Therapy is not set up as "normal give and take," in fact it's the opposite, where disclosure is not supposed to be reciprocal. I'm unaware of any legitimate school of therapy that suggests equal disclosure between therapist and client. In my experience, my T's have disclosed quite a lot, but certainly not to where it equaled mine. Nor would I want that. If my current T disclosed more than the small tidbit once or twice a session, I'd be please shut up, I want to talk more about myself. Focus is on the client, not the therapist. Not equal sharing. What you were or are expecting in therapy isn't how it's built. If you need reciprocal disclosure, talk to your friends.

Perhaps you don't intend your statement to be as the universal truth that your words suggest, but trust is a whole lot more complex than just reciprocal disclosure or shared vulnerability. I've been in two different therapy groups and was in a support group for five years. Not only did people differ in how much they disclosed (assuming this is even possible to quantify over some period of time), but one of the functions of all these groups was to be accepting of whatever level of disclosure people were comfortable with. Some people became more open over time and some stayed the same, but nobody was looked upon with suspicion.

In my long term therapy with multiple T's, trust was established over time, with me poking my toe into the water at time, sometimes diving in, sometimes pulling back, sometimes running away. It was never linear and I was never told I had to disclose something or everything at any given time, and my choices to trust my T's or not was always supported as normal for therapy clients and, moreover, as an intelligent choice. I was never asked or expected to just spit out information without any connection or feedback or relating back to me. Trust in therapy has been different than with my marriage or close friends, although it has been useful to consider in therapy if the way I move forward or backward in trust bears any resemblance to my relationships outside of therapy. It usually does, and it's been helpful to me to observe the way I feel about trust in therapy as a microcosm of how I trust people outside the room. For me, at times when I felt distrust of my T, it was really about how I couldn't trust other people. Or when I felt like I didn't get enough back from my T, I told her I needed her to not let the silence go on as long, and now she jumps in quicker than she used to. Or I told her I wanted her to ask me more questions, be more directive, and she did that until I told her to stop.

So I'm curious, if you want to share, is this sense that therapy didn't give enough back to you something that you experience in life in general? Do you feel like you always end up in relationships with people who take but don't give back what you give?