About Austa
Austa Murray is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with over 22 years of experience helping people manage anxiety, stress, depression, and life transitions. She works with people facing relationship and intimacy concerns, grief, parenting strain, trauma and abuse, and challenges tied to identity and LGBT issues.
Her approach aims to start where the person is and move at a pace they find comfortable. Austa keeps sessions practical and direct.
Background and approach
She listens first, then helps people identify patterns that maintain worry or low mood. She teaches skills for managing emotions and changing unhelpful thoughts. Sessions may include support for communication, boundaries, and coping during big life changes.
Her work draws on attachment-based ideas to look at how early relationships shape current reactions. Austa also uses client-centered ways of working that focus on each person's goals and values. She incorporates cognitive behavioral techniques to teach specific strategies for anxiety and mood management.
Austa describes her style as compassionate and nonjudgmental. She brings years of experience from varied mental health settings and aims to combine listening with practical skill-building. Together with each client she outlines concrete steps to address the problems that brought them to therapy.
People who choose her can expect an emphasis on insight plus tools to cope in day-to-day life. Sessions are collaborative and tailored to individual needs, including concerns like ADHD, caregiver stress, codependency, and recovery from domestic violence or abandonment wounds.
How her approaches work online
Austa uses attachment-based ideas to understand how early bonds shape current reactions. This approach often helps people who notice repeating patterns in relationships or who struggle with trust and emotional closeness. It focuses on how current distress connects to past relationship experiences. She also uses client-centered therapy, which centers the person’s goals and values. In practice that means sessions follow what the person brings and concentrate on building on strengths and personal priorities. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is used to teach specific skills for managing anxious thoughts and mood. CBT sessions often include identifying unhelpful thinking and practicing new behaviors to reduce worry or low mood. Finding the right mix of approaches is part of the work together. The therapist will collaborate with each person to choose methods that fit their needs, goals, and preferences. That plan can shift as progress is made and circumstances change. Online formats support flexible care. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation for deeper discussion and skills practice. Phone sessions can be a good option when bandwidth is limited or a quieter check-in is needed. Live chat and text-based messaging are useful for brief check-ins, coaching-style support, or when writing out thoughts feels easier. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into busy days and to keep momentum between sessions.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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