About Melissa
Melissa Averett is a Licensed Professional Counselor with 14 years of experience. She practices in Louisiana and focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, and other life challenges. Melissa takes a straightforward and compassionate approach in sessions.
She earned a Master of Education in Counseling from Southeastern Louisiana University in 2008. Early in her career she spent four years working in a residential setting with women recovering from addiction.
Background and approach
She then provided outpatient counseling for nine years, working with adults facing a wide range of struggles and mental health concerns. Melissa uses Client-Centered Therapy to build rapport and help clients name their needs and set clear goals. She also applies Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques to identify and change unhelpful thinking patterns.
These approaches are used to teach healthier coping skills and practical tools. In sessions she focuses on tangible skills a person can use right away. That includes setting healthy boundaries, improving self-esteem, understanding choices and consequences, and practicing assertive communication.
She also helps people process grief, trauma related to divorce, and relationship problems. Clients can expect a warm, empathic presence while working on difficult topics. Melissa aims to make therapy a collaborative effort, combining listening with straightforward strategies.
Her style emphasizes clear steps for moving forward and building more stable daily routines.
How Melissa Uses Client-Centered and CBT Online
Melissa uses Client-Centered Therapy to build a trusting working relationship, listening closely and helping people name their goals. This approach focuses on empathy and collaboration to help someone feel heard and understood, which can be useful for stress, relationship issues, and grief.She also uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which involves identifying unhelpful thoughts and practicing new thinking and behavior patterns. CBT is often helpful for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, and coping with life changes because it gives concrete tools to use between sessions.
Choosing the right approach is part of the process. Melissa works together with each person to decide which methods fit their needs and goals. She blends listening with straightforward skill building so the plan matches preferences and everyday demands.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to increase flexibility. Video calls allow deeper conversation and visual cues, phone sessions can be simpler when bandwidth is limited, chat can work for shorter check-ins, and messaging supports continuing work between meetings. These options make it easier to fit therapy into a busy life and to practice skills in real time.
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Avoidant personality
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Visually impaired
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 14 years
- Licensed
- Louisiana
- Languages
- English
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