Josie Self

Josie Self is a Licensed Associate Counselor and National Certified Counselor at East Valley Mental Health, working with women and couples in Gilbert and by telehealth across Arizona, including Chandler, Queen Creek, Mesa, and Tempe. Her work focuses on anxiety, relationships, and the emotional complexities that arise during seasons of transition — pregnancy, postpartum, and early parenthood in particular.

The people she sits with often arrive with anxiety that feels constant or difficult to turn off, a sense of disconnection in a relationship, or a life change — becoming a parent, enduring a loss — that has landed harder than expected. She names a particular bind she sees often: someone who has all the information at their disposal and feels successful in most areas of life, but still feels stuck, and believes they should have been able to understand or “fix” it by now. Her counter-question is what if healing were less about knowing and doing, and more about being.

Her work is grounded in attachment-focused, trauma-informed care, and she is direct that she does not place bandaids on complex issues. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, therapy becomes a space to understand the underlying patterns shaping a person’s internal experience and their relationships — how they respond to stress, how they connect with others, and what feels difficult to change.

She draws on Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR for trauma processing, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for anxiety and OCD, and Gottman-informed couples therapy, alongside relational work that treats the therapy relationship itself as part of the change. In her framing, therapy works best when it is centered on real relationship and the shared experience of being human rather than a clinical blank slate — structured enough to have direction, and in tune enough to follow the person in front of her. She describes the result as support for meaningful, lasting change rather than short-term relief.

Her training includes advanced training in perinatal mental health psychotherapy through Postpartum Support International, Level 2 training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy through The Gottman Institute, and training in EMDR and in ERP. She holds a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from Western Seminary and has been a National Certified Counselor since 2023. The four areas she names — perinatal and postpartum mental health, couples and relationship therapy, anxiety and OCD, and trauma and attachment patterns — often turn out to be connected, and she treats understanding how they interact as part of the work.

Individual sessions run 50 minutes and couples sessions 80 minutes, offered in person in Gilbert and online across Arizona, and a free 15-minute phone consultation comes first. She is candid that this is not quick-fix work but is deeply intentional and focused on lasting change. As a master’s-level associate licensee, Josie practices under Board-approved clinical supervision pursuant to A.A.C. R4-6-211; her Board-approved clinical supervisor is Brittany Coppelli, LPC.