Shannon Stearns, MFT

As a seasoned therapist, I sincerely value supporting my clients with relational insight, sympathetic witnessing, and actionable change in all realms they seek wellness and healing. I do so with warmth, compassion, and a sense of shared humor amidst the human struggles. I will walk with you in solidarity and care through it all, and it is my honor to serve as a safe support in your soul’s work.

I specialize in working with complex trauma, relationship rupture and repair, mutual and self-regulation, addiction recovery, multicultural identities, parent-child and family systems, and LGBTQ clients. I also help clients identify and underscore sources of strength, support, creativity, redemption, inspiration, and uplifting associations in their lives.

My approach to relational healing is integratively informed by research-based evidence and its intersection with many years of clinical experience working with individuals and couples from a whole-person neurobiological, cultural, and attachment-centered perspective. I have multiple advanced degrees in psychology, counseling, consciousness, cosmology, and comparative religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions, all of which enrich my understanding of the human condition and maximize my capacity to support clients as wholly as I can. I came to San Francisco to study the relationship between many of these subjects at the California Institute of Integral Studies, after which I completed my most recent master’s degree in counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, where I wrote my thesis on working with couples with unresolved complex trauma.

In my commitment to continuous training and research, I have been most inspired by the work of Dan Siegel (seminal scholar of interpersonal neurobiology), Bessel van der Kolk (complex trauma, neurobiology, and somatic memory/interventions), Marsha Linehan (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), Stan Tatkin (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy), The Gottmans (eminent leaders in couples research and practice), Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy), Alan Fruzzetti (Dialectical Behavior Therapy for couples with high conflict), and Gabor Maté (addiction medicine specialist emphasizing the role of culture and attachment trauma in addiction recovery). I remain actively invested in cutting-edge scholarship addressing the effective treatment of individuals, couples, and families, and provide relevant, research-based suggestions each session, and the space in between. I look forward to sharing this set of well-studied solutions with you, and the healing that can only come from warmly supportive human relationship.