[Asiablue]

On this forum [U]trust[U] seems to be a big issue for people (myself included)
and trusting therapists is something a lot of people are struggling with.

I'm trying to work out why i think i don't trust my therapist because since i voluntarily go back week after week and spill my guts to her and rely on her to help me i must on some level trust her. My fear of abandonment gets in the way, my fear of betrayal, my fear of being let down, my fear of rejection etc but what are these fears?
Realistically, she can't abandon me, i'm a grown woman and i don't need her for survival, if she does something wrong then yes i can feel rejected, she could betray me i suppose and at some time she probably will let me down because she's human. So as an adult there's actually not much she can do to me, because i'm responsible for myself and anything else is just feelings and feelings can't physically put you in danger.

So why the irrational overwhelming feeling that she has my life in her hands?
I wonder if what my fear actually is is the fear of dealing with loss, the fear of feeling anything negative? Maybe once learning how to contain my emotions, how to sit with pain, once i am confident in my ability to look after myself no matter what that she won't seem so powerful in my life? She won't have the perceived ability to annihilate me. Maybe once i trust myself trust won't be such a big issue? Maybe i'm mistaking fear of loss, fear of experiencing hurt as a trust issue because the fact that i turn up every week proves that trust comes naturally whether i want it to or not. Maybe i trust her but fear her.

Hope this makes sense, i'm just trying to pinpoint the trust issue.

[Mapleton]

Originally Posted by Asiablue

Maybe i trust her but fear her.

Could it be "Maybe I desperately want to trust her, but I fear that my trust is, somehow, incomplete. I fear that she, as unconditionally accepting and wonderful as she is, will still somehow manage to hurt me"?

Just spit ballin'

[Asiablue]

yeah Mapleton, my trust is definitely incomplete. But if you deconstruct the building block of trust... what is underneath it all? If you think about it, you would never give your trust and your vulnerabilities over to someone you know for a fact you cannot trust. So there is trust in the relationship, i mostly "know" she is a person of trust, a person who is being paid specifically not to be damaging. She is as a therapist a person of high regard.

But something still gets in the way, that "knowing" of trust isn't enough. So what drives the fear, the feeling in your body that say to put up the defences?

[Mapleton]

Originally Posted by Asiablue

yeah Mapleton, my trust is definitely incomplete. But if you deconstruct the building block of trust... what is underneath it all? If you think about it, you would never give your trust and your vulnerabilities over to someone you know for a fact you cannot trust. So there is trust in the relationship, i mostly "know" she is a person of trust, a person who is being paid specifically not to be damaging. She is as a therapist a person of high regard.

But something still gets in the way, that "knowing" of trust isn't enough. So what drives the fear, the feeling in your body that say to put up the defences?

I'd say, experiences of hurt. A lot of our prediction of the future, is based on experience of the past.

Problem is, as I'll often say, we don't forget. I think at a meta level, that therapy is about overwhelming the prior experience with a newer more healthy experience. Make sense?

hey Asia,
very interesting thread.
I think everyone has been through some kind of trust issues during their life, from the little child who was abused by her parents, the teenager who was bullied in school, the spouse was was cheated on, some can get over the mistrust they place on others, some can't.
I think it is because we take a huge risk when we start a new relationship, sexual, friendship even our therapeutical one. We disclose the most intimate parts of our lives to people who we think we can trust but later this information can be used against us and mostly is should the relationship break.
Is anyone really trustworthy? Well we are all humans so we are programmed to make mistakes and learn from them (hopefully)!
It is up to us who we trust and why we trust certain people and not others- these are all choices we have to make in life. I think I am subconsciously choosing to trust the wrong people so I can stay in this darl pit of misery and act like a victim.
Of course this had to be pointed out to me by t because otherwise I would never have seen this pattern of destruction.

We can hand all of our trust over to someone else and I think this is what happens in therapy sometimes. We do hand ourr lives over to our therapists and open up the gates for judgements and new ways of dealing with old wounds and just sometimes our therapists screw this up and becuase we are so vulnerable in therapy we share things we wouldn't with anyone else, it can be devastating. Yes, these feelings afterwards are just feelings but our thoughts and feelings control our minds and our minds control our bodies and therefore take over our beings and can lead to disaster if we let them.
I think you underestimate the power a therapist can have over us if they reject us but of course we have to give them that power in the first place.

[feralkittymom]

I think past experience definitely plays a huge formative role. I also wonder if both the trust and fear aren't about the T at all, but rather (dis)trust and fear of oneself? There's a deep desire, perhaps, to have the T accept and hold that (dis)trust and fear, and so neutralize them, but no developmental experience of being successful doing so.

I never felt distrust or fear of my T, but I certainly experienced those feelings about myself. The way I got past it, or healed it, was exactly by allowing my T to take those feelings on, hold them, neutralize them, and by doing so, allow me to borrow his strength until I could feel powerful enough myself. I could have the developmental experiences I'd missed in childhood. But the fear was more a feeling of "what if I can't follow through? If I fail despite T's competence and empathy, what else is there?"

