An Interview with Melinda Zappone
Melinda Zappone, LMHC, is a licensed mental health counselor, trauma therapist, educator, and creator of The Toolbox Approach® – a trauma-informed, phase-based healing method designed to meet individuals wherever they are in their journey. With a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling and advanced certifications including Level 3 Relational Life Therapy and Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2 (CCTP-II), Melinda brings a deeply integrative and relational approach to healing.
Her work is grounded in the belief that mental health challenges are not signs of brokenness, but invitations to understand the inner blueprint of how we hold pain, patterns, and potential. Drawing from somatic practices, LifeForce Yoga, and trauma-informed care, she offers tools that go beyond talk therapy – supporting narrative, relational, and body-based healing.
Melinda is the founder of Everyone Needs You Always (ENYA) LLC, a free resource platform offering podcasts on Spotify and subscription services on Substack and Patreon. She offers live healing events to make therapeutic tools accessible to all, regardless of financial means. Her mission is to democratize healing and shift the paradigm from ‘fixing’ to ‘understanding.’
As a speaker, coach, and community project leader with over twenty years of service, Melinda is known for her full-body listening, strength-based perspective, and commitment to relational and ecological healing. Her work invites readers and clients alike to explore the question: “How are we, as a team, going to approach the personal classroom you hold inside?”
Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?
You Are Not Broken, as a book title, is the other side of my inner conversation. The side that, with my Toolbox Approach for healing in phases, has won over the ‘you are so broken’ whispers that come back into anyone’s mind when a fixing mindset is applied to personal growth and recovery. This book is my healing journey. It started in childhood, and it’s no longer repressed. I identify as a wounded healer. My education in healing comes from my own trauma, not just textbooks or training.
As a trauma-informed therapist with over twenty years of experience, I’ve applied what I’ve learned in sessions. But more importantly, I’ve made those lessons self-helpful. Because the truth is: trauma fractures your trust with yourself more than with anyone else.
And even as a therapist, I know I can’t give you that trust back. Healing doesn’t happen just because you show up to therapy. Some people come in and out. Some avoid it altogether. And for many, the healing journey never begins. The brokenness is an invitation to heal, that is also where the title comes from, learning that feeling, that whisper, ‘you are so broken,’ is an invitation to inner work. It’s an invitation for your own healing journey. One that starts not with perfection, but with a mirror. And a conversation with yourself that is a real look into the mirror of understanding for your own truth.
How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?
I was scared when I saw my own eyes on the book cover. I had thought the picture was an example of the eyes I wanted to use, the ‘effect’ I wanted to accomplish, when I submitted it to Ronaldo. It was really confronting to realize I was scared of my own eyes on the cover boldly stating You Are Not Broken – the real Melinda Zappone is saying this to you with all she’s got. I have not wanted to show my face or have shown a false one that smiles and looks sweet, hiding the pain. It helped me own the writing, ultimately, and if anyone thinks it is about attention seeking or vanity, I know it will evaporate once they open and read.
Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?
I think I am an accidental author. Trauma was pushing up out of repression and my sixth-grade self, the one who thought she might be a reporter someday, not a trauma therapist, took over and accounted for everything. That is how the writing began. She reported and then the healer in me transformed it into self-help, so that it was not about trauma dumping but a real manual for how to heal in phases starting with the narrative healing phase.
What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?
I have been a therapist all my adult life. Something my readers should know is that every tool in the approach is used on me first and I am in a relational healing phase myself, which calls on me to love myself beyond my helping but by writing daily, letting the tears of grief for my life of non-recovery for forty years previous to now leave me, and trying to believe the Universe hears me every morning when I do ‘my conversation time,’ somatic healing trauma informed yoga and morning walk.
If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?
Rise Up by Andra Day would be the key song. The opening lyrics represent me very much. I was broken, but always going on my morning walk, I started to remember, create tools to hold my traumas differently, and rose up.
What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?
My perfect reader would be the accidental one, the one who suddenly feels like this book was put in their path through some larger force because it lands profoundly but they never intended to start reading it. This reader would then feel ‘the invitation’ to do inner work like a happening and see that it had always been there but just needed to be organized through The Toolbox Approach.
What creative projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on creating You Are Not Broken University, where we have classroom experiences and group intensives with The Toolbox Approach curriculum and phases of healing in tracks for relationships, personal development and trauma. I aim to democratize mental health and contribute to equal access healing for anyone who has the brokenness as an invitation mentality or can align to it when they find out about it.
What would you tell other writers who want to publish?
I would tell writers to let go of the outcome. Writing is a portal to the subconscious, yours and others’. There is no ‘the end’ or ‘success,’ just write and put it out there!
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