About Melissa
Melissa Maaske is a licensed independent clinical social worker with 10 years of experience in Minnesota. She welcomes people who feel stuck by worry, relationship strain, or low self-worth. Seeking therapy can feel hard, and she aims to make the first step clearer and calmer.
Melissa uses down-to-earth conversation to uncover what is keeping each person from feeling better. She helps people notice thoughts and patterns that cause anxiety or stress and then practises ways to change them.
Background and approach
Sessions focus on small, doable steps as well as understanding deeper emotional themes when that feels right. Her work covers common concerns like anxiety, depression, grief, and addictions. She also supports people facing trauma, attachment or abandonment wounds, body image and eating issues, and challenges related to caregiving and codependency.
Melissa pays attention to relationship and intimacy issues and helps people manage career change, compassion fatigue, and ADHD-related struggles. In sessions she draws from approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, motivational interviewing, psychodynamic therapy, and solution-focused work. That mix lets her tailor practical tools and reflective conversation to each person’s needs.
She aims for warmth, clear goals, and measurable steps. People who want straightforward guidance and a mix of skills-based practice plus deeper reflection often do well with her style. Melissa encourages people to take gradual steps and tracks progress together so therapy feels purposeful and grounded.
Approaches that translate well to online therapy
Melissa often uses cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors to reduce anxiety and improve daily functioning. CBT is useful for issues like panic, phobias, depression, and stress because it gives clear skills to practice between sessions.She also draws on dialectical behavior therapy techniques to teach emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and better interpersonal skills. DBT-informed work can help with strong emotional reactions, relationship conflict, and impulsive behaviors by offering step-by-step coping strategies.
Choosing the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and how they respond to different techniques. That collaborative process guides whether sessions focus more on skills practice, motivational interviewing to shift behavior, or deeper psychodynamic reflection.
Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video is useful for full sessions and demonstrations of techniques. Phone sessions can fit into a busy day or when bandwidth is limited. Live chat and text messaging work well for brief check-ins, assignment follow-up, or when someone prefers written communication. These options make it easier to fit therapy into life and keep work moving between sessions.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 10 years
- Licensed
- Minnesota
- Languages
- English
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