Fermata Psychotherapy

10/12/2026

As the holidays approach, preparing for family gatherings can bring mixed feelings: anticipation, affection, anxiety, or dread. Even if we feel more grounded in our adult lives, being with family can draw us back into old familiar roles: keeping everyone happy, defending ourselves, or remaining quiet while our needs go unnoticed. These ways of relating often carry a history of how we sought closeness, protected ourselves, or tried to feel seen.

We may also arrive with wishes, needs, and hopes that remain unacknowledged. Preparing emotionally can involve recognizing these wishes and mourning the loss of what we didn't have while considering what is realistically available from others.

Our latest article explores how noticing these patterns, reflecting on our expectations, and deciding how we are willing to participate can help us prepare for difficult family situations. Whether that means speaking more directly, being more compassionate, stepping away from a painful conversation, or choosing a shorter visit, preparation can create more room for agency and freedom, even when difficult feelings remain.

Prepare for difficult family gatherings by understanding old patterns, hopes, and boundaries. Explore how therapy for relationship issues can help you show up differently.

10/05/2026

Sometimes the hardest part of setting a boundary is the anxiety that follows. Declining a request or deciding what we are willing to participate in can stir fears of rejection, guilt about disappointing someone, or uncertainty about our worth when we are less available. These feelings may reflect earlier relationships in which closeness depended on setting our own needs aside. Our latest article explores these dynamics and how anxiety therapy can help us recognize our limits while making room for the feelings they bring.

Explore the link between anxiety and difficulty setting personal boundaries, and how anxiety therapy can help you understand guilt and the fear of rejection.

09/21/2026

Coming out can change what others know about us without changing what we feel safe allowing them to see. We may be open about our identity while still concealing our needs, monitoring our behavior, or trying to become undemanding enough to secure acceptance. Being known and feeling free to be ourselves can remain very different experiences.
Sometimes, hiding protects us from ongoing discrimination or rejection. It can also preserve important attachments: blaming ourselves may sustain the hope that, if we change enough, someone we love will finally accept us. These patterns can persist even in more welcoming relationships. This article explores the emotional life of hiding and how LGBTQ+ affirming therapy can help.

Coming out doesn’t always bring an immediate sense of safety. Explore how LGBTQ+ therapy addresses anxiety, internalized shame, and the realities of potential rejection.

09/17/2026

Someone else’s success can stir unexpected feelings, even when we are happy for them. A friend’s promotion, a colleague’s recognition, or a milestone we hoped to reach may suddenly leave us questioning our own worth. Nothing in our life has changed, yet we may feel smaller.
These moments can carry the weight of earlier experiences in which recognition felt scarce or approval depended on being impressive. Over time, those expectations may become an internal judge that measures our value against other people’s accomplishments. Envy can also bring us into contact with wishes we have dismissed, alongside feelings of inadequacy we try to manage by diminishing others or criticizing ourselves.
This article explores why comparison can feel so personal and how therapy for self-esteem can help us understand the meanings underneath it. Understanding these reactions can give us greater freedom to pursue what matters to us without requiring every accomplishment to settle the question of our worth.

Why does someone else’s success make you question your worth? Explore comparison, envy, and how therapy for self-esteem can help you understand these feelings.

09/09/2026

An apology can express care and accountability. But when “I’m sorry” becomes an automatic response to having needs, feeling hurt, or sensing someone else’s displeasure, it may carry meanings rooted in our earliest relationships. Accepting blame may have helped preserve an old attachment or sustain our sense of self, while apologizing repeatedly can also be a manifestation of internalized accusations or protect us from recognizing our own anger.
This post explores these different meanings and how childhood trauma therapy can help us understand and work through the feelings and conflicts beneath them. As we become more connected to our full selves, we can take responsibility for our impact on others while allowing room for our needs, wishes, and experience. An apology can become something we choose when warranted, rather than the perceived price of remaining connected or being who we are.

Explore how childhood trauma therapy helps us understand the unconscious meanings of over-apologizing and distinguish responsibility from reflexive self-blame.

09/02/2026

Why can reaching a long-awaited goal leave us feeling empty rather than proud? Depression can lead us to minimize praise, attribute success to luck, or turn an accomplishment into the starting point for another demand.
This article explores how harsh internal standards, conditional approval, and fears of being exposed can make success difficult to take in. It also considers how psychodynamic therapy for depression can help us understand these reactions with compassion and develop a more grounded capacity to recognize our growth.

Why can achievements feel empty during depression? Explore the hidden conflicts behind success and how therapy for depression can help you take it in.

08/26/2026

Feeling lonely in a relationship can be especially difficult to understand. There may be love, care, and a shared life, yet parts of us remain unseen and unknown. This loneliness rarely belongs to only one person. It can emerge from the internal relationships we carry, our ambivalence about being known, and patterns the couple creates together.
Our latest article explores how early relationships shape what closeness evokes, why partners can become trapped in unconscious roles and patterns, and how therapy for relationship issues can help bring these patterns into view. The opposite of loneliness is not a relationship without difference or disappointment, but one with greater room for recognition, vulnerability, and repair.

Therapy for relationship issues can uncover why loneliness persists, linking past relationships, hidden needs, and the patterns couples create together.

08/18/2026

Anxiety often carries a second layer of distress: the belief that feeling afraid, overwhelmed, or uncertain is evidence of weakness. Self-criticism and self-judgment may seem like a way to remain vigilant, responsible, and protected, but it can transform anxiety into an attack on the self.
Self-compassion does not require denying anxiety or abandoning accountability. It allows us to approach fear with greater curiosity, understand the relational history beneath it, and preserve a steadier sense of self amid uncertainty. In anxiety therapy, developing this more secure inner relationship can reduce anxiety’s punitive quality and create greater freedom, stability, and emotional integration.

Learn how self-compassion can soften the self-criticism that accompanies anxiety and how anxiety therapy helps create a more secure inner relationship.

08/08/2026

Grief is not only about losing someone or something we once had. Sometimes, we also carry grief for what was absent. For example, the emotional safety, attunement, recognition, freedom, or repair we needed as children but did not receive.
While these losses are always present, mourning them can sometimes be painful because it brings us closer to realities and experiences we may have spent years minimizing or avoiding.
Making room for that grief can help us understand the longings that continue to shape our relationships and our sense of self, allowing us to create a live that feels more authentic and free.
Read our latest post: "Mourning What We Never Had."

Explore how grief counseling can help us mourn unmet childhood needs and live more authentically with loss, longing, and relationships.

08/07/2026

We are excited to welcome Tina Chen, LPC, to Fermata Psychotherapy!
Tina works with adults navigating complex trauma, attachment wounds, anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, self-esteem issues, perfectionism, and cultural and life transitions. She offers therapy in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
👉 In-network with Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO plans
👉 Immediate daytime and evening availability
👉 In person in Downtown Chicago and online throughout Illinois
In her own words: "My approach is rooted in the belief that making sense of your inner world allows you to move forward with greater clarity. With tears, laughter, reflection, and discovery, we work toward finding the courage to make meaning of the past and imagine how you want your story to continue."
You can read more about Tina here:
https://www.fermatapsychotherapy.com/tina-chen
Welcome, Tina!