Director of Operations & Senior Advisor
Location: Laguna Beach, CA
Values: Service, Trust, Courage
Education: Master of the Arts in Psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy
Certifications: CRAFT Trained, ITC Trained
Chelsea Brigham is Doyen Consulting Group’s Director of Operations and a senior advisor — bringing over a decade of clinical and field experience across crisis intervention, treatment planning, assessment, and family coaching for addiction, eating disorders, and complex mental illness. Her understanding of how these challenges unfold — for the individual and the families who love them — is both professional and personal. She knows firsthand the chaos, grief, and fear that can accompany addiction. That experience is what drew her to this work, and her own healing from it is what keeps her here.
Her clinical training is rooted in narrative therapy and family systems theory, with a focus on restoring personal agency, values-driven living, and systemic change. She holds a B.A. in Communications and a Master’s degree in Psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy, and is currently pursuing licensure as a marriage and family therapist in California. Her continued education runs alongside something harder to teach — innate pragmatism, lived experience, and a practicality that gives families a sense of groundedness and direction when they have long felt without a plan for a path forward.
Chelsea’s ability to hold both empathy and clarity at once — to understand the weight of what families are carrying without getting lost in it — is what makes her an effective leader within Doyen. Families are well served not just by who is in the room with them, but by who is guiding the work from above, and this is precisely why families trust her in crisis.
In addition to her clinical and supervisory work, Chelsea leads Doyen’s treatment consultation and placement function. Chelsea maintains ongoing professional relationships with providers and programs across the country, with the clinical intuition to know what questions to ask and what answers to trust. That continual pulse on who is doing the best work — and what is shifting in the field — allows her to match the deep understanding Doyen builds of each client with precision.
Chelsea brings the same drive to her personal life. A California native, she has returned to her home state and lives in Laguna Beach — where she is most often found surfing, hiking, or in the kitchen.
Intervention is a word that conjures a familiar image — people gathered around a loved one, pleading for change. What I’ve learned through my experience is something different: intervention means intervening on the status quo. It is the courage to say, I am no longer willing to live this way — and the willingness to sit in the discomfort that follows, while giving others the agency to make their own choices, even choices we wouldn’t make for them.
My goal for every family that comes to Doyen is simple: I want to give them hope again. Not necessarily the hope they arrived with — that their loved one will change — but the hope that they can find peace and fulfillment in their own life. That they can choose a path forward, rather than remain captive to the revolving, exhausting cycle that addiction and related struggles so often create.
I believe we cannot change a loved one without changing the environment in which that person lives. The family is the environment. My work is to help families understand what it means to participate — or not participate — in what is actually helpful, and to trust that loving someone and being held hostage by their problem are not the same thing. I want to reframe what help and support look like, and to restore a family’s sense of choice, agency, and forward movement.
That is what I take pride in. Helping families take their next step.