About Melisa
Melisa Ford is a Licensed Professional Counselor with 12 years of experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship challenges. She works with clients who are coping with grief, addiction, ADHD, mood disorders, and problems tied to communication and intimacy. Melisa writes plainly and listens carefully to understand each person's situation.
She focuses on practical skills that can be used right away. Sessions often include talking through current struggles, learning new ways to respond to strong emotions, and building routines that reduce impulsivity and overwhelm.
Background and approach
She tailors those steps to each person's goals and life context. Melisa draws from client-centered methods to create a nonjudgmental space. She also uses cognitive behavioral techniques to change unhelpful thoughts and behaviors.
When needed, she adds dialectical behavior strategies to help with emotional regulation and distress tolerance. Her background includes work with people encountering multicultural stressors and blended family issues. She also supports those with substance use concerns, abandonment or attachment difficulties, and intellectual disability-related challenges.
Her practice aims to be inclusive and respectful of different identities. In sessions she emphasizes clear communication skills, problem-solving, and step-by-step plans for change. The focus is on small, achievable shifts that add up over time.
Melisa is licensed as an LPC and practices in Alabama.
Approaches that translate to online work
Client-centered therapy emphasizes listening and understanding each person's experience. Online sessions let a therapist follow the client's lead while offering empathy and reflective feedback, which helps people feel heard and seen even when meeting remotely.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and changing behaviors. This approach works well in an online format because exercises, thought records, and behavior plans can be shared and reviewed between sessions to track progress.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, teaches emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. Those practical skills are easy to practice between sessions and discuss over video or messaging to reinforce new habits.
Finding the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with the client about goals, try techniques, and adjust methods based on what helps most. Clients are invited to give feedback so the plan stays aligned with their needs and preferences.
Online therapy through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging offers flexibility for busy schedules. Video is useful for deeper conversation and visual cues, phone calls can be easier when bandwidth is limited, live chat supports shorter check-ins, and text messaging lets clients send updates or reflections between sessions. These options make it simpler to keep momentum and fit therapy into everyday life.
Questions people ask
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What this counselor works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Addictions
- Anger management
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Antisocial personality
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Family conflicts
- Family problems
- Grief
- Impulsivity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Relationship issues
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 12 years
- Licensed
- Georgia, Alabama
- Languages
- English