If you are considering therapy and weighing whether to do it virtually, the format matters. This page walks through what virtual therapy at 365 Psychotherapy & Counselling actually involves: the reasons people end up here, how sessions work, what the research says about effectiveness, and the situations where virtual is not the right fit.

Why do people end up looking at virtual?

People end up looking at virtual therapy for different reasons, and most of them are practical.

For professionals in demanding roles, commuting to an office for a weekly session is often the reason they never start in the first place. Forty-five minutes of therapy becomes three hours of logistics, and it stops happening.

For clients in small towns or rural parts of Ontario, local options are thin. The therapists available may not be the right fit, and the nearest city is an hour away. Some clients also carry privacy concerns in smaller communities, where running into your therapist at the grocery store is a real thing that affects what gets said in session.

For parents of young children or people caring for aging relatives, an in-person slot that works with the rest of life is often genuinely unlikely to exist. Virtual removes the question.

Virtual also tends to appeal to people who have moved away from a therapist they trusted and want continuity without starting the search over locally. And it suits people who would simply prefer to talk from somewhere that already feels private, rather than a waiting room in a building they have never been in.

None of these are bad reasons. Virtual therapy exists in part because these situations are common, and because the format turns out to work well for most of them.

What virtual therapy looks like here?

Sessions run through OWL Practice, a Canadian psychotherapy platform. You sign into your OWL account on a phone, tablet, or computer and join the session by clicking the button beside your appointment time. There is no separate Zoom link, no app to install, and no additional software to set up.

Sessions are 50 to 60 minutes. On your side, you will want a private space where you can talk freely, a reliable internet connection, and headphones if you share a home with other people. If you are joining from a phone or tablet, please have a stand or stable surface to prop the device on. A steady camera is much easier to stay with over an hour.

Shelby sees clients Monday through Thursday, 9am to 5pm. All clients are Ontario residents, which is a regulatory requirement for psychotherapy services provided by an Ontario-registered RP.

If the connection drops mid-session, the standard procedure is to reconnect by re-joining through OWL. If that does not work, Shelby will follow up by phone or email to either continue the session or reschedule. Brief technical issues are a routine part of running a virtual practice. For a detailed walk-through of the first session specifically (the free consultation, intake paperwork, and what session one covers), see the first session page.

Does virtual therapy actually work?‍ ‍

The short answer is yes, for most people and most presentations. The research to date has consistently found outcomes comparable to in-person therapy across a wide range of issues, including the ones that get raised most often: anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship difficulties, and grief.

Early concerns about whether it was possible to build a real therapeutic relationship on video have mostly not played out. Most clients settle into the format within the first few sessions. For some, the fact that they are sitting in their own space, often with the option of closing the curtains or wrapping themselves in a blanket, makes it easier to talk about difficult things than a neutral office would. For others, the lower activation cost of opening a video link versus driving across town to an appointment turns out to be the factor that lets them actually show up every week, which matters more to outcomes than the specific room the session is in.

Virtual therapy is not an experimental format anymore. It has been studied and practiced long enough to have a solid evidence base across most common presentations. The one area where it is genuinely more limited than in-person is where in-person crisis response might be needed, which is addressed next.

Who virtual therapy suits, and where it isn't the right fit‍ ‍

Virtual therapy works well for adults who are stable enough to engage in weekly conversation-based work, have a private space they can use reliably, and are dealing with the kinds of concerns therapy generally addresses: difficult relationships, patterns they want to change, processing something that has happened, mood and anxiety concerns, grief, and similar. It is not the right fit for everyone. It is worth being direct about where it falls short. Virtual is not appropriate as a primary modality for:

• Active safety concerns, including recent suicidal ideation or self-harm that call for more coordinated or in-person care. If this is where you are, please reach out to 9-8-8 (Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline, call or text, 24/7), go to your nearest emergency room, or call 911 if you are in immediate danger.

• Acute psychosis or severe mood episodes that need psychiatric stabilization before outpatient therapy of any format can be useful.

• Not having a consistent private space to take sessions from. Attempting therapy from a car, a coffee shop, or a shared room where you can be overheard does not work over time.

• Any situation where in-person crisis response might be needed. Virtual is not a substitute for emergency services.

If any of the above apply, the right next step is almost never a therapy booking. It is usually a call to your family doctor, a visit to your nearest emergency room, a call to 9-8-8, or a call to 211 for non-crisis Ontario community and social services. If you are not sure what you need, starting with your family doctor is usually the cleanest way to sort that out.

Shelby's approach online‍ ‍

The core of the work does not change because it is happening on video. Shelby, a Registered Psychotherapist (CRPO #12083), works in a trauma-informed and integrative way, drawing on a range of modalities (ACT, DBT, Gestalt, narrative, somatic, psychodynamic, and an IFS-informed lens) based on what is most useful for each client. That shape of work translates to the virtual format without losing much of anything. The parts that depend on conversation, on tracking what happens in a client's body and voice while they talk, on working with patterns that show up over time: all of it carries over.

Somatic work is a useful example. Tracking what a client notices in their body as they speak does not require being in the same room. What is needed is a therapist paying close attention and a client who has the space to pay attention to themselves, both of which video handles.

What video does not carry as well are the small, incidental cues of an in-person setting: how someone moves through a waiting room, body language below the shoulders, the shift in presence when they walk out the door. In practice, these matter less than they sound like they should. Most of the therapeutic work happens in what the client says, what they notice, and what the therapist returns to them.

What you will actually experience in session one is covered on the first session page. In short: 50 to 60 minutes of conversation, oriented around what brought you in and what you want to address, led by Shelby, with no expectation that you arrive with a plan or a script.