Online only · For professionals · Seven days a week
Online Burnout Therapy for High Achievers
You don’t have to burn out to earn rest.
You run the meeting, the ward, the case, the call. TEO Counselling provides private burnout therapy for professionals online, in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador — evenings and weekends, in English or Arabic, with Hindi and Malayalam for clients in British Columbia. Bring the version of you that nobody at work gets to see.
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.
Burnout therapy for professionals, at a glance. TEO Counselling provides private burnout therapy 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.
Who this is forExecutive burnout comes with different job titles
You might be the physician charting at midnight. The lawyer who billed eleven hours and still answered email at dinner. The executive who carries the numbers — and every person attached to them. The founder who can’t tell where the company ends and they begin. The first responder who has seen what others never will.
Different seats, same pattern: you hold more than your share, for a long time, and nobody checks on the holder. This page is for professionals who pay privately and keep their circle small. One thing to know before you read on: ambition is welcome here. You don’t have to want less from your career. You just can’t keep paying for it with yourself.
Looking for a therapist for burnout usually comes down to one question: can I get help without it becoming one more thing to manage? This is private, online therapy for professionals whose work has been taking more than it gives back, from home with no office to visit, and the free consultation is where that question gets answered.
Work stress is a load. Burnout is the ground giving way.
Work stress is carrying a heavy pack. It’s hard, but the weight lifts when the deadline passes. Burnout is different. Burnout is when the ground under the pack starts to give way. The project ends and nothing lifts.
It can show up in three ways: exhaustion that sleep doesn’t touch, a growing distance from work you used to care about, and a quiet slide in performance at things you’re good at. None of this means you’re weak. It means you’ve been running a system past its limits, and the system is sending a bill. Therapy is where we read that bill line by line — and look at how the spending happened.
High-functioning anxiety: the cost of looking composed
You’ve mastered looking composed. That’s part of the problem. The calmer you look, the less anyone asks. So nobody asks. High-functioning anxiety can hide this way: the to-do list gets done, the emails get answered, the standards stay high — while the inside runs hot. Our article explains what high-functioning anxiety is, and how it differs from burnout.
Here’s the reframe. Coming to therapy is not breaking character. It’s the same skill that built your career: noticing a problem early and putting a professional on it. You review your finances. You review your contracts. This is a review of the operator.
What is burnout?
Burnout is deep exhaustion — physical, mental, and emotional — built up over a long stretch of chronic workplace stress that never got managed. The World Health Organization treats it as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, and defines it by three features: depleted energy, growing mental distance from or cynicism about the job, and a slide in how effective you feel at work.
Two things in that definition matter for therapy. First, burnout is chronic: one brutal quarter does not produce it, but the tenth one can. Second, “unmanaged” does not mean you failed to cope — you may have been coping impressively for years. It means the load and the recovery never balanced, and no amount of personal grit changes that arithmetic. Burnout counselling starts by mapping where the imbalance actually lives: the role, the rules you work under, and the rules you carry with you.
The World Health Organization reserves the term burnout for the workplace, but a similar pattern can show up outside it. What gets called caregiver burnout — the parent of a child with complex needs, the adult managing a parent’s decline while holding a career — follows the same arc and deserves the same attention. Watching a parent decline can also bring anticipatory grief, the grief that begins while someone is still here.
Is burnout the same as depression?
Not exactly. From the outside the two can look alike, but burnout, by definition, is tied to a particular role or workload, whereas depression can reach into every part of life — the parts that have nothing to do with work included.
A rough test is distance. Real distance from the stressor — a genuine holiday, a leave, a long weekend with the phone actually off — can touch burnout at least a little. Depression can travel with you: the flatness is there on the beach too, and the things you loved outside work have also gone grey. The two can overlap, and burnout that runs long enough can sit alongside depression in the same person, which is one reason it deserves more than a self-diagnosis from a listicle.
Can burnout cause depression?
Possibly, though the research has not settled it. Long-term studies have tracked burnout coming before later depressive symptoms, and depression coming before later burnout, and researchers have not agreed on whether the two are truly separate. The more useful question for you is where the low mood lives now.
Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and counsellors and psychotherapists do not diagnose. If low mood, hopelessness, or the loss of pleasure has spread well beyond work, bring that to your physician — therapy can run alongside medical care rather than instead of it. And if any of it has tipped into thoughts of ending your life, do not route that through a booking page: call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7).
The jobs that quietly collect a toll
Some workplace stress is loud — layoffs, restructures, a manager everyone warns you about. The kind that produces burnout can be quieter: an on-call rotation that never truly ends, targets that reset the moment you hit them, emotional labour nobody logs. Nurse burnout and physician burnout have their own vocabularies for a reason; healthcare workers spend their shifts absorbing other people’s worst moments, then charting them. Teachers, social workers, and frontline support staff carry a version of the same load.
One specific piece of it has its own name: compassion fatigue — the gradual wearing-down of the capacity to care that comes from caring professionally, at volume, for a long time. It is not a character flaw, and it is not the end of your empathy. It is a signal about dosage.
First responders, and other special cases
For police, fire, paramedics, dispatchers, and emergency-department staff, burnout may not arrive alone — it can come braided with what the job required you to witness. That work has its own page here: first responder therapy, where EMDR and the culture of the work get proper attention.
Two other patterns are worth naming. ADHD burnout: the boom-and-bust cycle of masking, over-committing, and crashing that some adults with ADHD describe. Counselling works with the overwhelm and the self-criticism; diagnosis stays with your physician. And the high performer whose burnout hides inside a promotion — because the usual reward for surviving an unsustainable job is a bigger one.
