Stacey Shuster, Ph.D. has been a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco for over 25 years, specializing in therapy with couples, families and children in addition to her ongoing work with individuals. She has taught family therapy at a variety of graduate programs in the Bay Area, most recently at the California Pacific Medical Center Department of Psychiatry. She enjoys working with a diversity of families, including LGBT, single-parent, unmarried-parent and Spanish-speaking households.
Over the years, Dr. Shuster came to realize that therapists tended to try to keep couples together, but did not know how to respond to the need or desire to separate, with the result that couples would leave therapy and end up seeking help from divorce attorneys. In order to serve these clients, she sought out training in mediation as well as collaborative practice to gain expertise in the areas that separating and divorcing couples and families need at this very challenging time in their lives and in the lives of their children.
Dr. Shuster combines her knowledge and experience of children’s developmental needs, couple and parent-child interactions, patterns of communication and the tasks involved in divorce to help separating and divorcing couples navigate the tricky and sometimes treacherous landscape of divorce. Working together with family law attorneys dedicated to a similar goal, she hopes to help her clients go through this process in the most humane and cooperative way possible.