One-to-one therapy · Virtual · Six provinces
Anger Management Counselling, Online
You may not have come here for yourself. You may have come because of the look on someone’s face.
One-to-one anger therapy online in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador. Free 15-minute consultation first, on a video call or a scheduled phone call, booked online.
Prefer not to create an account? Text two times that suit you to (519) 760-5211 and we will book it for you, or send them through the short form. We reply with two consultation times, usually within 24 hours. If you would rather work with a particular clinician, say so and it is arranged.
If you found this page after something happened
Looking for anger management counselling is not something that waits for a calm afternoon. It can happen on the drive home, or at 2am, or in the twenty minutes after a door has been slammed. The feeling that brings someone here may not be anger at all. It can be closer to dread — the sense of having become someone you did not agree to be.
That feeling is uncomfortable enough to make you close the tab. This page is written on the assumption that you would rather not.
If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7).
Anger management counselling, at a glance. TEO Counselling provides anger management counselling online in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Newfoundland and Labrador. Sessions are with Mohamad Shabib, a Canadian Certified Counsellor with the CCPA (#11249205); Rola Shbib, a Registered Social Worker (Ontario) with the OCSWSSW (#866715); or, for clients in British Columbia, Alison Shaji, a Registered Clinical Counsellor with the BCACC (RCC #22608). Individual sessions are $150 and couples sessions $175, each 60 minutes, with no intake or assessment fee. No provincial health plan covers counselling in private practice; every session comes with an insurance-ready receipt, and direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross and TELUS eClaims plans (Canada Life, Manulife). The first step is a free 15-minute consultation, on a video call or a scheduled phone call, booked online with no referral.
What anger is doingAnger is a signal. It can arrive late
Anger is information. Its job is to flag that something matters and something is wrong: a line crossed, a need that keeps getting stepped over, a threat to something or someone you care about. Having little access to anger is not the same as being calm. It can make it harder to notice when a line has been crossed, and harder to say so.
The problem is not that anger exists. It is more a question of timing and volume.
Anger is not necessarily the first response to a situation — it can be the fourth or fifth. Something lands badly at nine in the morning and gets filed as nothing. It happens again at noon and gets filed again. By seven in the evening, a cupboard door left open is not a cupboard door. It is everything that was filed as nothing, arriving at once, in the only feeling that ever gets to speak.
That is why the size can fail to match the trigger. It is also why the moment afterwards gets described as not knowing where it came from.
There is a physical layer to this too. The body can get there first when something reads as a threat — including social threat, like being dismissed or humiliated. Heart rate up, jaw and hands loading, attention narrowing to whatever seems to be the source, with the slower and more deliberate part of thinking arriving afterwards. That is not an excuse for anything. It is a description of a sequence, and sequences can be worked with once you can see them.
Feeling it and doing it are not the same thing
No one is going to stop having anger, and trying to stop it can flatten everything else along with it — warmth, desire, the ability to say no. What is actually available for change is the gap: the small stretch of time between the surge and what your voice, face, and hands do next.
You may arrive with almost no gap at all. That is not a verdict on your character. It is a description of a nervous system that has learned, sometimes for good historical reasons, to skip a step.
And because a page like this should say it plainly: understanding where your anger comes from does not make what it did to someone else acceptable. Both things stay true at the same time. Explanation is not permission. If you are reading a page like this, you already know that. You may know it harder than anyone else in your life does.
What can sit underneath
Anger can be carrying something else as well. Not in every case, and not in a fixed combination — but these are the ones worth looking for underneath.
Fear
Fear of losing someone, of being found out, of not being able to provide, of what happens next. Fear is exposing. Anger is not. The switch can happen faster than thought.
Shame
Shame sits in this list too, and it can be one of the hardest to name out loud. It is also self-feeding: you snap, you feel like a bad person, the shame raises your baseline, and the next thing lands on a shorter fuse than the last.
Exhaustion and sleep debt
You may notice the gap shrinking when sleep is short, in a very direct and unromantic way. Shift work, a new baby, insomnia, a second job — it can show up in the temper before it shows up anywhere else.
Chronic pain or illness
Living inside constant physical discomfort can take a share of your patience every day before anyone speaks to you.
Unprocessed trauma
Old events that were never metabolised can leave the alarm system calibrated too sensitively. Present-day moments that rhyme with the past can trigger a response scaled to the past.
Being unheard for years
Long stretches of not being taken seriously — at home, at work, in a family, in a system — accumulate. Anger is sometimes the only register in which a person has ever been listened to.
Grief, substance use, and untreated stress can also sit in this picture. Alcohol in particular can widen the volume and narrow the gap.
None of this makes anger a fake emotion or a mask. It is real in its own right, even when something else travels with it.
Signs anger management counselling might help
Read this as description, not accusation. It is a list of things people describe, not a checklist and not a diagnosis.
- You go from fine to gone in under a second, and then spend hours in the part afterwards that nobody sees.
- Someone in your house has started reading your face before they decide whether to speak.