How burnout counselling works here
We start with your goals, not a script. Then we match the approach to the job. CBT looks at the thinking habits that keep the grind running — rules like “rest must be earned.” IFS works with your inner parts: the driver, the critic, and the one who is tired of both. EMDR works with how the brain stores the hardest moments, which matters for first responders and physicians in particular.
Sessions are direct and practical. We set a focus, we work, we review what’s changing. Sessions are with one of three clinicians. Mohamad Shabib holds MACP, CCC; Alison Shaji is a Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC) with the BCACC; Rola Shbib is a Registered Social Worker (RSW) with the OCSWSSW. CBT and EMDR are with Mohamad, or with Alison for clients in British Columbia; IFS is with Mohamad. Bring your questions to the free consultation — including questions about approach.
Discretion, by design
There is no waiting room, because there is no walking in. Sessions are virtual — you join from any room with a door that closes. Book evenings or weekends, so therapy never has to appear on a work calendar.
We don’t share information with your employer. We don’t contact workplaces, and we don’t need anyone’s approval for you to be here. What you say in session stays in session, within the narrow limits the law sets — and we’ll explain those limits plainly before you share a word. Discretion here isn’t a favour. It’s the design.
What does recovery from burnout look like?
Recovery can be gradual, and rest alone may not do it — the pattern that produced the exhaustion has to change as well, or the same job quietly refills the same hole.
In practice the work moves through a few territories, in whatever order fits you. Stabilising the basics: sleep, some genuine form of stopping, a first honest look at the calendar. Renegotiating the rules — the internal ones, like “rest must be earned” or “if I don’t do it, it fails,” and sometimes the external ones, which can mean the workload conversation you have been postponing. And rebuilding a self that is not only the role: burnout narrows identity until the job is the last thing left standing, and widening that back out is real clinical work, not a hobby suggestion.
What we will not do is promise a timeline. How long this takes depends on how long the pattern ran, how much of it your workplace will let you change, and what the exhaustion has been keeping you too tired to notice. Your clinician should be able to give you a realistic read after the first few sessions — and should be willing to revisit it, out loud, as the work goes on.
A free tool for this
Two free printables sit alongside this work: the Stress and Burnout Recovery Kit, a load audit and a recovery planner that assumes you still have a job to run, and Getting to Know Your Inner Manager, questions for the part of you that is still on shift.
Maintenance for the person running all of it
You already spend real money maintaining what you run — the dues, the insurance, the certifications, the car. This is maintenance for the person running all of it. One hour, at a time you choose, with no commute attached.
Session details
Virtual-only, for clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland & Labrador.
Book a Free ConsultationBurnout, in brief
What is burnout?
Burnout is a state of deep exhaustion — physical, mental, and emotional — that builds when chronic workplace stress goes unmanaged for a long time. The World Health Organization classifies it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and describes it through three features: energy depletion, growing mental distance or cynicism toward the job, and a slide in how effective you feel at work.
Is burnout the same as depression?
Not exactly. Burnout and depression can look similar from the outside, but burnout is defined by its tie to a specific role or workload, while depression can reach into every part of life — including the parts that have nothing to do with work.
Can burnout cause depression?
It may. Burnout and depression can overlap, and researchers still disagree about whether they are separate (Koutsimani and colleagues, 2019; Bianchi and colleagues, 2021). One long-term study found burnout predicting later depressive symptoms (Hakanen and Schaufeli, 2012), and others found the link running both ways (Ahola and Hakanen, 2007; Toker and Biron, 2012). The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health describes depression as symptoms, such as loss of interest in favourite activities, that last most of the day, continue for more than two weeks and get in the way of how a person functions. If low mood like that has spread beyond work, raise it with a therapist and a doctor or nurse practitioner, who can check for physical causes such as sleep apnea. If thoughts of ending your life come up, call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7).
What does recovery from burnout look like?
Recovery from burnout can be gradual, and it may not come from rest alone — the pattern that produced the exhaustion has to change too, or the same job simply refills the same hole.
Can I do burnout therapy online?
Yes, and at TEO it only runs online: one-to-one, 60 minutes, $150, between noon and 9 pm Pacific seven days a week (3 pm to midnight Eastern), so sessions can sit outside work hours. You join from any private room, and nothing goes through your employer.
Is burnout therapy covered by extended health insurance?
It can be, through workplace extended health benefits. No provincial health plan covers counselling in private practice, and coverage depends on the credentials your plan recognizes — check for CCC, RCC or RSW. You receive an insurance-ready receipt after every session, and direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross and TELUS eClaims plans.
Should I take a stress leave?
That decision is yours, made with your doctor or nurse practitioner, who is usually the person who completes any medical note an employer or insurer asks for. Therapy can help you think it through — what rest would actually change, and what a return would need to look like — and prepare for that appointment.
Therapy is not a crisis service
- 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline — call or text 9-8-8 (Canada, 24/7)
- Kids Help Phone (for young people) — 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868
- Hope for Wellness Help Line — 1-855-242-3310 (24/7)
If you are in immediate danger, please call 911.
Getting started is a 15-minute conversation.
A free consultation, on a video call or a scheduled phone call. No intake forms about your feelings before you’re ready. Just a direct conversation: what’s going on, what you want from therapy, and whether we’re the right fit. If we’re not, we’ll say so. You don’t have to be in crisis to book a call.
Book a Free ConsultationOr text (519) 760-5211
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.