Melany Freytes
Serving ages 6+ for individual therapy
M.A. Registered Mental Health Counselor Intern
Melany works with children, adolescents, and adults navigating health anxiety, chronic illness, chronic pain, medical trauma, OCD, anxiety, panic, social anxiety, phobias, and perfectionistic patterns. She has a particular interest in helping people who feel caught in cycles of body scanning, symptom checking, reassurance seeking, medical fears, or difficulty trusting their own physical experiences. She also supports clients who have experienced medical gaslighting, disability-related stress, or anxiety alongside complex medical experiences.
Melany brings specialized training in both cognitive and mind-body approaches, including EMDR, Brainspotting, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (iCBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT), Emotionally Focused Therapy, Mind-Body Coaching, and health anxiety treatment. Her training allows her to address both the thought patterns that maintain anxiety and the nervous-system responses that can make the body itself feel unsafe.
My Style
My style is compassionate, collaborative, validating, and mind-body focused. I want therapy to be a place where you don’t have to mask, minimize what you are experiencing, or feel like you have to over-explain yourself in order to be understood.
When health anxiety or chronic illness is involved, it can become difficult to know when to trust your body, when to trust your thoughts, or how to respond when fear takes over. Together, we can slow those patterns down, understand what is keeping them going, and develop practical ways to respond with greater confidence.
I believe your lived experience matters. My goal is to create a space where we can address both the cognitive side of anxiety and the ways fear, trauma, pain, and stress can become stored and experienced throughout the body.
Pembroke Pines Beach + Virtual Throughout Florida
Affirming list
LGBTQIA+ Affirming
Neurodiverse-Affirming
Trauma-Informed
|
|
|
Chronic Illness-Affirming
Culturally Responsive
BIPOC — Hispanic / Latina / Puerto Rican
|
My Focus Areas
Health Anxiety
Support for health worries, checking, reassurance seeking, and uncertainty.
Chronic Illness & Chronic Pain
Support for the emotional impact of chronic conditions, pain, and disability.
Medical
Trauma
Helping process difficult healthcare experiences, procedures, and feeling dismissed.
OCD & Intrusive Thoughts
Support for intrusive thoughts, obsessive doubt, checking, and compulsions.
Panic & Phobias
Help with panic, medical fears, phobias, and physical sensations.
Social Anxiety
Support for fear of judgment, self-consciousness,
and social avoidance.
Perfectionism
Helping reduce rigid expectations, overcontrol, and pressure to
get things right.
Mind-Body Anxiety
Understanding the
connection between thoughts, physical sensations, and anxiety cycles.
Therapeutic Approaches
Pain Reprocessing Therapy
PRT
A mind-body approach designed to help clients change the way the brain interprets certain pain signals and reduce fear surrounding physical sensations.
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
EMDR
A trauma-focused approach that can help clients process distressing experiences and reduce the emotional intensity connected to them.
Brainspotting
A mind-body therapy that uses visual focus and awareness of internal experience to support the processing of trauma and emotional distress.
My Why
I’m especially drawn to working with people whose relationship with their body has become complicated by health anxiety, chronic illness, chronic pain, or difficult medical experiences.
When your body has been a source of pain, uncertainty, or fear, it can become easy to stay on constant alert. A small sensation may trigger a wave of worry. You may repeatedly check symptoms, search for answers, seek reassurance, or avoid medical care because the uncertainty feels unbearable. Past experiences of being dismissed or medically gaslit can make trusting yourself even harder.
I want therapy to be a place where those experiences are taken seriously without allowing fear to control your life. My goal is to help you step out of constant monitoring and reconnect with a greater sense of safety, presence, and trust in your own experience.
For me, healing isn’t simply about making anxiety disappear. It’s about helping you feel more able to live your life even when your body or your mind cannot give you perfect certainty.
A Little More About me
Baking
She enjoys baking sweet treats and spending time in the kitchen.
My Yorkie, Monkey
Melany loves spending time with her Yorkie, Monkey.
