Meet Lori
Lori Linseedoil Case
Formerly Lori Marchak
For many years, I believed becoming a better therapist meant learning more—another training, another certification, another way of understanding why people suffer. Much of that learning mattered. But the deepest shifts in my work came somewhere else.
They came from discovering that I was struggling with many of the same questions my clients were bringing into the room.
Why do thoughtful, caring people continue to feel lonely? Why do intelligent people remain trapped in patterns they understand so well? Why does insight sometimes change everything—and other times almost nothing?
Those questions have shaped my life as much as my profession. They continue to shape the way I work with individuals, couples, and therapists today.
Over more than twenty-five years of clinical practice, I’ve worked with hundreds of individuals and couples, trained more than 200 therapists, and founded the Montana Emotionally Focused Therapy community. Again and again, I’ve watched people arrive believing they were broken, resistant, or simply not trying hard enough. Increasingly, I came to see something different: many of the ways we suffer are intelligent adaptations to the relationships and environments that shaped us.
I was originally trained as an experimental psychologist, which gave me a deep respect for careful observation and research. Years later, searching for answers that research alone couldn’t provide, I became a psychotherapist. Today, my work draws from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP), attachment science, nervous system research, and decades of sitting with people in the places they most want to escape.
My approach is both deeply relational and practical. Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with you?” I find myself asking different questions. What has your nervous system learned? What has it been protecting? And what would need to become possible for more of your life to come into view?
Along the way, I’ve learned from remarkable clinicians, contemplative traditions, literature, and teachers across many disciplines. Each has expanded my understanding of what helps people change. More than anything, however, my clients—and my own ongoing therapeutic journey—have shaped the therapist I have become.
Outside my office, you’ll usually find me on a Montana trail, immersed in a good book with a pen and paper, writing, dancing, or spending time with people I love. Curiosity, movement, nature, and creativity continue to nourish both my life and my work.
If you’re exploring therapy, relationship intensives, or professional consultation, I invite you to learn more about the services below and see whether one feels like the right fit.
“Life protects itself until it encounters a place where what has been hidden can safely come into view.”
— Lori Linseedoil Case