About Melody
Dr. Melody Madaris is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) with 14 years of experience. She combines practical strategies with a straightforward style to help people facing mood disorders, addiction, trauma, and ADHD.
Her approach is direct and focused on clear steps readers can take right away. She spent much of her career working with people dealing with substance use, trauma, and bipolar disorder. That clinical background shaped how she approaches treatment plans and crisis situations.
Background and approach
She also oversees programs that address co-occurring mental health and substance use concerns in Illinois. In administrative roles she manages a residential treatment facility and several outpatient programs. She also coordinates a 24-hour mobile crisis program and employee assistance efforts.
Those responsibilities inform how she thinks about continuity of care and real-world supports. In sessions she emphasizes identifying the parts of life that need to change and making doable plans to start that work. She uses proven talk therapies and skills practice to help people reduce symptoms and build routines that stick.
Sessions aim to be practical and action-oriented. She welcomes conversations about grief, eating concerns, process addictions, first responder stress, compassion fatigue, and career coaching. She also offers support around body image, relationship endings, and complex trauma reactions.
Her style is collaborative and goal-focused, with attention to what can be changed now.
Therapeutic approaches for online care
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) focuses on clarifying personal values and committing to actions that align with those values. It helps people tolerate difficult thoughts and feelings while making meaningful changes in life. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) examines how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors interact and teaches practical skills to change unhelpful patterns. CBT is often used for mood disorders, anxiety, and many everyday problems.Choosing the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, symptoms, and preferences. From there she collaborates to match methods and tries options that fit the person’s needs and life circumstances.
Online sessions come in several formats: video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging. Video allows face-to-face conversation and skills demonstrations. Phone sessions can be useful when bandwidth is limited or for shorter check-ins. Live chat and text-based messaging can make it easier to fit support into a busy day or to send quick notes between sessions. These options aim to make therapy more flexible and easier to fit into daily life.
Questions people ask
What concerns does she help with?
What is her therapeutic style?
How much experience does she have?
Where is the therapist located and licensed?
Which languages are supported and can international clients connect?
What session formats are offered?
How does cost work for sessions?
How do I begin working with her?
What this therapist works with
Most often
- Addictions
- Trauma and abuse
- Bipolar disorder
Also listed
- ADHD
- Anger management
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Coaching
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Depression
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Eating disorders
- First responder issues
- Grief
- HIV / AIDS
- Mood disorders
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Post-traumatic stress
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Gottman Method
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 14 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English
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