I am not sure that just because some therapists don't directly say "Trust me", they don't expect one to do it all the same.

My therapist was totally cool, expansive even, and willing to be very kind and compassionate about my trust issues when I directly said that I didn't trust her. She in fact responded saying "But, why would you trust me?" etc. So, that was the 'direct' part.

Fast forward a week or two -- I mentioned a couple of changes in my life (not at all related to why I was in therapy) and I immediately got told that I was "dropping things" on her; that I was being "guarded" and "wanting to keep things to myself" and so on.

This last part (my "guarded-ness") has come up more than a few times (even at the very beginning of therapy) -- all of it has been related to stuff that I'd said I expressly did not want to discuss in therapy.

Would I say my therapist is a truly crappy one? No, she has helped me a fair bit but yeah, I do consider switching to a non-trivial extent.

But, would I use the metric of her being okay with my saying that I don't trust her as a way of assessing her 'quality' as a therapist? Nope, I've found that to be utterly useless.

And, here's my guess as to why -- therapists are trained to deal with standard situations rather well. They have canned (okay, internalized) responses down pat. Stuff like clients saying that they don't trust (or, for e.g., want to quit or are overwhelmed or are missing them etc) are all rather par for the course and so, they likely know (or should know at any rate) how to handle it.

It's the non-standard stuff -- the very client-specific stuff (our unique madness, so to speak) -- which throws them seriously off their game (or not).

That's when the rubber hits the road so to speak and the good ones get separated from the not-so-good ones. And, so when we talk about not being able to deal with therapy, I think we usually end up assessing how they failed us when it came to these one-of-a-kind will-not-work-with-a-standard-response kind of situations.

I'm not sure if this makes a lot of sense. To be honest, I think I agree with a bunch of points on both (or rather multiple, at this point!) sides of the argument. So, I guess I just leave it as to each her / his own.