Trust: A Crucial Ingredient in Counselling Relationships

What is trust? 

Trust is 'reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence' according to the dictionary.

  

Trust is a critical element in all human relationships. Trust is important in marriage as it is in family relationships in general because without reliance on the integrity of a marriage partner or a parent or child, relationships quickly become compromised.

Trust is also a crucial ingredient in counselling relationships because without reliance on the integrity and ability of the psychologist-counsellor little real sharing by clients of their problematic living issues will occur.

It can be said that trust (or trustworthiness) superintends two other vital aspects to the counselling relationship. These two aspects are counsellor competence and counsellor likeability. A large body of research derived from social psychology has found that client-perceived counsellor trustworthiness, competence and likeability are highly correlated with counselling effectiveness. This type of theory is an interpersonal view of counselling. (See here.)

Clients who don't trust others

In some clients, the issue of trust itself becomes the focus of counselling. Perhaps the client has been abused physically, emotionally or sexually. Such abuse often results in a chronic problem with trust. Such clients find that their primary relationships are plagued by mistrust.

Counselling can help by firstly identifying where the mistrust may have become rooted in the person's life.

And then the counselling process itself can become the vehicle for opening up issues of trust and resolving those same issues because every moment of the counselling is dependent on some trust. Counselling becomes an exercise in learning to drop out of date attitudes to trusting others and learning to develop healthy attitudes to others.