About Melissa
Melissa Thompson is a counsellor credentialed with PACFA and has 14 years of professional experience. She focuses on practical support for people feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, grief, low self‑esteem and motivation. Melissa aims to create a calm space where thoughts and feelings can be shared without judgement.
She presents as warm and straightforward and encourages small, steady steps toward change. Her approach blends pragmatic tools with attention to emotional safety.
Background and approach
Melissa uses strategies from cognitive behavioural work to spot unhelpful thinking patterns and from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help people notice values and take meaningful action. She also draws on attachment-based ideas to understand how past relationships shape current reactions. Sessions are conversational and goal-focused.
Melissa listens first, then helps set short-term goals and simple exercises you can try between sessions. This might include behavioural experiments, grounding techniques for stress, or values-based actions to rebuild confidence. She also supports people dealing with addiction, relationship and intimacy concerns, career difficulties, sleep problems, anger and life transitions.
Additional interests include abandonment, adoption and foster care, co-morbidity and first responder issues. Melissa works in English and practices from Australia. Melissa aims to help people feel steadier and more able to manage everyday challenges.
She offers a practical, collaborative style and supports clients as they try new ways of coping and make gradual changes.
How Melissa’s approaches translate online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages you to notice thoughts and feelings without getting hooked by them, then choose actions that match your values; it can help with anxiety, avoidance and motivation. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) focuses on spotting and changing thinking patterns and behaviours that maintain stress and low mood, and it often uses simple exercises between sessions. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationship patterns shape current responses and can be useful for intimacy, trust and relationship-related worries.Finding the best approach is a collaborative process. Melissa will listen to your goals and preferences, explain different ways of working, and help decide which methods to try together. She adapts tools to your needs and checks in about what is helping as therapy proceeds.
Online sessions are offered by video call, phone, live chat or text-based messaging to give practical flexibility. Video calls let you see facial expressions and have a fuller conversation. Phone sessions need less bandwidth and can fit into a short break. Live chat and text work well for quick check-ins, written reflection or when being on camera does not suit. These options make it easier to fit therapy into work, family and everyday life.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Career difficulties
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Women's 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)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
- Experience
- 14 years
- Licensed
- Languages
- English
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