[Mapleton]

Originally Posted by feralkittymom

I think past experience definitely plays a huge formative role. I also wonder if both the trust and fear aren't about the T at all, but rather (dis)trust and fear of oneself? There's a deep desire, perhaps, to have the T accept and hold that (dis)trust and fear, and so neutralize them, but no developmental experience of being successful doing so.

I never felt distrust or fear of my T, but I certainly experienced those feelings about myself. The way I got past it, or healed it, was exactly by allowing my T to take those feelings on, hold them, neutralize them, and by doing so, allow me to borrow his strength until I could feel powerful enough myself. I could have the developmental experiences I'd missed in childhood. But the fear was more a feeling of "what if I can't follow through? If I fail despite T's competence and empathy, what else is there?"

Exactly. Therapy is patient-focused because trust of others IS about a fear of lack of worth of self, and a projection of that on others (probably formed by hurtful experiences, I'd say.)

Also, therapy is patient-focused because it would be exhausting for a therapist to have so much (unethical) sex with all of their clients.

[boredporcupine]

So as an adult there's actually not much she can do to me, because i'm responsible for myself and anything else is just feelings and feelings can't physically put you in danger.

So why the irrational overwhelming feeling that she has my life in her hands?

I think it's because the parts of you that don't trust your T are coming from a younger place, and aren't yet fully aware that you are an adult and can take care of yourself. Parts of your brain can still be stuck in a childlike mentality in which your T really is viewed as someone essential to your survival. It's like when you were little, you had experiences of rejection or abandonment or whatever that scared you, and so somewhere in your brain a part of you decided "we should be careful and not trust too much, because we can't survive on our own yet!" Yet even years later as an adult they can still be in there, running on autopilot...

[Perna]

I think since my feelings and thoughts guide my actions, and feelings come from the primitive area, the amygdala Amygdala and the thoughts are "controlled" by the frontal lobe http://voices.yahoo.com/frontal-lobe...y-361802.html; it's a bit of a life's work trying to figure out how to balance the two. I think I started out with loss and my fears being in the forefront, so I overcompensated and got "intellectual" and worked mostly out of my frontal lobe.

I went to therapy every week for years and years because I knew that was what I was "supposed" to do. It was scary and, despite going for years and years, it didn't get a lot easier in some ways, T going away on vacation got me to the very end, for example. Once in the habit of working out of my frontal lobe, it gets difficult to let go of that and pay more serious attention to what my amydala might be saying, to let it have its say instead of trying to immediately shut it down?

They talk about stress and how humans don't "let go" of the stress and let it leave the body but I think some of that is that we try to shut it down, ignore it, pretend it is wrong/bad/crazy-making/inappropriate. We talk about how we don't trust but we don't talk about how we don't acknowledge the rightness of our fear/panic/feelings we don't "like" to feel.

I've only had one true panic attack in my life and I was able to use my frontal lobe to look around and evaluate my surroundings, think about what was being required of me backwards and forwards in the immediate time period to see there was no genuine threat but I did not belittle how I felt. I took how I felt seriously (as they were some powerful serious feelings happening! :-) but I used my head to evaluate those feelings and, eventually, everything came out all right. I use some of what I learned from that panic attack to this day; when I am having trouble breathing (I have asthma) I don't like it at all but I do not panic, I note all my physical sensations and try to work with my body to help it feel better. I don't let my thinking carry me further in the "wrong" direction. I am not Pollyanna, telling myself "It's okay, nothing's wrong, you are breathing fine" but I am also not, "I cannot breath, I'm gonna die" and run around in a panic, making it worse.

I think the frontal lobe is there to remind us which direction we would like to go in. I get the feelings (can't breathe) and my frontal lobe thinks, "What can I do to help make it better?" The frontal lobe is trying to take the feelings and turn them into words/a path for action that will help this organism called Perna. But, if we are still hostage to the feelings we let habitually tell us to run, hide, play dead :-) all the time, then the frontal lobe is going to go along with that and panic, warn, give directions on how to run, hide, or play dead. It is going to be a slave to the feelings.

I think trust is like faith a bit; one has to decide to trust and choose to move in that direction.

[Asiablue]

So many good points being made here.

Mapleton- "therapy is about overwhelming the prior experience with a newer more healthy experience. Make sense? yes, this makes perfect sense and i think this is what i'm seeking from therapy, i'm just unsure if i'll get what i'm looking for and maybe that's what's bringing up the trust issue.



Monalisasmile- I think you underestimate the power a therapist can have over us if they reject us but of course we have to give them that power in the first place. i don't underestimate the power a therapist has, but the point for me is that they only have that power because of our issues with attachment and abuse/neglect etc if we didn't have those spaces in our development then a therapist couldn't hold such power or risk.

Feralkittymom- There's a deep desire, perhaps, to have the T accept and hold that (dis)trust and fear, and so neutralize them, but no developmental experience of being successful doing so. omg, exactly, we've had no success in life at being successful in neutralizing them, this gives me food for thought.

