Fermata Psychotherapy

12/12/2025

Addiction is often a response to early relational trauma, unmet needs, and emotional experiences that were too overwhelming to face alone. Our latest post explores how unresolved attachment wounds shape the inner landscape that makes substances feel comforting, necessary, or even stabilizing. We can understand addiction as an attempt to regulate emotions that were never safely held in childhood. Trauma therapy offers a pathway that can deepen recovery by rebuilding a sense of connection, emotional safety, and internal steadiness.

Trauma Therapy reveals how early relational wounds shape addiction, offering a path toward deeper recovery, emotional safety, and lasting change.

11/21/2025

Sometimes healing begins with grief. Not only for the losses we remember, but for the versions of ourselves we had to become in order to survive. Many of us carry invisible ropes from childhood: the belief that we must stay small, stay quiet, stay perfect, or stay needed to be loved. Even when those patterns no longer fit our adult lives, they can feel impossible to set down. Letting them go can feel like losing a familiar identity or a part of ourselves. Therapy creates space to mourn the losses we need to endure in order to health, change, and grow. Read our latest article, by Fermata therapist Patricia Nolan!

Grief counseling supports the deep mourning that true healing requires, helping you let go of limiting patterns and reconnect with who you are deep inside.

11/12/2025

When one partner longs for closeness and the other withdraws, the pattern often reflects more than incompatibility: it reveals two internal worlds negotiating safety, love, and autonomy. Relationship therapy helps couples uncover the unconscious choreography beneath the pursuer–distancer dynamic, creating space for a more stable and intimate connection. Read our latest article!

Relationship therapy helps couples understand the unconscious pursuer–distancer dynamic and transform cycles of pursuit and withdrawal into connection.

10/31/2025

Shame is not just an emotion, but a way of organizing our inner world, shaping how we see ourselves and relate to others. It can silence our voice, diminish our experience, and make closeness feel unsafe. Over time, shame can become woven into our personality, making visibility feel dangerous and belonging uncertain. We may learn to hide our longings, minimize our needs, or internalize a sense of unworthiness that quietly structures our relationships. If shame is such a complex process, its "opposite" cannot be reduced to a single experience. In this article, we consider the role of healthy narcissism, mutual recognition, integration, desire, and dignity. These are not independent layers, but interconnected dimensions that help create the possibility of a life with a greater sense of agency, authenticity, aliveness, and belonging.

Therapy for shame helps restore dignity, desire, and connection by addressing the unconscious patterns that erode self-worth and disrupt our capacity for authentic relationships.

10/27/2025

Not all depressions are alike. Each reflects the structure of our inner world: how we love, how we cope, how we protect ourselves. Depression is a signal, much like a fever, pointing to deeper psychological conflicts and needs. Psychodynamic therapy for depression goes beyond symptom relief and invites us to listen to that signal in the context of who we are. When we understand the meaning of our depression against the backdrop of our personality, it becomes a doorway to self-understanding and change.

Depression therapy helps uncover how depression reflects our unique personality structure, revealing it as a signal, not just a symptom.

10/15/2025

When the world is unstable and unpredictable, our anxiety often reflects more than personal stress, revealing the deep connection between our inner life and the social realities around us. The psychological and the social are intertwined: the conditions we live in shape our sense of safety, belonging, and possibility. Anxiety therapy offers a space to explore how political and collective tensions interact with our own emotional histories. By understanding these intersections, therapy can help us recognize that the unease we feel in turbulent times is not only a symptom of distress but also an expression of our individual and shared humanity.

Anxiety therapy helps us understand how political and social unrest affect our inner world, offering steadiness and reflection amid uncertainty.

10/12/2025

Personal growth begins when we stop needing all the answers. The need to be sure about who we are may feel familiar and protect us from discomfort, but also from transformation. When we can tolerate not knowing, new possibilities emerge. Space opens for reflection, flexibility, and authentic change.

10/07/2025

We can understand abandonment not only as the experience of being left, but as feeling unseen or emotionally alone, even when others are present. Sometimes, when those experiences are overwhelming and we don't have anyone to help us find our way through them, they can be traumatic. Trauma therapy for abandonment issues helps us explore how these early experiences shape our capacity for closeness and trust, offering a space to rebuild a sense of emotional safety and connection with ourselves and others.

Trauma therapy for abandonment issues helps people understand emotional absence, rebuild trust, and form deeper, more secure relationships.

10/02/2025

There are unseen parts of ourselves that shape our lives quietly, surfacing in dreams, sudden emotions, or in the reflections others offer us. Meeting these hidden dimensions with curiosity rather than fear invites growth, reminding us that self-knowledge is less about certainty than about openness to discovery.

09/29/2025

We are drawn to love triangles not just for the drama, but because they echo our earliest lessons about love and belonging. Since childhood, we navigated complex feelings of desire, rivalry, and exclusion within the relationships that shaped us. These early triangular experiences played a central role in our emotional and psychological development, and their effects often live on in adulthood. Love triangles in the media stir something familiar inside us, allowing us to safely revisit intense feelings that shaped our sense of self. This article explores why they resonate so deeply with us and how therapy for relationship issues can help uncover the hidden impact of these early dynamics on the way we relate today.

Discover why love triangles captivate us and how therapy for relationship issues helps untangle deep unconscious conflicts and patterns.

09/23/2025

Growing up with a depressed parent leaves a mark that is often quiet but enduring. As children, we adapt, becoming caretakers, perfectionists, retreating inward, or dismissing relationships in order to survive an atmosphere heavy with sadness and grief. These adaptations follow us into adulthood, shaping our personality, our relationships, and the way we feel about ourselves. Depression therapy should offer more than symptom relief. It can help us uncover how early experiences continue to live within us, mourn what was absent, and open new possibilities for connection, agency, authenticity, and aliveness.

Explore how parental depression shapes personality, mood, and relationships, and how depression therapy helps reclaim agency and a stronger sense of self.

09/15/2025

Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It ebbs and flows, sometimes quietly, sometimes with overwhelming force. In grief counseling, we learn to trust these tides, exploring the unconscious work of mourning that helps us live with loss while keeping love alive. Read our latest article!

Grief counseling helps us navigate the ebb and flow of mourning, honoring the unconscious work of grief as it comes and goes in waves.