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.

There is a particular kind of patient who arrives in the consulting room already doing most of the work that some might need years to reach. They can identify their patterns. They understand the developmental origins of their difficulties. They have read the right books, done the meditation retreats, maybe had previous therapy. And yet here they are, still suffering in the same ways, still unable to stop doing the thing they can so clearly see themselves doing.

What gets in the way is often not a lack of insight. It's the voice that turns insight into another occasion for self-attack.

The inner critic is a clinical concept with roots in several traditions. In psychoanalytic theory, it maps closely onto what Freud called the superego: the internalized representation of parental and cultural standards that monitors and judges the self (Freud, 1923). When the superego is harsh, it operates less as a conscience and more as a prosecuting attorney, always building a case, never considering mitigating circumstances, incapable of mercy.

In the Jungian tradition, the inner critic is understood as a complex, an autonomous cluster of thoughts, feelings, and images organized around a particular emotional theme, in this case the theme of insufficiency. Complexes behave like subpersonalities. They have their own logic, their own emotional charge, and they activate in ways that feel less like choosing a thought and more like being temporarily taken over by one.

What both frameworks recognize is that the inner critic is not simply the voice of accurate self-assessment. It is a structure, built over time, often in response to early experiences in which love felt conditional, in which being good enough was always just out of reach, in which the cost of failure seemed genuinely catastrophic.

The inner critic is not limited to any particular kind of person. But it takes on a distinctive shape in people whose lives are organized around achievement. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, academics, creative professionals. In these patients, the relentless drive that produces genuine excellence at work and the voice that says nothing is ever enough are not two separate things. They are the same mechanism, running the same program in different registers.

This is worth sitting with. The inner critic is not a malfunction. It was, at some point, adaptive. It kept the person performing, producing, surviving in an environment where approval was scarce or unpredictable. The problem is that it doesn't update. It keeps running the old code in new circumstances, long after the original threat has passed, long after the person has more than enough evidence of their competence and worth. Johnson's framework of character styles offers a useful way of understanding how these early adaptive patterns solidify over time, becoming the very structures that later create difficulty (Johnson, 1994).

The cost is significant and often invisible. These patients do not typically present as people who are cruel to themselves. They present as people who are exhausted, who can't quite relax, who find it difficult to receive care or acknowledgment, who feel a persistent low-level anxiety that never fully resolves no matter what they accomplish. They have stopped expecting the feeling of being enough to arrive, because it never does.

The clinical work with the inner critic is not primarily about challenging the content of self-critical thoughts. The thoughts are usually not the problem. The problem is the relationship to the thoughts, and underneath that, the relationship to the part of the self that is being attacked.

Psychodynamic work approaches this differently. Rather than disputing the inner critic's claims, we become curious about it. Where did this voice come from? Whose standards does it represent? What was the original function? What is it protecting against? And, crucially: what happens in the therapeutic relationship when the patient begins to extend to themselves something like the understanding they might more readily offer someone else?

That last question is often where the work moves. The therapeutic relationship provides a different kind of experience, not just a different set of ideas. Being genuinely seen and not found wanting, having one's difficulty met with curiosity rather than judgment, over time this begins to create the conditions for a different internal relationship. Not the elimination of the critic, but a change in its dominance.

The goal is not to become uncritical. It is to develop what might be called a more compassionate inner witness, one that can see clearly without turning clarity into condemnation.

A companion piece, "What the Inner Critic Is Really Protecting," explores the defensive function of the critic in more depth, drawing on Winnicott's concept of the false self.

REFERENCES

Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19, 1–66. Hogarth Press.

Johnson, S. M. (1994). Character styles. W. W. Norton & Company.

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.