PTSD & CPTSD · Virtual · Six provinces
PTSD and CPTSD Therapy, Online
Some people can name the day it happened. Others just grew up bracing.
Online trauma therapy in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador. EMDR with the clinicians trained in it. Evenings and weekends.
In immediate danger, or not sure you can keep yourself safe tonight? Call or text 988 anywhere in Canada, or call 911 in an emergency. Therapy is not a crisis service. Full list of crisis lines →
Functioning, with something running underneath
Many people searching for a trauma therapist are not in the middle of a collapse. They are functioning. They hold jobs, raise children, answer email on time. Something is just running underneath all of it, and it has been running a long time.
It usually shows up as some combination of these:
- Sleep that breaks at three in the morning for no reason you can name
- Reacting to something small with a force that surprises you afterward
- Scanning a room for exits, or a face for mood, before you have consciously decided to
- Going flat or numb, often when things are finally calm
- Avoiding a place, a person, a conversation, a date on the calendar
- A sense of being permanently behind everyone else at being a person
- The same relationship pattern arriving again with a new person
None of this is a diagnosis, and recognizing yourself in a list is not the same as being assessed. None of it needs a dramatic origin story to be worth attention. Some people come in after one identifiable event. Others cannot point to an event at all, because the harm was in the ordinary weather of a house.
PTSD vs CPTSD — what’s the difference?
The short version: PTSD tends to follow a specific event, or a defined period of events. CPTSD — complex PTSD — tends to follow trauma that was prolonged, repeated, and difficult or impossible to escape. Childhood abuse or neglect, years of domestic violence, captivity, war, displacement.
Shared by both
The PTSD core
ICD-11 describes PTSD around three things:
- Re-experiencing the event in the present rather than simply remembering it
- Avoiding reminders of it
- A persistent sense of current threat — the hypervigilance and startle that stay switched on long after the danger has passed
What CPTSD adds
Disturbances in self-organization
On top of those three, complex PTSD includes:
- Affect dysregulation — emotion tends to arrive at full volume or not at all, and takes a long time to settle
- Negative self-concept — a durable sense of being worthless, damaged, or fundamentally different from other people, usually carrying shame with it
- Difficulty in relationships — trouble feeling close to people, or ending things pre-emptively before they can go wrong
Two manuals, two answers. Complex PTSD is a formal diagnosis in the ICD-11, the World Health Organization’s classification system. It is not a separate diagnosis in the DSM-5, which is the manual in general use in North America. That is why one clinician will use the term freely and another will not use it at all. The disagreement is largely about naming rather than about whether the pattern is real.
Why the distinction matters in the room. With single-incident PTSD, the work is often organized around a discrete memory and what the body still does with it. With complex trauma there may be no single memory to work with. What is often there instead is a way of being that formed while the harm was ongoing — and that, at the time, may well have been an accurate read of the situation. Sessions tend to move differently: more attention to regulation, self-criticism, and relationships, alongside the memory work rather than after it.
How it commonly gets mislabelled. Complex trauma often arrives dressed as something else. As anxiety. As depression. As burnout. As a personality problem. As “I have always just been like this.” People frequently spend years working on the surface symptom and wondering why it keeps regrowing.
Again: none of this is a diagnostic tool. If some of it lands, it is worth a conversation — not a verdict you hand yourself at midnight.
Why it can surface decades later
A child in an unpredictable house often learns to read faces fast, keep their own needs quiet, and stay useful. Those are intelligent adaptations. They are also expensive to run for thirty years. In adulthood they often look like reflexive people-pleasing, difficulty naming what you actually want, constant self-monitoring, or a nervous system that treats an unanswered message as a threat.
Neglect complicates it further. When the injury is an absence — of attention, of comfort, of anyone noticing — there is often no scene to point at. “Nothing really happened to me” is a common way of putting it.
The goal is not to relive any of it. It is to work toward updating it, so the part of you still braced for a house you left twenty years ago has a chance to take in some evidence that it is no longer that house.
If that is the part that brought you here, our childhood trauma therapy page goes into it properly — how it shows up in adult life, and what the work involves.
EMDR, IFS, and trauma-focused CBT
Three approaches get used here. Which one leads depends on what you walk in with — a single memory that still hijacks your body, or a self-critical voice that has been running since you were nine.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a widely used trauma-focused therapy for PTSD in adults. In session it looks unusual at first: you hold part of a memory in mind while following a repeated left-right stimulus, in short sets, pausing between them to notice what shifted. The aim is that the memory becomes something you can recall without your body responding as though it is happening now. How EMDR works, including over video →
Internal Family Systems (IFS) works with the parts of you that argue internally — the one that pushes, the one that shuts down, the critic that gets there first. It is often useful where shame and self-attack are the loudest part of the picture, which is common with complex trauma. More on IFS →
CBT adapted for trauma works with the conclusions trauma can leave behind: that it was your fault, that you should have seen it coming, that nobody can be trusted with anything real.
