About Melissa
Melissa Harris is a Licensed Professional Counselor with eight years of experience in Tennessee. She focuses on practical ways to reduce stress and anxiety and to handle life changes that feel overwhelming. Melissa aims to make sessions straightforward and supportive so people can start feeling more in control.
She works with common struggles like grief, trauma and abuse, ADHD, substance concerns, and mood challenges. Melissa also helps with relationship friction, intimacy questions, parenting strain, and workplace stress.
Background and approach
Her approach is down-to-earth and focused on small, usable steps. Melissa uses several evidence-informed methods to guide sessions. She leans on tools from cognitive behavioral approaches to spot unhelpful thoughts and from acceptance-based work to clarify values and build tolerance for hard emotions.
Attachment ideas and client-centered listening shape how she talks about relationships and personal history. In practice, sessions involve clear goals, teachable skills, and check-ins about what is and isn’t working. She helps people build routines, communication habits, and coping plans that fit daily life.
Therapy can include short-term problem solving or longer work on patterns that repeat. Melissa welcomes people who want a practical partner for change. She focuses on steady progress and on skills you can use between sessions.
The aim is to help people regain balance and move toward the life they want.
Therapeutic approaches and online care
Melissa often combines cognitive behavioral techniques with acceptance-based work. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on identifying and changing unhelpful thoughts and behaviors, which can be useful for anxiety, depression, and stress. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy encourages noticing difficult feelings while clarifying personal values, which helps people take meaningful action even with hard emotions.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. The therapist collaborates with each person to choose methods that match their needs, goals, and preferences. Together they assess what helps most and adapt the plan over time so sessions stay relevant and practical.
Online formats make this process flexible. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation and visual cues, phone sessions work well when bandwidth is limited, live chat can be used for brief check-ins, and text-based messaging supports ongoing, shorter communication. These options help people fit therapy into busy schedules and maintain continuity between sessions.
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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