Today we’d like to introduce you to Carrie Carrington.
Hi Carrie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Austin Family Care is the culmination of my partner, Astrid, and my dream to provide quality mental health care for the entire family. In both our personal and professional lives, we could see a growing need for mental health care that addresses the needs of individuals, couples, and families. Both Astrid and I had individual practices that addressed different needs, hers being children/adolescents and their families and mine focusing mainly on trauma and its impacts on couples. We merged our practices in October 2019 to form Austin Family Care to better address our community’s growing mental health concerns. We started with one additional practitioner focused primarily on couple therapy issues. Now, we are a thriving group practice with around 12 practitioners who focus on a variety of specialties, including play therapy, parenting concerns, eating disorders, EMDR, sex therapy, substance abuse/addiction, and more.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I don’t know if anything worth doing will be smooth! Life is a journey, and Austin Family Care’s birth has been a labor of love. When our clinic doors opened in October 2019, I had no idea that a worldwide pandemic would sweep our community. So, our original plans had to be quickly modified to meet the ever-changing landscape of a pandemic world. Before this point, I had been considering adding teletherapy to our practice to meet the challenges of helping rural communities around the greater Austin area. The pandemic necessitated us pivoting an entirely in-person practice to a completely virtual platform. This opportunity has greatly benefited the provision of care to more people throughout Texas. Other challenges have been maintaining a collaborative team culture in a wholly virtual world during the pandemic. Even today, we have the opportunity to create hybrid teletherapy and in-person environments to work with our clinicians’ needs and the community’s current demands.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Austin Family Care is a group mental health practice offering various mental health services for children/adolescents, individuals, couples, and families. Currently, we have twelve licensed clinicians who specialize in a variety of therapies to assist these groups, including sex therapy, EMDR, play therapy, ADHD therapy, ASD/neurological differences, family therapies, eating disorders, and substance abuse/addiction treatments. Our mission is to be able to provide mental health services to whole families who need a variety of different services, both in-person and virtually. We hope we aim to provide one place that can treat the entire family system, from children to couples, along their life journeys.
What was your favorite childhood memory?
One of my favorite memories is berry picking in the summer with my family. My family would pick every berry that would come in season in Tennessee. One time, I remember blackberry picking with my grandmother, and I was curious about the need to climb over barbed wire fences. About halfway into our berry-picking expedition, an old pickup truck turned down the road next to the blackberry briar. I will not forget my grandmother yelling for us to hide. Startled, I asked if it was okay to be picking these blackberries. I will not forget my grandmother commenting that she couldn’t let good blackberries go to waste. I realized at that moment I was a Blackberry thief!
Pricing:
- Accept the following insurances: Aetna, Blue Cross/Blue Shield PPO, United Healthcare
- Private Pay: $125-$200
Contact Info:
- Website: www.austinfamilycare.com
