Licensed to practice in California and accepts 9 insurances. Specializes in Trauma and PTSD, Domestic Violence, Sex Therapy and 3 more.
(she/her)
New to Grow
My name is Chloe Melka - LPCC and I am the founder and clinician of a trauma-informed private practice. I help women in California with sexual and relationship trauma break free from survival mode, stop repeating painful relationship patterns, and build the kind of healthy, secure love you deserve. I am passionate about helping other women! My forensic training increased my knowledge and skill working with complex trauma cases. My work blends advanced clinical training and personal experience.
Reaching out for support takes courage — especially when you're carrying something as personal as sexual or relational trauma. If you're feeling nervous about that first session, that's completely normal. Here's what you can expect, so there are fewer unknowns walking in. Everything starts with the free 15-minute consultation. This isn't a session — it's a chance for us to say hello, for you to ask any questions, and for us to get a feel for whether we're a good fit. There's no obligation and no pressure. You're allowed to talk to more than one therapist before deciding who feels right for you. Once you decide to move forward, I'll send you a few intake forms to fill out ahead of time. These cover the basics: contact information, a short history, and consent paperwork. Filling these out beforehand means we don't spend our first real session doing paperwork — we can spend it actually getting to know each other. Our sessions are virtual, so you'll be joining from wherever feels safest and most comfortable to you — your bedroom, your car, a quiet corner of your home. Wherever that is, it's yours to choose. The first session is mostly about orientation, not excavation. My goal isn't to have you relive your trauma in detail on day one. Instead, we'll spend time on: Getting to know each other. I'll ask about your life more broadly — your relationships, your support system, what's going well, and what feels hard right now. This helps me understand you as a full person, not just a list of symptoms. Understanding what brought you here. You'll have space to share as much or as little as you want about your history and what's prompting you to seek support now. You are always in control of the pace and depth of what you disclose. If something feels like too much to say out loud yet, you can simply say "I'm not ready to talk about that part," and I will respect that completely. Naming what you want. We'll talk about what you're hoping therapy can help with — whether that's feeling safer in your body, understanding recurring patterns in your relationships, learning to trust again, or simply having a space that's entirely yours. This isn't set in stone; it's just a starting point we can revisit and adjust as we go. Explaining how I work. I'll walk you through my approach to trauma-informed therapy, what confidentiality looks like, and how we'll structure our time together going forward. You'll leave knowing what therapy with me actually looks like in practice, not just
I founded this practice out of a desire to help other women who have been sexually assaulted or been through domestic violence. I started out wanting to work with the perpetrators of these crimes. I got my Master’s degree in Forensic Psychology and provided counseling and risk assessments for sex offenders. I figured I was working on the preventative side. But over the years I realized that that wasn’t where my passion was rooted. My passion is helping women. Amazing women who were taken advantage of. I know this because it happened to me. Someone who studied psychology since they were 14 years old. Someone who preached taking safety measures and watching out for red flags. That’s why my practice and therapy style works. I go beyond the obvious and the book learning because I’ve lived it too. I was where you are now. Women deserve so much more than we are dealt. And I say fuck off to anyone that tries to silence us.
My ideal client is a woman in her mid-20s to 40s who is ready to stop white-knuckling her way through relationships and start understanding why certain patterns keep repeating. She may have survived sexual trauma — whether a single incident or a pattern of harm — and she's noticing how it continues to shape her present, even years later: difficulty trusting a partner, a hard time saying no, disconnection from her own body, or a nervous system that stays braced for something to go wrong. She's likely functional on the outside — holding down a job, showing up for the people in her life — but privately exhausted by patterns she can't quite name or break. She might be in a relationship that feels unsafe in ways she can't fully articulate, freshly out of one, or avoiding relationships altogether because closeness feels dangerous. She's not in acute crisis. She's past the emergency phase and is looking for steady, sustained work — someone she can return to week after week to actually process what happened, rather than just manage symptoms. Her goals often center on trust: learning to trust her own instincts again, trusting that she can set a boundary without losing the relationship, and eventually trusting another person with the parts of herself she's kept guarded. She wants healthier, more secure relationships — but she also wants to feel safe and at home in her own body along the way, not just intellectually understand her trauma. Above all, she's someone who is done surviving and ready to start healing — even if she's scared, even if she doesn't know exactly where to begin.
Other specialties
I identify as
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the core tools I bring into our work together, though I adapt it to move at trauma's pace rather than a rigid, symptom-checklist pace. Sexual and relational trauma often leaves behind deeply held beliefs that feel like facts rather than interpretations: I can't trust anyone. I'm responsible for what happened. If I set a boundary, I'll be abandoned. My body isn't safe. These beliefs usually formed as a way to make sense of what happened or to protect against future harm — but over time, they quietly shape decisions, relationships, and self-worth long after the danger has passed. In session, we start by gently identifying these patterns: noticing the automatic thoughts that show up in specific moments — before a difficult conversation with a partner, after being touched unexpectedly, when someone gets close emotionally. From there, we slow down and examine them together. Not to argue you out of your feelings, but to ask: Where did this belief come from? Is it still protecting you, or is it keeping you stuck? We also work on the behavioral side — the actions these beliefs tend to drive, like avoiding conflict, over-explaining, staying hyper-vigilant in relationships, or shutting down during intimacy. Together, we build small, manageable experiments to test out new responses in low-stakes moments, so change happens through lived experience, not just insight. Because this work involves trauma, I never use CBT to rush past what your body or nervous system needs. If a thought or belief is tied to unprocessed trauma, we make room for that first — regulation before restructuring. The goal isn't to think your way out of trauma, but to gradually loosen the grip of the beliefs it left behind, so your responses come from the present moment rather than from what happened before.
Feminist
Feminist theory shapes not just specific techniques I use, but the underlying lens through which I understand your experience — and it's especially central to working with sexual and relational trauma, because that trauma so rarely happens in a vacuum. At its core, feminist therapy holds that the personal is political. The self-blame, shame, and confusion you might carry after trauma didn't arise out of nowhere — they were shaped by a culture that often questions survivors, minimizes harm, and teaches women from an early age to prioritize others' comfort over their own safety and needs. Understanding this context doesn't erase what happened to you individually, but it does shift the question from "what's wrong with me?" to "what happened to me, and what messages did I absorb along the way?" This shows up in our work in a few concrete ways. We name power dynamics directly — in the relationships and situations you're describing, and in our therapeutic relationship itself. You are never a passive recipient of my expertise; you're the expert on your own life, and I see my role as walking alongside you, not directing you from above. We also actively examine the messages you've internalized about who you're "supposed" to be — agreeable, accommodating, responsible for managing everyone else's feelings — and gently question whether those roles are actually serving you. Boundary-setting, saying no, taking up space, and trusting your own perceptions aren't just therapeutic skills in this framework; they're acts of reclaiming agency that may have been taken from you. Ultimately, feminist theory keeps the work oriented toward empowerment rather than just symptom relief — helping you rebuild not only trust in others, but trust in your own voice and right to define your own life on your own terms.