Melissa Lorenzo

Speech Language Pathologist, Founder, Designer

Melissa Lorenzo, M.S., CCC-SLP, is a neurodivergent speech-language pathologist and the founder of Sunny Side Up Therapy & Consulting, LLC in Lutz, Florida. She built her practice around a single conviction: every patient deserves a root-cause map and a plan designed around their actual life.

She works with children, teens, and adults across the lifespan whose struggles don't always have a clean label — but always have a real cause worth finding. Her clinical scope spans communication, cognition, and swallowing (dysphagia), myofunctional therapy, brain-body retraining, stroke recovery, Parkinson's disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, and early language development.

Her method is to sit with the patient long enough to see what's actually driving their struggle. She connects research that's rarely read together — pulling in influences from muscle tone, primitive reflexes, breathing patterns, auditory processing, and cognitive communication — to design plans around the person, not the chart. The breakthroughs arrive in unexpected places: in one recent session, a patient stuck on a rough day became fluid, smiling, and verbally engaged the moment Melissa stepped onto the therapy floor for a bachata with him. Real clinical gains, real unfiltered fun.

She takes the often-overlooked step of helping patients and families understand what's happening to them and how to navigate a healthcare system that wasn't built for their brains. As a neurodivergent clinician living with ADHD, dyslexia, a learning disability, anxiety, and depression, Melissa brings a lifetime of personal pattern-finding into every session — and a conviction that different brains aren't broken brains.

A lifelong learner, she supervises graduate students in speech-language pathology — training the next generation of SLPs to stay flexible in their clinical process, notice the small connections that compound into the larger picture, and put the patient first. She is currently writing a book connecting speech, airway, auditory processing, and language development to literacy and neurodivergence.

Her foundation includes a Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology, ASHA's Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC-SLP), a Level 2 certification in the Tomatis Method, and specialty certifications including ADHD-RSP, ASDCP, ECDCS, CCFP, and IMC. Her tagline: Human therapy. Real-life support.