It’s great to meet you!
Welcome to the home of my work at the intersection of creativity and mental health.
Here are some things about me to introduce you to background and my approach - if my story, my work, and where I find inspiration resonates with you, let’s connect!
“Suffering is not usually that creative over time. The transformation of suffering into art is what is creative.”
— Dr. Susan Raeburn
I’m a child of the music industry.
Raised up and down California, music has been my lifelong expressive language. My piano has been the constant; meanwhile, this ex-theater kid learned her vocal cords were better suited for storytelling, not belting, and turned folky singer-songwriter. Know thyself.
I followed my dad into music industry nonprofits, working my way through communications and program and project management roles, for incredible organizations like The NAMM Show, SF’s original school of Rock ‘n Roll Blue Bear School of Music, and The Recording Academy/GRAMMYs.
In my years in San Francisco, I also learned to engineer at Women’s Audio Mission and from some incredible mentors, working in Hyde Street’s Studio B and in live venues in my quest to find my place in music.
Creativity + Healing
Now, as I work towards my Master’s in Clinical Counseling and my future practice takes shape, I’m finding resonance in Existential, Person-Centered/Humanist, Narrative, and Expressive Arts approaches to therapy, from music industry mental health trailblazers like Backline and the Music Industry Therapist’s Collective, and in thinkers like Dr. Irvin Yalom and Dr. Sharon Blackie, with whom I studied and completed a graduate certificate in her Eco-Feminist, Depth-Oriented Narrative therapeutic approach.
I’m also especially interested in how connecting with their older, indigenous art forms can help people develop authentic identity and expression.
My second album, Girl from the Golden State, is almost finished, and will be released in 2025. We get deep into songwriting’s ability to celebrate and transform human experiences like love, grief, trauma, and death into the tangible, and I can’t wait to share it, and to bring this experience into my future therapeutic work with creatives using their music for a similar goal.
Finding My Place
At the same time, I began writing and recording my own music, beginning to explore the healing storytelling aspect for myself. I released my first album in 2021 chronicling my family stories and my own, Carry Them All.
Next, I followed my curiosity and learned Irish Gaelic sean-nós singing and keening (the ancestral/pre-Christian Irish death and grief tradition) from the incredible teacher Mary McLaughlin. Putting these final puzzle pieces together with my favorite aspects of my experiences thus far, plus some good old fashioned travel, helped me to see my way of being in my music community.
I found that I can be a guide as people wade into the waters of universal human experience and in the task of processing and transforming it all. Or, more clearly for today’s world, a therapist!
Steph-as-Counselor coming 2026!
In the meantime, I’m learning everything I can about healing with a Creative-Expressive-Narrative and Existential-Humanist lens, writing about it all on Substack, and continuing to make music and support aligned projects like the Women of NAMM Podcast ReVoicing the Future. I’m also excited to be supporting the music mental health organization Backline as their Neal Casal Music Foundation Clinical Fellow for 2025.