I have a hard time trusting my T can you guys help?

For me it was an alternate or substitute reality. It did not have much to do with real life. It was an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. The attunement was a staged thing... I paid her and she manufactured various responses.

Clients are expected to reveal deeply personal and painful things, maybe things they have never shared. Therapists typically reveal almost nothing and remain hidden. This is an absurd basis for trust. It's antithetical to trust. Just because therapy doctrine says this is the way it is does not mean people should trust it.

I don't care if a mechanic is phony with me, as long he fixes the car. Bu therapist phoniness corrupts and undermines the whole thing. The client is expected to place supreme trust in someone who simply never earns it. And if the client balks, they are pathologized and pressured further (maybe subtly or implicitly) to surrender their secrets. My god.

Why are you here then if you don’t seem to believe in the entire foundation of therapy? You don’t have to know everything about someone to trust them... your replies aren’t really helpful, they sound very bitter and angry and I’m sorry for whatever caused you to feel this way but I don’t want a debate on what forms trust and the philosophy of therapy and stuff...

My therapist earns my trust in her consistency. In her positive regard. She earns my trust my always having her **** out of the way so she can focus on me and what is happening for me. I am not there for a two way relationship, I do not want a two way relationship, in that therapy time I want to focus entirely on me and figuring out my ****. She makes this possible by managing her responses, her transferences, her beliefs, and operating in that professional and clinical mode to apply her knowledge of dissociative processes to guide me towards a more unified existence.
Therapy does not work for you. It works for other people. Stop putting your **** onto others.

Clients want to reveal personal and painful things and they do reveal them not because they are "expected to", but because there is no other way to tell about your problems unless you..well.. tell about them, which means you'll reveal personal and painful things because they are the problem. How else are you going to explain what the problem is?

Thank God. I don't know who'd want their therapist to spend their precious sessions' time, for which they pay big $$$, talking about their personal **** - their problematic marriages, problems with their children, parents, colleagues, their own mental health issues. Would you really want your therapist to share all that personal stuff with you during the time you are paying for? If yes, then it'd be a paid friendship. I don't want to pay for friendship, thank you very much. I get friendships for free or don't get it at all.

What is absurd is your logic that doesn't grasp a simple reality that friendship and professional service are not the same thing.

And, "trust" in this situation comes much more out of necessity to get an assistance than out of the idea that someone "should" trust someone else.

There is no "doctrine" that says that clients "should" reveal their personal things to therapists.

People tell therapists personal things because they want to get help, not because some "doctrine" tells them that they should.

I wasn't talking about a mechanic or a doctor being "phony". I was saying that not revealing personal stuff, in and of itself, doesn't make a person "phony" and that there are plenty of social and professional situations where it is inappropriate to get personal with others, which doesn't make anyone "phony". You are phony when you feel one way about someone and you KNOW it, but pretend to feel differently. This has nothing to do with following different social and professional rules. If I am not sharing my marital problems with my co-worker, I am not "phony". I am a private person, who separates her personal and professional lives.

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Yeah, isn't this the whole point of professional service? To have a certain time in a week when someone could help me figure out my **** without bringing their own **** into the conversation.

Therapy doesn't work for me either, but not because I was ever craving a "two way relationship" in therapy. I got into a somewhat two way relationship with the last therapist due to him leading me there by bringing too much of his "true self" into the consulting room.

While I express a lot of criticism of therapy as a system, I never denied that, just as it is, it still works for many people...while, unfortunately, doesn't work for many others. So, I am certainly not going to "convert" anyone into my ideology if it is clear to me that the person is fine where they are.

I realize now that the emerging debate is hijacking your thread. I feel like I am contributing into this so I am going to stop. I wasn't the one who started it though. But, I do get easily triggered by certain posts that intentionally stir conversations towards what the poster wants to "discuss" (or more precisely, to fight about) instead of what OP wished to get input on.

If anyone wants to continue the debate about the evils vs the virtues of psychotherapy, I'd encourage them out of respect for OP's wishes, to start a separate thread for that. I don't want to continue to hijack OP's thread anymore, so I won't be responding to arguments on this thread.

It takes time to learn to trust. It sounds like you are in very good hands but it still just takes time to experience the relationship with T enough so that things would start to sink in.

