Self-Esteem & Identity · Online in Six Provinces
You deserve to feel at home in yourself
Low self-esteem and identity struggles can be a quiet and persistent form of suffering. Therapy online across six provinces to help you understand where your self-concept came from — and build something truer.
Therapy for low self-esteem, at a glance. TEO Counselling provides therapy online for low self-esteem and identity struggles in six provinces. Sessions are with Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, IFS Levels 1 and 2, in six provinces; Alison Shaji, MA, a Registered Clinical Counsellor (BCACC #22608), CBT and inner-child work, in British Columbia; or Rola Shbib, BSW (Hons), RSW (Ontario), OCSWSSW #866715, in six provinces, where self-worth came apart around a death or in recovery. Individual sessions are $150 and couples sessions $175, each 60 minutes. 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, no referral needed.
Low self-esteem can sound like:
A relentless inner critic that's never satisfied
Comparing yourself constantly to others and always falling short
People-pleasing or saying yes when you want to say no
Fear of judgment, rejection, or not being 'enough'
Difficulty receiving compliments or positive feedback
Feeling like an imposter — waiting to be 'found out'
Not knowing who you are outside of your roles or others' expectations
Sabotaging good things because you don't believe you deserve them
If any of these resonate, you are not alone — and you do not have to work it out by yourself.
What self-esteem therapy works on:
Understand where your self-concept came from — and why it isn't the truth
Develop a compassionate, stable relationship with yourself
Set boundaries from a place of self-respect rather than guilt
Build a sense of identity that belongs to you — not your roles or history
Show up authentically in your relationships
Change your relationship with the inner critic without pretending it doesn't exist
Our therapeutic approach
We tailor every approach to what you actually need. No single method works for everyone — we draw from a range of evidence-based tools to find what fits you.
IFS
Gets to know the critical, diminishing, and self-sabotaging parts of you — understanding their origins and helping them let go of old burdens.
Psychoanalytic Exploration
Explores how early relationships and experiences shaped your core beliefs about yourself — with curiosity and without judgment.
CBT
Identifies and challenges the cognitive distortions that maintain low self-esteem, building more balanced and accurate self-perception.
Attachment Theory
Examines how early attachment patterns created beliefs about your worth and lovability — and what it would mean to develop a more secure sense of self.
Self-Compassion Practices
Builds the capacity to treat yourself with the same kindness you'd offer others — a foundational skill for building self-esteem.
EMDR
Processes formative experiences — shame, rejection, criticism — that left deep marks on your sense of self-worth.
You might also need
- Social anxiety — when the self-criticism is loudest around other people
- Recovering from narcissistic abuse — where the self-doubt was installed by someone else
Low self-esteem and a harsh inner critic are not the same problem
The two get used interchangeably, and they call for different work. Low self-esteem is an estimate — a quiet, settled assumption that you count for slightly less than the people around you. Sometimes no voice is attached to it at all. A harsh inner critic is louder and far more specific: a running commentary that appraises you sentence by sentence, during the meeting, on the drive home, at two in the morning.
Some people have both. Some have only one. Someone can hold a steady enough sense of their own worth and still be attacked from the inside over a mistyped email. Someone else goes a week without a single critical thought and never once considers that what they want might matter.
The difference changes what a session looks like. A critic is something you can be in a relationship with — it can be interrupted, and asked what it thinks it is protecting. A flat estimate gives you nothing to argue with, so that work is slower and more concrete: noticing a preference, saying it out loud to another person, staying with how uncomfortable it is to take up room.
Where the critical voice was learned, and why it arrives as fact
Nobody is born with it. It gets assembled out of a tone of voice repeated over years. A parent's sigh. A sibling who was the clever one, which made you the other thing. A house where warmth arrived after achievement and left when the achievement stopped. Sometimes it is a family under real strain — migration, illness, money, a parent who was not cruel but was not available — and a child concludes that needing things is what caused the trouble.
What makes it land as truth rather than opinion is when it was installed. A six-year-old cannot consider that a father's contempt is information about the father. Beliefs formed before you had the equipment to test them are not stored as claims somebody made. They are stored as how things are, filed next to gravity. The voice also speaks in your own words, with no source attached, so nothing about it signals that it might be someone else's opinion.
It holds on for one more reason: it once worked. A child who works out that being smaller and more careful keeps the house calm has solved a real problem with the tools available. That is why being told the criticism is irrational may not land. From the inside, dropping it feels less like correcting an error than like removing a safeguard.
Why the symptoms get mistaken for strengths
Overworking gives the critic nothing to say. Produce more than was asked, earlier than was asked, and there is no gap to attack. From outside it reads as drive, and it gets rewarded. Underneath, worth is being paid for in output, and the payment can never be made in advance.
People-pleasing gets described as being easy to work with. What it involves is constant monitoring — reading faces, tracking small shifts in tone, adjusting before anyone has to ask. It is a demanding job, done without acknowledgement, and it does not switch off when you leave the room.
Not being able to take a compliment looks like modesty. Underneath it is a consistency problem: praise contradicts your own account of yourself, and deflecting it settles the contradiction much faster than revising the account would. Accepting it also creates something to live up to.
