About Melissa
Melissa McKay welcomes people who are feeling stuck, overwhelmed or unsure where to begin. She is a PACFA counsellor practising in Australia with 12 years of experience. Melissa aims to create calm, practical sessions that help clients make small changes that matter.
She works with a wide range of concerns including stress, anxiety, addiction, trauma, depression and intimacy-related issues. Melissa also helps people dealing with relationship tensions, sleep problems, anger and low self-esteem.
How Melissa works
She pays attention to how attachment patterns and past hurts affect current behaviour and connections. Sessions are shaped around each person’s needs. Melissa draws on approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Client-Centred Therapy to help people notice thoughts, try new actions and build coping skills.
She also uses elements of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy when emotional regulation and distress tolerance are priorities. Her style is respectful and down to earth. Conversations are straightforward and practical tools are offered alongside space to make sense of difficult feelings.
Melissa aims to balance compassion with clear steps that can be practised between sessions. People who choose Melissa usually want therapy that mixes emotional understanding with skills they can use day to day. To start they complete a short questionnaire, then schedule sessions that suit their timing and needs.
Melissa lists 13 ways of working on the entry:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Internal Family Systems
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.
Also listed
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Control issues
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Men's issues
- Midlife crisis
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Training and background
| Register | PACFA |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 12 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Australia |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
Evidence-informed approaches available online
Melissa commonly uses Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Attachment-Based Therapy as part of her online practice. ACT focuses on noticing thoughts and values-driven action rather than getting stuck in unhelpful thinking, and it can help with anxiety, depression and avoidance. Attachment-Based Therapy looks at how early relationship patterns affect current connections and helps people build healthier ways of relating and feeling safer in relationships.Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. Melissa will talk with each person about their goals, preferences and what has or hasn’t worked before. Together they work out which methods to try and adjust the plan as progress is made.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls let people use screen sharing and visual tools, phone sessions suit those with lower bandwidth or who prefer not to be on camera, and live chat or text-based messaging can be useful for shorter check-ins or when typing feels easier. These options help fit therapy into busy lives and make it easier to maintain contact between sessions when needed.
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Common questions
What concerns does Melissa commonly help with?
What is her general therapy style?
How much experience does she have?
What credentials and location should I know about?
Can I see her if English is not my first language?
What online session formats are available?
How much do sessions cost?
How do I begin therapy with her?
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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