About Marissa
Marissa Katz Bellani is a licensed mental health counselor who focuses on helping people facing stress, anxiety, relationship strain, grief, and depression. She works with concerns like trauma, addiction, intimacy issues, and self-esteem. Marissa provides straightforward, compassionate care and aims to meet clients where they are in their lives.
Her style blends body-aware methods with talk-based techniques. Somatic work helps people notice how stress shows up in the body, while cognitive and acceptance approaches help shift thoughts and values.
Background and approach
Sessions often mix soothing grounding practices with practical steps to manage daily challenges. Marissa has eight years of experience and holds an MA and the LMHC credential. She draws on person-centered values to create a respectful space where clients lead the pace and focus of therapy.
This approach is warm and interactive rather than prescriptive. She pays attention to relationships and attachment patterns, and she supports people dealing with family-of-origin issues, communication problems, caregiver stress, and chronic health concerns. Marissa also works with concerns related to sexuality and LGBT stressors, isolation, and complicated grief.
Sessions are offered to people in Hawaii and to international clients in English. Therapy can combine expressive, body-focused work and practical skills so people can build more balance. Marissa encourages small, realistic steps toward the goals each person brings to therapy.
Approaches that connect body and mind in online care
Somatic-informed work focuses on how stress and emotions show up physically. It helps people notice tension, breathing patterns, and bodily signals so they can learn simple ways to calm and regulate during hard moments. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, emphasizes values and small committed actions. It supports people struggling with anxiety, depression, or life transitions by teaching acceptance of difficult thoughts and steady movement toward what matters. Client-Centered Therapy centers the person in the room. The therapist follows the client’s lead, offers empathy, and helps clarify goals so change happens at a comfortable pace.Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work. Marissa collaborates with each person to test methods and adjust as needed. Together they decide whether more body-focused exercises, values-based actions, or reflective conversation will best fit the client’s needs and preferences.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. These options make it easier to fit sessions into busy lives, to practice techniques between meetings, and to access care from home or when traveling. Licensed professionals can use these formats to blend somatic exercises, ACT practices, and client-centered conversation in ways that match each person’s goals and schedule.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Family conflicts
Also works with
- Addictions
- Attachment issues
- Autism and Asperger Syndrome
- Bipolar disorder
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Communication problems
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Hospice and end-of-life counseling
- Infidelity
- Intellectual disability
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Money and financial issues
- Mood disorders
- Multicultural concerns
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
- Self esteem
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trauma and abuse
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 8 years
- Licensed
- Massachusetts, Hawaii
- Languages
- English