Lorrie Louws
Mental Health Occupational Therapist
Lorrie is a Mental Health Occupational Therapist with 15 years’ experience, including face to face therapy. She has worked extensively with clients, teams and organisations across NSW health and the Non-governmental organization sector.
Lorrie’s ‘Key Resilience’ Program, which supports mental health and wellbeing in children, has been recognised via a win for Explore and Develop Childcare Penrith, who implement this program, and have been given the Hesta Education and Care Award for Outstanding Organization.
Face to Face Therapy
Lorrie’s therapeutic beliefs:
- Connection and strengths are fostered by safety, trust and choice inside relationships.
- People can be understood by exploring their experiences, beliefs and personal values.
As an Occupational Therapist, Lorrie assists people to understand how their day to day functioning is impacted by their environment, thoughts, feelings, motivations and actions. Our life roles and levels of personal satisfaction are connected to the choices, patterns and habits we form across these domains.
By building skills in targeted areas and using our existing strengths, we can repair and support a sense of meaning, purpose and well-being when things go wrong. Experiencing challenges is a normal part of the human experience. With a focus on self-awareness and self-reflection, we can use these experiences to provide us with some of our best learning and growth. Processing and problem solving can happen in an office, but sometimes it can be difficult to implement this in real life. Hence, as an OT Lorrie has scope to include assessments and targeted sessions in home and community environments to assist the change process.
Lorrie has a strong evidence base behind her work.
Areas of Interest :
- Coping with change across the lifespan: parenting, relationships, productivity roles – work & education, retirement, loss and grief.
- Overcoming adversity – distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness, fostering a growth mindset, communication strategies, boundary setting and personal value orientations (goal setting).
- Connection to self and others – attachment styles
- Behaviour as a communication of needs/unmet needs – a parenting essential!
- Thriving, personal values and strengths – understanding what matters and getting the most out of life.
- Working with Voice Hearers’ and psychosis – Maastricht Interview & personal recovery.
- Trauma-informed care & meaning-making.