- A child has gone quiet around you, and you noticed.
- You are calm and reasonable all day at work, and something entirely different in your own kitchen.
- You have apologised more times this year than you can count, and the apologies have stopped landing.
- You said something you can still hear in your own voice.
- Your body gets there first — jaw, chest, hands, heat behind the eyes — and you only catch up afterwards.
- Driving has become a place where you do not recognise yourself.
- You have told yourself that was the last time, more than once.
- You are more frightened of yourself than you would admit to anyone.
If several of those are true, that is worth taking seriously. It is not evidence that you are beyond help.
If someone is being hurt
This part matters more than a booking page, so it goes before the booking part.
Immediate safety
If you or anyone in your home is in immediate danger, call 911. If someone has been hurt, that is not a therapy question yet — it is a safety question, and safety comes first.
- Suicide Crisis Helpline — call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7)
- VictimLinkBC — 1-800-563-0808, calls and texts around the clock in British Columbia for people affected by family and sexual violence
- Kids Help Phone — 1-800-668-6868, across Canada, for young people
- Other provinces run their own family-violence lines — search for the one where you live
If you are the one being hurt, frightened, or controlled: that is not something to work on later, and it is not your job to fix by understanding the other person better.
This also needs saying plainly: anger management counselling at TEO is not a partner-abuse intervention program. Abuse and coercive control are not the same thing as an anger problem, and anger work is not designed to address them. If someone is using violence, threats, intimidation, or control toward a partner, couples work is not appropriate while that is ongoing. If you are the one who has been harmed, TEO offers individual counselling for narcissistic and relational abuse recovery, and crisis and support lines by province are listed on the resources page. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7).
If you are worried about your own behaviour — if you have hurt someone, or you can feel that you might — being worried about that is not, on its own, a reason to stay quiet about it. Whether one-to-one online therapy is the right fit for your situation is what the free consultation is for. What does not change is that immediate safety has to be handled first, and by the right service. Counselling is scheduled in advance and is not an emergency or crisis response service. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7), and book counselling for the work that comes after.
One more thing to know before you decide what to bring: privacy in counselling has limits. They include reporting a child who may need protection, disclosing information where a clinician believes it is needed to reduce a serious risk of harm to someone, a court order for records, and clinical supervision. Your clinician will go over those limits with you.
Counselling vs. classes
People searching for anger support can be looking for two very different things, so this should be clear immediately.
What this is
One-to-one online therapy
- Scheduled sessions with a clinician
- Privacy has limits, described above
- Open-ended — it goes where your situation actually needs it to go
- Couples sessions available if the pattern shows up in your relationship — but not while abuse or coercive control is ongoing (see above)
What this is not
Not a class, course, or program
- TEO does not run anger management classes, courses, or groups
- No court-mandated or court-approved anger management programs
- Not a partner-abuse intervention program
- No completion certificates of any kind
- If a court, employer, lawyer, or child protection worker requires a specific program or proof of attendance, this is not the service that produces that
If what you want is one-to-one therapeutic work on how anger operates in your life, that is exactly what this is.
Book a Free ConsultationWhat it actually involves
There is no lecture, and there is no session where you are told what you already know about yourself.
What the sessions look like depends on the clinician and on what you bring. Work on anger can start by getting specific: what preceded a moment, what the body did first, what the thought was at the top of the escalation, how long it took to come down. Something that felt like pure chaos can turn out to have more structure in it than expected, and structure gives you more to work with than chaos does.
From there the work can run in two directions. One is present-tense and practical: widening the gap, learning what your own early warning signs actually feel like, deciding in advance what you do at the point where you can still choose, repairing properly afterwards rather than only apologising. The other is slower: looking at what the anger has been carrying, and at the older material that keeps loading it.
Which methods are used depends entirely on which clinician you work with — their training differs, and the next section sets out what each of them holds. Your clinician will talk the approach through with you rather than applying one silently.
Nothing here is a promise about outcome, and nothing on this page is a diagnosis or a substitute for assessment. Therapy is not a guaranteed result. What can reasonably be described is the direction of the work: from reacting, toward noticing, toward choosing.
Who you’d be working with
Which clinician you can work with depends on the province you live in. Registration is provincial, and each clinician’s is different. That gets sorted in the free consultation, before you pay for anything.
Mohamad Shabib
Founder. MACP, CCC. He has Advanced EMDR training through an EMDRIA-approved programme and is trained in IFS Levels 1 and 2, Gottman Method Levels 1 and 2, CBT for Trauma Levels 1 and 2 and Motivational Interviewing, offers DBT-informed individual work, and has worked in concurrent trauma and addictions treatment. He served as a Trauma Counsellor at Edgewood in Nanaimo with concurrent trauma and addictions, including first responders, and has worked in crisis response, First Nations community mental health, and refugee support. Of the approaches he is trained in, EMDR can be used for older material that keeps loading a present-day reaction, and CBT for trauma for the thinking at the top of an escalation. He began counselling in 2020 and works in English and Arabic.