Pacing. There is no fixed sequence here. The order is matched to the person: you are not pushed into processing before you are ready, and you are not made to wait a year either.
Book a Free ConsultationYou can ask exactly how this would be paced for you before you commit to anything.
Meet the trauma therapists
Mohamad Shabib
Founder. MACP, CCC, Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying), CRPO — Ontario. Advanced EMDR training (EMDRIA), IFS Levels 1 and 2, Gottman Method Levels 1 and 2, CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2, and hands-on addictions experience. He began counselling work in 2020. He worked as a trauma counsellor at Edgewood in Nanaimo, in a specialized program for concurrent trauma and addiction, including work with first responders, and has also done crisis response, First Nations community mental health, and refugee support. Sessions in English or Arabic.
Full bio →Alison Shaji
Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC), British Columbia. MA in Clinical Psychology. Trained in psychoanalytic therapy, DBT, EMDR, CBT, EFFT, inner child work, shadow work, and empty chair technique.
Full bio →Rola Shbib
BSW (Hons), Registered Social Worker (RSW) with the Ontario College (OCSWSSW). Trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, ASIST-trained, a Mental Health First Aid facilitator, working from a trauma-informed, person-centred stance, with an honours degree in thanatology — grief and loss. Sessions in English or Arabic. She does not offer EMDR; if EMDR is what you are looking for, that would be Mohamad or Alison.
Full bio →Which clinician you can work with depends on the province you are in. Alison is registered in British Columbia. Rola is registered in Ontario only. That gets confirmed during the free consultation, before you book anything.
Common questions
Do I need a diagnosis to book?
No. No diagnosis and no tidy explanation of what happened. Plenty of people book while still unsure whether what they went through counts.
Where do you work, and when?
Video sessions only, for people in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador. Evening and weekend appointments are available.
What does it cost?
$150 per 60-minute session for individuals, $175 per 60-minute session for couples. The first consultation is free and runs 15 minutes. Receipts are provided for extended health benefit plans — check yours for which registration categories it reimburses. TEO is an approved provider with BC’s Crime Victim Assistance Program (CVAP).
Does EMDR work?
EMDR is one of the trauma-focused therapies in common use for PTSD. That is a statement about averages rather than about you: some people shift quickly, some do not respond to EMDR at all, and that is a normal outcome rather than a failure. It is one of several approaches used here.
What happens in a first session?
The free consultation comes first, and it is a conversation rather than an intake interview. In the sessions that follow, you decide what gets opened and in what order, and pacing is discussed before any memory work begins.
How long does trauma therapy take?
It depends on what you are working with, and nobody can responsibly quote a number in advance. Single-incident work is often shorter than work with long-running childhood trauma. You can raise how it is going at any point, and you can stop at any point.
Will talking about it make things worse?
A reasonable and very common fear, and the reason pacing is discussed before processing starts. You decide what gets opened and when. A session can be slowed down or stopped at any point.
Can I have sessions in Arabic?
Yes. Mohamad works in English and Arabic.
Crisis support
Therapy is not a crisis service. If you are thinking about ending your life, or you are not sure you can keep yourself safe tonight, use one of these instead of waiting for an appointment.
- 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline — call or text 988. Free, 24/7, anywhere in Canada.
- Emergency — call 911 if there is immediate danger.
- In British Columbia — BC Crisis Line, 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433), 24/7. HealthLink BC — call 811 to speak with a registered nurse any time.
- Outside British Columbia — 988 reaches help anywhere in Canada, and your provincial health line can direct you to local crisis services.
You do not have to be in danger to call one of these lines. Being overwhelmed is enough.
You might also need
- CVAP-funded counselling — if the trauma was a crime committed against you in BC
- First responder therapy — occupational trauma and shift-work realities
Start with a conversation
The first step is a free 15 minute consultation. It is a conversation, not an intake interview: you say what has been going on, ask whatever you want about how the work is done, and decide afterward whether to continue. Nothing is owed at the end of it. Sessions are $150 per 60-minute session for individuals and $175 per 60-minute session for couples, by video, evenings and weekends included.
Book a Free ConsultationPrefer to speak to a person first? Call (519) 760-5211
Not ready to book? Send a message instead.
If you would rather ask a question first, write a line or two and we will reply by email. No appointment, no commitment.