I think we just need to see therapists as people; some are nice and trustworthy, and some will stab you in the back, either for their own benefit or for some other equally disgusting reason. Some people are kind, and some people are cruel.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that a lot of us go to therapy to deal with personal struggles caused by people who have been cruel to us in the past. We need the therapist's office to be a safe haven, we need them to protect us, in a way, and so I understand why some would be extra cautious about trusting a therapist because it sort of feels like they hold a form of power over us. There is a significant imbalance there, in that they know so much about you and you know very little about them, and that can be troubling, I suppose.

There are a number of reasons as to why it could be hard to open up to a therapist, and sometimes it's because of the therapist and what sort of connection the client feels towards them. For example, I have no worries about talking to my therapist, because I don't have any particularly strong feelings towards her. She is a kind and empathetic person who listens to my problems and tries to help me work through them. It feels neutral, uncharged, so it doesn't feel risky in any way. However, my relationship with my academic mentor (trained psychotherapist) is very different; it is charged with feelings and transference, because she is the first person who has really seen me. She tells me that she worries about me, that she has "a lot of time and energy" for me, that she would be so proud of me if she was my mother, and that she feels like she has a special relationship with me. Because of this, there is now a whole new set of feelings that I'm afraid to talk to her about, because she means so much to me and I don't want to ruin it by telling her how I really feel about her. I hold a lot of things back in my sessions with her because I'm afraid to allow myself to open up about it. I'm really scared of these feelings, because I know that once I finish university my relationship with her will be over. So I hide things, because my rational self tells me that I cannot trust her fully. It's just her job to be nice to me.

So I have one therapist that I trust, and one that I love. The latter is the one who has helped me the most, because she has helped me identify my destructive scripts, and she has somehow managed to unlock the cage where my inner bully has kept my pathetic emotional self prisoner for so many years, and as a result of that I am now able to feel other things than self-hatred. But I am so afraid to trust her completely, the way I wish I could, because ultimately I am just another student to her.