Florida and Ontario Therapy
Your relationship runs between Ontario, Canada and Florida. Your therapy can too.
Some couples move between the two together: summers in Ontario, winters in Sarasota, the same marriage in both houses. Others live on opposite sides of the border, one of you in Toronto and the other in Sarasota, holding the relationship together with flights and video calls. I work with both, and I'm licensed in both places, so the work continues wherever you are.
One therapist, two jurisdictions
Therapy usually stops at the border
Most therapists are licensed in one jurisdiction. When you leave it, the work pauses, or it restarts with someone new who spends the first six sessions learning what the last one already knew. For an individual, that costs momentum. For a couple, it costs more, because the pattern between you keeps running whether anyone is watching it or not.
Snowbird Couples
When you move between two homes together
The logistics of a two-country life are usually handled well: two homes, two sets of doctors, a routine that moves south in November and north in April. What rarely moves cleanly is the relationship itself. A season away from the usual pressures can make a strained marriage look calmer than it is, and a calm stretch is easy to mistake for a resolved one.
Cross-Border Couples
When the border runs between you
Distance changes how a couple fights. Conflict gets rationed, because nobody wants to spend a visit on it. Hard conversations happen over text, where tone disappears. A weekend together has to carry the weight of a month apart, and both of you feel it arrive at the airport.
Underneath, the question is usually where you'll live, whose career bends, and whose family ends up closer. Those decisions are hard to make well from two countries, and harder when each of you is quietly tracking what you've already given up. Usually one of you has a firmer answer about where this ends up than the other has heard. Say so early, because the distance has been making that conversation easy to avoid.
You can each join sessions from your own side of the border. When you're together, come in person to my downtown Sarasota or Lakewood Ranch office.
Licensed in both places
Two licenses, one clinician
Families and wealth
Money that crosses a border
Families with assets in both countries bring two sets of rules into every conversation about money. Two tax systems. A cottage one sibling wants to keep and another wants to sell. A business one child runs and the others own. A second marriage that inherited all of it.
Your lawyers and accountants build the structure. What the structure means to each person in the family is a separate problem, and it tends to surface at exactly the moment the paperwork is supposed to settle things.
That conversation happens here, directly. It is the same financial therapy work I do with families whose money sits in one country, with the added weight of a second jurisdiction on every decision.
How it works
The practical details
Before you book
What clients in two countries ask first
I split the year between Ontario and Florida. Can we meet all year?
Yes. The work continues in both places because the practice holds credentials in each. Send me your travel dates once you know them, since a move you plan for needs no adjustment and one discovered the morning of a session usually costs that session.
Which licence applies to a given session?
Whichever jurisdiction you are physically in at the time. Your mailing address, your tax residency, and where you were living when we started do not change it.
We live on opposite sides of the border. Can we still do couples therapy?
Yes, and it is a common arrangement here. Each of you joins from wherever you are, as long as that is Florida or Ontario, and it does not have to be the same one. When you are together, come into the office.
What if I travel somewhere other than Florida or Ontario?
Sessions pause for that stretch, because licensing does not travel with either of us. Tell me the dates ahead of time and we can usually shift the session rather than lose it.
Do Ontario extended health plans cover this?
Many cover services from a Registered Social Worker, and receipts are provided for you to submit. Read your plan's wording before you start, since limits and eligible provider types vary more than most people expect.
Do you bill insurance in Florida?
Reclaim is private pay. Superbills are available where out-of-network reimbursement applies and is clinically appropriate, and you submit those to your insurer yourself.
If your situation is not here, bring it to the consultation call. The logistics are usually simpler than people expect.
A confidential consultation
Start from wherever you are
Couples in both situations tend to wait until they're in the same place to start. For snowbirds, that means after the move. For couples living apart, it means after someone relocates, and that decision is often the very thing you need help making. If you're each in Florida or Ontario today, book a consultation from there.