It took me five years to trust my therapist. Five years where the major thing I worked on was learning to trust.

I think by trust I mean that I believed that he heard and understood what I was really trying to say, and didn't overlay his own thoughts on top of mine. I believed that he would fairly consistently behave in the way I expected him to behave. So I guess that was partly that I trusted my understanding of who he was. And I realized that no matter what I had done, he had consistently responded without retaliation. He got angry sometimes, but his anger didn't affect how he treated me overall.

So overall trust for me was believing that I really knew who he was (in his therapist role at least) and that he really knew who I was.

Of course, there were probably gradations of trust in that five years. But I know that at five years, I lowered all protective barriers to him. And that's not anything I do very easily.