About Austa
Austa Murray is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 22 years of experience helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, grief, and ADHD. She focuses on practical support for relationship and parenting concerns, self-esteem, trauma and abuse, and issues that follow major life changes. Her approach is steady and compassionate, aimed at meeting each person where they are.
She keeps sessions centered on the client's goals and moves at a pace that feels comfortable.
Background and approach
Conversations focus on building a working relationship, hearing what matters most, and developing skills to handle day-to-day challenges. She uses straightforward tools that people can try between sessions. Austa draws on attachment-based ideas to look at how early relationships shape current patterns.
She also uses client-centered listening to prioritize the person's perspective and cognitive behavioral techniques to break unhelpful thinking and behavior cycles. Dialectical behavior ideas help when emotions feel overwhelming, and elements of the Gottman Method inform work on communication and trust. Her style is nonjudgmental and educational.
She explains concepts in plain language and practices with a strengths-based mindset. Many sessions include skill teaching, guided reflection, and a plan to support change outside of therapy. Austa has worked in a variety of mental health settings across her career.
She applies that background to tailor an approach to each person’s needs, combining insight, skill-building, and steady support.
How therapeutic approaches translate to online care
Austa uses attachment-based thinking to look at how early relationship patterns affect current behavior and emotional responses. That approach helps when people want to understand recurring problems in relationships and why certain interactions feel triggering.She also uses cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and testing new behaviors. CBT is useful for anxiety, depression, ADHD-related routines, and for building concrete skills to change daily patterns.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. She will collaborate with each person to choose methods that match their needs, goals, and comfort with different techniques. Together they decide whether to prioritize insight, skills training, or relationship work and adjust as progress is made.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to give flexibility. Video lets people use visual cues and deeper conversation, phone can be lower bandwidth or easier when movement is helpful, and chat or messaging supports brief check-ins and ongoing coaching between sessions. These options make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules and to continue momentum when life gets hectic.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Family conflicts
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- Abandonment
- ADHD
- Adoption and foster care
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Co-morbidity
- Coaching
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Polyamory / non-monogamous relationships
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Relationship issues
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trichotillomania
- Women's issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 22 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English
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