You expressed concerns over money. Maybe this is something that needs to be reconsidered? If you are worrying over money all the time and this makes you want to hurry a progress that really cannot be hurried then maybe it would be worth to talk to the T again and see that perhaps he can come even a bit lower with his fee, so you would feel more comfortable in this respect?

Thank you, I actually really appreciated your responses against budfox’s. It made me feel less like I was doing something wrong trying to pursue trust in therapy.

For me, trust is usually based on experience. I don't trust people just because they are in certain positions, relative to me or in general. It usually comes when someone demonstrates with their actions that they have interest, competency in whatever I am trying to do with them, they are respectful, and are willing to invest and make effort, not just expect gain without contributing. I also like to feel that the person is compatible with me. I usually start new experiences with an assumption that there is nothing to distrust a priori, then let my experience and reality guide the rest. So, trust for me is largely an earned thing.

In terms of therapy, I went into it first with a completely open mind and a lot of curiosity. I had two Ts and, even after having a bad ending with the first, I was able to be open to the second very much in the beginning, in part because he seemed so different. What I learned though from critically evaluating my experiences, including my side of it, is that therapy is really not very useful for me. So, of course, now I tend to approach it skeptically when I discuss it and am not planning on doing more therapy anytime soon, because now I don't trust I would gain much from it. I tend to approach most life experiences in this way: with openness at start and then see what happens. Of course sometimes I have intuitive red flags but if the rest of the situation is appealing and promising, I like to give it a reality check. Sometimes it takes effort to force myself to overcome skepticism that often comes from previous experiences that I compare with the current one (sometimes unconsciously). But if the current reality shows that my doubts are unfunded, it can be very liberating to be open to a different experience and not derive strong conclusions based on assumptions, projections and such.

I don't believe in the entire foundation of therapy either.
Therapy fails a lot of people and the system is set up to encourage those same people to blame themselves rather than the therapist or therapy. I think it is therapy and therapists that should be blamed.
If someone has found therapy useful, it is fine with me but I don't think it is nearly as useful across the board as therapists portray and sell.

I don't think trust can be rushed with a therapist or anyone else. If the one you have hired is trustworthy, then I think your belief in it will come along as the therapist continues to prove to be such. I think trying to rush trust is folly.

I don't think it's about right or wrong. Therapy failed me-- I got some good stuff, eventually, processing what had happened by myself and with input from this forum. But it took far too long and did harm along the way.

Real trust, it seems to me now, involves a balance. I can trust in some good stuff and be cautious about some other stuff. And change my opinion, change my feeling, about either as things change in what I observe in the world.

Ultimately -- trust in yourself is what is needed, I think. Trust that when you trust it's for good reasons and trust that when you doubt, there may be something there to look at and take into consideration, too. If therapy helps you with that, then good for it and good for you!

You asked for input on whether your list constitutes evidence that you can trust your therapist. I gave my honest opinion about that. Then you asked me to elaborate so I did.

I see my posts as supportive. Usually when a client has trouble trusting, it's put back on them. But therapists don't really do anything to earn trust. I'm saying... of course it's hard to trust, look at the circumstances. The less you know about someone the harder it is to trust them. Plus there's the money thing.

I have a lot of trouble trusting my T, or at least, as he likes to say, PART of me has trouble trusting him.

What helps me is accepting my distrust. T and I talk through it a lot, without pushing me to make myself trust (or pretend to). We lack trust for good reasons and I think it comes naturally in time as the relationship in therapy builds evidence for it. I trust my T so much more now than I once did. But I still have some doubts, and I probably always will, because of my own history. And that’s okay, and protective, and not bad or wrong. That acceptance has helped me a lot.

I'm also a therapy newbie.
I hear you. All of you. And I don't see any particular posts as being unsupportive; I think they are all honest and authentic. Which is the basis of trust itself, if you think about it.

For me, I had to make a decision that I was going to trust the process, rather than the individual. For me, therapy is a process of authenticity. It's like looking in the mirror, only this mirror is kind.

Hope that helps. Hang in there, and we will hang in there with you.

I didn't read through all the replies, but I just wanted to say I can relate. I can write down things I want to discuss and feel confident about it, but the moment I sit down with my T, i close down. And I don't even know why. She's never given me any reason why I shouldn't trust her. It's so frustrating to me! I hope you're able to work through it!