Lori Cheek Gilroy
Guiding parents through practical next steps
- Credentials
- LCSW
- Experience
- 26 years
- Licensed in
- Illinois
- Languages
- English
- Format
- Online sessions
About Lori
Lori Cheek Gilroy is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who offers calm, practical support for parents and families facing stress and life changes. She speaks plainly and listens closely, helping caregivers sort priorities and find workable steps forward. Lori draws on 26 years of experience as a counselor and life coach to guide conversations that focus on everyday problems and choices.
She uses straightforward methods to address anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and parenting concerns.
Background and approach
Sessions tend to center on identifying clear goals and small, doable actions people can take between meetings. Lori also helps with career shifts, caregiver strain, chronic illness challenges, and family communication issues. Her background includes work in child welfare, family counseling clinics, a family birthing center, crisis intervention, and community mental health.
Those settings shaped a practical, solution-minded way of working and comfort with crisis and transition situations. Her license is LCSW in Illinois. Lori integrates client-centered listening with focused tools when needed.
Techniques may include cognitive behavioral ideas to change unhelpful thoughts, solution-focused steps to move forward quickly, and trauma-informed practices for safety and stabilization. She also brings coaching skills for planning and accountability. People who meet with Lori can expect direct, respectful conversation and a plan that fits family life.
Her work reflects a values-based outlook and a belief that clients carry the wisdom to shape their own solutions.
How Lori's Approaches Fit with Online Therapy
Client-centered work focuses on the person and what matters most to them, using listening and open questions to help people find their own answers. This approach helps parents and caregivers clarify priorities and make choices that fit family life.Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, looks at how thoughts, feelings, and actions connect and uses simple exercises to shift patterns that cause distress. It is useful for anxiety, low mood, and stress-related problems and adapts well to video or phone sessions where homework and tracking can be reviewed together.
Motivational Interviewing supports change by exploring a person’s own reasons for wanting something different and strengthening motivation through collaborative conversation. It pairs well with coaching-style planning for steps parents want to try between meetings.
Finding the right approach is part of the work. Lori will listen to a client's needs, goals, and preferences and suggest tools or combinations of methods that make sense. She treats the choice of methods as a team decision and adjusts plans as progress is seen.
Online therapy offers flexible access through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging. Those options make it easier to fit sessions into busy family schedules, continue care during transitions, and use a mix of check-ins and longer conversations based on what the family needs.
Client-Centered Therapy
The direction comes from you rather than from a set programme. The therapist offers a warm, non-judgemental space to think out loud and work at your own pace. Online, this rests on the relationship rather than on being in the same room.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT looks at the link between what you think, how you feel, and what you do. You work on noticing unhelpful patterns and practising steadier responses. It suits online sessions well, because much of the work happens between appointments and can be talked through from anywhere.
Motivational Interviewing
A way of working through mixed feelings about change without being pushed. The therapist helps you weigh things up and find your own reasons, which often makes a difficult decision feel less stuck.
Frequently asked questions
What kinds of concerns does Lori address?
How would you describe her therapeutic style?
What is her professional background?
What credentials does she hold and where does she practice?
Can sessions be conducted in languages other than English?
In what formats are sessions offered?
How does payment and cost work?
What are the first steps to begin therapy?
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
Next step
Talk to Lori
- Takes a few minutes
- Nothing to set up just to look
- Stop at any point