What makes a therapeutic relationship therapeutic? There is, of course, the need for keen and attuned listening from the therapist, and their willingness to empathically engage with their client. There is the related demand for the therapist to be accepting and nonjudgemental about the person who is seeking their help. There is the need for personal warmth and the call for a kind of love, or for love itself. And then there is the difficult dance of facilitating a sense of psychological holding. There are, of course, many other relational compounds to add to the elixir of a nurturing therapeutic environment—this space of hope and potential from which a person might venture out into self-discovery and greater authenticity—but none of them mean anything without trust.
Trust, in other words, is everything. If you can get to trust, you will be where you need to be. If you can’t, you will be lost. And trust this: Mistrust is never absent from the room and is always a central element in psychological suffering.
Ellenhorn’s eighth-annual New Perspectives Series will focus on trust, and, in the process, take a close look at the relationship between trust and the “dignity of risk,” harm-reduction models as the best forms of trust-building care, the relationship between trust and play and trust and mentalization, how to build trusting relationships with clients’ families, and the central need to create trusting organizations for innovative and flexible treatment planning.
