Melissa Friesenhahn

What clients take away from working with Melissa Friesenhahn is something practical: a clearer sense of what’s keeping them stuck and real skills for moving forward. As a Licensed Professional Counselor based in San Antonio, Texas, she draws on an eclectic therapeutic foundation — meaning she adapts her methods to the person in front of her, rather than fitting people into a single framework. In sessions, she and her clients work through emotional and cognitive patterns together, examine past and present relationships, and build goals collaboratively.

Melissa works with children, adolescents, adults, and couples navigating anxiety, adjustment challenges, career transitions, professional burnout, family conflict, and the particular weight of relationships under strain. For couples especially, she brings Gottman Method training (Levels 1 and 2) and Emotionally Focused Therapy — both grounded in decades of empirical research — alongside Prepare and Enrich for premarital work. She also notes that many clients arrive exhausted from never fully powering down, their nervous systems running hot from a day that never really ends, and that learning to rest is often where real therapeutic progress begins.

With backgrounds in both business and education spanning many years, Melissa brings a grounded, nonjudgmental presence to a wide range of life circumstances. She offers both in-person and online sessions.