Trusting People Including Therapist

['91 Girl]

SIA, I think that's the point of therapy. It's painful, it's frightening beyond compare, and it works because it helps repair our ability to trust. The only way to learn to trust is to be afraid, do it anyway, and then realize its not as dangerous as we thought. Really, that's what it takes. Moving doesn't fix the problem. The problem is fear, and the only way to overcome fear is to face it and conquer it. That's the only thing you can do.

I say this from experience. I am an extremely afraid person by nature. Add abuse throughout childhood onto it and I am terrified of everyone and everything. But eventually I got to the point where I hated letting fear continue to control me. And so I have spent the past several years facing my easier fears and overcoming them. I still have a list a mile long. But as I conquer one, the next ones become easier. I am still afraid of trusting people. I haven't overcome that one yet. But I am trying, little by little, first in therapy, and them eventually I will be able to trust the people around me. The only way to do that, though, is to bite the bullet and do it.

 

[LhasaLover]

Hi surviving_it_all,

Sometimes, I find, my lack of trust is from a lack of faith that things will work out. Trusting your therapist just enough to have a discussion about your fears and concerns may bring positive affirmations that life is o.k.

Yesterday, a woman approached me who was a social worker. I know that this person understands the value of privacy. At some point, you can trust yourself and the boundaries that you establish. If after that, something does not work out with a person then we do not have to associate with them.

Putting yourself out there has really helped me in my recovery. It is very difficult to trust anyone, but slowly I trust some people. Part of the process is the people have to know they can trust me to abide by boundaries. Trusting was a huge issue for me which ended up in me isolating.

I still have a lot of work to do but it may turn out that your therapist will respect your honesty, it shows you are serious and committed about therapy. Also, with what you have been through, it's going to be an issue. It's strange, my issues with trust were not in the forefront of my mind as I was so busy protecting myself and putting others first.

If someone transgressed boundaries, that is not your fault. While being observant of my behavior as well as others, I can draw some strength to trust. It has taken a lot of time and practice, so I relate to your post.

Surrounding yourself with encouraging, supportive people is like Voltaire said, cultivating your own garden. Taking care of the needs of yourself comes before the needs of others. It has been interpreted that this expression meant that in life you need to work towards expressing yourself.

Here's an interpretation from Psychology Today,
You do indeed need optimism to carry you through this difficult stage and keep your momentum. But through these failures you make adjustments, learn new skills and perhaps even develop new competencies. Whether driven by hope or dissatisfaction, it is your will that compels you to act. As Voltaire reminds us at the end of Candide "We must cultivate our own garden."

I personally do not look at myself as an eternal optimist by far, but I do have hope and am determined. You maybe need to wish or pray for you to be ready to ask your therapist. If they are a good therapist, you are going to come out of the session empowered. I have had situations where I feel I've reached a plateau and get annoyed with my therapists, but I find often I projecting my own thoughts of myself on them. For example, I don't like myself, so I assumed one was tired of my lack of progress. You may feel, I am not sure, that you cannot trust yourself even.

Congrats for hitting a milestone realization, you are quite strong and it is my guess that this could and will be a bridge to cross in your recovery. You may have a few bridges to cross or leaps of faith ahead, but I find the universe does send us answers. And after that, if you really don't trust your therapist, you can find one you do trust.

Hope that helps.

 

[EvenStrongerNow]

Its not just that people mean well. You can have the BEST intentions but still violate trust. If they act against my wishes, they are not people I can trust. The robbers even with the WORSE intentions TRUST each other.

I can SO relate to you on every single level. You know, just the fact that you opened up and shared this snippet right here really helped me see something differently. I don't know how long I will sustain it, but still...

I often have a hard time reconciling intentions with trust also because I think if someone acts against my wishes, they have violated my trust. This thought puts me on the receiving end every time.

If, allowing myself to be human for a moment, I put myself on the giving end of that, knowing that I'm not perfect, I can see how even though my intentions are good, I myself can violate trust! Something as simple as a loved one asking me to please stop asking them if they are okay. Well, because I love them, I'm going to keep asking them if they are okay because I can tell by the way that they are acting, that something is wrong. This, in a sense, goes against their wishes since their wish was for me to stop asking, and I continued to persist on asking, regardless of my Intention.

