Melissa Lehrich, LCSW

Melissa Lehrich is a licensed clinical social worker with 25 years of experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, and relationship struggles. She offers direct, practical support for common life challenges. Her approach is warm and down-to-earth. She focuses on clear steps clients can try between sessions.

Melissa uses cognitive behavioral ideas to help people notice unhelpful thoughts and change behaviors that keep them stuck. She also draws on Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for emotion management and grounding. For clients impacted by trauma, she integrates EMDR techniques when appropriate to address distressing memories.

Sessions are collaborative. Melissa listens to what matters most and builds a plan around each person’s goals. She emphasizes simple, doable strategies for sleep, managing panic, improving communication, and coping with loss.

Her work includes helping people with parenting stress, intimacy-related concerns, anger, self-esteem, career shifts, and life purpose questions. She addresses both short-term problems and longer-standing patterns that erode well-being. Melissa pays attention to emotions like guilt, shame, and loneliness as part of the healing process.

Based in California, she brings decades of clinical experience to online formats like video, phone, chat, and text. The first sessions usually focus on understanding the problem and agreeing on small steps to try. From there she adjusts methods to match progress and preferences.

How Melissa’s approaches work online

Melissa uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help people identify unhelpful thoughts and try different behaviors. CBT often focuses on small experiments to reduce anxiety, improve sleep, or change patterns that fuel low mood.

She also integrates Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills to teach emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and clearer communication. DBT skills are useful when intense feelings or relationship conflict get in the way of daily life.

For those affected by trauma, she may include EMDR techniques to process distressing memories and reduce their emotional charge. EMDR is typically paired with stabilization skills so clients feel ready to work on traumatic material.

Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. Melissa will talk with each client about symptoms, goals, and preferences, then try methods that fit the situation. Sessions include checking progress and adapting the plan as needed.

Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face work and experiential exercises, phone sessions give an easier option when bandwidth is limited, and live chat or text-based messaging supports brief check-ins or ongoing coaching between sessions. These formats make it easier to fit therapy into work, caregiving, and travel schedules while maintaining continuity of care.