different directions.
Start with a conversation
Book a free 15–20 minute consultation. It is a conversation about what you are dealing with and whether this approach fits — including whether what you actually need is the full programme we do not run. No commitment, and no obligation to book afterward.
Book a Free ConsultationOr call (519) 760-5211
Not ready to book? Send a message instead.
If you would like to ask which clinician you would be matched with, or whether DBT-informed sessions are the right fit, send a short note and we will reply by email.