What I'm Working On: Trust

Trust is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, in the consulting room, in my own life, and in the space between the two where the most interesting thinking tends to happen.

What keeps catching my attention is not the question of whether trust is warranted in any given situation. That's usually the easier question. The harder one is what happens when trust is available and we still can't quite reach it.

I've been noticing this in my own life. Not the circumstances around it, which are neither unusual nor especially illuminating, but the pattern underneath: a persistent guardedness, and moments of friction that feel like they're about one thing and are clearly, in retrospect, about something else entirely.

What I keep coming back to is the mirror.

In psychodynamic terms, projection is one of our earliest and most enduring defenses: we locate in another person an aspect of ourselves that feels too uncomfortable, too threatening, or too unfamiliar to own directly. What disturbs us in someone else is often, though not always, something we haven't yet made peace with in ourselves. The object relations theorists, particularly Melanie Klein, extended this further with the concept of projective identification: we don't just see our disowned qualities in others, we can unconsciously induce them to actually carry those qualities for us, pulling for responses that confirm our internal world (Klein, 1946).

This dynamic is visible in clinical work constantly. A patient arrives furious at a partner for being emotionally unavailable, and over the course of several sessions it becomes clear that the unavailability they're responding to is partly real and partly a screen for something older, something carried in from a much earlier relational experience. The irritation isn't wrong. It's just not telling the whole story.

What I find in my own experience, and what I observe in patients navigating similar territory, is that underneath the specific relational complaint there is usually something quieter and more honest: difficulty trusting. It isn't about this particular person, or not only this person, but something more fundamental. A particular kind of vulnerability that full trust requires, an openness that gets resisted even when we want to stop resisting it.

This is where attachment theory becomes useful, not as a label, but as a map. Bowlby's foundational insight was that the patterns we develop in our earliest relationships become internal working models: templates that shape how we expect relationships to unfold, how safe we expect connection to be, how much we can risk depending on another person (Bowlby, 1973). These models don't disappear when we grow up. They travel with us, organizing our experience of intimacy in ways that often feel like simply "how things are" rather than how things were learned to be.

When I follow the trust anxiety far enough, in my own experience and in the clinical work, it doesn't bottom out in any particular relationship. The thread leads back through old friendships, past relationships, the original relational weather of the family of origin, and then further still.

What I find at the bottom is something more fundamental: a raw, unaccounted-for aloneness. Not loneliness in the ordinary sense. Something closer to the basic condition of being a self at all. Separate. Bounded. Aware of it.

I don't think that's fixable. I think it's just what it's like to be a person.

What changes is what we do with it. The clinical work isn't aimed at eliminating the aloneness. It's aimed at developing the capacity to tolerate it without having to wall off everything that makes connection possible. That distinction matters. Patients who come in hoping to solve the trust problem often find that the more useful question is: what would it mean to be in contact with this feeling without being destroyed by it?

When I sit with this material closely enough, in myself or in the clinical work, I find it doesn't stop at the personal history. I'm in contact with something much older. The thread brings me close enough to the edge to feel it. That can be uncomfortable. And yet something keeps reminding me: it's not a problem. It's the territory. Most of the difficulty we bring to therapy is, underneath it, some version of learning to stand there.

I'll write more about what this looks like when it moves from concept to something felt. For now: the trust issue is real. It's also a door.

References

Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss, Vol. 2: Separation: Anxiety and anger. Basic Books.

Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99-110.

David Brown is a psychotherapist in San Francisco specializing in depth-oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy. He writes about the inner life, the clinical work, and the things hiding in both.