About Melissa
Melissa Hurt is a licensed independent clinical social worker (LICSW) in Minnesota. She brings a social work perspective to therapy and is attentive to how systems and life context shape everyday struggles. Melissa aims to help people find more peace, stability, or joy depending on what they most need.
She earned a master’s degree in social work with a macro focus, then pursued clinical licensure. That background informs how she notices the impact of institutions, culture, and family stories on a person’s life.
How Melissa works
Those influences are part of the work she does in sessions. Melissa has spent years supporting disability services teams and collaborating with other social workers. Those roles taught her practical problem solving and how to stay connected to daily challenges people face.
She emphasizes strengths, compassion, and creative options when people feel stuck. Her personal experience includes long-term partnership and raising children, and she has experience supporting young college professionals and people connected to the military community. She mentions those life contexts as parts of the perspective she brings to conversations about relationships and transitions.
In sessions she blends approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Emotionally-Focused Therapy, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Mindfulness and self-care are woven into the work, and she helps people figure out what actually fits their life. Melissa describes herself as honest, compassionate, and a steady source of support.
People who want a practical, empathic listener who notices systems and everyday pressures may find her approach helpful. She works to meet people where they are and to build goals that match real life.
Melissa lists 6 ways of working on the entry:
What Melissa works with
The areas below are the ones Melissa selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- Stress, Anxiety
- LGBT
- Relationship issues
Also listed
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- ADHD
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Cancer
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- 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
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Smoking / vaping cessation
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Training and background
| Register | LICSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 3 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Minnesota |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Therapeutic approaches and how they work online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourages people to notice difficult thoughts and choose actions that match their values. It helps with anxiety, depression, and life transitions by focusing on what matters and small steps toward it. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns. CBT is often used for anxiety, stress, and mood concerns. Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) focuses on understanding and reshaping emotional responses to improve closeness and communication in relationships and to address attachment-related worries.Choosing the right approach is something the therapist does together with each person. Melissa will ask about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t worked before. That collaborative process means methods can be adapted as needs change rather than sticking to a single technique from the start.
Online therapy offers several practical benefits for this work. Video calls allow for a near face-to-face conversation when visual cues matter. Phone sessions are useful when bandwidth is limited or for a shorter check-in. Live chat and text-based messaging make it possible to share thoughts in writing between sessions or when a quick touchpoint is needed. These options make scheduling more flexible and help match the format to a person’s routines and comfort.
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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