Perfectionism works as insurance. If the work has no flaw in it, nobody can say out loud the thing you already believe. The cost is that finishing becomes dangerous — drafts pile up, deadlines slide, and the strategy meant to prevent criticism ends up producing it.
Why affirmations may not move it
The standard advice is to repeat a sentence like "I am enough" until it takes. If you have tried it and it felt like lying, that is not a failure of discipline.
A statement pitched far outside what you currently believe does not get absorbed; it gets rebutted. You say the sentence, and something supplies the counter-evidence — the specific memory, the specific failure. That rebuttal is the critic, and the side with twenty years of practice argues better. Affirmations also treat the voice as a fault to overwrite, which can make it louder, since it is being told to stop doing a job nobody has asked it about.
The work runs the other way. Statements are pitched at a distance you can actually hold — "I handled that badly and I am not a fraud" is arguable, "I am wonderful" is not. And the attention goes towards the voice rather than against it: when it started, whose it sounds like, what it predicts would happen if it went quiet. That last answer can be oddly specific, and it is where the useful conversation starts.
What the work involves, and who does it
The clinicians here come at this through different training, and the fit matters more than the label.
Internal Family Systems with Mohamad
Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, is a Canadian Certified Counsellor with the CCPA, trained in Internal Family Systems at Levels 1 and 2. IFS treats the mind as made up of parts rather than one voice. The critic is understood as a protector — a part with a job, standing in front of a younger part that carries shame from a particular time.
In practice you learn to speak about the critic rather than from inside it: "a part of me thinks this" instead of "I am pathetic." That separation changes what is possible. The questions then get direct — how old does the voice sound, what is it afraid would happen if it eased off, what was going on when it took the job. Nothing is deleted. It is a renegotiation. He works in English and Arabic, with clients in all six provinces.
Inner-child and psychoanalytic work with Alison
Alison Shaji is a Registered Clinical Counsellor with the BCACC and works with clients in British Columbia. Her approach is slower and less structured on purpose. It follows what repeats — the way a manager's silence produces the same stomach drop a parent's silence once did, and the way that pattern eventually turns up in the counselling relationship itself, where it can be noticed as it happens rather than reconstructed later. Inner-child work here is not a visualisation exercise. It is taking seriously that part of you formed an opinion at nine and has not been consulted since. She works in English, Hindi and Malayalam.
What we will not do
Rola Shbib is a Registered Social Worker (Ontario), with a background in crisis intervention, addictions, and an honours degree in thanatology — relevant when self-worth came apart around a death, or is tangled up with recovery. One limit holds whoever you see: counsellors do not diagnose. If what you describe looks like it warrants medical assessment, we will say so, and the next step involves a physician.
Common questions
Do I have to talk about my childhood?
No, and you set the pace. It is possible to work entirely in the present — what the critic says this week, when it gets loudest, what changes when you answer it differently. That said, if the same reaction turns up with bosses, partners and strangers alike, its history tends to become relevant on its own, and you can decide then whether to follow it.
What if nothing bad happened to me? Am I making this up?
This question gets asked, sometimes apologetically. Harsh self-criticism does not require a dramatic event. It grows just as readily out of ordinary conditions — a home where achievement was the currency of attention, a chronically stressed parent, being the responsible child, a school where comparison was the default. None of that looks like anything from outside the family.
Can I book with Alison if I live outside British Columbia?
No. Alison is a Registered Clinical Counsellor with the BCACC and works with clients located in British Columbia. Mohamad works with clients in all six provinces we serve — British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. What counts is where you are physically sitting during the session, not where you grew up or where your family lives.
Can you tell me whether this is low self-esteem or depression?
Not as a diagnosis — counsellors in Canada do not diagnose, and we will not pretend otherwise. We can describe what we notice in plain terms and say when something needs a physician's assessment. If sleep, appetite, energy, or thoughts of not wanting to be here are part of the picture, that belongs with a physician alongside any counselling, and we will say so rather than work around it.
What does it cost, and will insurance cover it?
Individual sessions are $150 for 60 minutes, couples $175. The first consultation is free, runs 15 minutes, and needs no referral. Direct billing is available with Mohamad and Alison for Pacific Blue Cross, CVAP and plans on the TELUS eClaims network (Canada Life and Manulife among them). Where your plan is not one we can bill, you get an insurance-ready receipt after every session — you pay, then submit. No provincial health plan in Canada covers counselling in private practice, so coverage depends on an extended benefits plan; check whether yours names certified counsellors, clinical counsellors or social workers; the plan's wording is what decides it. A small number of reduced-fee spots are held. Cancellations need 24 hours notice; later cancellations and no-shows are charged in full.
A free tool for this
Three free printables sit alongside this work: the Boundaries Workbook for the scripts and the audit, Getting to Know Your People-Pleaser for the part that says yes before you have checked with yourself, and The Shadow Work Handout for the disowned parts, golden shadow included.
If you need someone now
Therapy is not a crisis service. These are free and staffed around the clock:
- · 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.
Ready to take the first step?
Book a free, no-pressure consultation. We'll talk, listen, and figure out together if we're the right fit. No commitment required.
Book Free ConsultationOr text us: (519) 760-5211