Chelsea Johnson, LMFT

Chelsea Johnson (she/her) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in the state of North Carolina. She earned a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology with a minor in Family Studies from James Madison University and a Master's Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from Syracuse University. Chelsea specializes in working with couples and families, and is a lesbian-identified provider who has over 12 years experience working with the LGBTQIA+ population. Chelsea is included in the LGBT Center of Raleigh’s list of Health Works Team-Approved Mental Health Clinicians, and the LGBTQ Center of Durham's Preferred Mental Health Provider Resource List. Chelsea practices within the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) standards of care, as well as ALGBTIC (Association for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues in Counseling), and is an active member of WPATH. Chelsea is an active Clinical Fellow Member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). Chelsea has additionally completed a 12-hour intensive LGBTQ-Affirmative Cognitive Behavioral Therapy training through the Yale LGBTQ Mental Health Initiative (2024). Chelsea is actively anti-racist and continues to seek out trainings to recognize her own biases and blind spots.

Chelsea founded Horizons Marriage & Family Therapy with the vision of creating an LGBTQIA+-community resource for mental health with trained, experienced providers in this area of practice. Chelsea believes patients should be able to trust their therapist to understand the complexity and beauty of their experiences, and feel safe in the therapy space without fear of re-experiencing past traumas and discrimination. This continues to be her mission every day.

 

 Chelsea structures treatment around a client's lived experiences and their needs. She focuses predominantly on LGBTQIA+ individuals, and recognizes the diversity in their experiences. She takes a non-hetero and non-cis-normative approach to treatment, and allies with patients on goal-development and developing skills and new patterns that serve these goals. Chelsea works with clients from many different modalities, focusing on increasing awareness of values, beliefs, and perceptions, and how these impact a person’s relationships and behavior. Chelsea employs a feminist, intersectional approach as an undercurrent to her work with all individuals, and is authentic and genuine, often using humor and lived experience to connect on a human level. Chelsea believes our past experiences can create emotional injuries, which often affect our current relationships and our perceptions of ourselves. Chelsea helps clients to explore these experiences in a safe and supportive way, and find comfort in their resiliency, strength, and ability to affect change in their current life.

 

Chelsea's ideal client is age 11 and up, with presenting issues such as relationship challenges, queer and neurodiverse partnerships, exploration of gender identity and sexuality, family challenges related to gender identity/sexuality, and ethical non-monogamy and polyamory. Chelsea is specifically experienced in working with queer-identified youth and their parents in "building bridges of understanding". Chelsea provides individual, couple, and family counseling using systemic and family-centered approaches.
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Chelsea has additional specific training in Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), and was trained clinician in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) through the program with the North Carolina Child Treatment Program (NC-CTP) in 2015.

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Fun facts: Chelsea is a Scorpio who originally grew up in the Washington, DC area. When she isn't with her three children, she enjoys baking bread, fixing things in her home, cooking meals for others, and tending to her many plants.