Austin Schrag

I have worked with clients from ages 3 through 80 and with individuals, couples, and families. With that breadth of experience, very little shocks or surprises me, and I am able to develop an individualized approach for each client, combining therapy modalities that play to my strengths as a counselor and that are helpful for the people I’m working with.

Three principles shape all the counseling I do:

• Counseling should be efficient. Counseling has significant costs in time and money. I think the benefits far outweigh the costs but when I can give you the benefits while helping you save on the costs I will do that. So I choose approaches to counseling (like EMDR and EFT) that generally work more quickly. That being said, I don’t want to you to feel better for three to six months and then need counseling again because we only worked on symptom relief and didn’t bring healing to the underlying causes. That doesn’t seem very efficient to me. So my goal is to provide as long-lasting and complete help as possible in as little time as possible.
• The client is always in charge. People are complex and come with years of history that I can never know all of. I know a lot of things but you will always be the one who decides what you want to get out of counseling, how we work towards that goal, whether or not what we’re doing seems to be working, and when we’re done.
• Change and health happen through relationships. The work we do in counseling will touch on how your relationships impact your health. No matter what you come in for, there are always relational implications of change and relational factors that contribute to whatever it is that you came to counseling to change. Change can only happen in counseling because of our relationship. It’s my responsibility to make our relationship a place where you feel heard and accepted.

Much of the therapy I do is talking through things and helping my clients process events, feelings, and relationships. However, I also use two specific approaches for helping healing in particular areas.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT): Emotionally Focused Therapy is an attachment based therapy mostly focused on couples and families. You can find out more information here: https://iceeft.com/what-is-eft

EMDR: I am an EMDR Certified Therapist. EMDR is a research based approach for treating trauma and reprocessing traumatic memories. You can find more information here: https://www.emdria.org/about-emdr-therapy

If you would like to schedule a short phone consultation before scheduling an appointment, you can find my contact information at https://www.schragcounseling.com/contact

I start first sessions with some quick information about therapy in general and therapy with me. After that, we spend most of the session talking about what brings you to therapy and what you hope will be different after therapy. At the end of the session, I will let you how I am making sense of what you have told me and how I would approach helping you get where you want to be. After that, it's up to you to decide whether you like the plan I've described or whether you want to go in a different direction.