Children
Play-based and creative work for kids who would rather show you than tell you. Parents get practical strategies to carry the work through the week.
Meet the team
Austin Whitman, AMFT
Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, working with children, teens, young adults, and couples. He also leads the Men's Support Group. In Laguna Beach, or by video anywhere in California.
Austin Whitman works with the younger end of the practice: children who are not going to sit still and discuss their feelings, teenagers who have decided in advance how much they plan to say, and young adults trying to work out what they are doing with any of it. He sees clients under Kay Wenger's supervision.
He is unhurried, which turns out to matter more than almost anything else with this age group. Young people can tell immediately when an adult is waiting for them to produce something. Austin is not waiting. That tends to be the thing that makes the second session easier than the first.
How he works
Nobody has to perform being okay in here.
Austin draws on Person-Centered work, CBT, DBT, and ACT, which is less complicated than it sounds: he follows the person in front of him, and he has practical tools for the moments when following is not enough. Skills for a body that has gone into alarm, and room for the feelings underneath the behaviour everyone else is worried about.
With younger clients, a lot of it does not look like a conversation at all. Art, music, movement, and games do the work, because a child will show you what is wrong long before they can explain it. With teenagers, it looks more like two people talking, at whatever pace the teenager sets.
He works with couples as well, often younger ones still figuring out how to be a team, before the habits set like concrete.
Austin WhitmanAMFT #145401Associate Marriage and Family TherapistSupervised by Kay Wenger, LMFT #38183, LPCC #1450
What he works with
Where Austin tends to help most
The concerns that bring younger clients in, and a few that bring their parents in first.
- Anxiety School, friendships, performance, the future. The version where a young person is managing it well enough on the outside that nobody noticed how much it costs.
- Depression Flatness, withdrawal, the thing that gets called laziness by people who have not looked closely. Often it is not sadness at all, it is a shut door.
- Anger The presenting problem that is almost never the actual problem. Anger is usually the only feeling that felt safe enough to show, which makes it worth listening to rather than just managing.
- Substance use Early patterns in teens and young adults, approached without panic and without a lecture, which is generally the only way the conversation stays honest.
- Grief and loss A death, a divorce, a friend who moved, a version of family that is not coming back. Young people grieve sideways, in bursts, between ordinary afternoons.
- Life transitions New school, new town, leaving home, or the strange flat stretch after a goal everyone else celebrated. Change arrives faster at this age than anyone is ready for.
Who he sees
From primary school to the first real job
Teens
A low-pressure room for someone who arrived with their guard up, which is a reasonable thing to arrive with. No requirement to talk before it is worth talking.
Young adults
The stretch where everyone assumes you have it worked out. Identity, direction, independence, and the quiet worry that you are behind.
Therapy that does not look like therapy
Ask a nine-year-old how they are feeling and you will get "fine", or a shrug, or a question about whether this is going to take long. It is not evasion. Most children do not have the vocabulary yet for what is happening inside them, and being asked to produce it on demand is its own small pressure.
So with younger clients, Austin works sideways. Art, music, movement, and games carry the session, and the real material arrives through them: who the character in the drawing is afraid of, what happens in the game when someone breaks a rule, how a body moves when it is angry versus when it is worried. A child will tell you the truth through a made-up story long before they will tell you straight out.
With teenagers it looks more conventional, two people talking, but the same principle holds. Nobody is graded on how well they do therapy. If a session goes twenty minutes on a game they are into before it goes anywhere near the hard thing, that is not wasted time. That is how the hard thing becomes sayable.
The Men's Support Group
Austin also leads the practice's Men's Support Group. It exists for a simple reason: a lot of men have exactly one person they talk to honestly, and sometimes not even that. A group is a different instrument than individual therapy. Hearing someone else say the thing you assumed was yours alone does something a room with one other person in it cannot quite manage.
If you are curious whether it would suit you, the free call is the place to ask.
Where to go next
More about the practice
Therapy for teens
If you're a parent weighing this up, the teen page walks through how the work actually goes, and what your role in it is.
Teen therapyTherapy for children
How we work with younger kids, and how we support the parents alongside them.
Child therapyThe rest of the team
Every therapist here works under Kay's supervision, and the free call exists partly to make sure you land with the right one.
Meet the teamThink Austin might be the right fit?
The free 15 to 20 minute call is where we sort that out. Parents are welcome to make the call themselves first. You can ask for him by name, or describe what's going on and let us suggest who fits best.
Book a free call
Free and confidential. Be seen within 24 hours.
Navigating Life's Waves Together