About Melissa
Melissa Harris is a Licensed Professional Counselor with eight years of practice in Tennessee. She works with people facing stress, anxiety, grief, trauma, and attention difficulties. Her style is straightforward and caring, aimed at helping people feel steadier in day-to-day life.
Melissa builds a calm space where people can talk through hard memories and current struggles. She helps clients set small, actionable goals. Those goals are meant to reduce overwhelm and improve coping skills.
Background and approach
Her work draws on several practical approaches, including cognitive behavioral techniques and acceptance-based strategies. She uses these methods to help people notice unhelpful patterns and try new ways of responding. Sessions often focus on real-life problems such as workplace stress, relationship communication, and parenting challenges.
Melissa also uses attachment-informed ideas to look at how early relationships shape current habits. This can help when trust, intimacy, or abandonment worries affect daily life. Dialectical behavior ideas are incorporated when people need skills for emotion regulation and building balance.
People who choose her tend to want clear recommendations and steady support. She talks about coping skills in plain language and helps clients practice them between sessions. The aim is useful change that fits each person’s life and goals.
Approaches that translate well to online work
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy helps people notice unhelpful thoughts and commit to actions that match their values. It is often useful for anxiety, stress, and life changes because it focuses on practical steps rather than only changing feelings.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy involves identifying thoughts and behaviors that keep problems going and testing new ways of responding. It tends to help with anxiety, depression, and pattern-based issues by breaking problems into manageable pieces.
Attachment-Based ideas look at how early relationships shape current expectations and closeness. Using these ideas can help when trust, intimacy, or abandonment worries affect daily relationships.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will talk with each person about symptoms, goals, and preferences and then try methods that seem to fit best. This is a collaborative process with adjustments over time based on what helps.
Online sessions can use video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different needs. Video is useful for face-to-face conversation and exercises, phone can work when bandwidth is limited, and messaging supports shorter check-ins or skill practice between appointments. These options make therapy more flexible and easier to fit into busy schedules.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Cancer
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Immigration issues
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Gottman Method
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
- Systemic Therapy
- Experience
- 8 years
- Licensed
- Tennessee
- Languages
- English
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