Melanie Downs, LCMHC (NC),LMHC (NY), LPC (OR)

Melanie has been a practicing clinician for over twenty years in a variety of educational, community, and private settings. She currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with her family, and sees clients virtually in NC, NY, and OR. As a therapist, Melanie uses an integrative approach drawing from evidence based models including Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), existential-humanistic theory, mindfulness grounded in Buddhist Psychology, the Hakomi Method, and Internal Family Systems (IFS). Melanie is an IFS Level1trained therapist and has additionally completed training with IFSCA’s Stepping Stones 16 week course. She additionally has training in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy.

During sessions, Melanie helps you explore the parts of yourself that may feel disconnected, activated, or overburdened. She sees therapy as a safe and sacred space where you have the opportunity to take a closer look at the habits and patterns you may have developed to survive, connect, and move through life. This may turn up in your life looking like isolation, loneliness, depression, anixety/panic, exhaustion, frustration, emotion dysregulation, and disconnection. Melanie’s true joy is in helping you find deeper understanding & compassion for yourself, and inevitable re-connection to yourself in mind, body, and spirit.

As a white, cisgender female therapist, Melanie acknowledges the role traumatic experience and oppressive systems can play in how folks cope and adapt to the challenges life brings, particularly for vulnerable populations. To this end she strives to create a people first, relationship-driven clinical practice in pursuit of reconciliation and healing. From your first session until the last, Melanie works collaboratively using regular feedback to promote transparency in the therapeutic relationship and introduce you to a a new framework so you can continue to find healing and transformation in your life as you come home to yourself.

Humans possess an incredible capacity to heal themselves given the time and space to do so.

*Melanie works with Headway to accept the following insurance plans: North Carolina - Aetna, Cigna, Oscar, Oxford, United Healthcare; New York - Aetna, Cigna, Empire BCBS, Oscar, Oxford, United Healthcare

**Melanie does not accept insurance for relationship therapy