Lori Brinkley

Lori Brinkley is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with 25 years of practice. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, relationship strain, parenting challenges, career transitions, and coping with life changes. Lori brings a warm, direct style and a practical focus to sessions.

She uses everyday language and clear tools to help people navigate big moments. Lori often blends cognitive behavioral techniques with mindfulness and solution-focused strategies. She also draws on dialectical behavior therapy ideas when emotions feel overwhelming.

Lori's approach mixes challenge with support. She says humor has a place in therapy and uses it when helpful. She aims to help people make concrete changes in thinking and behavior, and to build better coping skills for daily life.

She also offers a form of work some people call "couple's counseling for one" where a single partner learns skills and boundaries to improve connection when their partner is not participating in therapy. Lori has experience with trauma and abuse, grief, intimacy issues, eating concerns, anger, and compassion fatigue among other concerns.

Outside of work she is a mother, loves being outdoors, and enjoys reading suspense and hunting for waterfalls. She draws on that life experience to relate to clients and to model practical ways to face fears and make changes. If you want straightforward help adapting to a life shift, Lori helps people set goals and try new ways forward.

How Lori's approaches translate to online work

Lori frequently uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness Therapy to help people notice unhelpful thinking and practice new responses. CBT focuses on identifying thoughts and testing them with small experiments, which can help with anxiety, depression, and stress. Mindfulness teaches simple attention and breathing practices to reduce reactivity and improve focus, which often supports coping during transitions.

She also draws on Client-Centered Therapy, which centers the person's experience and priorities. That approach emphasizes listening, validation, and working at a pace the client finds manageable. Together the therapist and client decide which methods to try based on goals, comfort level, and what has helped in the past. Finding the right approach is part of the work itself and Lori treats it as a collaborative process.

If you are considering online sessions, confirm the current session options before booking. Online work can make it easier to fit therapy into busy schedules, shorten travel time, and allow check-ins that match a work break or a brief period between commitments. Discuss format and scheduling during the matching process so sessions align with daily life and therapeutic goals.