About Melissa
Melissa Thompson is a counsellor credentialed with PACFA who has 14 years of clinical experience. She supports people feeling overwhelmed by stress, anxiety, grief, low self‑esteem and motivation. Her work also covers trauma and abuse, addictions, relationship and intimacy concerns, and ADHD-related challenges.
Melissa aims to make sessions easy to understand. She keeps language simple and focuses on practical steps you can try between meetings. She builds a calm, non‑judgemental space where people can talk about difficult feelings and start to make changes.
How Melissa works
Her approach draws on several methods including cognitive and acceptance‑based tools. That means she might help you spot unhelpful thinking patterns and try small experiments to test new behaviours. She also pays attention to attachment and relationship dynamics when those are getting in the way.
Sessions can include coaching elements when people want to work on goals like sleep, career decisions or coping skills. Melissa often uses emotion‑regulation strategies from dialectical behaviour work to manage intense reactions. The overall focus is on what helps you feel steadier and more able to handle life’s demands.
If you prefer online options, she offers video calls, phone sessions, live chat and text‑based messaging. That flexibility makes it easier to fit therapy around work, parenting and busy schedules.
Melissa lists 14 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)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative 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
- 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
Training and background
| Register | PACFA |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 14 |
| 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
How Melissa’s approaches work online
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) helps people notice unhelpful thoughts without getting pushed around by them, and then choose actions that match their values. It can be useful for anxiety, low mood and navigating life changes. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) focuses on spotting and testing thinking patterns and trying small behavioural experiments to reduce distress and improve routines like sleep. It often helps with anxiety, depression and anger. Attachment‑based work looks at how early relationship patterns affect current connections and emotional safety, and it can be helpful when trust, abandonment or intimacy issues are present.Choosing the right approach is something the therapist will do together with you. Melissa will ask about your goals, what has and hasn’t worked before, and your preferences so you can agree on a plan that fits your needs. That collaborative process helps match the methods to the problems you bring.
Online therapy here includes video calls, phone sessions, live chat and text‑based messaging. Video is useful for face‑to‑face conversation and reading non‑verbal cues, phone can be quicker and needs less bandwidth, live chat suits shorter check‑ins and text messaging works for ongoing support between sessions. These options give flexibility to fit sessions around work, parenting and other commitments.
Start online instead of waiting
Our partner service asks a few questions about what you are looking for and matches you with a therapist for sessions from home.
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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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