Food For Thought: Maybe the robbers trust each other because they know they both have the same intention :)

This is by no means minimizing what happened to you. I am only talking about right now and finding it hard to trust people in our personal life who love us.

In any case, I deeply relate to you. I battle with this SO often in life. Just wanted you to know that you aren't alone. Keep sharing!:hug:

 

[EvenStrongerNow]

I just wanted to add, I have been so brave at times to flat out ask people what their intentions are. When they've told me, I still don't believe them. Ha ha ha! I know it's not funny, but sometimes you gotta just laugh.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

Maybe, just for now, you just need to accept the fact that you can't trust. Sometimes fighting against these things does us more harm than good if we're constantly fighting against them. Not only is it tiring, but the constant struggle reinforces that there's something wrong with us and we ultimately end up feeling worse about ourselves.

Long/short, I'm not saying ignore the issue, just take a break from struggling with it by accepting that's where you are at the moment. Sometimes a little break can give you great insight. I say this because I've done the same thing with a similar issue, and it really helped me gain perspective.

 

[surviving_it_all]

I spoke to my therapist and he describes it as an echo of the past. I couldn't trust people before. When I stop trusting people in general, it is more about me and less about them. Its not that they are any less trustworthy. It is that I am having issues with trust from the past.

 

[fyredrift23]

Its not that they are any less trustworthy. It is that I am having issues with trust from the past.

Hi surviving_it_all,

I do think your therapist was on to something there, but it's not only you having issues with trust. People you come across and have in your life may, indeed, be untrustworthy regardless of whether you are viewing them through a distrust scope or not.

What I think your therapist meant for you to see is that sometimes, largely due to past experiences, we automatically enter new situations with others wary and unsure if it is safe to trust them or not. This does, indeed, take a lot of energy and can leave us feeling quite exhausted and confused.

It would be a lot easier if we could always magically know whether or not we can trust someone or know if their intentions are for good or for otherwise. It's easy for me to sit here and tell you to just try really hard to trust and you can do it. The reality that you are well aware of is that "trust" is not an easy or simple topic at all.

So much of trust is relative and depends heavily on that individual's experiences, thought processes, feelings, and a slew of other things. Trusting is hard, surviving_it_all, very hard, and anything that tells you otherwise is grossly misinformed.

I'm not trying to bum you out (and sorry if I am!), but it's the truth (no pun intended, lol). I think that you should go a little easier on yourself and not feel like something is wrong with you simply because you're having difficulty trusting people. You're not weird or strange, you have had ridiculously appropriate reactions to horrible occurrences. Why in the world would anyone who has suffered through what you have feel great about others and easily trust them? That's a bit crazy, don't you think? ;)

I'm very sorry about what happened to you. It shouldn't have been, and you did nothing to deserve any of that terrible pain that presently seeks to hold you back from what you want in your life :sorry:

To me, it sounds like you really want to trust others badly, and you don't want to have to feel all this stress and confusion in the process. I think that you're on the right track :tup: This stuff takes time. It's important to remember to be patient with yourself and applaud yourself for every small effort. You can do it!

 

[EvenStrongerNow]

Wow fyredrift23, that was epic and beautiful!!!!! Thanks for sharing.

 

[just me here]

I can relate to the total lack of trust and the desire to leave and try another location with other people.

It is a huge problem in my life, this desire to maintain a total distrust to protect me from other people and the hardwirng we are born with that makes us want to feel social interaction as a good thing and to have a place in a group. No one wants to get voted off the island right? ( I assume you know the TV show Survivor). But we don't want to be betrayed either and the desire to survive as a member of the group versus the desire to avoid betrayal is an awful battle to be in. If I could eliminate any feelings of loneliness or exclusion from my life I would but I don't believe it is possible to fight that much programming. But I could work on eventually learning to trust again and I choose not to. It's a tough one, this trust issue.