Boredporcupine- "we should be careful and not trust too much, because we can't survive on our own yet!" Yet even years later as an adult they can still be in there, running on autopilot..." yes this is definitely happening too, that's the panicked voice or our inner child being activated at the perceived threat.

I asked my T why sometimes I trust her & other times I don't. She said it depends 'where I am'. Ie, am I back in my past experience or 'am I there' with her in the here-and-now. It's not quite as B/W as here now or not. It's more a continuum.

[tinyrabbit]

My T says I trust him unconsciously, which is why I keep coming back week after week, and that enables me to go through conscious experiences of not trusting him, transference, etc. Remember the conscious part of you isn't the only part...

[Asiablue]

Originally Posted by tinyrabbit

My T says I trust him unconsciously, which is why I keep coming back week after week, and that enables me to go through conscious experiences of not trusting him, transference, etc. Remember the conscious part of you isn't the only part...

hmm that's interesting. Will need to think on this.

[ultramar]

Monalisasmile- I think you underestimate the power a therapist can have over us if they reject us but of course we have to give them that power in the first place. i don't underestimate the power a therapist has, but the point for me is that they only have that power because of our issues with attachment and abuse/neglect etc if we didn't have those spaces in our development then a therapist couldn't hold such power or risk.

This is such an important point, Asiablue. It's a reminder that we have agency, we're not at someone's (a therapist's or anyone else's) mercy. At least not -generally speaking- as adults, and you're making important distinctions between child and adult in your explorations here. The work is in resolving the attachment issues within the relationship, but this doesn't have to equate to giving up your-self, your agency, the strength that's there to both celebrate the triumphs in therapy and sit with the pain of therapy, without denying/destroying the triumphs in the process.

[Asiablue]

Originally Posted by ultramar

Monalisasmile- I think you underestimate the power a therapist can have over us if they reject us but of course we have to give them that power in the first place. i don't underestimate the power a therapist has, but the point for me is that they only have that power because of our issues with attachment and abuse/neglect etc if we didn't have those spaces in our development then a therapist couldn't hold such power or risk.

This is such an important point, Asiablue. It's a reminder that we have agency, we're not at someone's (a therapist's or anyone else's) mercy. At least not -generally speaking- as adults, and you're making important distinctions between child and adult in your explorations here. The work is in resolving the attachment issues within the relationship, but this doesn't have to equate to giving up your-self, your agency, the strength that's there to both celebrate the triumphs in therapy and sit with the pain of therapy, without denying/destroying the triumphs in the process.

I feel like the problem is that to resolve the developmental ruptures, you kinda need to get into that child space again, allow that child part of you to be seen in order to allow the therapist to resolve the ruptures that took place. And while in that child ego state it is very easy to feel like your therapist has the power to help you survive or to annihilate you.
If you were never taught how to tolerate your emotions then it's very easy to become lost in them, terrified by them, shamed by them and to feel like they threaten your very existence. And it's fine to experience all that in the safety of the therapy room but after that one hour you have to somehow put yourself back in to your Adult ego state and join real life again and worse than that, you have to try an put your child-ego back in a box for another week. Which for me is like abandonment all over again. And every minute of the 168hours i need to wait till i see my therapist again is a minute of abject fear and grief and shame and utter turbulance because i never learned how to tolerate being seen or being kind to myself, or to accept my own anger or sadness. So how do you deal with all those emotions when you don't have the tools yet?

[Syra]

Originally Posted by Asiablue

On this forum [U]trust[U] seems to be a big issue for people (myself included)
and trusting therapists is something a lot of people are struggling with.

I'm trying to work out why i think i don't trust my therapist because since i voluntarily go back week after week and spill my guts to her and rely on her to help me i must on some level trust her. My fear of abandonment gets in the way, my fear of betrayal, my fear of being let down, my fear of rejection etc but what are these fears?
Realistically, she can't abandon me, i'm a grown woman and i don't need her for survival, if she does something wrong then yes i can feel rejected, she could betray me i suppose and at some time she probably will let me down because she's human. So as an adult there's actually not much she can do to me, because i'm responsible for myself and anything else is just feelings and feelings can't physically put you in danger.

So why the irrational overwhelming feeling that she has my life in her hands?
I wonder if what my fear actually is is the fear of dealing with loss, the fear of feeling anything negative? Maybe once learning how to contain my emotions, how to sit with pain, once i am confident in my ability to look after myself no matter what that she won't seem so powerful in my life? She won't have the perceived ability to annihilate me. Maybe once i trust myself trust won't be such a big issue? Maybe i'm mistaking fear of loss, fear of experiencing hurt as a trust issue because the fact that i turn up every week proves that trust comes naturally whether i want it to or not. Maybe i trust her but fear her.

Hope this makes sense, i'm just trying to pinpoint the trust issue.

This is a lot for me to ponder, and the timing is perfect for me. I like your last line!! THank you for sharing this.