Chelsea Harvey Garner is a psychotherapist, writer, and founding director of Big Feels Lab, a nonprofit promoting collective mental health. Clinically, she specializes in working with trauma survivors, self-identified misfits, and unconventional families. In both her creative and therapeutic work, she helps clients turn pain into purpose and find true belonging with themselves and each other.
A past fellow with the American Psychological Association, Chelsea holds degrees from Boston College and Creighton University. She has trained and collaborated with MIT’s Consortium of Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality, the Justice Resource Institute, the LEND Fellowship Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, The Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture, and others.
Enthusiastic, genuine, and difficult to discourage, Chelsea is always eager to collaborate with other artists and organizers working toward social progress. Her nonfiction book “A PITY PARTY IS STILL A PARTY: a feel-good guide to feeling bad” was published in July of ’23 by HarperCollins. In her spare time, she can be found starting impromptu dance parties in public and hosting cuddle puddles at her home in Western Massachusetts.
“To work with Chelsea is to thrill with epiphanies. Under her tutelage, the world takes on a bright, wild luminosity. She is a true and compassionate courage-teacher, deeply learned, audacious and kind, provoking us to seek our higher selves, that we might begin to mend all that is broken.” — Dr. Todd Robinson, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 2020
