About
Curious about people, relationship, and the long process of change.
I am Stephanie McCune, PhD, RCC, a clinical counsellor, researcher, educator, and writer based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, working across Vancouver Island and virtually throughout the province.


My work has taken me through many different spaces: community mental health and substance use services, private clinical practice, research, university teaching, professional education, writing, and consulting. For more than 26 years, I have had the privilege of sitting alongside people, families, practitioners, and communities navigating some of the more complicated places of being human.
Each part of my work continues to shape the others. Clinical practice keeps theory human. Research has taught me to question what we think we know and to listen carefully to knowledge that comes from lived experience. Teaching asks me to make ideas useful. And the people I work alongside continually remind me that there is rarely one explanation for why we struggle, heal, change, or become who we are.
I am especially drawn to experiences that can be difficult to name or neatly categorize: grief and loss, our relationships with substances, changes in identity, significant life transitions, and the spiritual, psychedelic, and non-ordinary experiences that can shift how we understand ourselves and the world around us.
The questions I return to
- What happened?
- What meaning are you making of it?
- What has carried you through?
- What is asking for attention now?
- What might become possible from here?
I am less interested in fitting these experiences into predetermined explanations than I am in becoming curious about them. Across all of my work, I return to a belief that has become increasingly important to me: people carry profound knowledge about their own lives. My role, whether I am working as a clinician, researcher, educator, writer, or consultant, is to bring what I know into conversation with what others know, and to create the conditions for something new to become possible.
My academic and professional work gives depth to that curiosity. I hold a Bachelor of Social Work, a Master's degree in Counselling Psychology, and a PhD in Social Sciences, completed through Tilburg University and the Taos Institute. My doctoral research explored family experience, lived knowledge, and substance use, questions that continue to influence my clinical, teaching, and consulting work today.
I have written and contributed to publications and professional resources exploring substance use, family inclusion, relational practice, mental health, and human change, and I continue to develop writing and therapeutic resources focused on psychedelic preparation, integration, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. For me, research and writing are extensions of the same work: ways of staying curious, challenging what we think we know, and contributing ideas that might help us care for one another more skillfully.
Credentials
- PhD, Social Sciences, Tilburg University and the Taos Institute
- MA, Counselling Psychology
- Bachelor of Social Work (BSW)
- Taos Institute Associate
- Registered Clinical Counsellor (RCC)
