Lisa OBrien, LCSW

Lisa OBrien is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) with more than three decades of experience helping people through hard times. She meets clients where they are and focuses on practical steps to reduce stress and handle life changes. Her approach is straightforward and aimed at making daily life feel more manageable. In sessions she works on problems such as anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, and addiction. She also supports people dealing with relationship and intimacy concerns, parenting strain, caregiver stress, and issues connected to adoption and foster care. Aging and geriatric issues are listed among her additional focus areas. Her work often mixes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with motivational interviewing and solution-focused techniques. Lisa adapts what she uses to each person’s situation and goals rather than following one fixed method. This means sessions tend to combine practical skills, goal-setting, and reflection. Clients can expect attention to life context, including family of origin patterns and communication habits. She has experience talking with people about compassion fatigue, first responder stress, and the complicated feelings that come with chronic illness or cancer in a family. Her background also includes work on gender and identity concerns. Based in Montana, Lisa brings 32 years of clinical work to her practice as an LCSW. She works in plain language and aims to make therapy feel like a collaborative effort toward clearer choices and better daily coping.

How therapeutic approaches guide online work

CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, focuses on identifying unhelpful thoughts and trying small behavior changes to reduce anxiety and depression. It often includes simple exercises and homework to practice skills between sessions. Motivational Interviewing is a conversational method that helps people find their own reasons for change. It works well for addictions, ambivalence about treatment, and setting personal goals. Finding the right approach is part of the work together. The therapist will discuss goals and preferences and then use one or more methods that make sense for the person. That collaborative process helps shape session pacing, topic choice, and practical tasks to try between meetings. Confirm the specific session options before booking because the biography does not list formats. Ask which ways of meeting fit into your routine and what will work best for your needs. Online therapy can make it easier to fit sessions into a busy week, allow shorter check-ins when time is limited, and remove travel time so therapy fits around caregiving or work. Therapists can also adapt exercises for use at home and suggest simple practices to use between sessions.