
Maria Mellano, LICSW, CP/PAT
Maria Mellano is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW), a Certified Psychodramatist (CP), and a Practitioner Applicant for Trainer (PAT) in Psychodrama. In practice since 1999, Maria specializes in helping highly sensitive people, often trauma survivors, make sense of their childhoods, recreate empowered narratives, and integrate the deep insights they uncover to live values-based, intention-aligned, purpose-driven lives they genuinely love. She calls this living a VIP life - values + intention + purpose = a meaningful life of impact you love.
Her approach is warm, engaged, and direct, balancing emotional and psychological depth with pragmatic, life-affirming, transformational choice. At the heart of her work is the deep belief that we are all already whole and complete.
Maria is a trauma-informed ontological practitioner trained in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Classical Psychodrama, Psychodramatic Bodywork, and Transformational Life and Leadership Coaching. She is passionate about helping others bloom lives they love, starting from where they are. She leads a private therapy group practice based in Boston, MA, and offers coaching services from her bi-coastal bases in New England (Boston, MA and Brattleboro, VT) and San Diego, CA.
Maria’s coaching background also includes work with the End Violence Project’s Another Way to Go program, providing transformational thinking and leadership tools to individuals impacted by incarceration—both inside and beyond prison walls. When not working, you’ll find her replenishing in nature, tending her garden, and cherishing time with her beloved Pug-Zhu, Izzy.
A fun fact is that Maria was born and raised on a flower farm in Southern California that has been in her family for a century since her grandparents immigrated from Italy in 1925. The theme of blooming carries deep, personal meaning for her, hence the founding of Integral Bloom - Bloom a Life You Love, her personal expressions of living a values-based, intention-aligned, purpose-driven life.
Another powerful influence was her time living in Japan for three and a half years: teaching English, studying social science at Sophia University, and immersing herself in a culture that deeply shaped her healing and worldview. That experience, combined with her graduate education at Smith College and training at Harvard Teaching Hospitals, ultimately carried her from the West Coast to the East Coast, and now bridges both as she stewards Bloom REVIVE, a community for healers and healing offering in-person gatherings, workshops, healing arts markets and retreats.
If you are curious about working together, Maria would love to connect. She has a particular passion for supporting trauma survivors transitioning to thrivers, and fellow therapists and healers both personally and professionally, while welcoming individuals from all walks of life.
One of her favorite quotes captures the spirit she brings to her work:
"Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it."
~ Maya Angelou
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