Steadfast Counselor: The Life and Legacy of Dr. Stan Steinar Skarsten

Early Life and Origins

Born on June 18, 1934 in the coastal city of Bergen, Norway, Stan Steinar Skarsten carried a Scandinavian beginning into a Canadian life that would center on families, faith, and the often quiet work of healing relationships. The arc of his life moved from fjord to city — a migration from one cultural climate to another — and with it a migration of purpose. He arrived in Canada in the mid-20th century, pursued advanced training in social work and psychology, and turned his formal education into a career that mixed clinical practice, institutional leadership, and teaching.

Basic Information

A Family at the Center

Family life was the north star of Stan Skarsten’s personal and professional compass. Married to Mary Aileen Self Skarsten, whose upbringing wove English and Scottish roots with a childhood in India, Stan shaped a household that blended cultural breadth with practical devotion. Their daughter Rachel, born April 23, 1985, would later become a visible public figure as an actress, but within the home she was one node in a network of routines, rituals, and counsel. A younger son, Jonathan, born around 1991, remained largely out of the public eye, preserving a private life away from the spotlight.

The family dynamic resembled a well-tended hearth: steady heat, predictable turns, and the occasional spark. Stan’s professional focus on marital and family therapy intersected with his roles as husband and father; what he taught in clinics and classrooms he also lived at home. When tragedy struck with his death in 1995, the rupture not only altered intimate lives but also triggered an unlikely public moment — a memorial that, as family lore holds, placed his daughter Rachel on a path toward discovery in the performing arts.

Career, Counseling, and Institution Building

By training and temperament, Stan was a clinician and teacher. Over the 1970s–1990s he established himself in Toronto’s mental health community, taking on senior roles such as Chief Social Worker at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry (an institution now part of the wider Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). He combined hands-on clinical work with a commitment to education: evening classes, adjunct instruction, mentoring of junior professionals. His academic standing included a doctoral level of preparation — records suggest a doctorate in social work or psychology (a DSW or PhD) — and a dissertation focus that explored counseling married couples and relational dynamics.

Around the 1980s, Stan co-founded the Institute of Family Living in partnership with Henry Regehr. This organization embodied his therapeutic philosophy: a faith-infused, rigorous approach to marriage and family therapy that aimed for balance — work, leisure, and family life in tension and harmony. The Institute offered counseling services, training, and community resources that reflected Stan’s belief that spiritual considerations and clinical best practice could be woven together, not held apart.

Teaching and Mentorship

Stan’s classroom presence was described as steady and formative. As an adjunct faculty member at the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) he taught courses in psychology, counseling, and marital therapy. He favored accessible schedules — evening sessions to accommodate working professionals — and he modeled the mentorship he expected of a senior clinician. Several mentees credited extended periods under his guidance (for example, an eight-year formative relationship with one Dr. Brown) for shaping their therapeutic style and practices.

His participation in academic and community conferences — including dialogues on spirituality, family systems, and ethics — placed him at the intersection of theory and pastoral care. He did not chase prestige for its own sake; rather, he cultivated influence through fidelity to practice and the steady shaping of future practitioners.

Dates, Numbers, and a Compact Timeline

Numbers appear throughout Stan’s professional life as measures of commitment: decades in practice, years of mentorship, courses taught, clients seen, families counseled. The numeric thread—dates, ages, spans—gives form to a life otherwise lived in the intangible work of repair.

Personality and Professional Ethos

Colleagues and students remembered Stan as a clinician with a firm hand and a compassionate posture. There was a throughline in his work: faith and fidelity to the family unit. He treated counseling as both art and craft, combining structured approaches with the improvisational skill required when real people — with messy histories and unpredictable griefs — sat across from him.

He maintained a relatively low public profile, preferring the slow, accumulative work of influence: training a cadre of counselors, setting up an institute that outlived his immediate reach, and shaping the habits of practice in local circles. Financially, his roles suggest a stable middle-class professional life typical of senior clinicians of his era in Canada; there is nothing in public accounts to suggest flamboyance or wealth. Instead, his legacy reads more like an heirloom: less in objects than in habits, less in money than in the methods and loyalties he passed on.

Passing and Aftermath

Stan’s death on March 28, 1995, at the age of 60, was a turning point for his family. The memorial, a moment of mourning, also became part of the origin story for his daughter Rachel’s entry into acting. The personal loss generated ripple effects: an altered family trajectory, a daughter who would go on to public life in film and television, and a private son who retained his privacy. The Institute and the students he mentored continued work rooted in the practical theology and therapeutic rigor he championed.

Stan’s life resembled a well-built bridge: constructed deliberately, used daily, bearing the weight of many crossings, and when it finally yielded to time, it left a route still followed by those who learned to walk it.