When did you begin to trust your T?

What do you think are signs that you are beginnning to trust your T?

Do you think all clients show the same signs or are they individualized?

[Mouse_]

T says I trust her because I can protest to her. ...T says I trust her now by the deeper feelings that I am exploring now. I use to think if I felt relaxed and chilled and like I was chatting over lunch with a friend, then that was trust. T says that doesn't necessarly mean I would expose myself to her or become vunrable just becase I appear relaxed and chatty..even though I feel as awkard as %#@&#! when I arrive each session, I am able to talk about deep feelings.....Trust is a process and cannot be forced or dictated...each of us reach our own levels of trust in our own time...

[ECHOES]

I think there may be similarities between people about trust with T just like there are similarities between people about anything.

It took me almost a year to start to feel trust. I was very quiet in sessions for that time. I wanted to trust. Then during the Christmas holiday break, and after reading a post by Mouse, I decided I was going to make a leap of faith and just begin to trust. (I think trust is a process) I was going to trust and talk freely. That's just what I did and it worked. Trust began to form and grow.

Now really feeling it took until just recently. Deciding to trust and all that happened in between then and now contributed to my being able to really feel the trust. I had to learn that I could .. trust.. the trust.

For me signs of trust were being able to be more present in therapy (not dissociating), not withholding so much, feeling more relaxed, and being able to feel she is still there for me after I leave and if I don't get to something that session then there is next time... she's not going anywhere.

There is much relief in the trust. It was so worth the leap of faith it took. One of those times I had to be afraid and yet do it anyway.

[Dinah]

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.

[kessa19]

I think trust/mistrust is on a spectrum and it depends on where you start. I think people tend to go forward and backward on the spectrum even with those we are closest to. I think because people are human there is no such thing as perfect , complete, continuous trust . (I hope someone can argue that point because I don't want it to be true.)
Here's a web site I found that looks really good:

http://www.coping.org/growth/trust.htm

[sunrise]

With my current T, I started trusting him a little bit the first time we met, and gradually built up until I was able to share harder and harder things with him, and then we reached a milestone in trust after 7 months when I was finally able to bring my H in for couples therapy with him. It took a tremendous amount of trust to do that, and I resisted it for ages. Just takes time to develop trust...

It seems like a number of people do not have trust with their therapists right away, and it makes me wonder about how short term therapy works. I have heard that short term therapy is just 6-12 sessions on specific issues (e.g. with a CBT approach). How can that work if you haven't developed trust yet?

[tulips30]

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kessa19 said:
I think trust/mistrust is on a spectrum and it depends on where you start. I think people tend to go forward and backward on the spectrum even with those we are closest to. I think because people are human there is no such thing as perfect , complete, continuous trust . (I hope someone can argue that point because I don't want it to be true.)



This reminds me of something my t. say's to me on a regular basis. "It's all fluid". The way we feel about therapy, trust, where our feelings are each day......I try to keep that in mind when I start my "should" thinking. Ex: I should be feeling more trust, I should be less depressed, I should be further a long etc.

It's simplistic, but some things really ARE that simple. Funny, how we assume that something simple can't possibly hold any truth.

tulips (don't know where my quote box went )

[chaotic13]

Trust did not come easy to me and even now I find myself continually checking the relationship. Learning to not constantly anticipate an attack or fear betrayal is an ongoing process. For me trust developed as I took small leaps of faith in therapy and my T proves herself trustworthy. My T has responded consistently with integrity, not attacked me, or deliberately harmed me . However I think the greatest trust came, when I started to regain trust in myself. I think my level of trust is slowly developing as I regain my sense of self. If I am confident in who I am and the judgments I make then I will know who I should trust and who I shouldn’t. And if I make a mistake and trust someone who betrays me, I will be hurt but I’ll survive.