Full bio →Alison Shaji
Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC #22608, BCACC). She works with clients in British Columbia only. MA in Clinical Psychology. Works with psychoanalytic therapy, DBT, EMDR, CBT, EFFT (emotion-focused family therapy, a family model), inner child work, shadow work, the empty chair technique and the Gottman Method (Levels 1 and 2). Of those, DBT includes skills aimed directly at the gap itself. She works in English, Hindi and Malayalam.
Full bio →Rola Shbib
BSW (Hons), Registered Social Worker (RSW), Ontario. She works with clients in all six provinces. Trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, ASIST, and as an MHFA facilitator; trauma-informed, person-centred practice, with an honours degree in thanatology. Her work at TEO focuses on grief, addictions, and recovery from relational or narcissistic abuse. She does not use EMDR or IFS.
Full bio →Mohamad and Rola work with clients in all six provinces; Alison works with clients in British Columbia. Which clinician fits is confirmed case by case in the consultation.
How it works
Online only. Sessions happen remotely. There is no office to visit. TEO Counselling Services Inc. is based in Nanaimo, BC.
Six provinces. British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador. You need to be in one of them at the time of your session.
Insurance. Receipts are provided for extended health plans. Check your own plan for what it covers.
Crime Victim Assistance Program. TEO is an approved provider with British Columbia’s CVAP, which funds counselling for victims of crime. If that applies to you, say so in the consultation.
Session details
Questions and answers
Does online anger therapy actually work?
Online therapy does not suit everyone, and nothing here promises an outcome. Anger work depends on detail and on honesty, and both carry over online. Sessions also happen where you live, with no drive home afterwards to sit alone with. What matters more than the format is whether you can be straight with your clinician.
Does it matter where I live if sessions are online?
Only at the province level. Everything is virtual, so there is no commute and no waiting room. What determines whether we can work with you is which province you live in — regulation is provincial, not municipal.
Is anger management therapy different from anger management counselling?
Not here. Anger management therapy and anger management counselling are the same thing at TEO: one-to-one sessions with a clinician, online, in the six provinces TEO works in. The distinction that does matter is counselling versus a class or a course — TEO offers the first and not the second.
Will I be told I have an anger problem?
Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and anger is not a diagnosis. A clinician’s job here is to help you describe what is actually happening with enough precision to work on it, not to label you. If something they see calls for a different kind of assessment, they should say so and tell you where to get it.
Is anger management counselling covered by insurance?
Reimbursement depends on the designation your plan covers (CCC, RCC or RSW), and plans differ. Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross and plans on the TELUS eClaims network, and, if you live in British Columbia, for CVAP (the Crime Victim Assistance Program); otherwise TEO provides receipts you can submit to your plan. Check your own plan before you book, and raise anything you are unsure about in the consultation.
What happens in the first session?
That depends on the clinician and on what you bring. It is a fair thing to ask directly in the free consultation — what the first session will cover, what the limits on privacy are, and what they would want to know from you. You do not have to prepare anything.
My partner thinks I need this more than I do. Should I still come?
That is an understandable reason to hesitate. It is worth using the free consultation to decide for yourself rather than deciding on someone else’s behalf. If the pattern shows up in your relationship, couples sessions can be an option too, but not while abuse or coercive control is ongoing.
Is anger management counselling the same as a program for partner abuse?
No. Anger management counselling at TEO is not a partner-abuse intervention program, and abuse and coercive control are not the same thing as an anger problem. If someone is using violence, threats, intimidation, or control toward a partner, couples work is not appropriate while that is ongoing. If you are the one who has been harmed, TEO offers individual counselling for narcissistic and relational abuse recovery, and crisis and support lines by province are listed on the resources page. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7).
How long does this take?
It depends on what is underneath. The work can centre on a narrow, recent pattern, or the anger can turn out to be the visible end of something older. Your clinician should be able to give you a realistic sense after the first few sessions, and should be willing to revisit it.
Do you provide a certificate or a letter for court?
TEO does not run court-mandated or court-approved anger management programs and does not issue completion certificates. If you need any form of written correspondence for a legal matter, raise it in the consultation before you book — it is not something that can be promised in advance.
What if I have already done damage?
Then the work includes that, honestly, without being turned into the only thing that is true about you. Start with the free consultation, and if anyone is in immediate danger, call 911 instead.
A free tool for this
The Emotion Regulation Skills Pack is a free printable of DBT-informed skills for widening the gap between the surge and what your voice, face and hands do next.
A short call, no explanation required
The next step is a free 15-minute consultation. No clinical assessment, no charge, no commitment — a short conversation to find out whether this is the right fit and which clinician can work with you in your province.
Book a Free ConsultationOr text (519) 760-5211
You do not have to arrive with an explanation ready. If you had one, you probably would not need the appointment.
Prefer not to create an account? We can book it for you.
Send your name, a way to reach you and a few times that usually suit you. We will book your free 15-minute consultation at one of those times, or offer the nearest open one, and confirm by email or text, usually within 24 hours.