Welcome to The Stelter Institute
Evidence-based Strategies and Compassionate Support Throughout Your Pregnancy and Postpartum Recovery
Our Mission
The Stelter Institute is dedicated to the science of helping pregnant and postpartum women embrace resilience. We envision communities where women are supported to feel patient with their changing emotions, confident in their abilities to assert their needs and wants, powerful in their ability to assemble a supportive team, safe to give birth and parent their children in the way they know in their hearts is best, and divine in their ability to nurture themselves and their families.
Dr. Mary Stelter, Founder and Research Director
Mary Stelter, PsyD, is dedicated to understanding the experiences women navigate and helping them achieve the life they want to live. As a psychotherapist, she specialized in trauma recovery, and this experience informs her work now as a researcher and teacher. She is dedicated to helping women prevent perinatal mental health challenges through resilience and trauma-preventive education. She works with individuals and groups who are looking for help getting “unstuck” from patterns of sadness, anger, depression, and anxiety. Her research focuses on the prevention and treatment of Complex Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Birth Trauma, prolonged grief, betrayal and moral injury, and stress.
Dr. Stelter received her Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) degree from California Southern University, her Master of Psychology from Pepperdine University, and her Bachelors of Theatre from Wichita State University, where she first learned the power of people’s stories. Interning in community mental health settings in Los Angeles County gave Dr. Stelter the experience and skills to rapidly diagnose and treat a wide variety of psychological concerns, tailoring the therapeutic experience to each client’s needs, in a way that was honoring of the client’s cultural beliefs and traditions, and now she applies that same multicultural respect to her research and education offerings. She believes in a strengths-based approach and will look for the skills a client is already using and will help them expand those areas of confidence.
Dr. Stelter has advanced training in Perinatal and Postpartum Mental Health (PMH-C), Drama Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Somatic Therapy, Clinical Hypnosis and Meditation, Exposure Therapies, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Existential therapies, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, Brief Strategic Therapy and Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). This helps her to integrate both the theoretical foundations and the practical experience of common therapeutic modalities.
Dr. Stelter teaches various college psychology courses, including Introduction to Psychology, Abnormal Psych, Critical Thinking, Human Sexuality, Lifespan Development, and Psychology of Adjustment (Grief). She teaches, researches, and writes in Southern California, where she lives with her husband, their five children, two cats, and one dog.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million…
Finding the right therapist can sometimes be like trying on a glove. Sometimes it just isn’t the right fit. Short of meeting in person, video may be the next best way to get a quick sense of someone’s personality.