Kerry Pastine is a life guide rather than a therapist. She has
been through the kind of thing that rearranges a person, and she
came back with the route written down.
She has sat with hundreds of clients over twenty-five years,
through the transitions that arrive uninvited: divorce,
bereavement, illness, a career that stopped fitting, a move to a
country where they were a stranger. She has fronted rock bands
for three decades. She has shown paintings in the United States
and across Europe. She has survived narcissistic abuse and serious
chronic illness. At sixty she packed up a life in Denver and
rebuilt it in Lisbon, which took longer and cost more than anyone
warned her it would. She asks of a client only what
she has already done herself.
In 2026 she published Take Back Your Self, a guided journal built
on six chapters in order: Discover, Understand, Accept, Nurture,
Be, Design. It is a process rather than a formula, and it is meant
to be written in.
She speaks and writes about self-knowledge, reinvention after
forty-five, emotional intelligence, loneliness, and what it takes
to design a life that looks like the person living it. She brings
the warmth of a mentor, the bluntness of someone who has been at
the bottom of it, and the humor of a woman who has found her way
back more than once.
