As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Melissa has been providing therapy to children, adolescents, and their families since 2008. Her entire life, people have confided in her, and through those experiences she has learned that helping people is part of who she is. Melissa has worked in residential care, private practice, intensive outpatient programming, and partial hospitalization programming. She has advanced training and/or certification in Accelerated Resolution Therapy
(ART), Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Permanency and Adoption Competency, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and Board Approved Clinical Supervision with the MN Board of Marriage and Family Therapy and the MN Board of Behavioral Health and Therapy.
Melissa believes that often, people are struggling and need more intensive support, and she wanted to be part of providing more intensive options her our community. Aside from working individually with adolescents, she has a special interest in helping parents and/or family systems improve their abilities to care for one another and meet the needs of the family
system. She enjoys doing family therapy and/or teaching parents’ skills groups to help the caregivers involved with the adolescent feel more equipped to support the child they are bringing to my office. She believes that we are all doing the best we can with the tools we have and hopes to help people have more tools that they feel capable of using on a daily basis to maintain progress and create improvement in their lives.
A collaborative approach to therapy is very important to Melissa in her relationship with patients and their families. She wants to be able to encourage people in such a way that they are able to sustain themselves in their growth and healing, and believes that collaboration and connection are an invaluable way to do so. Melissa thinks in a systemic way and wants
to treat the entire individual in the context of their life; focusing on an individual’s strengths, biology, history, and current support/skills. Melissa wants to make sure that through her relationship with patients and their families she is encouraging their growth, providing a safe and nurturing environment, building trust, and increasing use of skills so that an individual can continue to have success in his/her/their life outside of the therapeutic relationship. It is her dream that, in the future, mental health care will be viewed as a preventative part of everyone’s wellness; that we will shift our culture in such a way that we view taking care of emotions and healing from past hurts as important as taking care of our physical bodies. After all, one does not exist without the other.
Quote from a patient “Instead of avoiding the hard stuff, you embraced it. You challenged every stubborn bone in my body, but never gave up on me. ” “You helped save my life, and for that I will forever be grateful. Thank you for never giving up on me. “
Melissa enjoys being engaged in relationships, both at work and at home. When she is not working, she likes to spend time with her husband, children, and other extended family members. She loves learning new things and can often be found reading 3–4 books at a time.