Fermata Psychotherapy

07/27/2026

We all bring our relational histories into the workplace. Our experiences with authority, recognition, competition, belonging, and criticism influence how we interpret and relate to supervisors and coworkers, whether childhood trauma is part of our history or not.
When early relational trauma is part of the picture, however, these repetitions may carry a stronger sense of danger. A delayed response from a boss or an ambiguous co-worker’s expression during a meeting may evoke intense fears of rejection or a deep sense of inadequacy. As a result, we might feel anxious, withdrawn, or defensive. The workplace can feel psychologically unsafe even when the immediate situation does not fully explain the intensity of our reaction.
Psychodynamic trauma therapy can help us understand how past and present interact in our experiences of work. The aim is not to dismiss legitimate problems and systemic dysfunction, but to become better equipped to evaluate what belongs to this workplace, what is being amplified by our earlier experiences, and how do the two interact.

Trauma therapy can help uncover why workplace dynamics such us uncertainty, criticism, and comparison trigger hypervigilance rooted in childhood relational experiences.

07/15/2026

The first time away from your toddler can be anxiety provoking but it creates the opportunity for the development and strengthening of attachment. Secure attachment can't happen without separation and reunion. Fermata's founder and therapist Santiago Delboy shared a few thoughts about this for ParentMap.

After initially feeling hesitant, one mom shares the benefits of spending the night away from toddlers and babies, and encourages others.

07/06/2026

Depression is often associated with sadness, fatigue, and loss of motivation. But it can also involve a more subtle loss: the loss of curiosity and imagination. Our inner world begins to narrow, our future feels predetermined, and old certainties about our life, our self, and our relationships can feel like permanent truths.

Curiosity and imagination are central to our emotional life. They allow us to wonder about ourselves, make connections with our history, symbolize pain, and imagine new ways of being and relating.

Psychodynamic depression therapy helps reopen psychic space to be curious about the feelings that certainty protects us from. It can make grief thinkable, anger speakable, and longing more bearable. As curiosity returns, life can once again become something to question, encounter, and imagine from within.

Depression can narrow our inner world. Depression therapy helps make despair thinkable, grief speakable, and imagination possible from within again to rewrite your future.

06/25/2026

Anxiety is often thought of as a symptom that needs to be reduced or managed. But for many people, anxiety also serves a psychological function. It can create the sense that, as long as we remain worried, vigilant, or prepared, we might prevent something terrible from happening. In this way, anxiety can be at the same time a source of suffering and a protection from suffering.

In relationships, this can become especially painful. We may feel responsible not only for our own words and actions, but for another person’s emotional state. Anxiety can then become an attempt to manage what is not fully ours to control: how others feel, how they respond, and whether a relationship will feel secure enough.

This article explores how this function is connected with experiences in our childhood, how anxiety becomes part of our sense of self to deal with the threat of inconsistency and uncertainty, and how anxiety therapy can help us understand what it is trying to protect.

Anxiety therapy can help uncover why worry may feel protective, offering a deeper way to understand fear, control, hurt, and uncertainty in our lives.

06/17/2026

Feeling criticized by a partner can be deeply painful, especially when a comment or request for change is felt as a judgment of the whole self. In close relationships, we do not hear each other from a neutral place. Old experiences of shame, disappointment, love, and rejection often shape how we receive what the other person says.
Our latest post explores criticism as a shared relational experience: how one partner may hear condemnation where vulnerability was intended, and how the other may use criticism to protect against need, longing, resentment, or fear. Relationship therapy can help slow these patterns down, making room for both partners to understand what is being defended against, what is being asked for, and what remains difficult to say directly.

Relationship therapy can help couples understand how criticism and defensiveness may conceal shame, longing, resentment, and fear of vulnerability.

06/08/2026

Conflict is part of life. Disappointments, disagreements, and misunderstandings are natural aspects of human relationships. For many people, conflict avoidance may be a survival strategy learned in relationships where anger, disagreement, or disappointment felt dangerous.
In this post, we look at how complex, relational trauma can shape the way we respond to conflict, why we may freeze, apologize, withdraw, overfunction, or silence ourselves, and how trauma therapy can help us reconnect with our own feelings and needs without losing connection to others.

Trauma therapy can help you understand why conflict feels dangerous and how early relational wounds shape fear, shame, anger, and connection.

06/04/2026

We are excited to welcome Zack Wiener, MHL, MA, to Fermata Psychotherapy!
Zack works with adults dealing with anxiety and depression, grief and bereavement, addiction and recovery, complex trauma, family dynamics, LGBTQ+ issues, questions of identity and purpose, spirituality concerns, and chronic or terminal illness.
👉 In-network with Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO plans
👉 Immediate daytime and evening availability
👉 Appointments in person in Downtown Chicago and online throughout Illinois
In his own words: "People are much more complex than the initial reason they seek therapy. Whatever desires, fears, or mixed feelings you arrive with, I will be glad to hear your story and eager to help."
You can read more about Zack here:
https://www.fermatapsychotherapy.com/zack-wiener
Welcome, Zack!

Our expert therapists offer therapy and mental health counseling in Downtown Chicago to get to the root, change old patterns, and live a fulfilling life.

05/26/2026

Depression is not always experienced as sadness. Sometimes it appears a mix of certainty and futility: the feeling that nothing we do will matter, that others will never feel moved by us, that the future will only repeat the past, or that wanting too much will lead to disappointment.
This post explores how learned helplessness can become linked to depression, and how depression therapy can help restore a more alive sense of agency from within.

Learn how depression therapy helps address learned helplessness, resignation, and the deeper emotional patterns that make change feel impossible.

05/19/2026

Some people seem to take in the anxiety of others as if it was their own. What may appear to be heightened empathy can also reflect unconscious attachment patterns, internalized relationships, and a vulnerable boundary between one’s own emotional life and the emotional life of others. Another person’s distress may stir old fears of disconnection, blame, rejection, or aggression.
This post explores why absorbing other people’s anxiety can be an expression of unconscious identifications, conflicts, and allegiances. Making them more visible in therapy is a way to loosen their grip, allowing for a sense of self that feels more grounded and secure.

Explore how emotional contagion can intensify anxiety, and how anxiety therapy helps you care for others without absorbing their stress.

05/08/2026

Loss is inevitable when we love. Sometimes, our efforts to avoid the pain of mourning will keep us from being able to love. Allowing ourselves to become attached always involves risking loss. But even if we lose the object of our love, our capacity to love can survive, keeping our hearts open to receive and give again.