About Melissa Paakh

Before becoming a clinician, I spent years in environments where performance was constantly evaluated.

As a Division I and All-American collegiate swimmer, I learned what it means to train toward outcomes measured in fractions of a second - and what it does to a person when the measurement never stops. Later, more than a decade in entertainment as a television host, model, and stand-up comedian placed me in entirely different environments where confidence, identity, comparison, rejection, appearance, public evaluation, and resilience mattered in different ways.

Those experiences inform a question that now sits at the center of much of my clinical work:

How do we pursue excellence without making achievement the measure of our worth?

Performance does not exist in isolation. Athletes and high achievers are also daughters, sons, partners, friends, teammates, students, and eventually adults building lives and relationships beyond achievement. My training as a Marriage and Family Therapist gives me a systemic lens: I am interested not only in what happens inside a person, but in the families, teams, relationships, environments, expectations, and attachment experiences surrounding them.

My work is grounded in attachment theory, relational psychotherapy, psychodynamic thought, family systems, and trauma-informed care, and with couples it draws on Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Gottman Method. Together, these perspectives help make sense of the patterns that develop between people - and how those patterns can be understood, transformed, and replaced with new ways of relating.

Alongside my clinical work, I am pursuing doctoral research in relational psychology, exploring the dynamics that foster resilient, enduring relationships. That evidence-informed perspective is present in every session, but therapy itself is always human first: warm, direct, and deeply engaged. I'll help you slow down recurring patterns, gently name what may be difficult to see on your own, and create space for meaningful, lasting change.

With athletes in particular, I try to be the person I would have wanted in the room at sixteen: someone who takes the sport seriously, does not flinch at ambition, and still insists that what I accomplish is something I do - not who I am.

My clinical training has also given me the opportunity to work under the supervision of Dr. Markus Rogan, PsyD, LMFT, whose perspective brings an unusual intersection of clinical practice and elite athletic experience. Before becoming a psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist, Dr. Rogan competed in four Olympic Games and earned two Olympic silver medals in swimming.

This matters to me because the psychological demands of achievement are difficult to understand solely from the outside. Athletes can simultaneously be extraordinarily capable and deeply affected by pressure, perfectionism, identity, comparison, expectations, relationships, injury, failure, and the question of what happens when performance becomes connected to self-worth.

The person behind the performance matters.

Sessions are offered in person at my Beverly Hills office and virtually for clients throughout California.