Short bio (150 words)
Kerry Pastine is a life guide, author, rock musician, and fine artist with over 25 years of coaching experience. She is the author of Take Back Your Self (2026), a guided interactive journal-book that helps people reclaim who they are and how they live — and Know Thyself (2012), its predecessor. Her second forthcoming title, Take Back Your Heart, applies the same framework to love and relationships.
Kerry's credibility is personal and earned. She has survived narcissistic abuse, navigated chronic illness, fronted rock bands, exhibited fine art internationally, and relocated to Lisbon, Portugal — emerging from each chapter of her life with hard-won self-knowledge and the conviction that radical reinvention is always possible. She works with private clients globally via Zoom and lives in Lisbon, where she continues to write, create, and coach.
Long bio (speaker introduction)
Kerry Pastine is not a therapist. She is something rarer: a life guide who has genuinely been through it — the kind of it that reshapes you — and come back with the map.
With over 25 years of coaching experience, Kerry has worked with hundreds of clients through the most seismic transitions life offers: divorce, loss, identity crisis, illness, relocation, reinvention. She has fronted rock bands. She has exhibited fine art internationally. She has survived narcissistic abuse and serious chronic illness. She has packed a suitcase and moved to Lisbon, Portugal, and built a life there from scratch. She has done every single thing she asks of her clients.
In 2026, Kerry published Take Back Your Self — a guided interactive journal-book grounded in her six-step framework: Discover, Understand, Accept, Nurture, Be, Design. The book is not a formula. It is a living process. And it has already changed the lives of everyone who has worked with it.
Kerry speaks and writes about self-knowledge, reinvention, emotional intelligence, the loneliness epidemic, and what it actually means to design a life on your own terms. She brings the warmth of a mentor, the honesty of someone who has been to the bottom, and the wit of a woman who has found her way back — more than once.
Interview and speaking topics
The real reason you feel like something is missing
On the difference between a midlife crisis and outgrowing your life — and what to do when you realize the two are not the same thing.
Why feelings are the most underused tool in your life
Kerry's framework begins with emotions — not as problems to be managed, but as data to be followed. A counterintuitive approach with profound results.
Reinvention after 45: what nobody tells you
Based on Kerry's own experience moving to Lisbon and rebuilding — and the stories of hundreds of clients navigating major life transitions in midlife and beyond.
The loneliness epidemic and the crisis of self
Kerry's read on why so many people feel disconnected — not just from others, but from themselves — and what genuine connection actually requires.
Journaling as self-inquiry: it's not what you think
How the right questions — not affirmations, not gratitude lists — can unlock self-knowledge that years of therapy sometimes can't reach.
Surviving narcissistic abuse and reclaiming your identity
Kerry's personal story and the framework she developed for understanding, forgiving, and rebuilding a sense of self after relational trauma.