About Melissa
Melissa Maaske is a licensed clinical social worker with ten years of practice in Minnesota. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, and relationship and intimacy-related concerns. Her style is straightforward and compassionate, aimed at helping people take small practical steps forward.
Melissa often works with people coping with trauma and abuse, grief, addiction, body image and self-esteem struggles. She also pays attention to issues like codependency, commitment and communication problems, and the stress many caregivers carry.
How Melissa works
Her experience includes helping people navigate life changes such as divorce, adoption and blended family challenges. Her work draws on several approaches that match the need at hand. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps people notice and change unhelpful thinking and behavior patterns.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers skills for managing strong emotions and improving relationships. She also uses motivational interviewing and solution-focused techniques to set clear goals and find practical next steps. Sessions are intended to feel collaborative.
Melissa helps people set priorities, try small experiments, and track what helps. Conversations are paced to the person, with both short-term problem solving and attention to deeper patterns when useful. She provides services in English and sees people in Minnesota.
Melissa describes therapy as a process people enter when they want clearer coping skills, better communication, and more stable daily routines.
Melissa lists 8 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
- 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
Training and background
| Register | LICSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 10 |
| 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
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Melissa blends Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing into online work. CBT focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors to reduce anxiety and depression. Motivational Interviewing helps people find their own reasons to change, which is useful for addictions, career shifts, or making lifestyle adjustments.Choosing an approach is collaborative. Melissa will talk with each person about their goals, preferences, and what has or hasn’t helped before. Together they decide whether short-term solution-focused work, skills-based DBT techniques, or deeper psychodynamic discussion is the best next step.
Online sessions are offered as video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to fit different needs. Video works well for deeper conversation and visual cues. Phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth is limited or a shorter check-in is needed. Live chat and text messaging allow brief, flexible contact between longer sessions. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around work, caregiving, or travel.
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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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