About Lori
Lori Cheek Gilroy welcomes people seeking practical support for stress, anxiety, depression, parenting challenges, grief, trauma, and a wide range of life changes. She frames the work around helping clients identify their strengths and develop concrete steps toward better coping and emotional balance.
Background and approach
Lori’s approach is collaborative, inviting clients to define goals and tap into resources that already exist in their lives. With 26 years of experience as an LCSW licensed in Illinois (IL LCSW 149.007215), she has worked across settings including child welfare, family counseling, birthing centers, crisis intervention, and community mental health.
Her clinical practice integrates client-centered listening with evidence-informed techniques such as cognitive behavioral strategies, motivational interviewing, solution-focused methods, and trauma-focused interventions. She also brings experience addressing caregiver stress, chronic illness and disability, adoption and foster care concerns, and issues related to family of origin and life purpose.
In sessions she emphasizes respect, sensitivity, and compassion while helping people clarify priorities and create practical plans. Lori welcomes those ready to explore change and move toward more stable coping, greater meaning, and improved functioning.
Therapeutic Approaches and Online Flexibility
Many clients find benefit in a client-centered approach, which emphasizes empathic listening and collaboration so clients can explore values, strengths, and personal goals in a respectful space. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) complements that work by examining unhelpful thoughts and patterns and teaching practical skills to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress. Trauma-focused therapy offers targeted tools for processing traumatic experiences and reducing their ongoing impact on mood and functioning.Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will work with each person to clarify goals, assess needs, and select the methods most likely to help, combining strategies as appropriate rather than relying on a single technique.
Online sessions make it possible to access this style of care through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. These options provide flexibility for scheduling, allow people to continue work from home or another convenient location, and support consistent engagement when in-person meetings are difficult to arrange. Licensed professionals can adapt these methods to each format to keep the focus on practical skill building and meaningful progress.
Frequently asked questions
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
Also works with
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Anger management
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Coaching
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Forgiveness
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Isolation / loneliness
- Life purpose
- Mood disorders
- Parenting issues
- Post-traumatic stress
- Relationship issues
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Trauma and abuse
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 26 years
- Licensed
- Illinois
- Languages
- English